Fred On Something'sComments

Directing traffic (metablogging post)

Okay, I’m not particularly fond of metablogging, or blogging about blogging. Enough people do it, some even do it well. Regardless, I had an email conversation yesterday about exactly this topic, and I figured the stuff I wrote was worth throwing out there.

Disclaimer: I don’t know what I’m talking about. Other people know way more about marketing themselves than I do, but I’ve paid attention to what I’m doing with Slacker Manager and, who knows, it might help someone else.

Assuming you’ve got a reason to blog, then in no particular order, here’s the braindump…

[…]

You don’t know what you are talking about? If I check your feedburner counter I can’t really agree with you. You know what you are doing and you are doing it well (really well).

You only forgot one thing that you mastered: Be yourself when writing. People want to see the guy behind the blogger.

I would also like to suggest a platform for beginners: blogsome.com. It’s a full Wordpress system available for free. I putted my comments blog on their servers and I’m more than satisfied. Wordpress if a professional blog software available for free and blogsome is a server that host Wordpress and give you free accounts.

Rob: trackbacks are a way to say: “Your article is great and I also blogged about this subject, there is the link”. It’s a way to link posts with same subjects. It’s a way to tell to readers of a specific post that you also blogged about this subject. Then, if they are interested in it, they will follow the link and read your post as well.

Thank for this post Brendon; it’s always a pleasure to remember these essential things about blogging,

We All Have a Life. Must We All Write About It?

In 1884, Ulysses S. Grant, desperate for money and terminally ill with cancer, did what countless statesmen and military leaders had done before him: he sat down to write his memoirs. Racing against the clock, he turned out two substantial volumes on his early life and his military experiences in the Mexican and Civil Wars.

By any measure, he had a lot to write about and a lot to tell. He produced a classic memoir, as the genre was then understood: important events related by a great man who shaped them.

But that was then.

Today, Grant’s memoirs fall into the same sprawling category as “Callgirl: Confessions of an Ivy League Lady of Pleasure,” “Bat Boy: My True Life Adventures Coming of Age With the New York Yankees” and “Rolling Away: My Agony With Ecstasy,” to pluck just three titles from the memoir mountain looming in the next month or two.”

We All Have a Life. Must We All Write About It?

The question is: To whom must we all write about it? Are we writing for ourselves or for others? Personally I write for myself. Other will write to get published. But I think that when we talk about journals and diaries, that can eventually lead to a memoir, we can’t really talk about to get published. It’s sure that they are really good foundations to future writings. But, in themselves, they are not wrote for others, but firstly for yourself, eventually, for your family, and finally, possibly, for the world. There are some quotes that can help you to answer that question that I extract from the book: Leave a Trace by Alexandra Johnston.

Wild Mind

Ten years ago I was dumbstruck reading the snippet below - and I’ve never forgotten it - from Natalie Goldberg’s classic for writers and writer wannabees (highly recommended).

Ten years ago, I was curled up in the dot’s lap (patience…read further) cranking out C++ computer programs.

I am dumbstruck again recalling ten years ago. I would have thought it utterly impossible - crazed even - to live the way I do now. Note to self: Scrap five-year plans - I’d only limit myself.
[…]

Thank a lot for this great post. Such books are always a pleasure to read. They all say the same things, but in other words, images and contexts. The authors tell you how they started to write, their family situation (most of the time literacy families), and tricks that helped them to get published, but more important then this: what the benefits of writing in their lives. All the same? Mostly… but… how inspirational! I can’t wait to read this one; he is already en route to my door.

I lately read another great work on journals and diaries keeping by Alexandra Johnston. I would like to share this reading with you. I posted about it some days ago:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0140770/2005/03/27.html#a114

I hope you’ll enjoy the reading.

New del.icio.us interface testing.

Thanks to Fred on Something I note that a new del.icio.us interface is testing.

I like the new look, but do I *really* have that many tags? Eeep! It’d be lovely if I could tell del.icio.us that ‘language’ and ‘languages’ were really the same thing, and that ‘french’ was one example of ‘language’ - so clicking on languages would get me french, german, english and so on - but I could then click on french to only get me french!

I like that the tags are larger when they’re more common, but would dearly like some way to combine tags, more than that, I’d like to see the inbox functioning again! Still, it’s free, and in combination with bloglines to monitor favoured tags the result makes for a killer application - so one cannot really complain! (Though the application is more deadly with the inbox!)

First of all, thank a lot for this entry. It’s always fun to see that people are interested in what we wrote

So, I think you got the point. It’s what I reproach to tags. The more you have, the less their utility. I posted something in this trend some days ago. I don’t know if you read it but there it is:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0140770/categories/onBlogs/2005/03/15.html#a107

I also discussed of the problem with people at Many-to-Many weblog (the technorati founder and many other influential social software academics). http://www.corante.com/many/

An archives of my discussion is available on my comments blog at: http://fredonsomethingcomments.blogsome.com/category/on-folksonomy/

So, I think that new technologies will emerge from this “tag” thing

Are you an IT-empower worker or an old school worker?

Harold has a good post on what knowledge workers want. I’m turning it into a test… see in the table below whether you an IT-empower worker or not… I score 4 out 4 as an IT-empower worker.
[…]

It’s just a little reaction on this assertion:

“My blog is one of my key knowledge management tools.”

Have you ever read this article: http://www.roell.net/publikationen/distributedkm.shtml

It’s one of the best I read about Blogs as Knowledge Management Tool. I think it worth the reading. I personally like it because it’s the article that incited me to blog. Since then, I only discovered the virtues of blogging

Semantic web as future reality

In reply to:

Formal specifications of software can be useful. However my problem with things like Z notation vs. for instance extensive use of units tests and a natural language specification is that Z notation and similar languages aren’t the native language of anyone - with a random group of software developers from all over the world, I’d be much more likely to find a reasonable number of people with sufficient English skills than people with reasonable Z notation skills.

In fact, through my career I’ve met perhaps 3-4 people that might have had sufficient skills in Z to be able to create proper specifications with it.
[…]

Yeah, I agree. Formal Specification are just a tool and as with other tools, we need to learn how to use it. What was interesting with the link I mentioned above is that none of the developers knew what was formal specifications and none (except one if I remember right) ever do any Z specifications.

So, it’s sure that well done unit tests are inevitable at the moment. It’s probably the best tool we have, for anybody, at the moment. It’s sure that the technologies of formal specifications need development (specifically the Semi-Demonstration system).

Semantic web as future reality

In reply to Vidar:

I really don’t agree that math formulas are essential to get rid of ambiguities. In my experience, math formulas create ambiguities in software specifications more than get rid of them, as they are rarely used correctly and even when they are, they are rarely understood correctly by whomever read them.

If you want to get rid of ambiguities, you need to use language that is simple enough that people both understand it at write it correctly.

As an example, at a previous job I did have a developer that did write his specs using lots of maths, and his specs were useless. Partly because they were not verbose enough - the formulas were correct, but without a well defined context (and it would be close to impossible to define one using purely maths) they could be interpreted in infinitely many ways, but more importantly most of the other developers did not know how to interpret them correctly.

A good specification is verbose: It describes the desired outcome from several different perspectives that can be trivially checked against eachother, and that can be communicated to both developers and “customers”/end users.
[…]

What I was talking about was the formal specification of a program. Some formal specification languages have been created, some decades ago, to handle some problems with software development, precisely in the field of critical code. This is not an end in itself, it doesn’t answer to all questions and it’s not full proof. But it’s a good way to define the needs of your clients while checking that your system or algorithms don’t fall in undesired states. I’ll not do a course on formal software specifications here but check out this whole project firstly specified en Z then coded in C for a Radiation Therapy Machine:

http://staff.washington.edu/~jon/z/rationale.html
http://staff.washington.edu/~jon/z/machine.html

Read the introduction, it’ll tell you a lot (pros and cons) about formal specifications. It’s sure that it’s not intended for all software projects and in practice you’ll not specify everything but, personally, I think it can have his place in software development(specifically in the future).

The problem with natural languages, in an international environment, is that English is not the native language of everybody. By example, many teams of American developers do outsourcing in India. Not all Indian bachelor programmers are perfect bilingual. Formal specification could (and not would) be a partial solution to future problems.

Why mathematical versions of algorithms are essential? Because you can prove them. The whole present system is working because it’s proved.

So it’s a really interesting discussion with two different points of views. Thank for your interest in it.

Semantic web as future reality

In reply to Vidar:

Thanks for taking the time to comment. I agree with you that the code is complex too. I think the main thing is that if the code/markup is simple, then it doesn’t matter as much if the specification is hard to read and the other way around… The problem with things like RDF and OWL for instance is that both are hard.

I’m hoping to spend some time trying to understand the technologies and writing some tools, but I know my time is way too limited to make a major impact. I’ve gotten part way through an N3 parser, though, and that’s helping me understand a lot of the technologies.

[…]

Yeah, I have a formation as a computer scientist and math formulas are essential to get rid of ambiguities (it’s, for example, one of the goals of formal specification of softwares).

But the current problem is that the technology we are discussing about is intended to be used by anybody, computer scientists or not. It’s why we will need to write both scientific and vulgarized articles. The first to erase ambiguities and to have formal foundations; the second to be understood and implemented in softwares of any kind.

Moleskine Madness

Every once in a while I come across a website which opens a door to a new corner of the web. Yesterday while glancing through pages on how people organize weblogs, I came across a site which appealed to me both as a geek and a Luddite. The geek in me loves my iPod Shuffle, which sits next to my fountain pen. The Luddite in me loves to write in bound notebooks, but LaTeX rocks. I have wireless broadband at home, but not cable TV. (Imagine the 20-minute conversation I had with Time Warner trying to get a cable-modem, but not cable…)
[…]

For some it’s the equivalent of Japanese tea ceremony. For others it’s a way to lengthen the life of their diaries and journals with the acid-free paper. Personally it’s for the love of books and paper.

I like your analogy with iPod. It’s definitely this: a community created around these little black notebooks made in Italia with acid-free paper.

Personally I use them as ideas and thoughts repository. It’s a way to develop my creativity. If I need inspiration I reread my journals.

Inspiration and creativity are not just useful in art; it’s the core of the new technologies and theories. There are other methods, but it’s the one I’m using with success: journals writing.

I’m glad you enjoyed the article

Semantic web as future reality

This entry at Fred on Something neatly summarises my painful experiences while reading the W3 specs and assorted tutorial this weekend:

The thing is that RDF is not intended to be easily understood by humans like simple XML documents. RDF is intended to be understood by machines.
However, I still think the lack of accessibility of the W3 specs is a big problem. The XML spec is reasonably accessible. Even the XML Schema spec is. I can sit down with them, read them, and start writing a parser. Granted, it wouldn’t be a very good parser if I didn’t know more than I’d learned from a single reading of the specs, but I’d be able to.

It’s less important that the formats are inaccessible if the specs are easily accessible so we get good tools to deal with them.
[…]

You are completely right. It’s sure that if the base specification’s document is not readable and understandable, we are in troubles. Personally i was talking about the resulting code, but the problem you rise is much more important. Every future softwares will be based on these documents.

The problem of documentation is deep in computer sciences. It’s why there are vulgarization contest in universities. Another problem is that many people think that putting useless mathematical formulas or incomprehensible words is essential to have credibility. In the present case, it is not. You are right: these technologies need to be understand by the average computer scientist or hobbyist. It’s essential to spread the good news and encourage them to develop software that use it.

I hope that people will write code example and clarified documents about these new technologies. Personally I would have some problems to do it considering my current English writing but I’m sure some will.

What will be the next Web? A prediction

In answer to:

In order to mark things semantically, you don’t need Semantic Web… See, to me, this is marked semantically:

The [geography]river[/geography] is [color]green[/color].

It has nothing to do with the Semantic Web. People have been using Semantic Markup for years… think DocBook. Semantic Web is not about data, it is not about semantic markup… Don’t believe me? Search for intersection between database research and Semantic Web… there is hardly anything. SW aims to represent knowledge. It is a very different goal, at least from a philosophical point of view.

For the Semantic Web, whether you have 1 GB or 10000 GB of data, there is very little difference… precisely because it doesn’t care about data, only about knowledge…

The Semantic Web is based on RDF. It takes RDF as a foundation. RDF is not about semantic markup, but about representing knowledge using graphs, and eventually, building ontologies. I’d say most of Semantic Web activities have to do with ontologies or ontology-related issues.

“Giving meaning to things”, that’s what ontologies are… But it doesn’t help find things, per se. It is an approach, a vision, a form of philosophy. It is a way to write down knowledge. What do you do with knowledge if you want to share it? Well, you write an article using English. Some people say that this is good enough for humans, but we want machines to be able to consume this knowledge, so you need to express it formally… but can knowledge be expressed formally? What is knowledge?

So you see, Semantic Web is not about data, it is about knowledge representation.

Here’s the difference… The SW approach to managing 100 GB of MP3 would be to express relationships between the music and an ontology of music… that is, a formal description of what we know about music… maybe it would say that such a song is a form of jazz and so on.

But if your problem is that you want to quickly browse through your MP3 collection to find what you listened to 10 months ago… well, SW can’t help you there.

No… the revolution won’t be, I think, massive storage per se. It will be what we will do with it. Just like the Web wasn’t about the Web, but about what we could do with it.

Thank for the scratch course on SW

Semantic Web is the Web view semantically. The semantic is expressed with languages based on RDF and RDFS like OWL (for future compatibility). RDF is a suggestion, adopted, for the moment, by the community. Eventually, other languages could be developed and OWL ontologies would be, eventually, be able to import these future ontologies, wrote in another language, with some sort of transformation process.

But as I see SW, with the newcomer’s eyes, defining meaning to resources could help us in the search process. The search time I was talking about is not the “hardware” latency time, but the time a normal person would spend to search what he really need; relevant resources. For this tasks, SW would be able to help us; interacting as a translator between humans and resources, to bring relevant ones with the meaning hidden in the user’s query string.

“No… the revolution won’t be, I think, massive storage per se. It will be what we will do with it. Just like the Web wasn’t about the Web, but about what we could do with it.”

I agree with this assertion

What will be the next Web? A prediction

In answer to:

Fred: what was important in Gutenberg’s time… the printing press, or the books? I think trivially, it is not the object itself that matters, but what it will bring. I could be wrong, but I think that affordable infinite storage has little to do with the Semantic Web which itself has little to do with searching. Semantic Web is about AI applications, not Information Retrieval. If the Semantic Web was about searching, then Google and Yahoo Overture would be making use of Semantic Web ideas, but they don’t. There isn’t a single idea in the Semantic Web that can help me browse through 200 GB of images. There is research in this topic, but it isn’t part of the Semantic Web research. But fair is fair, I want people to disagree with me, otherwise, I might have stated the obvious…

It’s true that the revolution was the printing press, no doubts. But the interrogation I have is: what’s the utility of such spaces if we can’t use effectively what is contained in this space?

We need a way to search, to classify, and to have access to what we really need. We don’t want to spend 20 minutes for a simple search or 1 hour for a longer one. The most information we have, the longest the search will be and probably the less relevant the results will be.

Given this, what will be the revolution, the space or the infrastructure supporting it?

I can also be wrong; I only throw ideas as they come; I try to cope with your point of view.

For the semantic web point, can we agree that Semantic web is only a way to classify information? The name says it, to give semantic, meaning, to resources. The languages used have been developed to help machines to understand the meaning, the semantic, of these resources. This specific attribute, machine understandability, can, eventually, be used by some artificial intelligence programs as a knowledge database. No? Semantic Web theories can be helpful for AI applications, but, tell me if I’m wrong, but the first goal of SW was not to serve as a simple AI application but to give meaning to things, to help users in their day-to-day works.

PC Forum Roundtable on Tagging

Scribbles from a session led by David Weinberger and Esther Dyson at PC Forum, also posted to the wiki.

Lots of productive friction here.

David Sifry, Caterina Fake and Ross Mayfield helped with an intro to tagging. (can’t remember what I said, please edit in)

Rael Dornfest: reminds me of RDF, but the cooling is its not in format or intent

David Weinberger: Take that semantic web! We will do it ourselves with tags!

Barney Pell: tags vs. models or inference rules.
[…]

—JP Rangaswami: Was going to use tags to solve a problem in my organization. people label things differently in different cultures in the same organization. Today english might be the language, but there are perhaps 300 dialects and the labels are different. Tagging lets structure to cross-reference, where patterns emerge. Important for me in a commercial context. To let people in diff keeping it simpel and the adoption rate high. Not pushing or pulling, its a community, which is why I like social software.—

I don’t think that tags will answer to this question. Two words, in the same language, can have the same meaning. Two words, in two different languages, can also have the same meaning. Tagging can’t cope with this reality. Tag can’t be an end in itself. We need something to wrap it to give it more semantic power. It’s why languages like RDF, RDFS and OWL have been created: to add semantic power to resources, any type of resources: words, links, photos, images, movies, a car; anything can be a resource.

What will be the next Web? A prediction

Gutenberg’s printing press was a major technological advanced that made it possible for the (initially quite rich) commoner to publish affordably. Books became affordable “soon” after and knowledge could spread further, faster and more accurately.

The Web has had comparable effect: it allows me to publish the content you are reading right now. I can reach thousands of people daily (and I do) at a minimal cost.

What these things have in common is that they made something that was once only available to very rich institutions, available to everyone. This is when meaningful revolutions happen. This is when technology people win, this is where technology researchers have to be.

It’s sure that infinite storage will change things but will this really be the next big thing? It’s a support for a future infrastructure. What will be the big thing: the support in itself or the thing that use this support? Internet, the mass of information that compose this Internet will always grow and grow faster with this infinite storage thing. But, we already have many problems to handle this mass of information. We have problems to store them (not in term of storage space) and we have problems to search them. So, will the next big thing be the thing that will help us to effectively search through this mass of information?

If the answer is yes, then I thing that it’s a little bit fast to say that semantic web could not be the next big thing.

Companies check blogs too

Blogging is good for anyone. It’s an ease to use publication platform. Everybody can easily create and maintain their blog. Blogsphere is an environment where people can talk about what they thing, without restrictions. They wrote about what they really think.

This special conversation environment is a gold mine for businesses. Why? Because they can know what their customers really think about their products; in good or in bad. This is possible because bloggers are also customers; not normal ones but customers that talk about what they really think.
[…]

You said: “Thanks for the comments, the recognition, and the support” but you didn’t steal it! I do it because I believe in Omea. I like what you do and how you do it. I just give to Cesar what belong to Cesar

So thank for these words. For them who don’t know, David Booth is the marketing guy at Jet Brains; there is his blog: http://themarketingbooth.blogspot.com/

Writing is fighting

Have you ever read a book about blogs? They all tell you to be spontaneous. Good advice, uh?
I always try to be spontaneous, anyway I do rarely immediately publish what I write. This is a rule of life to me.
Some write their posts directly on the blogging software box, I could never.
[…]

I’m like you, I get a break between the writing and the publishing.

The only thing I check after is if I think that my idea is complete and understandable. I don’t really check if it’s too arrogant or anything else (probably because I’m not in my life, so I’ll not write like this instinctively).

For me, the most important thing is not to be misunderstood. It’s not ease, I don’t always reach this aim, but I try I hard as I can

In answer to Max: Question : I want an English dictionary of usage and common errors

I was strolling in my local bookshop, looking for new books to put in my bookshelves for future reading. I get stock some times at the English dictionaries section. I checked the few they had wander if I would find an English dictionary like the French Multi Dictionnaire.

What this dictionary is about? In French you have two main dictionaries: an encyclopedic one, Le Larousse, and a linguistic one, Le Robert. There is also another one that has small definition of words. It tells you how to use the word and how not to use the word. It tells you the common errors people do when using it. There it is: Le Multi Dictionnaire.

It’s exactly this type of English dictionary I need. I need to know how to use and not to use a word, the errors I would make by using it.

Which English dictionary are you using? Is there such an English dictionary available on the market? Do you have other reference books to suggest?

Glad to see that you seem to have the same problems with Italian that I have with French;)

You are probably right, I’m searching for something that not have sense in English.

The best I see for my purpose is the Longman. I think it’s specifically build for students. It have some tricks on how to use some words, the most important English words are in red the others in blue. All definitions are wrote with 2000 words. It’s probably the dictionary the nearest of the one I was looking for.

The thing is that I don’t need a French/English dictionary; I already have one one. But I’ll check if there is no other reference books for French natives.

In answer to Todd: Two things why writing is now so important to me

Why writing is now so important to me?

Because writing is thinking.

While I write things, I think about them. It’s a moment I take in a day to think about things that fly in my mind.

Sometime I wrote my short and long term goals on a sheet. I check them; I check what I’m doing right now to reach them. While I’m writing them down, I think about them, I make them clear in my mind.

Because writing is learning.

While I write things, I learn from them. Sometimes, things will emerge from my unconsciousness: I’ll learn from them. It will give a new angle of attack to understand the thoughts I was writing about.

I started to read Page after Page by Heather Sellers. It’s one of the reason why I wrote this little post and why I’ll probably wrote others in the next days. It’s a really inspirating self help book on writing. It’s the same type of book as Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott.

It put you in mood to wrote such things

Amazon ads

I have recently added some Amazon advertisements to my blog. You will find these on the bottom right side of the page.

I never got into blogging to “make” money, but if I can make a few dollars by recommending products I love and think you will too, why not!?

It’s a good idea. I can’t see it as advertisement. I see it as information; information about you and what you like. These Amazon lists aren’t as invasive as other type of ads (text or graphics ones). They, generally, point you out interesting stuff that you’ll probably like. Why will you probably like them? Because you read the blog. If you read it it’s because you like what the blogger is blogging about. Then you’ll probably also like what he read and buy. It’s marketing by Amazon, but it’s interesting for users; readers.

Why should I comment old posts?

Fred asks what could be the solutions to these problems. I think a solution could be both human and technological change. When a blogger realize that comments are integral part of a post (human change), he will seek for tools to notice the presence of new comments, then web developers community will find a easy-to-use tool to achieve it. What can we do? Talking about it, like I’m doing right now.
I’d like to add some points to Fred’s post.
It’s not easy to face the whole thing, because there are many different kinds of blogs, each one with different peculiarities. There are literary blogs, where the comments could never add something useful to the post, but just feelings, liking or disliking; there are humour blogs, where the commenters will try to seem as funny as the author; there are (millions of) personal intimacy blogs, where the commenters could only express momentary thoughts or advices, and so on.
I’ll exclude these kinds of blogs, because in these cases it’s not important, IMHO, putting comments when the posts get old.
I agree with Fred’s post just with information or knowledge related blogs.
[…]

There are two reasons why bloggers didn’t comment back when you comment their old posts:

1- They are careless of their readers.

2- They don’t know that you have posted a comment. But this is not really a reason because, most if not all blog systems can send you an email of the new comments.

So, we were probably talking about an utopia.

Meta-tags, or, the Dublin Meta Core

As we sort through tags, it’d often be useful to know who created a particular tag. And when. And in which application. And probably other stuff also. While some apps remember who created which tag (e.g., Flickr), as we begin to aggregate tags, we could use a standard way to express this tagging metadata…a Dublin Core not for objects but for tags attached to objects.

If this were to happen, it’s very likely to come from the apps that benefit from having standardized tag metadata. The most obvious suspects are the search engines. (Hmm. I may be re-having Mary Hodder’s idea.)

The technology is there, waiting to be used.

Let users tag whatever they need but change the systems that works with tags. Think about Semantic Web. Systems will need to get tags associated with a resource (picture, post, etc) and extract them. Then they will create a resource with each tags group and semantically link them. After, systems (search engine for example) will not just show results of “puck” tag if you enter “puck” in your search but also posts that contain “hockey”, “Gretzky”, etc. Take note that I’m not talking of showing related categories of tags.

Folksonomies at Etech

“A transcript from a talk with Clay, Stewart, Joshua and Jimmy.

Clay: Not a debate about the meaning of folksonomy. This is about allowing a large group of users in on organizing a large volume of material. this is usually a function of professionals, why did you do this and what have you observed:

Jimmy: launched in June, didn’t have software to support it before. First few weeks was a madhouse in English. Germans held off but then the floodgates opened with order. Became more sensible as people adjusted the categories. We let the masses categorizes because its the crazy wikipedia way.

Stewart: Activity is for the individual first. Because of the word folksonomy, people assume it is for categorization.

[…]”

two days ago I blogged about the problem of tags and proposed a partial, intuitive, solution provided by semantic web:

“[…]

How could we upgrade the tagging idea to get rid of such feature and remove a part of the responsibility of the tagging authors in the whole process? I think that the principles of the semantic web would help us to upgrade the tagging idea.

How would this work? Intuitively it would work like this:

1. Consider the group of tags that describe a resource as a resource in itself.

2. Systems like Technorati would scan posts to extract these “tag resource”.

3. After the system would semantically link all these “tag resource” according to an ontology to relate, semantically, each “tag resources”.

4. Finally when a user would make a tag search query, results would not only be the resources with the specific tag but also all the other resources according to the semantic of the tag(s) searched.

[…]”

Why should I comment old posts?

Fred asks what could be the solutions to these problems. I think a solution could be both human and technological change. When a blogger realize that comments are integral part of a post (human change), he will seek for tools to notice the presence of new comments, then web developers community will find a easy-to-use tool to achieve it. What can we do? Talking about it, like I’m doing right now.
I’d like to add some points to Fred’s post.
It’s not easy to face the whole thing, because there are many different kinds of blogs, each one with different peculiarities. There are literary blogs, where the comments could never add something useful to the post, but just feelings, liking or disliking; there are humour blogs, where the commenters will try to seem as funny as the author; there are (millions of) personal intimacy blogs, where the commenters could only express momentary thoughts or advices, and so on.
I’ll exclude these kinds of blogs, because in these cases it’s not important, IMHO, putting comments when the posts get old.
I agree with Fred’s post just with information or knowledge related blogs.
[…]

I’ll put some of my thoughts

Feelings of people are information. Possibly not for you, but for some peoples it can be the information they search for. For a survey for example. Everything can be information. Some can be more important then other; everything depends of the context.

The problem with such blogging system is that there are other ways to handle blog’s spam messages. I don’t think that bloc old posts commenting is a good thing considering the fact that there are other systems to prevent comment spamming.

Some posts are information less like: “you done a good job”. But generally you comment on posts to add something to it; your vision of the thing.

You are right for the point 4.

6 -> Sure, but if you have a system to give back life to old posts, then, the old one is not old anymore because he got a new life, a new visibility. It’s a paradox or something like this… its strange when you think about it

Start.com? Try Harder Microsoft

This guy is nuts (no offence!) :

I came across these prototype projects by Microsoft this morning. I already saw the names in some feeds but I didn’t take attention to them. I just tested the two projects; they are awesome! The first one is a web based RSS and Atom reader. The second seems to be a hybrid of the first one and a bookmark interface (the goal of his development seem more obscure; probably he lacks features).

The two prototype projects are here and here. And they really, really suck. A Microsoft PR blogger wrote “All in all, pretty sweet. A sign of how things have changed at MSN as it ramps up to do battle with Google. I think we’ll be seeing a lot of these types of projects going forward…”

[…]

I don’t expect that you agree to my vision It was my reaction at the moment I discovered the prototypes. It’s possible that my enthusiasm decrease with the time; everything will depend of what they will do with it and how they will integrate it (if they don’t abandon it before).

So keep me in touch with the coming coverage!

Start.com? Try Harder Microsoft

This guy is nuts (no offence!) :

I came across these prototype projects by Microsoft this morning. I already saw the names in some feeds but I didn’t take attention to them. I just tested the two projects; they are awesome! The first one is a web based RSS and Atom reader. The second seems to be a hybrid of the first one and a bookmark interface (the goal of his development seem more obscure; probably he lacks features).

The two prototype projects are here and here. And they really, really suck. A Microsoft PR blogger wrote “All in all, pretty sweet. A sign of how things have changed at MSN as it ramps up to do battle with Google. I think we’ll be seeing a lot of these types of projects going forward…”

I’m sorry?! What?! This is the reason why Google is still leaps and bounds ahead of Microsoft and it’s MSN department; they were doing this stuff years ago and are moving onto bigger and greater things. The two demos make a big song and dance about how they work in Firefox- yet I’m mainly left wondering so what? What they meant to say, but obviously wouldn’t, is that they’ve taken the time to code the site properly and aren’t using shoddy technology like ActivX; perhaps this is to be commended. I noticed that they recently added “And seriously, we’re just messing around with some prototypes here” - you guys said it. Is it only a matter of time before the tired and bloated MSN layout invades? If you look hard enough, you can just about see the advertising men peeking behind the corner…

My homepage, btw, is Google News, who’ve just added a cool feature allowing you to change the layout, number of stories and the genre of story displayed. Rather cool…

A whole post for me? It’s too much

Don’t worry; I’m not obfuscated because you called me a nuts, talk of me in good or not but talk of my some Hollywood stars says.

So, the problem is not there. Is that because a prototype was not working on Firefox that this make the thing a heap of shit? I don’t think so. The start project number one now work nickel on Firefox. Your current post is talking about war between Microsoft and the world. I was not blogging about this. I described a prototype project and said what was cool and the missing features. Is this make me a nut? Possibly; it’s depending of your point of view. But I don’t think you fully understood the purpose of my post.

It’s about new technology, new user interface, and new web integration. It’s about a test to enhance users experience on the Internet.

It was not about my father is stronger than yours. Firefox is a cool project, but it’s the end in itself. It’s a player in the game. Each player has something to bring to his environment. It’s what makes the game interesting.

Salutations,

Fred

The life span of a blog discussion seem to be ephemeral

It seems that there are two problems with blog discussions that use comments:

1. People who start a discussion by commenting a post didn’t seem to check back for new comments on the message.

2. If the post is older than some days, nobody will comment on it.

Some will say that this is normal because blogs are used to publish thoughts of the moment and old thoughts didn’t worth commenting. If they see blogs as this, they are probably right.

[…]

Thank for your additions Max! News paper also have a permalink: it’s their date. There are system availbe to search newspaper archive to find old articles that talked about the first Iraq war for exemple. But as blogs… they are less read the week after their publication. One of the problem in both systems is probably the way search systems works for each of these systems. There are probably too many information available for the search infrastructure we are using these days. So I don’t think that there are a really great diffenrences between the two system; it’s just that the search system for newspaper archives is not free and less easily accessible.

What’s traditional media future?

Today I was thinking about the future of traditional media under the overflowing increase of internet use.
On a fistful of years, those media that seemed so perfect and irreplaceable, have fastly lose importance.
On a few years the electronic internet based application will prevail. In some cases this will happen fastly than anothers, anyway the trend is this.
All these changes are having an enormous impact on our lives.

Just think about:
[…]

I only wish to put my two pennies about books

I’ll never, in my life, stop buying paper books. Personally it’s just because it’s a compulsion, a psychological trouble; but I don’t have any problem to live with this one

But the real problem with electronic ebooks is the definition of screens. It’s so poor compared with paper print. As I already wrote about(you probably remember) we read approximately 30% less quickly on a screen then on paper. This is enough to encourage me to buy my paper book the double the price of an ebook (and it’s not the case; electronic versions seem the same price).

So, in my case, it’s just not a question

Multi-thinking instead of multi-tasking

Jeffrey Baumgartner of The InnovationTools weblog had a nice idea for managing the maelstrom in your head without it getting in the way of your work. Brainstorming technique - Multi-thinking - from InnovationTools

Whether you multi-task or not, you almost certainly have numerous tasks awaiting your attention at any given time. And it is inevitable that your mind occasionally turns to one task while you are working on another. A multi-tasker would be inclined to switch tasks at this point. I recommend you stick to the task at hand, but keep a notebook - or at least some paper nearby - when performing any tasks. (I recommend having a notebook with you all the time). When the mind turns from the task at hand to another task, simply note down your thoughts in the notebook. Then return to the task at hand.

Good point. Personally, for blogging purposes I wrote all my posts in a Word document and I put it on my desktop. Then I can have between 2 or 5 posts waiting to be finished, edited and published. Then when I have ideas about these future posts I add it quickly to keep my idea going, without thinking about the grammar, formulation and editing. If I didn’t have my laptop with me, I put my thoughs in my little Moleskine pocket diary and add it to my document when I come back home. After, when I publish the article, I change the name of the file and add the date of the publishing and put the document in a specific folder with the post category’s name.

Why do I use a Word document? Simple, because I only have to copy/past it to my Radio Userland software and the parsing will be done automatically in HTML; I’ll have the same editing on my weblog as the one I have in Word.

It’s how I work for by blogging writing. For now it’s do the job.

I also started a “comment blog” to keep track of my writing on other blogs. It does seem really useful to keep track of conversations and eventually I think that it will be a good source of inspiration… I hope so. There is the link to this experience blog: http://fredonsomethingcomments.blogsome.com/

I’ve been fark’d

It’s not as bad as it sounds, actually. Lifehacker picked up my post on body language in the office, and then somebody posted it on fark.com and Metafilter (those guys are harsh). Fark gets a lot of traffic. And it kinda rolled on from there. Slacker Manager hasn’t been slashdotted (yet), but this has got to come close.

The traffic spike is so crazy it’s cartoonish. Here’s the graph for the year. Last month I was pretty stoked to get 15,000 visitors. This month, thanks to fark and friends, it’ll be somewhere over 100,000 visitors. That won’t sustain, of course, but still it’s kinda fun. Lots of good comments in the post, too. There are a couple that are worth appending to the original post, such as the ever-popular Watch Glance, where you not-so-discreetly check the time while someone is talking to you.

It’s awesome to see such think happened. It’s one of the things that fascinate me with the internet: see how the links are made one between another. Sometimes it’s like magic; you can’t really see how and why it happened; the only thing you know is that it happened.

But in your case there is no magic; it’s because you done a good job with this article. Keep going Brend!

In reply to a comment of Todd (not in relation with the original topic)

It’s a test, I don’t know if it will be used by my readers but for my own purposes I like it and it’s useful. It’s much more easiest to follow conversations I posted in. A click and I see if anyone else added something.

I also think that this will be really helpful to find stuff I know I wrote about.

It’s a test. I’ll only know in the future if it will worth the time (not too great) I put in.