Fred On Something'sComments

Psyching yourself out

Interesting article on ways to jumpstart your brain into action by changing something physical.
By mimicking the sympathetic reactions to a threatening environment (sitting up straight, standing, moving quickly, deeper breathing), it appears to be possible to activate the sympathetic system, which then takes over. We are ready to act, or in our case, be productive. We can also change our environment to one that causes the sympathetic system to activate, one that is more spartan, threatening, or simply uncomfortable. The result? We take action. We are more productive.
This doesnt surprise me a bit, and if its all true, it might confirm my hunch that sitting still and staring at a screen all day is a recipe for lethargy, lame thinking, and productivity inertia.
[…]

However, I think that it is much more easy to say than to do; unfortunately. The problem in my case, tell me if I am the only one in this situation, is that you know that your time is precious and need to be productive. You also know that changing your environment would help you but you also know that it take times to change your environment, and you think that you do not have that time. So, this is hard to tell you: “He! you need to spend 30 ou 45 minutes of your previous time to go to that cofee shop, you will be much more productive this way!”. No… it is not easy

Longterm Traffic Building Tips For New Blogs

Many new bloggers, especially the professional or business kind, find it difficult, and ultimately a bit frustrating, getting people to come read their blog, especially via search engines like google.
Ive been asked many times if I know why a site doesnt show up in Google results after a reasonable about out time and what can be done to help move things along. Now, Im not 100% sure of all the details, I mean, Google is in large part a mystery even to someone like me who thinks he knows quite a bit about how it all works, but I do think it takes time to build worthwhile traffic and the best way to do it is to keep at it.

[…]

I think that the whole process start by creating relationship with other bloggers. Then, when other bloggers will read your posts, they will leave comments and ultimately link back to your good posts. Only then you will build your reader auditorium(can I said that in English? ).
How? I think that the first step his by doing what Im doing right now: by commenting other posts. Not only by commenting with posts like: Good Work!…. It was a good reading… etc. No. Try to bring something new to the discussion, ask questions to the author, etc. You also can leave email messages to the author to thank him for his work, etc. Its always appreciated.

Being open or not, that is the question

I keep being surprised at how such a large fraction of people around me want to hoard knowledge as if it was food. It is wrong on many levels. Your knowledge is more valuable when you share it. We are not competing for knowledge because knowledge is not scarce. In global economy, if you don’t share your knowledge, someone else will, you will simply be put out of the loop. You have to think yourself as an information node. Information nodes where data comes in but not out are broken and of little value.

[…]

Well said Daniel. What make profesionals (when I say profesionnal, I am talking about someone that work and learn about his domains for decades) worth his pay is not his “secret” knowledge of the domain, no, it’s the commun knowledge he have of it, and the intepretation he do of it.

A Successful Blog

I’ve had so much great feedback on my “Be a more productive blogger� post that I’ve decided to dedicate a Web site (and blog) to the concept. Way back I did a series of posts over at Asterisk on how to design, build and maintain a successful blog. Those posts were very popular and seemed to help quite a few people. After that I’d write on a fairly regular basis about tips, tricks and techniques for bloggers and, again, those posts seemed to be helpful for many people.

[…]

I am sure that you learned a lot in the process, the opposite would be surprising

It’s the same for me. I initially started blogging to try increasing my English skills and it worked like a charm (It’s not perfect but far better than 8 months ago hehehe)

I also meet really interesting people; I constantly clarified my thoughts by posting and discussions about these posts with my readers, etc. Only a fool could not learn from such a process that blogging is. It’s the magic of writing: something I had not discovered, and even suspected, before starting to blog.

Stickiness

One thing all bloggers and webmasters want is return visitors. Many of us watch the stats and monitor this critical measurement of web success�if you come back time and time again, you must like me. If you like me and return enough you’ll finally heed my call to action – make a purchase, register, click on an advertiser, etc. Stickiness makes a blog and return visitors are paramount to ecommerce success - repeat buyers are a critical component to revenue growth.

How best do you get people back to your site time-after-time?

[…]

As other readers said: Content. However, I will also add feeds. It’s the easiest way for your readers to get in touch with the news things you post on your website. Remember, feeds can containt anything� not just messages.

Do I Really Want to Share the Intimate Details of My Life With the Rest of the World?

This is a bit off the topic of cancer, but very much on the topic of putting together this new site. For the last few day I’ve been putting in some long hours at the computer, piecing together this blog, which I now call Cancer NewsWatch. As I was taking a break this evening, I cruised the sites of a few well-respected bloggers (culled from a recent list by Darren at ProBlogger,) and came upon two similar posts, one at ShaiCoggins.com, the other at The Blog Herald, lamenting the outright theft of original content, presumably for the goal of making a quick buck on ad-revenue, and wandering what could or should be done about it. As a person fairly new to blogging, I have to say I find the subject disturbing, though certainly not surprising.

[…]

Hello Cary,

You see why you ought to write about this topic? Because it reach intimately millions of people that have questions about how to handle it. I never had been confronted with cancer in my near surrounding (the few family members I have) but I know that soon or later there are good chances that it happen and then I will have many questions about the situation I’ll face, and people like you will help me in the process.

Keep going your good work Cary, I think you will help many people,

Salutations,

Fred

In answer to:

Thanks for your comments, Fred, and especially for the follow-up on Andrew Coyne. He has indeed suspended his blog’s comments function. Evidently he found his readers’ behaviour as tiresome as I did.

I can’t resist commenting, however, on something else Coyne has just published:

“A Liberal less than a week, la Stronach already has the ly - er, lingo down pat. Ms Stronach pronounces herself hurt by the reaction to her last-minute conversion to the Liberal cabinet/cause, and touches all the right bases: new low, return to civility, why the focus on her private life, etc. As her old friend and mentor Brian told her, ya dance with the one that bought ya.”

The Brian in question is the former Tory prime minister, Brian Mulroney, who achieved for his party both its greatest majority and its near-total destruction. And what I hope he told Belinda Stronach was: “Ya dance with the one that bRought ya.” Quite a Freudian slip!

Canadian politic is becoming a national sport. All the things that happened 25 years ago come back in unexpected places like the commission gommery…

The most beautiful paradox in the Canadian history is that the vote for the separation of the Quebec the 20 may 1980 give the repatriation of the Canadian constitution some years later. Is that not so beautiful?

Now, the program that helped the vote of the “Non”, is separating the Canada one more time.

Canadian politic is a pearl of our beautiful country

In answer to;

I knew that you would handle the problem and it’s what you done, thank.

However, this is a beautiful example of the security threats that could rise when more than one systems are using together (and that are not necessarily build to interact together). It’s the responsibility of everybody to be aware of the risks, specially the one of users.

If we have one thing to remember of this story, I think it would be this.

Careful with that e-mail feed, Eugene

Do you use Gmail? Have you set up the ability to read your Gmail via an Atom feed?

Have you made the mistake of doing that in a Web-based RSS aggregator that lets you search other people’s feeds?
[…]

I confirm that it’s always working. It seem that my subscription have been changed over the night for the “bloglines news” but I’m always able to see the username/password of such feed url.

In asnwer to:

Fred I can recommend Alain de Botton’s ‘How Proust can change your life’. It’s full of wisdom and it encouraged me to read the original which I had been afraid to do because of its sheer size. Jim

Thank a lot for this input! I would had read Proust as a French, but I didn’t had the courage yet. As I read the reviews of this book, I think that I’ll not have another choice to try it

I think I’ll really love this new section of my blog. If I can collect all your suggestions I’ll be more than happy It’s the second this week and they are more than interesting!

Thank alot for your input Mr Nasir

When and where do you think?

My best thinking time? When I’m not thinking at all.

When I have a problem, any type of problem, I learn about it. I learn what the problem really is. If I already have a solution to solve it doing this process, everything is then perfect and had gone well (it’s rare). Otherwise, I stop to think about it. I start to work on another non-related thing; I go outside. Then, eventually, a hint will show up in my mind; a track to follow to resolve my problem. My unconsciousness has then talked.

Its how I work: I feed my unconsciousness with the problem then I let him think about it, waiting for a hint. Sometime the process can get some hours, days even months to work; everything depend of the problem to be solved.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Bloggers of the World : Unite !

You have a blog. You like it, you’re devoting time and energy to it. And everyday, you’re being utterly infuriated by casino spammers messing with your comments, your trackbacks, your referrers logs, hostages and victims in their pathetic race to top Page Rank.

Bloggers, unite. The idea is simple : a million blogs are stronger than a thousand spammers when it comes to act upon search engine results, especially if they are using the same weapon. To nullify their spamming efforts, put on your site the following link : Online Poker (wikipedia page on this topic, all links mentionned there have rel=”nofollow”)

The cause is just and the experience is really interesting. It’s why I’ll post the link on my comments blog.

As I read it, the wikipedia link is at position 4.

I wish the blogsphere will win this one

Online Poker ^?

More header fun…

This one I call “granite”. Another Josh creation.

This one reminds me of working in a 58 story building in downtown Dallas. I would love your comments!

This one too is great.

Really, I’m jealous; you have all these beautiful headers that reflect your morning’s mood

Now I always click on the link of your posts in my feed reader because I need to look at the new header hehehehe

It’s a good marketing trick, not evasive for your readers and effective. A great business man you are

Former boss says I’m wrong

My former boss, Steve Sloan, disagrees with some comments I made about corporate blogging.

I should have been clearer. When you are identified as part of a corporation you’ve gotta be more careful in your writing than when you are talking with close personal friends over beer on Friday night. Some bloggers have told me they take great care to remain anonymous or, at least, don’t mention who they are working for.[…]

In response to a comment.

fear Ballmer…? Do you know what’s fear? I fear a person that have my life in his hand and that didn’t know what do to with it; but I can’t fear a person that have the only power to change my life for better or worse by fire me. No, this, I cannot fear.