Category: Tech

From from Timothy Appnell at O’Reilly; Ebay, Yahoo Groups and Calendar, PayPal, more.

The O’Reilly editors talk about rich web clients. More of the editors seem to like Flash. The articulate comments favor non-proprietary approaches using XHTML, XUL, SVG. Some tasty links in there to follow up.

Joel Spolsky’s mailing list got spamblocked too.
p.s. The problem seems to have cleared up, presumably thanks to Earthlink.

…on a project over the last few weeks, with a group of geographically dispersed colleagues. For the most part the experience has been quite pleasant. For folks who aren’t familiar with wikis, they’re collaborative web spaces that anyone can edit.
Benefits
* The wiki is used to post meeting times, resources for the group, and for individuals to post what they’re working on.
* We typically email to brainstorm ideas; then post the results of the brainstorming to the Wiki where it can be sculpted.
* The absurdly low overhead is delightful — click “edit this page” to edit the page. Even easier than keeping an intranet and ftp-ing html pages (which I’ve done in a previous startup). Less likelihood of versionitis caused by ftp-ing an old file version onto a newer one.
* Easy to keep track of what’s new by clicking on “recent changes”
* Keeps behind-the-scenes work out of email, freeing email for interactive conversation
Drawbacks
The easygoing “anyone edit” system works well except when more than one person is editing the same document on a deadline. Upon which we needed to implement “social document management” by verbally “checking-in” and “checking-out” sections.
After the first dozen or so entries, you need to start gardening the home page to keep it from getting tangled and overgrown.
The hyperlink-tyranny of the Wiki interface makes multi-page structures rather dizzying to navigate. This method will top out above a certain level of complexity, without the ability to add more navigational cues.
Reflections
Using a Wiki is much easier and more pleasant than the corporate Microsoft monoculture, which requires the use of rock-heavy tools like PowerPoint and Word to do simple things.
Using a Wiki requires collaboration and trust within the workgroup. Knowledge management isn’t technological, it’s social.
It will be interesting to see how and whether the use of Wiki will scale when and if the project matures. In the mean time, there’s a set of rapid, low-overhead collaboration processes that the Wiki works really nicely for.

Late last week I got a return email with a distressing header:
> SPAM:

John Udell writes about a new system that Delta has designed to give passengers waiting at the gate more information about the boarding process, like updates on how many people have checked in, and the state of the standby list.
Sounds really helpful for those times you’re standing there anxiously waiting to see if you’ll get on the flight.

Reflecting on David’s puzzlement about the Jews and software meeting in Boston the other day, I recalled this Joel Spolsky essay on how reading code is like studying Talmud, in that it is best done in pairs, puzzling through and arguing about the meaning of the text.
When you think about it, the “link” form of the weblog has similarities to the classical Jewish form of text commentary. The blogger links to an article somewhere on the web, and then writes a commentary on the original text; then other commentators refer to the original commentator. In the traditional form, Jewish scholars wrote texts that commented on the bible or on the writings of earlier rabbis; and other rabbis wrote texts that commented on the earlier rabbis’ writings.
Because they didn’t have hypertext at the time, commentaries linked using chapter and sentence references; so when you study traditional texts, you wind up with a table full of books following the cross-references from book to book.
The form of the Talmud is similar to a recorded newsgroup or blog comments discussion. In the classical rabbinic academies, scholars discussed and debated a wide variety of topics, and those discussions were eventually edited into book form. The editors were concerned with representing the debate of ideas, not with historical accuracy — often, there are arguments between rabbis who didn’t live at the same time.
Its not that the Rabbis didn’t know how to write neat, logical, linear exposition. The classic rabbinic period was contemporaneous with the Hellenized civilization of the ancient world; they had the models of Greek thinking all around them, and they borrowed when it suited them — the Passover seder is modeled after the Platonic symposium. They looked at neat, logical, linear, hierarchical writing, decided that they didn’t like it, and wanted to write in weblog form instead.

Intriguing Advogato essay by GaryM, sparked by David Gelernter’s NYT advertorial on the obsolescence of the file cabinet metaphor for organizing data.

“David Gelernter’s thinly disguised advertising piece Forget the Files and the Folders: Let Your Screen Reflect Life, for all it’s absurdities, is still something of a thread of a good idea in his “narrative file system” thesis: the idea of desktops, files and folders is a quaint retrieval from an office world very few of us remember and an organizational tool alien to the way people view their data.
No one organizes their home placing all items made by Scotts Tissue in one room, all Rubbermaid stuff in another, all Sony equipment on one shelf, Toshiba on another. We don’t even keep all audio tools in one room and leave all visual tools in another. How we actually use our data is determined by the stories and narratives we wish to experience and construct. It’s time we took the initiative to start building computing tools that recognize this.”

The article describes the problem nicely, doesn’t propose any useful solutions. Too bad.
MORE

When good interfaces go crufty has lots of well thought through examples of user interface traits that are artifacts of obsolete design constraints.
One such example: applications use awkward little filepickers to open or save files because when the Mac was first designed, it wasn’t able to run the file manager and an application program at the same time.
Installed base dependencies and cultural habits can cause cruft to be highly persistent. Think about it — the school year in the US begins in September and ends in May, to allow students time off to help with the family harvest.
One nit — Internet Explorer’s lack of an exit menu item is a bug, not a feature. If you’ve got more than one window open, you need to close them, tediously, one at a time.
The essay was slashdotted, so you may have read it already 🙂

Execution happens at ebb tide, when the hype waves have receded offshore. I was looking for The Self-Made Tapestry and found that Barnes and Noble Online now lets you search inventory of its local stores, enables you to reserve the book online for pick-up at the store, and even tells you in what section of the store it can be found. I wish that the local bookstores had this capability, but they don’t yet.
The last feature is particularly helpful for those who prefer books that aren’t clearly in one subject area. Is The Computational Beauty of Nature in Biology, Math, or Computer Science? Is The Printing Press as an Agent of Change in History, Sociology, or someplace else? Much time has been spent wandering bookstore aisles in search of books without an obvious category; this is one reason that I buy a lot of books online (of course, they could always reshelve sections on Social History of Technology and Computational Biology…).
By the way, they didn’t have Self-Made Tapestry, so I bought Acquiring Genomes instead, which is on the Lynn Margulis theory that cell organelles used to be free-swimming critters.