Over 1000 participants participated in the RSS Winterfest voice-blog-wiki-IRC multi-model conference last week. Socialtext hosted the “Eventspace” wiki-blog — we hosted the application, and we also helped to host the online party. It was lots of fun, included insightful conversation, and created useful resources.
Participants in IRC improvised conversation on the themes of the sessions. Bloggers posted session notes and questions and resources. Wiki participants built collaborative pages on RSS Tools, RSS Authentication, and other topics.
Here are some of the practices we used that helped make the conference lively:
* create weblogs with relevant topics
* set up sign-in space for people to describe themselves and learn about each other
* pre-populate the wiki with the conference program and other resources
* real-time gardening — link interesting pages to the home page, consolidate related resource pages, help harvest quotes and references.
Maybe most important, we helped weave questions, comments, and insights from the IRC and wikiblog into the voice conference. It’s a salon facilitation skill, translated to electronic media.
This RoperASW/Tandberg polllast year revealed the crushing tedium of traditional teleconference. Less than half of attendees actually pay attention to conference calls. With audience participation tools, you get an event that is more lively and intelligent.
Is RSS Ready for Prime-Time
Dylan Greene writes an insightful yet ultimately unsatisfying piece arguing that RSS is not yet ready for Prime Time.
He’s right that RSS has weaknesses. The way most people use it, it wastes bandwidth. Many feeds don’t include full-text (need to fix this…). Comments aren’t well integrated. And, the coup de grace, an RSS reader isn’t yet built into Microsoft Windows.
True, but not that useful, unless you’re a Gartner analyst trying to determine whether a technology has reached a state of ultimate, top-right-quadrant maturity.
The interesting questions are:
* is RSS mature enough to do what you want?
* can you benefit from RSS as an individual, a publisher, or an organization.
If you’re a mildly tech-savvy individual wanting to keep track of lots of weblogs and news, then RSS is a lifesaver.
If you’re a complete novice, or if you advise complete novices, you probably want to avoid RSS — though bloglines is pretty darn accessible — I’d recommend it to anyone who is comfortable with a browser.
If you’re a blogger or web publisher, and want to reach the increasing number of users who depend on RSS to read web content, then surely publish in RSS.
If you’re in an organization where most people are drowning in email (i.e. most of us) and you have influence over technology choices, you might want to consider using RSS to complement business applications, helping individual employees manage their time and attention.
Dylan’s points are correct, but they don’t tell you whether the rewards of RSS are worth the trouble for you. It takes a bit more effort to use technologies that are somewhat in their life cycle. You need to decide whether it’s worth it.
If you’re an open source geek or work for a technology company that’s not Microsoft, you have opportunities to shape next-generation syndication standards and applications. Those opportunities are here now, and will be gone in a few years.
Confidence in the voting system
A recent Zogby poll found that even in red states, which voted for George W. Bush, 32 percent of the public believes that the election was stolen. In blue states, the fraction is 44 percent.
via a succinct op-ed by Paul Krugman.
I’ve been working on evoting issues here in Texas. Voting administration officials are very concerned that “alarmism” about evoting will reduce public confidence in elections.
It is too late. We have a problem. Without a voter-verified paper trail, there’s no way to have a reliable audit. If something goes wrong, we’ll never know.
The way to handle citizens’ justified concern is action, not Xanax and lullabies.
Officials are concerned about cost. Krugman says it well.
What about the expense? Let’s put it this way: we’re spending at least $150 billion to promote democracy in Iraq. That’s about $1,500 for each vote cast in the 2000 election. How can we balk at spending a small fraction of that sum to secure the credibility of democracy at home?
Open source informalism
UC Irvine Researcher Walt Scacci is studying open source development, and has come across distinct practices.
It’s not clear to me how the open source practices differ from agile processes in general — a lighter, more conversational, less document-heavy design process.
What are some of the differences you’ve found, apart from the obvious ones?
For example, in software engineering, there’s a widespread view that it’s necessary to elicit and capture the requirement specifications of the system to be developed so that once implemented, it’s possible to pose questions as to what was implemented, compared with what was specified.
We do not see or observe or find in open-source projects any online documents that software engineers would identify as a software requirements specification. That poses the question: What problem are they solving, if they haven’t written down the problem? While it’s true that there’s no requirements specification, what there is instead is what we’ve identified as a variety of software informalisms.
What do you mean by “informalism”?
That word is chosen to help compare to the practice advocated in software engineering, in which one creates a formal systems specification or design that might be delivered to the customer. Informalisms are such things as information posted on a Web page, a threaded e-mail discussion or a set of comments in source code in a project repository. It may be a set of how-tos or FAQs on how to get things accomplished. Each is a carrier of fragments of what the requirements for the system are going to be.
Bruce Eckel on blogging and simplicity
Bruce Eckel is trying to cultivate bloggingas a genre for expressing ideas that aren’t yet complete thoughts. “I now believe there are three modes of written communication: books, articles, and ideas. The first two I have long experience with, but I lack a medium for ideas. ”
Eckel draws an interesting connection between initial simplicity — getting something out quickly — and elegant simplicity, which takes a lot of work to prune a complex expression to a simple form. They aren’t the same thing at all, but getting material out into the world helps give you the feedback that lets you refine and polish.
What is the balance between simplicity and expedience? “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work” is certainly not saying “do the most elegant thing” because the goal is to get something working, without too much effort, so that you can try it out and see if it solves any portion of the problem. “Trying it out” is what will produce the valuable information that can be fed back into the next iteration, and will also begin to tell you what’s most important about the problem.
Simplicity is hard
In the article about the 80/20 rule, Tim Bray explains that simplicity isn’t easy.
In Tim’s words, “the mental machinery involved in the design process naturally tends towards more rather than less.”
The unofficial version of my business card reads “grinch.” I spend a lot of time saying no to all kinds of attractive, bright, shiny jingly ideas. “Too complicated.” “Not the most important thing right now, maybe later.” “What’s the simplest way of doing things that works”? Two parts diplomacy, one part curmudgeon. Not a good way to win popularity contests.
Before Christmas, from a biotech company, “This is much easier to use and manage than $competitive product. I can use this with much more of my team”
Yesterday, from a consultant who helps organizations improve collaboration and manage knowledge… “It’s like $competitiveproduct, but easier to use and cheaper.”
The 80/20 rule wins
Tim Bray has been working on a series of articles analyzing which factors lead to technology success. The strongest predictor isn’t investor support, technical elegance, a compelling idea, standardization. It’s the “80/20” rule, systems that yield 80 percent of the benefit for doing twenty percent of the work.
The 80/20 Tribe
Anil Dash on NYT on teen blogs
In the link blog, Anil writes “i fear it may take us another few years to live down the impression generated by this story.” Anil, who is “us”? When you use the phone, you don’t have to “live down” the impression created by teenagers chatting about crushes and parties. People who blog about social software and politics don’t have to “live down” teenagers blogging about life — just like the teens don’t need to “live down” the grownups talking about car repair and jobs and insurance.
It’s just communication. People say what they want to say. The medium and the tools let us say it. All good.
Sopranos, Season 1
In one of the episodes of the Soprano’s first season, baby mobster Christopher Moltisanti, who’s trying to write his life into a screenplay, comments that a movie script is about 120 pages. David Chase takes advantage of the story-telling space in a 13-hour season to pull together a form more like a novel: developing characters, unfolding themes, interlocking plots, arcs, and pointed social commentary.
I’ve been watching the Sopranos for the first time on DVD this past week; it’s as good as its reputation.
Adaptation
Watched Adaptation over the holidays with the brother and sister-in-law in New Jersey. I enjoyed Nicholas Cage’s acting tour de force, playing an angst-ridden, intellectual, original screen-writer, and his cheerful, confident, cliche-loving twin brother, with similar mannerisms and different personalities.
I was entertained by the dogged resistance to making a movie without hollywood plot cliches — sex, drugs, chase scenes, personal revelation — and eventual surrender to a short, devastating parody of hollywood style.
The film even plays games with emotional trajectory; there’s one red herring, the striving of the New Yorker writer and screen-writer to “follow their bliss”; and the emotional moral the movie chooses; to “be confident, despite critics.” The film could have easily swapped themes and worked as well; it’s a critique of the tacked on “moral of the story” chosen from at random from the cliches of therapeutic culture.
It’s either a measure of a small bit of heart in the movie, despite overall cynicism; or personal vulnerability, but I resonated with the intellectual snobbery toward his sincere and middlebrow brother that the main character has to unlearn.
Ultimately, though, as Judith comments, the film-school cleverness isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. A film-school student watches oodles of movies, realizes that there are no new stories left, and that the industry uses golden chains to tie film-makers to sentimental and dramatic cliches.
Shakespeare had that problem — the groundlings all wanted fight scenes; comedies have a happy ending; tragedies end with blood on the stage. Homer presumably had that problem — there were hundreds of years of story-telling; he had to get the audience to listen to him, and somehow do something new.