There’s great discussion going on here about creating weblog aggregated from individual bloggers’ categorized posts.
This would be a fun way to create an Austin blog out of the various AustinBlogger posts that talk about local events and places.
And a conversation about Shelley Powers ThreadNeedle application, which will create threaded discussions out of trackback threads (if I understand it right).
Which we could use to create a single threaded discussion out of the distributed conversation about geoURL applications.
I’m still reading up on the conversation, please correct me if I’ve summarized wrong.
Networks of trust
Ross Mayfield has a good summary of a discussion about cognitive and emotional dimensions of trust.
As I said in the comments to that post, I like the notions that:
* trust is built over time
* trust is a parametric space, with different kinds of trust (personal trust that a friend will be reliable and sympathetic; professional trust that a colleague will produce quality work).
But I start getting suspicious about social science methodologies that attempt to quantify and parameterize trust. Organizations that rely heavily on this kind of analysis in Professor Stephenson’s work may have more problems than a consulting sociologist can help with.
My first market research job involved writing up the results of HR surveys in a large telecommunications company.
The results showed that employees did not trust managers and managers did not trust employees. The HR survey was repeated on an annual basis, showing that managers and employees continued to distrust each other.
This company had big problems with management and human relationships. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on survey research to quantify the distrust between managers and employees wasn’t the best use of money.
Pages full of survey results and armies of consultants don’t replace and can’t create honest leadership, aligned incentives, and day-to-day warmth and respect.
Pig clones are individuals
Piglets in litters or cloned pigs behave with individual personality traits — shy or outgoing, curious or passive — just like litters of normal pigs, according to research at Texas A&M reported by Salon magazine. The researcher theorizes that differences in gene expression in the womb might account for the distinction.
ACLU TX meeting Sunday
Public Forum : An ACLU Perspective on the 78th Texas Legislature.
ACLU of Texas Executive Director will discuss the many issues facing the Texas legislature that affect criminal justice and human rights.
This forum is being sponsored by the First UU Church of Austin on Sunday, January 12th, from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm. The church is located at 4700 Grover Ave. Directions can be found at http://www.austinUU.org/direct.htm
Now seems like a good time to show up at ACLU events.
Messing with Movable Type
Trying to add the “email this entry feature.” Please ignore strange behavior you may see while I futz.
The opposite of schadenfreude
Schadenfreude: glee at the misfortune of others
Mudita: happiness at the good fortune of others (apparently a Buddhist term)
p.s. got the link via a book link trail from All Consuming; I have no particular affinity for Ayn Rand!
Does the DMCA ban reverse engineering?
Lexmark is suing Smartek, a company that makes replacement toner cartridges, under the DMCA.
News.com reports: “Lexmark alleges that the Smartek chip mimics the authentication sequence used by Lexmark chips and unlawfully tricks the printer into accepting an aftermarket cartridge.”
Now, I am not and have never been a lawyer. But isn’t this the kind of reverse engineering that used to be a protected exemption to copyright law?
Will the case actually test whether the DMCA bans reverse engineering?
GeoBlogging Coffee
We could use GeoURLS to create the Global Coffeeshop blog.
Mark-up blog entries with the GeoURL for the coffeeshop. Then be able to look up coffee-shops in any part of the world.
Simple
Phil Wolff wrote a while back about how weblogs are going to evolve into a converged client, with attributes of weblogs, email, IM, PIM, presentation, word processor, newsreader, video editor, workflow manager, and a couple of other things in the pot for good measure.
I agree in part, and disagree vehemently in part. The many modes of human communication are all used together to support the relationships we have and the work we’re doing. There should be interfaces and touchpoints among the media; a common inbox for daily activities, common memory spaces for the things we want to remember in the context we want to remember them.
But an interface is a tool designed for a purpose. There is no way I want the controls required to edit video before me unless I want to be editing video right now. I don’t want lots of screen real estate taken up by publishing widgets when I just want to write and post three sentences. This is why Microsoft Office feels like it’s gotten progressively worse; there are too many potatoes in the sack.
Phil writes: “Are you presenting on a computer projector, a video stream, or paper? The software should understand how to adjust.”
Respectfully, Phil, I don’t want software to guess whether I’m trying to edit a video — this is an even more nightmarish version of Microsoft clippy, which obsequiously tries to write your business letters for you.
There’s a reason people like publish with using Blogger and MovableType.
Simple is good.
The hard part is not going to be tying all of these things together.
The hard part is going to be maintaining simple entry points to the underlying complexity.
Start-up marries blogs and cellphones
cool idea. Nasty, closed implementation — a proprietary service from the phone company to create blogs only from its own customers, vs. software and an open API to blog pictures.
That kind of openness probably isn’t possible in the closed cellphone world. Wonder what Russ Beattie thinks about it, as a mobile guy and blogger.
via Dave Winer.