I've been playing around with some linkblog solutions. Firstly, on Phil Pearson's advice I tried del.icio.us. Once I negotiated my way around the minimalist design and even more minimalist documentation, I liked del.icio.us. However the problem is that it's a 3rd party hosted service and I want to host my linkblog on my own server. So I had to nix it. Next I tried Erik Benson's Morale-o-Meter. This is a linkblog script that Erik has kindly made available to people from his website. It looked like what I wanted, but unfortunately for me I ran into some server issues with the CGI. I'm afraid I don't have much patience for CGI errors, they are very nit-picky and it's like hunting for a needle in a haystack to fix them. I should add that there is nothing wrong with Erik's script, the fly in the ointment was somewhere in my web server's configuration.
Today a simple solution presented itself to me. While browsing around reading up on linkblogs, in particular Cameron Marlow's overview (found via Seb), I discovered that Movable Type has a bookmarklet option. I have a Movable Type weblog that has been sitting around doing little, so I've now converted it into a linkblog. The bookmarklet is a piece of Javascript that I saved to my browser Favorites (there is also a right-click menu option for IE browsers). Whenever I read a webpage that interests me, I simply click on the bookmarklet in my browser and up pops up a Movable Type box with the page link pre-populated. A neat extra is that if I highlight something on the page, like a choice quote, then that too is pre-populated in the MT pop-up box. I also like that the page title is added to the link tag, which adds more metadata grist to the mill.
So, the end result is I have started my linkblog. It is called Web of Ideas, even though it's just the beginning of what I'd like to include in an Ideas Database. But the best applications start off as simple ones. Or as Lawrence Lessig memorably put it in his book Code: "Keep the elements simple, and the compounds will astound". He was talking about the TCP/IP protocols, but the principle should apply for all Web applications.
I've just returned from 4 days holiday. I was disconnected from the Web for the entire time. This was a good thing, as I spent lots of quality time with my family. Now I'm back sitting in front of my PC at home. I've spent the last hour reviewing stuff in my RSS Aggregator. But with 4 days worth of updates to dig through, I've barely made a dent in clearing out my RSS Aggregator! So rather than totally swamp my mind with new data, I decided to take the plunge and click the Mark All Read button. It's a drastic move I know, but it's the only way to keep my holiday clearheadedness intact. Plus, do I really want to engage myself in the RSS-Data debate? That's a rhetorical question ;-)
I did however bookmark Jon Udell's latest articles, on browsers and interactive microcontent - yum! I'll devour those later. Plus I've bookmarked a Mezzoblue essay entitled "markup: Bulletproof XHTML". That's of interest, because I have my own XHTML essay brewing inside me...
Too. Much. Information. Data floods my mind and my actions become water-logged. What to do? There's too much to do. Information washes over me, my head is submerged. Metadata fills my nostrils. I'm drowning, help!
I'm being melodramatic :-) But actually I do feel this way sometimes. Right now I am struggling to manage my information flow. Let me list my current methods of information management:
- Email for communication
- RSS Aggregator for reading weblog feeds
- Weblog for writing
- Linkblog for aggregating Web links (I haven't started this yet)
- Personal journal (currently inactive, superceded by my public weblog)
- Paper notebooks, lots of 'em
- Various bits of paper with scribbled notes (a sea of them)
- Emails to myself with ideas
- Ideas Database - my dream app, not yet off the ground...it's possibly my own personal Tim Berners Lee Semantic Web-like folly.
- SMS (I don't use mobile phones much though)
- Tasks in Outlook (separate ones at work and home)
- To Do lists written in my diary or on pieces of paper
- Outlook calendar (work only)
- Diary: where I note down tasks, appointments, do my finances.
- Jottings in books
- Photocopies and printouts - screeds of 'em
And that's probably just the tip of the iceberg. I haven't even mentioned other popular forms of information management like Instant Messaging or Skype, neither of which I use. The point of all this is that I have too many data platforms. What I'd like to do is reduce it down to 4-5 key platforms. Solutions?
Erik Benson posits a "universal text box", which would be a one-size-fits-all writing tool. Whether you're entering a weblog entry, an email, a search query, a photo, a comment on someone else's blog post, a ping to a server - it all gets put in the "universal text box". This is a variation on one of my favourite themes: the Universal Canvas. To me it would be a dream web application. The nightmare scenario, however, is that Microsoft are already building it and it's called Longhorn :-0
Erik concludes that to make a universal text box, we'll need to reduce and consolidate in terms of functionality and features:
"I'd like to create a catalog of different ways that people can currently write to the web (web forms on a zillion different sites, all ignorant of one another, various desktop applications, all saying the same thing in a slightly different way) and find the lowest common denominator. It's good that so much exploration has happened (that's the benefit of allowing innovation to occur in a distributed fashion) but I think innovation in the "write to the web" action is going to have to go through a couple steps of choice reduction and consolidation before we fully cross the chasm."
nb: emphasis mine
This is pretty much what I want to do in my own personal world of information. I want to pare down my data platforms to the bare minimum. I want 4-5 platforms maximum, which could be the following:
- Writing tool - my weblog and my paper notebooks (I still need both computer and pen)
- Ideas: Database
- Communication: Email
- Tasks: Outlook (or Chandler when it is finished)
- Reading tool: RSS Aggregator
Ideally I'd like to have just one app: one tool that rules them all. Not everyone would agree with me though. Andrew Chen is one person who believes we need specialist tools. Andrew writes:
"We need to make things "fun" for people to enter in the necessary MetaData in order for things to work. And to do so, we need more than just some generic one-size fits all data-entry method. That's why I think we'll need speciallized tools for each type of "fun" meta-data that people might want to enter."
I appreciate what Andrew is driving at and I agree it is fun to play with all the new Web toys that come out. But on the other hand... the amount of choice in web applications these days gives me a headache. There are just too many tools for a single human to grok. For example, every time I go to the Mozilla Projects webpage I feel a tremendous pressure of information... like a dam that's near bursting. Or when I go to the W3C site, I'm battered by giant waves of protocols and standards. Or when I go to SourceForge.net, I'm soon engulfed by the flow of web apps.
Yes I would be much happier with less information, less tools. It's why I'm so fond of the humble Web Browser, which is the nearest thing we have to a Universal Information Application. Sure it's not perfect, it's not a "smart" client. But hey, we can write in it. We can read in it. We can plug things into it (like Flash, or the latest Laszlo app). The Web Browser will suffice for me thanks... at least until Erik builds the Universal Text Box, in which case I want one ;-)
I've been thinking about starting a linkblog, like Phil Pearson has just done. Two of my favourite daily reads are Anil Dash's Daily Links and Erik Benson's Morale-o-Meter. Both those guys post a daily list of external links, with a 1-2 line comment on each link, which pretty much align with my own interests. Personally I prefer it when daily links are kept separate from the author's main writing blog. Which brings me to my dilemma. Every day I read interesting things on the Web. I want someplace to store those things, because they often seed ideas of my own, which inspire what I write in this weblog.
This continues my owngoing search for the ultimate Web of Ideas application. I see a linkblog as being one source of ideas, gathered from the Web. Other sources of ideas include my own mind, books I read, music I listen to, people I converse with, etc.
But the question is - is it worth me publishing my list of links so that people can subscribe to it? Because my special interest is the two-way web, my list of daily links could actually be a useful resource - especially considering the official Two-Way Web website and the community Write The Web site are no longer being updated (the latter has been taken off the air, which is a pity). So a focussed daily list of links by me, on the topic of the Two-Way Web, could be of value to other people.
Any thoughts?
