ReadWriteWeb

OK, so I'm not Kottke and my surveys don't attract hundreds of punters :-( But thank-you Rogers for linking to my survey. I'll keep the survey going till tonight NZ time, when I'll post my updated 'About Me' (with photo).

Until then, click here to participate in the survey.

So far I've gotten two very interesting responses to my informal survey: what do I look like? This is a fascinating experiment, because even from just two responses I can see that people form a definite image in their mind's eye of what a blogger looks like.

What I'd really like is for an A-List blogger to give my little experiment some coverage, so I can get more data. Come on Marc Canter, this is right up your alley - People Aggregator and all. Or Seb Paquet from Many-to-Many fame - this is a social experiment. How about Joi Ito?

If you haven't commented yet and you read my site even a little bit regularly, please take a minute to comment by clicking here. I won't be offended if your image of me is unflattering. Obviously, no family members or real life acquaintances please :-)

I'm currently updating my 'About Me' page, so that it reflects my 2004 goals and themes that I'll be exploring this year. I've got the draft sitting on my brand new Palm Tungsten T2, which Father Christmas bought me. Now I'm wondering whether to publish a photo of myself...if I can even find a decent one. I think it does help to put a face to bloggers we read on a regular basis. For me it's not for social Friendster-like reasons (although those are valid reasons for lots of people), but to build trust in someone's writing by humanizing it. Like how computer magazines have pictures of their columnists - e.g. Jon Udell and Steve Gillmor - in order to put a human face to the technical content.

The other day I saw a picture of a techy blogger who I've been reading for a few months now, but up till then I'd never seen what he looked like. His picture was totally different to what I had perceived him to look like in my mind's eye. Actually he looked a lot cooler than what I thought he would :-)

So with all this talk of social software going round, I'm curious what the differences are between one's weblog interface (a virtual avatar if you like) and one's human 'real life' interface?

Let's start with an informal survey. What do you think I look like in real life? If you were to construct a human avatar of my weblog, what would he look like to you? Please don't be shy, click the Comment button right below this sentence and don't hold back ;-)

I'm doing some incremental changes to the site. First up, I added my linkblog to the sidebar. I use my linkblog to save links, ideas and memes that interest me. Hence its name: Web of Ideas. It's a Movable Type site and the search functionality in particular makes it very worthwhile. Often when I'm thinking about a topic, I'll search my linkblog and look back at the links I've stashed there.

Because it's frequently updated, Web of Ideas is a good guide to what I'm thinking about at any one time. So I figured it belonged in my main weblog as well. Radio users may be interested to know I used the xml.rss.renderWithTemplate verb to achieve this (found via Radio Keola).

I'm in the middle of categorizing my main weblog content. I'm doing it in an OPML file and I plan to use XSLT to transform it into a topic navigation section. Right, off I go to do some categorizing...

I've just finished transferring a bunch of links from Outlook to my linkblog. They are links I've been hoarding over the past few months, as ideas for future weblog articles or just for inspiration. I plan to use my linkblog to store all the ideas I harvest from the Web. Beats emailing myself, plus because my linkblog is Movable Type I am able to use the search functionality to find things easily.

I'm still going to use this weblog, Read/Write Web, as my vehicle for original writing. And I promise my next article won't be about linkblogs! Even I'm getting bored with that topic now ;-)

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 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?

Forgive me, it's the end of the day and I don't want to write my usual lengthy blog post. So I thought I'd do the blogging equivalent of "piano pieces", which in this case is a collection of various links and quotes that have caught my eye recently:

Prelude No. 15 in D flat Op. 28 "Prior Art" (Ray Ozzie): "In 1993 or thereabouts, we saw the emergence of TCP/IP, HTML, HTTP, Mosaic and the Web. From our perspective, all of these were simplistic emulations of a tiny subset of what we'd been doing in Notes for years."

Etude No. 1 in A major op. 25 "Corporate Blogging" (Bill Seitz): "Focus on tools that maximize benefit to the team (not fuzzy enterprise Knowledge Management - the ConText is often too loose for [ReUse])"

Waltz No. 1 in A flat Op. 34 "I Keep Six Honest..." (Rudyard Kipling):
"I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who."

Mazurka No. 1 in E minor op. 41 "Email's special power" (Jon Udell): "Software that requires people to explicitly declare the formation of these groups, and to acknowledge their dissolution, is too blunt an instrument for such ephemeral social interaction."

Nocturne No. 2 in E flat op. 9 "Patterns and Sonnets" (Peter Lindberg): "We humans are built to create constrained universes for us to express ourselves within."

Impromptu No. 4 in C sharp op. 66 "Processing" (Paul Ford): "I wish that people would take a step back and look at everything we've done and "elegantize" the Web as a construct, define a set of core goals that web developers want to solve and create as small as possible a language, based on the smallest possible set of principles, that will help them meet those goals."

Mazurka No. 1 in B flat op. 7 "Weblog Design" ( Tom Coates): "...I spent an idle couple of hours thinking about what it meant to design a site for the weblog format - which was concentrated around putting long tracts of readable content on a page with almost no navigation at all, but instead quite a lot of ambient persistently useful peripheral information."

Fantasia in D minor op.119 "History" (Neal Stephenson): "When engineering types speak highly of some science fiction writer, usually it's not because that person predicted the future. Rather, it's because he or she put together disparate ideas into a coherent vision that could be used as a road map by the people who are actually deploying such a technology."

Etude No. 5 in B major op. 54 "Plug-ins" (Marc Canter): "It's 2003 for Christ Sakes! I like the CSS stuff I see, but there still is a real limit to the types of interactive interfaces available today on the web. So if we have to rely upon plug-ins - so be it. Let's just make sure (ar least) that what we do with it - rocks the house."

Waltz No. 10 in C Sharp Op. 67 "Destinations" (Don Park - in Seb's Comments): "To support topics, I think the concept of 'Destinations' should be introduced to blog tools. Wikis and multi-author sites can then be destinations. Ping sites could also become a destination of sort although only the 'ping' will arrive instead of the whole post."

Etude No. 12 in C minor op. 10 "Film" (Ingmar Bergman, pg 51 - Images): "I am in the grip of an uncontrollable curiosity. I note, I observe, I look everywhere; everything is unreal, fantastic, frightening, or ridiculous. I catch a speck of dust floating in the air; maybe it's the germ of a film - what does it matter? It doesn't matter, but I find it interesting, therefore I insist that it is a film."

ps this actually took more time to do than an original weblog post :-0 I guess there's a lesson in there somewhere...

On a less serious note than my previous post, it also occured to me that bloggers are like rock n roll bands. The best bands explore a different theme each album, just like the best bloggers (imho) write on an ever-changing series of themes. My favourite band The Velvet Underground released 4 studio albums that were each different in style and themes. Likewise in the tech blogging world, Don Park has recently written an album full of posts about Wikis, Dave Winer is in the midst of recording his thoughts on political blogs, Jon Udell has written a variety of classics on topics such as Universal Canvas. There are even the blogging equivalent of Unplugged albums - check out Mark Pilgrim's These Days.

Currently I'm writing on topics such as microcontent and the two-way web. Perhaps I'll start writing weblog "albums" - there'll be about 10 posts per album and each album will have a different unifying theme. For example: literary blogging is a theme I'm keen to explore. Or I could write a series of posts on the Semantic Web. I've already written a single post (a "song") about the SemWeb, so I could extend that into a whole RDF phase.

Now I just need to get my album covers sorted. Unfortunately with blogging that means getting stuck into CSS and XHTML :-)

ps this post was partly inspired by a radio interview I heard recently on Radio Active, a Wellington student radio station. The interview was with New Zealand musician Scott Mannion, who goes by the recording name The Tokey Tones. Scott said that he likes to come up with an idea for an album theme first, then record it using whatever musicians best fit the theme, and lastly get a band together to promote the album on tour. So he doesn't have a band in the traditional sense, he is part of a 'community of musicians'. For example members of The Brunettes helped him record his latest albums. The Brunettes, fyi, are another New Zealand band and they sound like a cross between The Velvet Underground and bubblegum pop (literally, the lead male singer has got the Lou Reed thing going on in both voice and guitar). They're fantastic and unique...if you're looking for some original kiwi music to listen to, check it out.

As per my previous post, I've updated my blogroll to include topics and conversations. I just manually updated my blogroll OPML file, but I envisage a web frontend for this in future - kinda like Phil Pearson's web form for his Feed Combiner.

A bit more about the two new sections in my blogroll. The Topics section is made up of links to K-Collector and Topic Exchange pages. There's potential for some automation here - e.g. the 5 latest posts for each topic could be automatically fetched and added to your blogroll. This is pretty much what Phil's Feed Combiner does.

The Conversations part of the blogroll is the difficult child right now (by conversations, I mean comments on a weblog post). There's currently no easy way to relate comments on a similar theme, but on different blogrolls, together. So we have to rely on popular bloggers to "host" our blogging conversations. For example, suppose Mark Pilgrim and I both write about the same thing on our respective weblogs. Who do you think is going to attract the most comments? Of course it'd be Mark, so naturally the party would be at his place. Now if we can implement Don Park's vision of a Wiki for every conversation, then we'd have independent places to gather for our "conversations". So anyway, currently my blogroll just links to comments attached to weblogs - which looks inelegant when you click on the link, as it opens up in a grey monotone window with little context about the original post. So bring on those Wikis :-)

Final thought for the night (it's nearly midnight now in NZ)...this from Tom Coates. It's a nice summary of the value of weblog conversations:

"And this is the big leap forward - this is where the value of weblogs lies in the newly amateurised world. This flexibility of publishing creates a fluid and living form of self-representation, the 'homepage (as a place)' has become the 'weblog (as a person)' that can articulate a voice. And when there are a multiplicity of voices in space, then the possibility arises of conversations. And where there is conversation there is the sharing of information."