Sun, Nov 30, 2003
Blog-Wiki Integration Turned On
#
Long-time followers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed my habit of
smooshing seemingly harmless words together. I often do it with
people's names -- for example, EugeneEricKim. Some of you may have
guessed why I did this, but most of you probably figured my space key
was broken. (GB)
Starting today, my reasons should be more clear. Notice that
"EugeneEricKim" is not only improperly written, it is now also a
link. Browse through my older blog entries, and you'll notice that
all of the smooshed words are either links or are followed by a
question mark link. This is blog-Wiki integration at its finest. (GC)
See more....
/tech/blosxom |
Posted at 3:11pm
Wed, Nov 26, 2003
Ross Mayfield on Social Software, Social Networks
#
Last Friday, I finally got a chance to meet RossMayfield, who was
speaking at the November
meeting of the Bay Area
Futurist Salon, held at SAP Labs in Palo
Alto. Ross is CEO and founder of SocialText, a company that is
selling social software to companies. Some people have compared
BlueOxenAssociates to SocialText, which is apt in some ways, but is
not quite right, as I'll discuss below. ChrisPeterson (one of our
advisors) had said great things about Ross and PeterKaminski
(SocialText's CTO), and Ross and I had exchanged some pleasant
e-mails. The meeting confirmed Chris's judgement. Not only is Ross a
good guy, he had some interesting things to say about SocialSoftware
and SocialNetworks. (D8)
See more....
/talks |
Posted at 9:06pm
"Turn Off Your Computer" and Other Pattern Ramblings
#
As I mentioned previously, BlueOxen is finishing up its second research
report. We spent several hours developing a survey for the report,
and all of us were quite satisfied with the final draft. Then we
e-mailed the surveys. Almost immediately afterwards, the three of us
thought of several more questions we would have liked to have asked. (CR)
The experience struck a chord in JoshRai, who suggested there was a
force there that manifested itself in several patterns. Last
Thursday, he came up with a pattern as an example:
TurnOffYourComputer. It's both a pattern for good living -- or as
Josh called it, a "Martha Stewart" pattern -- and also a pattern for
knowledge work. I think the underlying force is one that crops up
constantly, and is worth discussing. I also think explaining this
particular pattern is a useful way of demonstrating the difference
between a pattern and a force. (CS)
See more....
/collaboration/patterns |
Posted at 6:33pm
Sun, Nov 23, 2003
The Quest for Santa Maria Barbecue, Part II
#
Yesterday, I journeyed south to what is now known as "the O.C.," or
what my friend Christine refers to as "behind the Orange Curtain." I
think of it merely as my new home away from home. The trip gave me an
excuse to revisit an earlier quest: to sample some authentic SantaMaria barbecue. (BR)
To recap: Last July, I took a detour from my normal route south to
visit TheHitchingPost, a steakhouse in Casmalia, one of SantaMaria's
neighboring towns. While the food was good, there were two flaws in
the experience: The restaurant served steak, not barbecue, and it did
not serve pinquitos, a bean native to the Santa Maria Valley and an
integral part of the SantaMaria barbecue experience. (BS)
Going Grassroots (BT)
Having been disappointed by the restaurant experience, I decided to go
grassroots. I had read that the natives often congregated downtown on
weekends to smoke tri-tip and cook beans. I called the SantaMaria
Chamber of Commerce to confirm the story.
The woman who answered the phone did just that, waxing poetic about
how various community groups camped out on Broadway Street, the main
downtown thoroughfare, every Friday and Saturday and hosted barbecues.
She recommended visiting the Valley Christian barbecue just south of
Stowell Road. (BU)
See more....
/food |
Posted at 12:03pm
Thu, Nov 20, 2003
Upgraded Blosxom and Plugins
#
I finally upgraded blosxom to 2.0, which has
been available for a few months now. I upgraded Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's
ping_weblogs_com_xmlrpc to v0.06 (after fixing a minor bug), and I
installed two new plugins: entriescache_purple and
Rob Hague's cooluri. (BJ)
See more....
/tech/blosxom |
Posted at 10:24am
Wed, Nov 19, 2003
Response to Marc Canter
#
I meet a lot of interesting people in this business, but a few stand
out more than others. Anyone who's met MarcCanter knows what I'm
talking about. Marc is a big, boisterous fellow, mostly good-natured,
and very outspoken. The guy is sharp and passionate, and has a proven
track record of getting things done in the Valley, including
cofounding MacroMind (which became MacroMedia). He's also got an
incredibly cute baby daughter, which is a bit unfair, because it makes
it difficult for me to get mad at him. (B5)
Marc recently complained about BlueOxenAssociates. Among his complaints were: (B6)
Now I have nothing againist Eugene Kim and his stalwarts, but what they created and what they do is pretty lame - compared to what's going on out there - for free, everyday. What was it about Blue Oxen that SocialText, Phil Pearson, Dave Winer, Paolo Valdemarin, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Danny Ayers, Dan Brickley, Lisa Rein, Mitch Kapor, Mark Pilgrim, Aaron Swartz, and hundreds more aren't doing everyday? (B7)
Why did we need a white paper on why open source is a good thing? Why do we need yet another Wiki - ever if it is purple? (B8)
I just really think that Pierre's money could be put to better use. (B9)
There are lots of problems with what Marc says, the biggest being that
he's got most of his facts wrong. (BA)
See more....
/blueoxen |
Posted at 12:14pm
Tue, Nov 18, 2003
Howard Rheingold on Smart Mobs
#
(The last in my series of
retroactive
summaries.) HowardRheingold
spoke at Stanford on October 24, 2003. His talk, entitled,
"Smart Mobs: Mobile Communication, Pervasive Computing, and Collective
Action," centered around several themes raised in his most recent
book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social
Revolution. (AZ)
Rheingold suggests that there is a threshold for collective action,
and current technology is causing us to approach and, in some cases,
surpass that threshold. He cited many, many interesting examples,
among them: (B0)
- The most recent presidential election in South Korea, where a web site that sent thousands of e-mails and SMS messages in the days preceding helped determine the outcome. (B1)
- The Howard Dean campaign. (B2)
- The observation that the personal computer became a tool for the masses in the United States when the price came down to one month's salary of the average lower middle class family ($2,000-3,000). Rheingold then stated that wireless handhelds will reach that threshold on a worldwide basis (approximately $70) within the next three to six years. (B3)
Rheingold described a project that a friend from Microsoft Research
developed. The friend took an IPAQ with wireless networking and a
camera, and developed a bar code reader that would query the UPC
database and then do a Google search on the product. Rheingold
scanned a box of prunes in his friend's kitchen, which resulted in
articles on Sun-Diamond Corporation that raised questions about its
environmental practices. What would be the impact of a tool like this
if it were available on a wide scale? Such a scenario is not only
possible, it is probable within the next few years. (B4)
/talks |
Posted at 10:10pm
Missing Data in Qualitative Research
#
I'm currently working with MiroslavKlivansky and JoshRai on
BlueOxenAssociates' next research report -- an extensive case study of
the BlueOxen CollaborationCollaboratory, to be released next month.
The study is based on analysis of the community's archives correlated
with the results of a detailed survey of the community's participants.
The goal of the study is to discuss best practices within this
community and to propose a framework for examining communities and
collaboration. Internally, this is an opportunity to both improve the
collaboratory itself and also refine our research methodology. (AS)
We spent a significant amount of time developing the survey for the
study, which was an amazingly difficult process. We had two goals in
designing the survey. First, we wanted to gather information about
participant behavior that we couldn't gather from the data itself.
For example, we had know way of knowing how much time each participant
spent following the community's discussion. Second, we were trying to
determine whether or not the community had QWAN (QualityWithoutAName).
The problem with this question, of course, is that you can't just ask
it on the survey and expect to get meaningful responses. (AT)
While struggling with these problems, Miroslav drew our attention to
an article by Supriya Singh and Lyn Richards in a recent issue of
QualitativeResearchJournal? -- "Missing data: Finding 'central'
themes in qualitative research" (v3, n1, pp5-17). The article was
therapeutic in that it not only empathized with the challenges we were
facing, it identified them as standard steps in the research process.
Additionally, the article served as a testament to the NUD*IST
qualitative analysis tool (the predecessor to
NVivo). (AU)
See more....
/articles |
Posted at 9:06pm
Wed, Nov 12, 2003
A Village Across the World
#
My friend Ying Qian recently completed a documentary,
A Village Across the
World, with her film partner, Jie Li. From the synopsis: (AO)
A Village Across the World follows a group of international English-teaching volunteers into the cultural and emotional landscape of a Chinese village. Tucked away in the mountains, the Huangtian Village at first seemed a poor, forgotten outpost unaffected by dynamic changes happening elsewhere in China. Yet the splash of the volunteers' entry uncovered rich historical memories and changing power structures that directed the life of the village. As the "foreigners" became increasingly involved in the villagers' lives, both sides reflected on the fruits and dilemmas of intercultural contact and economic development. (AP)
The film is 48 minutes long, in English and Chinese with English
subtitles. (AQ)
I saw an early cut of the film, and think it's outstanding. Ying and
Jie are looking for
support to
help cover film festival entrance fees and finance a followup
documentary. Go to the
movie's web site and help support two talented filmmakers burgeoning
careers. (AR)
/movies |
Posted at 4:13pm
George Lakoff on Shared Language and the Rockridge Institute
#
GeorgeLakoff, professor of linguistics and cognitive sciences at
U.C. Berkeley, is an intellectual whose
work I have admired for several years now. He is the author of many
books, including Philosophy in the Flesh and Moral Politics: How
Liberals and Conservatives Think. (AD)
My friend Alex brought
an interview with Lakoff to my attention. Lakoff, along with seven
other professors from Berkeley and U.C. Davis, recently founded the RockridgeInstitute, a progressive
think tank. (AE)
One of Rockridge's goal is to develop a shared "moral language," and
to unify progressives around that language. In the interview, Lakoff
explains how conservatives invested heavily in infrastructure
beginning in the 1970s, creating a network of think tanks, scholars,
and media outlets devoted to pushing a conservative ideology and
agenda. The result was a shared language that framed public issues
from a conservative perspective. (AF)
See more....
/collaboration |
Posted at 3:46pm
Sat, Nov 08, 2003
Lois Hetland on Researching Arts and Education
#
On Tuesday, October 28, 2003, I heard LoisHetland? speak at Le Petit
Trianon in San Jose. Her talk, entitled, "Studio Thinking: How Visual
Arts Teaching Can Promote Disciplined Habits of Mind," was part of the
CulturalInitiativesSiliconValley ongoing lecture series. (9X)
Hetland's research centers around the following question: Does arts
education make people smarter? In other words, does it enhance
overall cognitive capabilities? While her talk reported the most
recent results of her research, she also revealed some very
interesting ideas about the role of research in general. (9Y)
See more....
/talks |
Posted at 8:16am
Mon, Nov 03, 2003
Hillside Group Annual Meeting
#
I attended lots of great meetings and talks over the past two weeks.
I'm going to start posting some notes and observations in reverse
chronological order. (9I)
Last Thursday and Friday, I attended the HillsideGroup's annual
post-OOPSLA meeting, held at the Anaheim
Sheraton in Southern California. RichardGabriel, president of the
HillsideGroup and one of our advisory board members, and DirkRiehle,
HillsideGroup's treasurer, invited me to attend. (9J)
See more....
/events |
Posted at 9:54am
