---
title: "11 Weblog Pieces"
date: 2003-09-18
author: "Richard MacManus"
categories:
  - name: "ReadWriteWeb"
    url: "/category/readwriteweb.md"
tags:
  - name: "2003"
    url: "/tag/2003.md"
---

# 11 Weblog Pieces

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](https://web.archive.org/web/20040310153336/http://www.ozzie.net/blog/stories/2003/09/12/savingTheBrowser.html)): “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](https://web.archive.org/web/20040310153336/http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/CorporateBlogging)): “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](https://web.archive.org/web/20040310153336/http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/i_keep_six_honest.html)): “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](https://web.archive.org/web/20040310153336/http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/09/12/36OPstrategic_1.html)): “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](https://web.archive.org/web/20040310153336/http://tesugen.com/2003/09/06/patterns-and-sonnets)): “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](https://web.archive.org/web/20040310153336/http://www.ftrain.com/ProcessingProcessing.html)): “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](https://web.archive.org/web/20040310153336/http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/09/a_brief_design_history_of_plasticbagorg.shtml)): “…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](https://web.archive.org/web/20040310153336/http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/history.html)): “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](https://web.archive.org/web/20040310153336/http://blogs.it/0100198/2003/09/17.html#a1720)): “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](https://web.archive.org/web/20040310153336/http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/) – in [Seb’s](https://web.archive.org/web/20040310153336/http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/) 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…

*Originally published on ReadWriteWeb ([archived copy](https://web.archive.org/web/20020204040018/http://www.readwriteweb.com/2003/09/18.html#a117))*