Over the past week I’ve been devouring a bunch of Etech 2004 session notes, including one I read today from Cory Doctorow on the subject of e-books. Cory wrote the book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and released it as a free download on his website in early 2003, under a Creative Commons licence. His book … Read more

I’ve noticed that a few of my favourite webloggers are being hit by comment spam. Bill Seitz’s WikiLog has been hammered this week and Andrew Chen noticed this morning a new trick. A spammer had exactly mirrored a comment made by me a few days ago on Andrew’s weblog, using my name but replacing my URL with its own nefarious link. Webloggers that … Read more

Today I came across a very interesting article in the New Zealand Herald newspaper entitled “US power and influence warrent careful scrutiny” by columnist Barbara Sumner Burstyn. She starts off by explaining why she writes about America so much (and gets flack from her readers because of her perceived anti-American stance): “So why do it? The answer … Read more

I’m in the process of writing a short story on the themes of Subjectivity and System in the blogosphere. I originally intended to treat it as a mini-Nanowrimo, but on reflection I’ve decided not to publish the story until it’s finished. This is not the same situation as Nanowrimo, which was all about Quantity – 50,000 words in a month. I published my … Read more

So I’ve decided to write and serialize a short story on Read/Write Web. I’ll treat it as a mini-Nanowrimo, with me as the only participant (unless anyone else is game). I’ll aim for 10,000 words in 2 weeks, which is pretty cushy compared to when I wrote 50,000 words over 4 weeks in November 2003. The … Read more

I’ve been following Erik Benson’s recentposts about his quest to find a “Big Goal” to work towards. The conversation has been very heavy, which is hardly surprising since we’re talking about The Meaning of Life here 🙂 I recommend you go over and read the discussion for yourself, but I wanted to cross-post my latest “comment” (which seems … Read more

Thought a) Some people post too much. Recently I subscribed to 7 Journalist Bloggers – 6 of them post too many items, so I’ve fallen behind already. One of them has 81 unread items sitting in my RSS Aggregator and it’s only 3 or so days worth. It’s too much! I don’t have the motivation to catch … Read more

Sren Kierkegaard, 19th century philosopher: “Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion–and who, therefore, in the next instant … Read more

Does anyone know when the beta of Game Neverending will start? I signed up a month ago, but I’ve only received one email from them and it basically said: wait till the beta starts. I can’t find any timelines on the official site. Incidentally my GNE article is currently the number 2 ranked Google link … Read more

One of my 12 main categories for this weblog is Corporate Weblogging. I recently wrote my category headings in the form of a manifesto, so here is how I actually phrased it: “Weblog technology can be used to enhance Corporate/Business communications and KM.” Thus far I haven’t written much on this theme, but it’s something … Read more

Over the past few days I’ve been doing some work on a new XSLT-based topic navigation for my weblog. I started it over xmas, but had parked it since the new year because of a couple of bugs. My goal was to swap my Radio Userland-hosted OMPL-to-HTML transform (see Weblog Archive – by Topic in my menu) with a custom XML-to-HTML transform hosted … Read more

Well my Fractal Blogosphere concept seemed to generate some interest this week. I think it’s the first article I’ve done that got picked up by the populace without the support of an A-Lister. By that I mean, it got linked to by many “normal” people and no A-Listers (as far as I know). However one person did steer loads … Read more

Somepeople disagree with my use of the word “fractal” (see the comments to my last post). I’ve done some extensive reading on the subject this afternoon and I have to say I’m satisfied the term “fractal” is applicable both to my idea of a scaled blogosphere and to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Fractal Society concept. The Wikipedia defines … Read more

In this article I draft guidelines for a Fractal Blogosphere and suggest that it be used as a measure of scale in the weblogging world. The goal is to help bloggers, particularly new ones, easily fit into a suitable blogging pattern. Joi Ito wrote an interesting post today in response to Clay Shirky’s Inequality post. It’s about the ever-contentious subject of the … Read more

I review Tim Berners-Lee’s recent interview with Christopher Lydon and analyse how the Fractal Society impacts on the world of blogging. Today I listened to Christopher Lydon’s recent interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. In it Berners-Lee discussed the state of the Web and outlined his vision of a “fractal society”. It … Read more