2003

Blogging is a 21st century art form and right now it is the most vibrant creative outlet in society. Ideas flow like water in the blogosphere and Weblogs.com ticks over with updated posts every few seconds. Anyone can publish a weblog and that’s partly what makes it so vibrant. But also, there is a pioneering … Read more

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 … Read more

Don Park has come up with some promising ideas on how to link weblogs with wikis. One of his ideas is for weblog comments to be cross-posted to Wiki pages, via some scripting that “can create or find” a matching Wiki page for each comment. For this to work, comments on a weblog post will need to be assigned a theme or topic identifier – … Read more

Don also mentioned auto-population of blogrolls, which is something that Phil Pearson has been experimenting with and I’ve been commenting on. My view is that the “blogroll” can be extended to incorporate not only links to weblogs (people), but links to topics and conversations (weblog comments). Later on you could add other chunks of microcontent … Read more

I’ve been wondering whether to get myself a FOAF file. FOAF stands for “friend of a friend” and it is a method of publishing personal information about yourself in a machine-readable format. Or as the FOAF Wiki puts it: “If you’re familiar with ‘blogging and providing RSS syndication of the content of your ‘blog, then … Read more

Dave Winer links to an essay he wrote 4 years ago about decentralized syndication: “In our [UserLand’s] system, each story has a *single* location, the site where it originated. We think this is the way the web was meant to work. Stories can live and grow while new information is obtained. Comments from readers can … Read more

Weblogs and Wikis are authoring tools that enable everyday people to write to the Web. However one part of the Writeable Web is often overlooked: weblog comments. Often some of the best nuggets of content can be found buried in a comment attached to a weblog post. I’ve even coined a phrase for this: Microcontent Wiki, which … Read more

A few days ago John Robb complained about his Google PageRank being zero after he moved to his new domain. I was in the same situation, but this morning I noticed my weblog has a new Google PageRank of 5/10. I see John Robb’s PageRank is back too (6/10). Another new blogger who had 0/10 … Read more

Dave Winer, on political campaign blogging: “The first candidate that helps voters publish their own stories and ideas and drive the campaign is the one who really captures the energy of the Web.” I agree, the essence of the Two-Way Web is that everyone has the right to publish. That could almost be “the lost amendment” of the … Read more

Today, August 25, is Elvis Costello’s birthday. It’s also my birthday 🙂 Co-incidentally, we also share the same surname. Elvis Costello’s real name is Declan MacManus. How cool is that! That’s why I affectionately refer to him as Uncle Elvis. Hey, maybe I’m the Elvis Costello of Weblogging… only less cruel 🙂 No, better to … Read more

Soon I’m going to shut up and do some actual work on my Web of Ideas application. But I have to note a few interesting things that have surfaced recently on the topics of ideas and microcontent. Firstly, Erik Benson has just released his own Ideas Database. As to be expected from Erik, who created … Read more

Yesterday I wrote about Sparrow Web, a 90’s web application developed by Xerox Parc. I discovered that Sparrow Web was like a Microcontent authoring tool. It divvies up information on a webpage into discrete chunks. So when you edit content in Sparrow Web, you’re editing a part of a webpage not the whole webpage (as in a Wiki). Today I … Read more

I’m doing some research into an Ideas Database web application, prompted by my recent Web of Ideas post (and its sequel). I have a Movable Type sandbox blog set up as a base for development. I’m planning on using XTM (XML Topic Maps) and/or ENT (Easy News Topics) as the engine for ideas, with MT as … Read more

Actually in New Zealand, we don’t have “grade schools” (they’re called Primary and Secondary schools here). But I wanted to subtly reference Jon Udell’s influential article called “Grade School CMS”. i.e. I’m just being a smart ass 🙂 Things I want to do with my weblog: 1. Contribute formal articles on the subject of the … Read more

A little while ago I wrote on the topic of “Smart Clients”, a Microsoft catchphrase for non-browser-based web applications. In my article I mentioned an interesting browser-based RSS News Aggregator being built by Lucmo. Today I read the following post in the Lucmo weblog: “The Read/Write Web blog writes that Lucmo is in “beta” — … Read more