2004

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

I got my first PDA for Christmas, a Palm Tungsten T2 – cost about $700 in New Zealand dollars. It’s already changed my reading/writing habits for the better. For a start, my information management has improved because I now have my goals and ‘To Do’ list on me all the time. I review, edit and … Read more

I’ve been getting more and more interested in the concept of a “Citizen Blogger”: a person who actively participates in politics via their weblog. For such a person, weblogging becomes a political act – an ‘Uncle Sam Needs You’ for the 21st Century. The term has been floating around for a few months now, primarily driven by … Read more

This is the last piece of self-promoting babble I’ll post for a while – I promise – but I thought I’d mention that I’ve added a favicon to my weblog. I’ve been admiring the favicons displayed in my Bloglines aggregator for some time now and a recent post by Makiko Itoh reminded me I should … Read more

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. Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)

I’ve been meaning to add the orange RSS button back to my menu for a while. However I’ve been reluctant to upset my finely-tuned but fragile CSS/Radio Userland code synchronisation, by throwing a gauche graphic into the mix. But today I discovered a nice CSS method which solved the problem neatly – the sort of … Read more

Note to self: don’t bother with any more surveys, because I’m not popular enough. As Homer Simpson might say, Stupid A-List… 🙂 But seriously, I was a little disappointed more people didn’t respond to my survey: what do I look like in real life. Particularly as the responses I did get were brilliant. I enjoyed … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

Summary: I analyse a 1994 Personal Information Management program and compare its goals to what we want in in a similar tool in 2004. I discover the requirements are basically the same. The blogosphere is mostly a synchronous give-and-take of content. People largely comment on and link to things that other people are commenting on and linking … Read more