If you liked Erehwon Notebook, you'll love the chewy hypertext goodness of Doing Something Different! That's right, all the drivel you've come to expect, but now with three times the links! Hop on over and check it out!
Disclaimer:This is just a first pass. Structure, content, and heck, the whole darn thing are subject to change without notice. But you already knew that, didn't you?
Warning: Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball!
Jumping the Shark
After nearly four years at this, I've come to realize that I jumped the shark here a long time ago. I have to confess that my interest in the blogging format as a means of writing online is waning. Things have run their course here, at least in this form.
I think it's time to try something different. I've been watching the deployment of wikis and the work Anders Fagerjord is doing over at Surftrail with interest. The chronological format is too artificial and too constraining; it's a throwback to paper formats. In fact, the entire concept of blogs as journals, while perhaps a valid form, increasingly feels like a straightjacket to me.
Weblogs are evolutionary - what started as simple HTML pages of annotated links where early web surfers shared their observations concerning the new and cool sites of the nascent web have become a primary means of online personal publishing. This evolutionary heritage seems to me to be self-limiting. There is a very definite model that's emerged that defines how we blog. This model eschews many of the possibilities inherent in hypertextual writing, primarily in the name of familiarity and expediency. Worse, this model has become firmly entrenched in the architecture of commercial weblog tools, making it more and more difficult to do things differently.
Blogs have become the PowerPoint of the Web.
Which isn't to say that blogs aren't good, or that there's anything inherently wrong with the model - at least as a model of personal online publishing. There's a great deal of good to be said for this infant revolution in personal online publishing, and despite the regular muttering of my cynical side to the contrary, I suspect it is, and will, change the world.
It just isn't a good model for me anymore.
I have a really great tool in Tinderbox, and I'm not using it to the fullest, at least for blogging. My publishing system gets in the way of writing, and so I don't write as much as I could. I've waffled from day one over wether to post short, pithy observations or to be an essayist. All of that, combined, makes it just too damn hard. It isn't fun anymore.
So, it's time to move to greener pastures. Erehwon Notebook is on permanent hiatus. I will be back, probably sooner rather than later - just not here, and not in this format. I'm seriously thinking about doing something along the lines of what Anders has done - a more wikish, "true" hypertext approach interests me a great deal.
Until then, adios amoebas! I'll be seeing you soon...
Free WiFi Sells Coffee
I can't testify to the nationwide effectiveness of providing wireless access in restaurants and the like, but I can tell you that it's changed my buying habits. I used to haunt the various local Starbucks when I needed a caffeine injection. Then, I learned that all of the local Panera Bread outlets provide free WiFi. I don't like their coffee nearly as well as I do Starbucks, but none of the Starbucks around here provide any access at all, free or not.
So it's Friday afternoon and I have a little time to kill before heading out to preview a home and put up some Open House signs, and I'm in a Panera. That's a few bucks Starbucks could have had from me that they gave up to their biggest local competitor.
At the Claddagh
I'm hanging out at the Claddagh on Meridian in downtown Indianapolis nursing a Harp, waiting for the ApplePickers Apple Users Group meeting to start. I was out showing houses earlier this afternoon, and had some time to kill between that and the meeting.
I'm guessing it's been almost twenty years since I sat at a bar nursing a beer by myself. It seems a very "salesman" thing to do. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.
This will be my first ApplePickers meeting. This meeting is a bit unusual, in that we're going to be in a theater screening a film festival of iMovie-made movies. Probably not the best setting in which to meet my fellow Indianapolis-area Apple aficionados, but it could still be pretty cool.
On the other hand, sitting in a very cool Irish bar listing to the Chieftains while bartender John feeds me Harp isn't a bad way to spend an afternoon.
Workspaces Don't Work
Ray Ozzie goes off on (another) self-promotional rant about how his product, Groove, is the logical replacement for e-mail:
I can't for the life of me imagine why this is a surprise to people. There is NO possibility of sustainable constraints on email - a fundamentally unaccountable medium. Are we surprised when we can't do productive work in an uncontrollable medium? Are we going to whine and look for legal relief when in fact it is our own complacency that keeps us from embracing (or demanding) effective solutions for information workers?
People who use Groove today, and people who used Notes in its early years (before most enterprises locked down the creation of databases), understand the personally-empowering feeling of doing work in "collaborative workspaces".
What, you might ask, is the big deal? It's actually quite simple: When you have a space (a workspace) online to do your work with others that truly feels more effective and more convenient than eMail, you start relying less and less on eMail for critical work processes. In Groove, for example, once you start experiencing the swarming aspects of work within its workspaces, you're hooked.
And it stops bothering you that eMail is so incredibly broken.
Well, that's all well and good there Ray, but I can't help but notice that your software is still tied inextricably to the monoculture OS, and isn't the least bit cross-platform. I guess that's a big part of what you mean by "sustainable constraints," huh?
E-mail, for all its warts, works on any OS you'd care to name. It's also simple. It's based on standards, so anyone can implement an e-mail client or server. Because the protocols are well known and freely available, those server and client implementations can be as simple or feature rich as the user cares to select. Further, the thirty year legacy you scoff at ensures that communications I had years ago are still accessible to me - something I really doubt will be the case with information stored in any Groove database I might happen to use - because once Groove is gone, those databases might as well be smoke.
I've tried Groove; in fact I tried to implement Groove to support a geographically dispersed and highly mobile group managing the start-up of a highly sophisticated e-commerce venture. The group was made up of highly experienced computer users as well as relatively inexperienced people, of retirement age individuals and young turks right out of business school. A substantial portion of them were either current or former Notes users.
They took one look at Groove, said, "hmm, looks interesting," and went right on using e-mail to coordinate their activities.
Ray, you and a bunch of the other talking heads can continue ranting about the "death of e-mail" all you want. Just don't be surprised when the rest of us happen to notice that every one of these rants ends up proposing some technology that you and your colleagues have some vested interest in promoting. I suspect e-mail will be around a long time after your companies are nothing but a memory.
Putting Your Calls into Context
Wired: In Pittsburgh, a research team at Carnegie Mellon University's Institute of Technology, or CIT , has developed a new context-aware mobile-phone technology called the SenSay. The SenSay cellular phone, still in prototype stage, keeps tabs on e-mails sent, phone calls made and the user's location. The phone also adapts to the user's environment.
"SenSay is a huge productivity boost," said Dr. Asim Smailagic, a senior researcher at Carnegie Mellon's Institute for Complex Engineered Systems . "Because people can see when you are available, the time it takes to hand off or receive information is greatly reduced."
To provide data about the user, SenSay uses motion sensors (accelerometers), a microphone, a heat-flux sensor (to measure the heat coming from the user's body) and galvanic skin-response sensors. These sensors are housed in a light, stretchy wireless armband. A GPS device helps to determine the user's position, both outdoors and inside a building.
See also The sentient office is coming, Project Oxygen, and Project Oxygen's New Wind. Human-centric computing, based on input from a network of personal sensors. If you have the right phone and a Bluetooth-equipped Mac, you can play with the first generation of this sort of stuff using tools like Salling Clicker or Romeo.
Google test-drives location search tool
Location-based search coming from Google:
Google Inc. is playing with the idea that with online as well as offline real estate what really matters is location, location, location. The company's Labs division unveiled a test version of a new search by location service Monday, allowing users to query for stores and services that are close to home.
To help users find more geographically-specific information on the Web, the new service analyzes Web page content for clues about location, like business addresses, Google said in a posting about the new service on its site.
The more search ties into the physical world the happier I'll be. I've become so used to using search engines to find stuff online that I find it frustrating when I'm looking for something in physical space and don't have a decent "search interface."
For example, I'll prefer Borders over Barnes & Noble bookstores mainly because Borders places search terminals around the store while B&N makes me go ask someone. I pay extra for digital cable mostly for the program guide - even though that's a pretty poorly constructed interface.
Hopefully, Google can extend its expertise into location search effectively. I've tried other location-based search services, like Vindigo, and they've all been less than effective. Either the data isn't there, or the interface stinks, or both. I suspect Google's major challenge will be in collecting the location data and keeping it current, a task far more daunting than indexing web pages.