Sig :

You talk to one person. You lunch with one purchaser. You present for one or more, same Powerpoint. Why the difference? It's all about people and a person is singular, always.

David Brin has a nice post summarizing his vision for "what we need from science" :

Given the daunting range of problems and opportunities that we face, I'd have to say that our most urgent scientific and technological need is to develop better methods for problem-solving.

Some pieces to the puzzle are already getting attention. Governments and big institutions are developing ways to combine sensor meshes and data mining with powerful analytic and projection tools. But this emphasis on centralized or professional-level anticipation ignores the other half of the solution -- generating a resilient citizenry. A populace so knowing and capable that all problems get noticed and addressed, quickly, by a billion eyes

Great point!

What Brin understands is that the "collective" and the "individual" are not in opposition but that smart, disorganized individuals can come together in dynamic, ad-hoc networks to solve problems.

Traditionally, we've relied on certain types of static "organization" (typically hierarchical and procedural) to achieve the benefits of acting collectively. These work. But at a high cost. They're often dumb (information flows badly through hierarchies because no one passes bad news up, and the top becomes a bottleneck); inefficient (participants waste their energy politicking against each other); and unpleasant.

In contrast, we want (and can start to seriously imagine being able) to retain our capacity for individualistic action while working together in loosely co-ordinated, ever changing but highly effective groups. The internet has taken us a long way in this direction, but as Brin points out, there's still room for more scientific understanding and other tools to take us further.

Q : Phil! Why have you put a Grazr widget in your gutter?

A : Something's happening. And it's about OPML, Grazr, and widgets ...

;-)

Q : Oh, and I noticed you changed the template.

A : Er ... yeah. The look didn't go with the widget. I wanted something that was more, I dunno, evolvable.

Q : What are you up to, exactly?

A : You know, general house-keeping, wanting to learn about new things. The truth is I've been using the OPML Editor a lot recently. Even tried to write a several thousand word essay in it.

And it's good. Perhaps I'm getting the outlining religion ...

Cool video showing WikiCalc embedding YouTube. And showing several evolving lines of thought in the multiple texts being created.

Bleaahhhgh! Least inspiring Hughtrain cartoon evah!

There's a new crop of business wikis. And some interesting discussion.

But what's wrong with this picture?

SystemOne, an enterprise-knowledge-management system masquerading as an ordinary business wiki. What's cool about this product is that it automatically creates, at the bottom of each page, a list of relevant other wiki pages, feeds, and Web search results. The autocreation of the links removes some of the need to manually create links to connect wiki pages together. This is a key feature if the wiki is to be used by a lot of people who aren't hypertext-savvy.

Answer : Everything is wrong here.

Firstly, what's the point of automatically making hyperlinks for people who aren't web-savvy? Or rather, why are you trying to get people who don't understand hypertext to use wiki? (In fact, in 2007, why are you even employing people who aren't hypertext savvy? But that's another story.) At the very least you should ask how exactly they are going to use wiki if they can't understand what hypertext is, or have some intuition about how to use it?

Remember, this is wiki we're talking about : all the hard graft of making links (like the trivially fiddly writing of "anglebracket a href", and the genuinely tricky part about finding the right URL to point to) has been eliminated by the simple WikiWord or [[double square bracket]] conventions. What's left is the only other difficult question : deciding what links to make.

SystemOne "solves" that part for you. But remember, the links are part of the valuable decision-making and information that goes into your wiki. Wiki links are not meant to mean that "this page is vaguely similar to that web-page". If I want to know what pages are vaguely similar I can use Google. Wiki links mean "I, the author, want the reader to notice this kind of similarity between this page or this paragraph or this word, and that page because I think it's significant." Which is far more precise and subtle piece of information.

A wiki which automatically creates links is as useless as a word-processor which claims to write your letters for you.

The purpose of creating documents is not to kill trees or fill up as much disk space as possible. The purpose of creating documents is to capture the value added by human intelligence. Attempting to automate away that, in order to help consume more wood-pulp or fill the screen with more blue-underlines is counterproductive. Bad links devalue the good links. The reader of a page is overwhelmed and confused.

Joel Spolsky on a good hack :

I think what makes a good hack is the observation that you can do without something that everybody else thinks you need. To me, the most elegant hack is when somebody says, "These 2,000 lines of code end up doing the same thing as those 2 lines of code would do. I know it seems complicated, but arithmetically it's really the same." When someone cuts through a lot of crap and says, "You know, it doesn't really matter."

For example, Ruby on Rails is a framework that you can use with the Ruby programming language to access databases. It is the first framework that you can use from any programming language for accessing databases to realize that it's OK to require that the names of the columns in the database have a specific format. Everybody else thought, "You need to be allowed to use whatever name you want in the database and whatever name you want in the application." Therefore you have to create all this code to map between the name in the database and the name in the application. Ruby on Rails finally said, "It's no big deal if you're just forced to use the same name in both places. You know, it doesn't really matter." And suddenly it becomes much simpler and much cleaner. To me, that is an elegant hack—saying, "This particular distinction that we used to fret over, just throw it away."

When I wrote SdiDesk I explicitly decided that I wanted many small, hand-layed-out diagrams which are hyperlinked together, rather than automatically generating a large diagram. (Of course, it helped that that was the lazy thing to do, in terms of coding :-)

Manually drawing diagrams doesn't help with *discovery* of new connections or of other structure but, for me, it's the right way to capture some of the structure in *my* thinking. I tend to create diagrams with around 10 (15 max) nodes where I might be deliberately representing a hierarchy or a supply-chain or some other small chunk of the world. And I can arrange the nodes in a way that makes sense for that kind of thing. If I really need more nodes, I probably want to break it up into an overview page and sub-pages with details. Of course, SdiDesk nets are more primitive than even I want, visually (so yeah, I am thinking about how to improve on that in my next opus) But I prefer them to Buzan-style mind-maps where I find most software forces me to build one "butterfly" shaped hierarchy. Or to something like TouchGraph which is very clever but actually not much use when you want to get acquainted with the shape of your information.

3-D web of idea nodes : TiddlyWiki ... - Smart Disorganized Individuals - tribe.net

ZenPundit on Super-empowered individuals

Wiki-based software for the enterprise

SocialText 2.0 is out.

Check out the screencast. Some nice work on the UI.

Here's what looks good to me :

* the automatic backlinks

* deciding you can be "expert" (an explicit recognition that SmartAscii mode corresponds to expertise),

* watched pages,

* the sortable table views of RecentChanges, watched pages and other queries. (I like this very much.)

What I'm still ambivalent about :

* "tagging". Why are tags special? Why are they not simply a convention on top of full-text search (as in CategoryCategory)? Maybe it's simple optimization. Faster to search an "index" of explicit tags. Maybe the flickr / deli.cio.us folksonomic culture is too deeply ingrained to fight?

* they haven't quite got there yet with blog integration. As I'm always banging on about, the tough problem with wikilogs or blikis is that you have two incompatible addressing schemes : pagenames and dates. Deciding which addressing scheme you need for any particular item of information is difficult. As SocialText 2.0 allows everyone in a group to edit blog-posts as wiki pages, blog-items can blossom into full pages. What's not clear is how you can link to a particular blog-item, or how such an item could migrate out of the context of a specific conversation and become a more independent citizen of the wiki.

As always, the problem isn't technical but one of shared concepts. If you have two types of objects with distinct addressing schemes : temporal and permanent, how do you make sure that you and the rest of the community understand which information is of which type? Are people putting it in the right place? Are they looking for it in the right place?

I don't have any answers. But I'll only really get excited about a wiki that *also* provides blogging when someone finally does find a nice way to help the users navigate this conceptual gap. Otherwise, you might as easily use two different products. (Not trying to beat up on SocialText here. I'm just saying that this in one of the grand unsolved problems in the area, and they don't seem to have solved it yet.)

Why I'm still on the edge of my seat :

* WikiCalc? What's happening here? When will grids become first class citizens of the SocialText product?

Note here that conceptually, grids are much less trouble to integrate than blog-posts. Yes, they're technically very different from ordinary pages. But addressably they're the same kind of animal. Individual cells are perhaps more problematic, although the spreadsheet convention is very strong.

Given that Chris Dent's at SocialText, and EEK's involvement, do they (still / yet) have purple numbers in the SocialText wiki? Perhaps they do but that's too geeky for this screencast.

In fact we may see SocialText having to come to grips with questions about integrating four different addressing schemes : page-names, purple-numbers, cell-addresses and blog-items. I suspect proliferation of incompatible addressing schemes will be one of the major issues faced by wiki as it starts to take over the enterprise.

Making business beautiful

Very interesting.

Now HyperScope has been released, don't miss Brad Neuberg's great Screencast of Douglas Engelbart's Augment System

How much was SdiDesk influenced by Engelbart? Directly, not so much. But indirectly, obviously a lot. My direct influences were wiki, the Smalltalk environment, Emacs, HyperCard and the web-browser. Obviously, all, heavily indebted to Engelbart's work.

Great idea for a productivity hack.

Brudnopis: Mailing Lists and WWW

Dave Winer says he made 2.3 million with his blog, without advertising.

What I think he means (as I explain to Bill Seitz, here) is that he sold the weblogs.com server last year.

For Winer, the blog is a full media and communications strategy. It’s how he does his personal branding, hypes his projects, and most importantly makes his connections with important users and developers.

Without Scripting News Dave wouldn’t get invited to the right kinds of parties and conferences, wouldn’t have people working with OPML, or reading River of News, or his podcast directories etc. Without Scripting News how would he (or anyone else) understand that there was even an opportunity called “weblogs.com” or what form it should take?

Update : Somehow this reminds me of another Steve Pavlina article : the $10,000 hour.

Not in the letter, of course, - Pavlina's tactics for commercializing his blog are antithetical to Dave's - but in the spirit.

Both eschew mere optimization of the normal microchunk in favour of the hard-to-measure, riskier, higher potential stroke of genius. For Pavlina that means merely increasing your hourly rate by gradual, evolutionary steps is a bad deal if by doing so you miss out on the $10,000 flash of inspiration. Winer says the same for merely monitizing eyeballs rather than making the connections, and having the conversations, that lead to the next weblogs.com.

I like Steve Pavlina's list of 10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed

Stowe Boyd interview : The individual is the new group

WTF!!! I've been Googling for references to SdiDesk, like, forever, but I've never seen August Agricola before today!

Wow! The guy has an SdiDesk mod that looks beautiful.



And sounds like he's done a tonne of cool stuff with it. Damn! I wanna see more!

Good point too, about SourceForge. The stupid thing is I even have an account ... just never got round to uploading it ... doh!

Here's more from August.

SdiServer screengrab
Originally uploaded by interstar.

Don't get too excited. This is just eye-candy at the moment. :-)

But it is what you think it is ... a page from an SdiDesk PageStore served by a web-server (I'm using web.py), and viewed in Firefox with some cute graphic tabs.

Hey, guess what ...

SdiDesk rocks!!!

Seriously.

I've been working, on and off, on the Python translation and making some progress, but the whole VB code-base had gone stale for me. And, although I've been using SdiDesk for the odd notes, I've been dabbling with other things like the OPML Editor and writing more on online wikis.

But this week I've started a new job in a fairly corporate environment. I've been expected to get up to speed on a lot of things fairly quickly. This is a local division of an international company, selling one component in a larger enterprise system. In the first three days I've had to get an idea of where our place is among various partners, suppliers, customers, systems integrators etc; I've had to get a picture of a range of different products and modules and libraries produced or consumed by different players; I went out yesterday and watched as someone upgraded the installation of our product on-site with one of our partners and will probably be expected to do it by myself the next time. SdiDesk has been absolutely, amazingly, invaluably useful as a place to dump all the information which is being thrown at me.

I've used most of the features : drawn a quick network diagram to sketch out our position in relation to our partners, clients, their clients etc. etc. And as each box in the diagram links to its own page, I can add other information about the parties : web-sites, contact info etc. I've drawn similar network diagrams to show the relations between the various tiers and modules in the software. My first drafts are often wrong but the diagrams are easily modified as new data comes in.

I've written out the steps to installing the software, using nested bullet lists. And, naturally, cross-linked to the modules when relevant. I can throw in login names and passwords. I've used footnotes, and tables, and hyperlinks to both online documentation and the actual web-based interfaces to the system. I'm confident that SdiDesk will become the dashboard that I will work through.

I've also seen its many flaws. SdiDesk has many rough edges, bugs, abandoned and unfinished roads, and is distinctly ugly. But, frankly, I haven't been this excited by, this in love with, it since the release of 0.2. I'm definitely back into it in a major way. (Of course, I don't have any time :-)

So if you don't know what I'm talking about because you haven't yet checked out SdiDesk; but you work in an environment where you need to cope with a lot of information including information that is list, table and graph-shaped; and you're a smart, if a little disorganized, individual; then you know what to do.

Yeah, there are still dozens of things that suck or are aesthetically challenged. Yep, I'm a slow and inattentive developer. But, to misquote Tati Quebra-Barraco, SdiDesk "is ugly but it's fashionable".

(And works off your pendrive.)