2003-04-25

Rolling ETCon notes


Some questions:
. What are the *themes* of ETCon? In between last year's and this year, the
social software community (terminology, etc) emerged. What's next?*
. After Alan Kay's thing: why *are* operating systems so slow, unstable etc?
I'm happy for community software to blindly follow the "worse is better"
mantra, but corporate-created OSes don't have to follow that route.
. So maybe this is the year all the people who have grown up with the web
formalise what we've been doing for the past year or two: drifting back in time
through all our assumptions, questioning them, and maybe throwing them away.
Which is why we're encountering history, etc. And it turns out things are
screwed a lot lower down. Web Services are the solution to the problem of a
poor architecture, not great in their own right!

* What's next, some answers so far:
. The economic implications of Linux bearing fruit
. This is the year RDF finally takes off!
. Lots of work on the *reading* problem (discovering, democratising, scaling)


RSS idea I had last night:
. upload opml file (or similar)
. get an rss feed of posts that you should like. with each one, an
rss-reader-native (ie, click and you subscribe in reader without the www
browser intermediate step) subscribe link.
. rss reader authors support this; build this in

(There are people working on this already...)


Okay, so everyone's using RSS readers -- what could tug people bag to the web?
How about your *own* blogroll on every weblog you visit? You could support that
from blogrolling.com fairly trivially, since it's centralised, with a single
cookie and a preference.


Books Tesugen is thinking about next:
http://tesugen.com/2003/04/25.html#whattoreadnext

More notes:
http://trevor.smith.name/ETConTexts/
(we *really* need a ETCon grid with links to notes all filled in)

Marc Canter's favourite book
http://pmbrowser.info/blaxm.cgi/?item=0262640414
The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So
Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution by Donald A. Norman
(see here http://blogs.it/0100198/2003/04/22.html#a974 )


Soho (London) to get blanket Wifi from the council!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/59/30404.html

Evolutionary biohistory (here so I get round to reading it)
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=20010720170659.26454.
00000302%40ng-mm1.aol.com
via robotwisdom


(This is such the perfect interface for updating notes - a text editor - why
can't I update my weblog as simply as this? It seems that as soon as I use my
weblog for something *other* than posting links and commentary, the interface
is totally inadequate and I switch.)


Talking to Gavin machinelake about lisp, he recommends MCL at
http://www.digitool.com/
and lisp porn
http://lemonodor.com/
[10:29]  *gavin* lisp on the mac is actually nice due to the great ui stuff you
get already.
[10:29]  *gavin* and for some lisp porn, check out out lemonodor.com.
[10:29]  *gavin* i.e. pretty pictures of lisp apps. heh.
[10:29]  *gavin* http://lemonodor.com/archives/000028.html


This Social Software weblog looks good
http://www.corante.com/many/


http://www.kottke.org/03/04/030425really_perso.html
"In a later conversation, Matt Haughey outlined a proof-of-concept approach to
the problem. He'd use Mozilla to override the stylesheet, strip out the current
ads, and plug in his own ads, which would be created by pulling them out of
iCal and using a Perl or PHP graphics program in conjunction with a local web
server to serve them on the fly"
[I'd say: a smarter Doubleclick would offer this as a service. 25% of all
banner ads would work like this, you'd look at them more, and clickthrough
would go up.]

http://craphound.com/unwirer/
Short story collaboration