People often talk to communities, but how do communities talk back? 3D17.org aims to answer that question by allowing a large number of people to collaboratively create some text, be it a letter, fax, or email. Have you ever thought what kind of letter the combined intelligence of 1,000 people might produce to support your opinion? 3D17 will answer that question.Currently any document can get accessed by anyone, so you could have a pre-teen from the Czech Republic collaborating on a letter to your senator, perhaps, but it is a new use of the web worth considering, even as a thought-experiment made real.
I've started having a few meetups, my first with Ron Lusk while he was in Austin visiting for a wedding. Its funny how I always get the voice wrong in my mental map of fellow bloggers.Since I hear myself from inside, I'm always interested in what my real voice sounds like...and also in what my written voice sounds like. Can you unpack that last sentence sometime?
(Clearly, Jane's catching up on things...I posted that entry on people's not liking to write—Note, Jane, the possessive with the gerund...I thought you'd like that—ahem, I posted that entry many months ago.)
It's a wonderful piece worth reading in full. And of course there's a serious point behind all the satire. The web came from scholars and is all about sharing knowledge. Citation is the conversational medium in which we do that. Links are powerful tools that we're still learning to use, but citation is a more than just linking. I'm becoming deeply interested in how we can publish fragments that are easy to cite and that, when cited, carry rich context with them. Phil Windley's [Jon's Radio](This, because I want a copy outside the firewall, too...)
Weblogs are particular in the sense that they allow to easily cut the fat out of content. If, after reading a few posts, you cannot get a feeling that the tone and content are right, then the weblog is probably not worth your time (or does not deserve to be called a weblog). In supporting weblogs, companies will not be able to skip what is my favorite question when I assess a web project: where is the beef?Once again, the issue of the human voice. Weblogs give us a chance to hear that quality, in a world more and more saturated with mechanical voices (as in glossy marketing, whether in a preacher or a luxury car ad) and inauthentic enthusiasm.
Aren't these two sons representations of two different sorts of people? The younger son representing anyone who didn't know the Lord or strayed away and then ended up in His presenece and forgiven of their sins, and the older representing the folks who maybe never physically strayed away from the church, but are obsessed with following the rules and look at the folks who don't with contempt. Most folks tend to fall into one catagory or the other. Who are you? [Every Tomorrow: The Blog]I think we all fall into both categories, with tendencies to be in one or the other. The longer we are in the Christian life, the more we are tempted to be like the older brother: judging, measuring, condemning.
I love Robert Farrar Capon's take on this: the goal of the Christian life is to dance down the street in a wild party with the Father and the Prodigal, calling the Elder Brothers out of the dark rooms they are sulking in to join us. (From memory: I don't even remember which book this is from.)
Read on for a few quick solutions which MovableType users can implement right now to stave off all but the most persistent spammers.
It looks as if spammers are attacking weblog comments (and TrackBacks) now. (Not me, yet, but this blog is very low-profile.) I may need to remember this.
Could it be that the ineffable Ron Lusk has returned?Google defines “ineffable” as
1. Incapable of being expressed in words; unspeakable; unutterable; indescribable.Really, I'm just a fairly ordinary man. Peculiar, but ordinary.
2. Not to be uttered; taboo
Klipper comes configured with a command that proposes starting the Konqueror web browser when it encounters an HTTP URL. The command uses the KDE framework to locate a running copy of Konqueror and instructs it to open the page; if Konqueror isn't running, the command starts a fresh copy.
I like to use Mozilla, and wanted the same CPU-saving capability. So after looking around, I found the -remote option for Mozilla, and created the following script, that I added to the Klipper configuration as another action when a URL is encountered.
(mozilla -remote "ping()" && \ mozilla -remote "openUrl($1,new-tab)") || \ mozilla $1 &Klipper is configured to call this script with the URL as the first parameter, as in
/home/user/scripts/openMozilla %sThe first line “pings” Mozilla to see if it is running already; if so, the second line is executed to tell the running program to open the URL in a new tab. If Mozilla isn't running yet, the third line starts it, pointing to the URL.
I could have included this script as a single line of code in the Klipper configuration, except that Klipper passes the URL as
'http://www.w3.org/'and Mozilla gets upset by the extra single quotes.
When you have spent fifteen minutes in front of a Monet, you are thankful that he had paintbrushes, but you are not in awe of them. You are in awe of Monet and his ability as a painter. The posture of brotherhood presents Christ as the great redemptive Artist. We are simply brushes in his hands. The glorious changes he paints into the hearts of people are not the result of good brushes, but of the skills of the Painter.from Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change, P&R Publishing Co., Phillipsburg, NJ. 2002. pp. 149–150.
on emerging platforms, the Linux business opportunity, and the commoditization of softwareI want to remember this blog and read more...
Before the "blogs" era, we were all slaves of our webmasters. Unless you were yourself one, most people, companies and organizations who wanted to have an online presence called a Web site, needed sooner or later someone technically skilled to take care of it for hir (him+her).This "webmastering" is the job I'd like to work myself (and a few others) out of.
I apologize for linking to such an irritating site (there appear to be timed pop-ups advertising the latest publication or e-mail newsletter or conference by the site author), but the article caught my interest (while searching for something else, of course).
Worth following: this article contains a link to an article on blogging at Seb's Open Research. I strongly recommend the history.
Today, Bush-Cheney '04 launched its official blog offering the latest news and views from outside the Washington “Beltway” and from Bush-Cheney '04.It seems more likely that supporters or campaign staff or other second- and third-parties are blogging “for” President Bush. This doesn't quite have the same feeling as an “own voice” blog.
This suggests to me one of the advantages of blogging as a form over newsgroups and threaded discussion. In a threaded discussion I am more bound by context than I am here. Lowering the power of context without removing it entirely, makes blogs more conducive to working out your own ideas. I wonder what Denham would have to say about this? He's generally been an advocate of the collaborative powers of tools such as threaded discusisons and wikis. Blogging adds another flavor to the mix. The challenge now becomes working out for yourself and your organization how to manage the mix.
Now just give it a XML-RPC server, its own home page and we'll be closer to distributed storage services. My coffee maker has a web server so I can turn on and off my coffee maker from anywhere I access the web.
I encountered Stephen Dulaney's blog Blogging Alone a few years ago when I was blogging using Radio Userland. We met early this year in Austin, when I was there for my niece's wedding. I'm glad to reacquaint myself with him and his blog.