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  Web

  Ted Nelson’s two-way links

  Matt Webb blogged the Hypertext03 conference and the resulting notes are a good scan. Thank goodness for people like Matt who blog conferences, because those of us who live on the other side of the world don't get to go to these flash harry conferences *sulk*. Matt's notes on Ted...

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  Rock n roll

  On a less serious note than my previous post, it also occured to me that bloggers are like rock n roll bands. The best bands explore a different theme each album, just like the best bloggers (imho) write on an ever-changing series of themes. My favourite band The Velvet Underground...

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  Entertainment

  Weblogs are the new Universal Art

  Blogging is a 21st century art form and right now it is the most vibrant creative outlet in society. Ideas flow like water in the blogosphere and Weblogs.com ticks over with updated posts every few seconds. Anyone can publish a weblog and that's partly what makes it so vibrant. But...

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  Web

  New School Blogroll example

  As per my previous post, I've updated my blogroll to include topics and conversations. I just manually updated my blogroll OPML file, but I envisage a web frontend for this in future - kinda like Phil Pearson's web form for his Feed Combiner.A bit more about the two new sections...

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  Web

  Extending blogrolls

  Don also mentioned auto-population of blogrolls, which is something that Phil Pearson has been experimenting with and I've been commenting on. My view is that the "blogroll" can be extended to incorporate not only links to weblogs (people), but links to topics and conversations (weblog comments). Later on you could...

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  Social

  Tracking conversations with Wikis

  Don Park has come up with some promising ideas on how to link weblogs with wikis. One of his ideas is for weblog comments to be cross-posted to Wiki pages, via some scripting that "can create or find" a matching Wiki page for each comment. For this to work, comments on a weblog post will need to be assigned...

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  Social

  May the FOAF be with you

  I've been wondering whether to get myself a FOAF file. FOAF stands for "friend of a friend" and it is a method of publishing personal information about yourself in a machine-readable format. Or as the FOAF Wiki puts it:"If you're familiar with 'blogging and providing RSS syndication of the content...

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  Social

  Organic stories

  Dave Winer links to an essay he wrote 4 years ago about decentralized syndication:"In our [UserLand's] system, each story has a *single* location, the site where it originated. We think this is the way the web was meant to work. Stories can live and grow while new information is obtained....

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  Social

  Microcontent Wiki

  Weblogs and Wikis are authoring tools that enable everyday people to write to the Web. However one part of the Writeable Web is often overlooked: weblog comments. Often some of the best nuggets of content can be found buried in a comment attached to a weblog post. I've even coined a phrase...

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  Web

  Google PageRank navel-gazing

  A few days ago John Robb complained about his Google PageRank being zero after he moved to his new domain. I was in the same situation, but this morning I noticed my weblog has a new Google PageRank of 5/10. I see John Robb's PageRank is back too (6/10). Another...

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  Web

  Political blogging

  Dave Winer, on political campaign blogging: "The first candidate that helps voters publish their own stories and ideas and drive the campaign is the one who really captures the energy of the Web."I agree, the essence of the Two-Way Web is that everyone has the right to publish. That could almost be "the...

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  Social

  Ideas swirling around – on Microcontent applications

  Soon I'm going to shut up and do some actual work on my Web of Ideas application. But I have to note a few interesting things that have surfaced recently on the topics of ideas and microcontent. Firstly, Erik Benson has just released his own Ideas Database. As to be...

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  Web

  Happy birthday Uncle Elvis and me

  Today, August 25, is Elvis Costello's birthday. It's also my birthday :-)Co-incidentally, we also share the same surname. Elvis Costello's real name is Declan MacManus. How cool is that! That's why I affectionately refer to him as Uncle Elvis.Hey, maybe I'm the Elvis Costello of Weblogging... only less cruel :-)...

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  Social

  The Microcontent Revolutions – a sequel to OpenDoc

  Yesterday I wrote about Sparrow Web, a 90's web application developed by Xerox Parc. I discovered that Sparrow Web was like a Microcontent authoring tool. It divvies up information on a webpage into discrete chunks. So when you edit content in Sparrow Web, you're editing a part of a webpage not the whole webpage (as...

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  Social

  Sparrow Web, webOutliner and Web of Ideas

  I'm doing some research into an Ideas Database web application, prompted by my recent Web of Ideas post (and its sequel). I have a Movable Type sandbox blog set up as a base for development. I'm planning on using XTM (XML Topic Maps) and/or ENT (Easy News Topics) as the engine...

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  Web

  Grade School Report for my weblog

  Actually in New Zealand, we don't have "grade schools" (they're called Primary and Secondary schools here). But I wanted to subtly reference Jon Udell's influential article called "Grade School CMS". i.e. I'm just being a smart ass :-)Things I want to do with my weblog:1. Contribute formal articles on the...

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  Web

  Browser-based RSS Aggregators

  A little while ago I wrote on the topic of "Smart Clients", a Microsoft catchphrase for non-browser-based web applications. In my article I mentioned an interesting browser-based RSS News Aggregator being built by Lucmo. Today I read the following post in the Lucmo weblog:"The Read/Write Web blog writes that Lucmo...

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  Web

  The Whiteness of the Whale – the Semantic Web

  Whenever I read about the Semantic Web, I am reminded of Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick. One of my favourite chapters of Moby Dick is chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale. Here's an excerpt:"Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken...

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  Web

  Trackback enabled

  Excellent, I now have Radio Userland's Trackback enabled. There have been some interesting suggestions for other new Radio features too, so hopefully some of those ideas will get implemented soon. I especially like the idea of modular templates, suggested by John Robb.

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  Web

  In XML did Kubla Khan – XML as Literature

  Dave Winer says there are 2 ways to approach XML: "...people who think of XML as a programming space, and people who think of it as a literary space."The first group "love XML for its technical intricacy". The literary people however "use XML because it is a convenient way to...