Categories
Writing

Word

This is an environment composed almost exclusively of words. They may be written, they may be spoken, and they might even be converted into images or code and thus need to be interpreted, but ultimately this is about words.

Some of the words I like, others I don’t. Some of the words may incite me to anger and despair, while others inspire and entertain. I have changed my mind based on words; I may have even changed minds with words of my own.

There are people who can wield words like a master painter his brush, or play words like a concert pianist her piano. The rest of us, we’re usually happy if we can write a post without someone pointing out spelling errors. Oh, and don’t get me started on punctuation and something or other dangling.

I have written words that have sparked a frenzy of feeding and I think wistfully of Amazonian rivers and small, busy fish with very sharp teeth. Other times, the words lay there on the page, not even a quiver of regret to mark their passing. (And one is never so glad, at times like these, to see the reverse chronology in action. I have been known, a time or two, to hasten the end of such words–a mercy killing, if you will.)

I’ve also had my words thrown in my face, slapped across my cheeks like a glove beckoning me to a duel. Sometimes I’ve picked up the sharpest of my words and have cried, “Have at ye!” Other times, though, I wander, confused, through the jumble of scratches on the page and think at it, “What did you do? What the hell did you do?”

My favorite words are the the ones we skip across the page like a rock across a pond; only exposing our selves when the word is in the air. Ha! Try reading these words through an aggregator.

I never tire of working with words. I never tire of reading others work with words. I do weary, though, of reading, “Oh, but I didn’t mean that…” when one is challenged, because its easier to orphan the words than acknowledge or stand by them.

Categories
Semantics

The meta wars

For all that people are saying 2006 is going to be the year of this or that, I think that 2006 is going to be the year of metadata, and as such, we’re about to see some of the bloodiest battles in blogging. She who controls the metadata rules the world, and if the sly hints and nay saying I’m reading online are but a tip of the iceberg, what isn’t visible would make the US Democrats and Republicans blanch and give fervent thanks that though they may be politicians, at least they aren’t, thank (God | politically correct non-sectarian object of choice), in the metadata business.

The Structured Blogging Initiative made its announcement yesterday, with a rollout of Structured Blogging plugins for WordPress and Movable Type. I’ve been playing around with these in order to create OutputThis and you can see my test weblogs based in WordPress (and here), Blogger Blogspot weblog and Movable Type. I installed the WordPress plugin in the Testing 2 weblog, and have been playing around with the different types of SB types, such as reviews, lists, and so on.

First a disclaimer: as of this morning I no longer work for Broadband Mechanics. I will be working on OutputThis, adding new functionality and making any fixes to make it a true 1.0 production system; however, I am doing so as a volunteer.

To reassure folks, I am not going to starve by making this move, and no, there is no acrimonious relationship between me and the Broadband folks. But I did find myself constrained in what I wanted to write to Burningbird, what I felt should be written; worried that because of my relationship with Broadband, I could be hurting that company with what I wrote. Now, though I won’t divulge any confidences I received during my tenure with the company, I feel anything that’s out in the ‘public domain’ so to speak, is fair game.

The plugins that Phil, Kimbro, Marc, and Chad provided are some fairly sophisticated bits of coding, and add a rather impressive set of editing interfaces to Movable Type and WordPress. I thought the use of XML templates, or Micro Content Descriptors(MCD) in order to drop in a new plugin interface to be both open and clever. In addition the code is open source (GPL), and can even be incorporated into other tools by pulling out the bits and pieces you want.

I’ve long thought of extending my own RDF/XML metadata generation through the use of templates that can be used to generate the content. Though we differ in how we provide the metadata–my system provides the metadata as pure RDF/XML when you attache an ‘/rdf/’ to any of my posts, while SB is embedded–this approach of providing format descriptions is very adaptable.

Will I alter the SB WordPress plugin to work with Wordform (my fork of WordPress)? No, but that’s because I’ve chosen a different direction in how I work with metadata. In the end, with the help of Danny Ayers, RDF/XML can be pulled from the SB effort, which means none of our stuff is incompatible.

As for the criticisms, all were valid but there’s a couple I want to specifically address.

Niall Kennedy mentioned during the presentation that the generated XML/XHTML/RSS didn’t validate. Good point, comparable to all those folks who said that Technorati’s performance sucked, and the results were unreliable. At the time of highest criticism of Technorati, Dave Sifry said, “We will fix it”. Yesterday, Marc Canter and the SB team responded with, “We will fix it.” Isn’t it nice to know both organizations are willing to acknowledge user concern about application problems with a willingness to repair them? Compare this with Google, whose only response to user exclamations of, “It’s broke!” is .

(To hear or see the response, you have to wear magic Google filters in order to pull it out of the aether. I’m thinking of selling mine on eBay, but then you’d have to have a filter to see the filter offered for sale. It’s very tough to make a buck nowadays. What’s a girl to do to earn money for the holidays?)

Stowe Boyd wrote:

My bet is that Structured Blogging will fail, not because people wouldn’t like some of the consequences — such as an easy way to compare blog posts about concrete things like record reviews, and so on — but because of the inherent, and wonderful messiness of the world of blogging…

I am not sure who is benefited if everyone falling into line and adopting consistent standards for the structure of blog posts. Perhaps companies like PubSub — one of the driving force behind all this — who would like to be able to sort out all the blog posts about hotels, gadgets, and wine out there, and aggregate the results in some algorithmic fashion, and then make money from the resulting ratings and reviews. But I am not sure that it would be a better world for bloggers, or even blog readers.

So I favor the microformat approach, which is messy, puts more of a burden on the blogger, and will require a host of tools to be built to make it all work. But microformats will work blot tom-up — tiny little tagged bits of information buried in the blog posts — as opposed to structurally. And I am betting — as always — on bottom-up.

My first reaction was to say that Stow Boyd wouldn’t be able to find a leafy, green vegetable in a field of lettuce, but that wouldn’t be civil and god knows, we all need to be civil.

So instead what I’ll say is that microformats, which are adding tags to existing elements such as links, and Structured Blogging are not an either/or; same as neither is incompatible with my own RDF efforts. All efforts are bottom up; all efforts are top down; all support a semantic web because at some point, someone has to make a decision to attach a bit of metadata to a chunk of web space. How you do so is irrelevant.

I can easily create SB structured content from microformatted data, and generate microformatted data from SB content, and RDF/XML from both. Piece. Of. Cake.

As for Boyd’s rather unsubtle dig at so-called hidden agendas and why is PubSub doing this et al–might as well as why Technorati just started Explore if not to bite itself a piece of that richly tasting, and potentially fruity, semantic web pie.

Four years ago, the name of the game was weblogging; three years ago it was syndication; last year was search engines and this year, podcasting; next year it will be metadata. Companies will fuss and fidget and claim to be first or best, or that they’re only operating in the best interests of us (with an implication that other companies are not). We know better, but we don’t mind because the more dirt they dish up on each other, the more flowers the rest of us can plant.

Categories
Weblogging

Mess o links

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Herewith for fun and pleasure, but absolutely no profit: a mess o’ links. And yes, some of these posts link to me–vanity, vanity, all is vanity. But sometimes, I need to look in a mirror.

*****

Frank Paynter brings us the first installment of answers to the question How do you blog?. Interesting our different takes on the same question. Featured in today’s post are Jeneane Sessum, Rebecca Blood, Ronni Bennett, and yours truly.

Elisa Camahort pointed out the Carnival of Computing, which I didn’t know about and appreciations to her for giving us a heads up. This is a good way of hearing the tech voices drowned out in the tech.meme.

You’ve seen his comments, now read his blog: McD’s McBlog. He’s already gotten into trouble — pretty good for a new blog.

Julie Leung has a lovely post about her husband missing her when she takes a break from her weblog:

In survival mode, I think only of the next minute. Typing seems tiresome. Naps are what I need. But as I begin to enter into health again, I find desire. I find dreams. I find creativity. I find the pieces of me that are here. And I find the ways I connect with others that don’t happen in any other aspect of daily life, perhaps even with the person who knows me most intimately.

Dave Rogers — the naughty one, not the nice one — has been writing a mess of good stuff lately. He just spent $150.00 at iTunes downloading Christmas music, but be sure to read his two posts on social hygiene.

(Juxtaposition of which is kind of ironic: Christmas has become too commercialized; ooo, look at what I downloaded from iTunes!)

From his Social Hygiene essay, the following rings true as Silver Bells (one of my favorite Christmas songs–especially with Brenda Lee or the Supremes):

My objection is that marketers are the people who are, more and more, driving every aspect of our lives. Our culture is becoming more and more commercial, with competition and consumerism being the two dimensions of commercialism. I don’t see many people objecting to this, and too many of the “authorities” on the web, high attention-earning webloggers, are little more than marketers, each with a commercial interest in advancing their own commercial message.

If we’re going to have any hope of preserving some space for purely social interactions, where someone isn’t manipulating us for the purpose of seeking a competitive advantage, we’re probably going to have to make one. But I wonder if it isn’t already too late?

No, not too late. It exists here. Unless I can convince you all to make me enough of a Successful Weblogger that I can retired from weblogging.

Seth Finkelstein who is always great about linking to other discussions on a topic in the A-Lister’s posts–thereby forcing them to look outside of their tight little circles–is feeling the pressure between life and weblog.

Phil Ringnalda summarizes his year in 12 copy and paste comments. Oddly enough, in response to my comment on this post, Phil wrote something that could be a copy-and-paste comment for me for December:

For now I’m still willing to play the hand I’ve dealt myself, but I’m thinking a lot less permanently about permanence these days.

Maybe even into January…

Dori Smith did a little matchup on the recent Backchannel discussion, with a comment something along the lines of …to be continued in March at SxSW.

I have started lifting weights; I’ll be ready.

Categories
Just Shelley

Finishing

The next few weeks are going to be busy. I’m finishing up my contract for Broadband Mechanics, and hope to have my work for the company completed by Christmas. I also have a tech edit for a book that’s rather enjoyable, and needs to be finished by month end; not to mention an older task that I’ve had some mental blocks with and we’re trying a different approach.

To me, December is a time of ends. It’s a time of completing unfinished tasks: meeting promises; reading that book you’ve put off; watching that movie you’re been saving for just the right moment. It’s a time of long walks and reflection and thinking back on the past year, and facing the truths you’ve put off for a rainy day.

Twice a week during December, I attack a room in our townhome and clean it top to bottom. If there’s a closet, I order it; if there’s clutter, I throw it out. With my roommates help, we use his sewing machine to fix clothes still good, but with tears, or splits, or frayed edges. I also organize my computers, and plan on cleaning up my photos.

All is not work: I am treating myself to a week off the last week of December. I have a set of books on order at the library, and a movie I received for my birthday I’ve been saving for a less hectic time. The Firefly movie Serenity will be out on the 20th and I plan on being first in line to buy it. I also plan on seeing both Narnia and King Kong at the theaters, on the big screen. With popcorn.

By that time the Battle of the Worlds BitTorrent download might actually be finished. Nope, nope — just checked and download time is still at 0.1 KiB/s.

Categories
Web Weblogging

Online

Aside from adding some links and text, my first release of OutputThis! is online. Notice the exclamation point? Punctuation is the new black.

The rollout of the Structured Blogging work is tomorrow afternoon, but I’ve been playing with it today. When SB rolls out tomorrow I’ll list links to the test weblogs, but for now, you can check out OutputThis! Yes, I designed it. Yes, I know you hate it.

There’s been some odds and ends about the ‘forking’ nature of Structured Blogging today. It makes no sense, and the folks who are concerned haven’t posted anything online expressing their concerns, so end of story.

What is it, though, with webloggers who reach a point of success and then seem to stop weblogging? Is that the key to getting rid of webloggers–help them become successful at weblogging, and then they’ll stop weblogging? For all those people who don’t care for me and who would like to see me disappear, here’s your chance: help make me a Successful Weblogger, and I’ll go away.

In the meantime, I have a couple of long posts I’m working on and a links post to some very nice stuff you all are writing. I am surrounded by such talented people, which is good for folks like me; too bad for you, though, that you’re not successful enough at weblogging to give up weblogging.