Categories
Weblogging

Weblog Graveyard

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I finally managed to get the For Poets sites up and running and have moved a couple of existing articles over, to Internet for Poets and Semantic Web for Poets. You can check the sites out following the links in the sidebar on the main page of Burningbird. Please let me know if the template I used for all the sites is causing breakage in your browser. I’ve tested in Mac OSX and Windows, with a variety of tools, but you know how it is.

All the new weblogs are using Movable Type. I did manage to install several other weblogging tools, but when it came time to try and skin them — I threw in the towel, and decided that what I’m writing is more important than what I’m using to publish it. Either I continued to fuss with the tools, or I started writing again.

Writing won.

In addition to moving the older articles over, I also published the first part of a multi-part series on Permalinks, Weblog links. Part 1, “The Impermanence of Permalinks”, discusses the problems of permalinks and moving weblogs or changing tools, something we all know all too well. The rest of the segments of the article are as follows:

 

Part 2: “Re-weaving the broken web”

What are some of the techniques you can use to point your old permalink addresses to your new page locations.

Part 3: “Architectural Changes for Friendly Permalinking”

What should tools provide, at a minimum, to prevent permalink problems.

Part 4: “Start fresh by sweeping out the old webs”

Sometimes you may want to break the permalinks, and sometimes you may want to deliberately throw out archive pages. This last section challenges the premise behind persistent archives, and the myth of the permalink.

Part 2 will cover techniques you can use to redirect from old pages to new locations, including using htaccess, ErrorDocument, Redirect, and so on.

Part 3 is going to focus on what weblogging tools should support to minimize the broken permalink problem. I plan on tying this back to the Pie/Echo/Atom effort, and see where the requirements outlined in the article would fit into the current work with the new initiative. In addition, I’ll write on how these same requirements will impact on existing weblogging tools, and what we can do to propagate changes more quickly through all the services we’re all so tied into now.

The last part is going to be the fun one. The scenario basically is this — throw out the rulebook, and break the permalinks, throw away the archives. Yes, violating the two strongest taboos of weblogging in order to make a move to a new site, or, more importantly, to redefine what your weblog is, and what you want it to say about you.

Sometimes you may find yourself caught up in weblogging patterns that you find, over time, don’t suit you. You may want to change what you write about, or change how you write, or even your subject matter. You look back through your old archives of what you wrote a year ago, two years ago, and it isn’t compatible with what you want to write now. So what do you do? Do you keep the old baggage — dusty old permalinks to dusty old writing? Or do you start fresh?

Somewhere along the way we built into Law that thou shalt not break permalinks, thou shalt not drop archives. We leave them lying, permanent reminders for all time and either just change direction in our writing (causing some confusion between the old and the new), or start a new weblog.

I envision a future Web, littered with the carcasses of old, old weblogs, long discarded, long forgotten, ghosts that haunt the threaded void. What exactly do you do with an old, old weblog that refuses to die? Can we take it out into the wilderness somewhere, and leave it by the side of the road? Will it manage to find its way back home? Can we pretend at some future time, that we don’t know it?

I think it’s time, and past, to put this law to the challenge. Part 4 talks about this, and also talks about how you can ‘break’ the laws with style, grace, and elegance.

Categories
Weblogging

For Poets

Completed the four new Burningbird Network weblogs – Semantic Web for Poets, Internet for Poets, Linux for Poets, and Weblogging for Poets – as shown in the list to your left. This is all part of a major rework of the entire Burningbird Network, something I’ve been wanting to do for some time and am finally getting around to it.

Currently I’m moving a couple of older posts over to the new sites, but I’m also working on a Semantic Web for Poets entry having to do with recent W3C TAG discussions, semiotics of photography, and the ultimate New Age question:

Who am I?

Couple of days. First I have an overdue essay for Linux for Poets, and one on Weblogging for Poets.

Fun. By the way, check out the poem for the Semantic Web for Poets weblog – see if you can catch the allusion to RDF.

Categories
Weblogging

There was a tree. There was a sock. There was a man of God.

Nothing I can say in this post will make any sense outside of the context, so all I can do is point you to AKMA’s most recent trip report from Oxford, no less.

You see, there was this tree, with this sock in it…

(BTW AKMA, I am glad you’re okay, and I hope you don’t mind the giggles. But…I can’t help it.)

Categories
RDF

FOAF:knows a clarification

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dan Brickley just came out with a why there’s a foaf:knows but not a foaf:friend. The better explanation occurs in the comments:

Because the concepts of ‘knowing’, ‘knowing well’, ‘friend’ etc. are both slippery and because people vary (personality, use of language etc.) in how they’re comfortable using those concepts, you get into situations such as X’s foaf file says that X has friends Y, and Z whereas Y’s foaf says X is ‘just’ a knows or knowsWell (knowsWell being particularly awkward as it suggests significant familiarity without affection, ie. no “would like to know better” wiggleroom). Z’s foaf might list neither as friends, and risk being taken (despite ommission not implying negation in RDF or FOAF) as suggesting that Z doesn’t consider either X or Y to be friends. Although Z might protest that the absence of a claim from a FOAF file is consistent with it still being true, X and Y could fairly counter-protest that Z could have made the effort to mention them since they made the effort to mention him/her. And so on…

You see similar economies of expected reciprocation in closed-world systems like Friendster or LinkedIn, especially where they offer endorsement and commenting facilities. Not something to blunder into with FOAF without some careful thought, so we retreated to the safer ground of ‘foaf:knows’.

Glad, am I, that Dan came out with this.

Categories
Technology

NotWiki

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Liz wrote a great note on the recent and growing pushback against the use of the Wiki for Pie/Echo/Atom, based in part on a discussion at Phil’s and a posting over at Sam’s.

Liz’s summary hits all the points:

I’m not yet at the point where I see wikis as adding sufficient value to any process I’m involved with to justify the installation, configuration, and learning curve for users necessary to add another tool to my social software arsenal. Like Phil, I continue to be troubled by the inherent ahistoricism built into the wiki environment; like Shelley I find the lack of social cues to tell me if I’m treading on someone’s toes by changing content to be inhibiting; like Dare, I find that large-scale active wikis are often too chaotic and disorganized, making it difficult for me to find what I’m looking for.

I had concerns about the wiki in the beginning because I wanted to get non-techs involved. Yes, the techs will have to build the tools, but tools are only as good as the people who use them, and I wanted others to have a voice. And face it – Wiki has a real geek feel to it that’s not necessarily inviting to the non-geeks.

Still, I participated originally, focusing in my area of expertise – the data model. It seems as if I had just started and then turned around and realized the work had zoomed right past while I wasn’t looking.

Okay, so I tried again, taking a snapshot and writing about the effort in a nutshell, and I figured I’d help contribute to the effort by doing this once a week or so – until the next week when I realized that there had been so much work, so much activity, that a snapshot wasn’t feasible. Of if it was, I wasn’t the person to provide it. The parade had passed by.

Wikis are a fascinating device, and I admire Sam wanting to get input from the world at large by using a wiki. He actually didn’t have much choice: he’d been warned what would happen if the Big Blog Tools met behind closed doors and just threw specs over a tall, tall wall.

But there’s got to be a happy medium between total control, personal ownership, and closed doors on the one hand; and a digital foodfight and freeforall that is the Wiki on the other.

Wikis favor the aggressive, the obsessive, and the compulsive: aggressive to edit or delete others work; obsessive to keep up with the changes; and compulsive to keep pick, pick, picking at the pages, until there’s dozens of dinky little edits everyday, and thousands of dinky little offshoot pages. And name choices like “BarbWire”.

(BarbWire. Good God. Let’s get pipes and hose and find the original Echo trademark holders and give them an offer they can’t refuse to let the trademark go.)

But Wikis also favor enormous amounts of collaboration among a pretty disparate crew, which is why there’s also all sorts of feeds being tested, and APIs being explored, and a data model that everyone feels pretty darn good about. So one can also say that Wikis favor the motivated, the dedicated, and the determined.

What we need now is a hold moment. We need to put this effort into Pause, and to look around at the devastation and figure what to keep and what to move aside; and to document the effort, and its history, for the folks who have pulled away from the Wiki because of the atmosphere. We need to do this for the techs and non-techs alike, because I’m pretty sure some technical decisions were made that are not going to make a lot of current webloggers happy if I’ve read some of the copy at the wiki correctly.

We need to record what’s been accomplished in a non-perishable (i.e. not editable), human manner. No Internet standard specification format. Words. Real ones. We then need to give people a chance to comment on this work, but not in the Wiki. Or not only in the wiki. Document the material in one spot – a weblog. After all, this is about weblogging – doesn’t it make sense that we start moving this into the weblogging world again? Not bunches of weblogs, with bits and pieces.

One weblog. Limited author access.

We need to get more people involved then a small core group and if this means using different mediums of communication and even – perish the thought – slowing down a bit, then slow down. Mediums that have history so those late to the party aren’t left out in the cold. This means not wiki, not IRC.

We also need another stated commitment from the stakeholders in all of this, the aforementioned Big Blog Tool makers, that they are still supporting this effort’s output. A lot’s happened between then and now.

Most of all, we need to ungeek Pie/Echo/Atom – start channeling this effort into a more controlled environment, with open communication, yes, but less movement, and more deliberation. I’m not saying give one person control, but we need to start identifying those with the most to gain and lose by this effort, those who are most impacted, and we need to start pulling them into a consortium. A weblogging consortium.

(Now, where have I heard that before?)

But here’s the kicker – include the non-tech webloggers, too. You know, the people that don’t get excited because Python 2.3 released?

Sam mentioned in a new post that I hadn’t contributed much in the last month because I was too busy. Because of this, he said the medium wouldn’t have mattered in my overall contribution. But that’s not the story, Sam.

My lack of recent contribution wasn’t that I was too busy for the Wiki effort; it was because the Wiki effort was too busy for me.

P.S. A new name suggestion for Pie/Echo/Atom – let’s just call it Pie/Echo/Atom.