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.

Categories
Just Shelley outdoors

Shortness of hair

I finally bowed to wisdom and hiking in hot, humid Missouri summers and had my hair cut short. Short, short – about 3 inches in length all around.

At the hair place – not a fancy place, Sam’s or some such thing – the stylist really took her time, carefully checking the cut every few minutes, peering at my image in the mirror to ensure the sides were even. During and between snips we discussed the problems another stylist was having that day with a boyfriend who had a drug dependency problem. She, the other stylist, cut my roommate’s hair. Yes, there is a deity.

I wasn’t sure about the haircut at first because I usually wear my hair shoulder length or longer. It’s thick and very wavy, and that’s the problem – when I walked I would get things in my hair, branches, and leaves and bugs, and then I would sweat, getting the hair wet. I couldn’t leave the windows down to cool, as my hair would get in my eyes, so I’d have to turn on the air conditioner, and then my hair would dry into this crinkly, curly mess somewhat like a Brillo pad. With stuff stuck into it.

After last week’s walk, which I’ll write about later, I decided enough was enough. Bring on the buzz cut.

After a couple of days of getting used to the cut – and it is short, seriously – I had to admit that it was cooler and easier to take care of. I also noticed that it subtly flattered my face, added a touch of, dare I say it? Cute. I’m close to 6 feet tall and 48 years old – I’ll take all the cute I can get.

Looks aside, the hair cut paid for itself today when I went to the Route 66 state park for a walk, and was able to have the window down all the way, hair whipped about and not a strand in my eyes. The experience went to my head, and I left the window down on the freeway. A bit of mistake, that, because the wind was blowing so hard it tossed a bill out the window that was lying in the front seat.

Pity.

It was a relatively pleasant day today, but when you’re surrounded by all that green, right next to the Meramec River, it’s going to be humid; I began to perspire, to put it delicately. However, instead of ending up with a soggy mess at the back of my neck, all I had was a tiny little flip of hair that curled up in the moisture, cute as a baby mouse in its nest, leaving plenty of bare neck to catch the breezes.

Ahhh.

I scrambled about by the river, climbing down to the water’s edge and walking along it, hacking through the tall weeds by the side. I’m sure there was any number of Missouri native arthropods lurking in wait, crying out in tiny, hungry little voices, “Sons and daughters of the clan! Here be meat!” But if anything landed in my hair, I was able to easily brush it out again, easily.

(It was a pleasure to discover today that I could climb down a steep trail I couldn’t make this last winter, though I’m sure this has more to do with my increased walking this summer than my hair cut. However, it is satisfying knowing that you can do something when older that you couldn’t do when you were younger. So often it’s the converse.)

I’m finding that convenience aside, I like my hair cut. I like the window open when I drive, and the little curl along my nape, and the cool breeze on my neck. And those funny loopy things are ears – fancy. Next thing you know, I’ll be wearing neon pink, be sucking on a lolli, and telling you all to call me Gigi.