Ruminate

I was gone all last week and weekend to the Alaska State Cup Soccer tournament. Congratulations to Althea (Arctic Knights ‘91), whose team was edged out in the semi-final, and especially to Galen (Fairbanks Phoenix ‘92), whose team went all the way in convincing fashion to be crowned the champions. Denver, here we come! I’ll post a few pics later.

After 10 days without checking in on Bloglines, I find myself afraid to even look there. At least I don’t feel the same obligation to read items there as I do my mailbox which is similarly bursting at the seams…

Someone hates WordPress. I’m using it on a couple of sites without any issues and the code validates. But then I’m not trying to use it to do things it isn’t meant to do! The whole article sounds a lot like someone who heard about the benefits of screwdrivers, tried unsuccessfully to tighten a nut with one, and decided that screwdrivers must be evil.

Still, the way the article is written is unintentionally funny and should appeal to other twisted geeks whose day becomes a little brighter when they see rants in mangled, awkward English…

…personal publishing (= push?), journalling, ephemeral commentary and cross-linking to like-minded blogs, is but a small facet of effective exchange.

Blogging, personal publishing, micro-publishing, whatever you want to call it (I’ll keep calling it blogging for now), has two simultaneous– and superficially contradictory– characteristics. Blogs are just tools which can only play one part in the much larger process of creating a knowledge space. Blogs are– in and of themselves– a revolutionary development in the social process of communication. So blogs are simultaneously insufficient and revolutionary.

The relative single-mindedness and ubiquity of blogging software and hosting combined with the low barrier to entry have sparked the revolution, in hindsight a logical next step given our natural desire to communicate and the growth of the web. But the simplicity of the tools and their widespread adoption make them unsuitable as a sole-tool for knowledge management.

This isn’t a failing, but a feature. If the tools become too complex, users won’t use them. Blogs aren’t meant to fulfill all the needs of knowledge workers or serve as knowledge repositories. Aloow them to flourish and succeed on their own terms. What blogs and bloggers are doing– what their relative success is doing– is pointing us away from the tarbabies that are monolithic applications. KM thinkers should harness the strengths of the blog as one part of a confederation of small tools loosely joined

It was ironic to find this combination of posts in my aggregator (more about aggregators, desktop and server-side later today, I hope) this morning: Alan Levine’s contention that in order to really be blogging rather than just ‘publishing a weblog’ one must have a comments function followed by the Contentious Feedless Hall of Shame where one can’t submit recommendations via the site because– you guessed it– comments were turned off due to spam.

There is more to being a blogger than merely publishing a weblog, just as there is more to being a writer than merely publishing a poem. The emphasis here is on the being aspect, the state of being something as opposed to performing the mechanical tasks involved in an activity. Being is complex, performance most often is not.

The most fascinating aspect of the blog phenomenon is how it focuses precisely on this very difference. One’s words are immediately out for public consumption– there is always an audience without the middleman of publisher (or editor, to my occasional misfortune). The tools and means are available to most without gatekeepers, so there is no particular respect that comes just from the publishing process in the way that many will automatically grant a privilege to something they see in physical print. Everything is about the writing, and good writing is not merely about the product, but about the state of being that enables one to be a good writer. Unlike a print publication there is a community one must work to become– and continue being– a part of both in the ‘blogosphere’ and in the context of one’s own site. Being a good blogger demands more than just publishing a blog.

So what makes a good blogger? Off the top of my head:

• Attention to Craft (a good blog is all about the writing)
• Consistency of Approach (without becoming dogmatic)
• Currency (whether you write of iPods or poetics)
• Interaction (interact with readers and other blogs)
• Breadth and Variety (a highly ‘vertical’ blog is an information resource not a blog)
• Personality (We know how to use a search engine, we come to blogs to hear from a person)

If you’re a Windows user and you are still relying on the lame (and I don’t mean the Lame mp3 encoder) software that came with your portable MP3 player to manage music transfers, run to dBpoweAMP.com and see if their Sveta Portable Audio software will work with your device. If so, get it!

The Rio Music Manager that came with my Nitrus is actually one of the better tools I have seen, but with a lot of MP3s it is dog slow at refreshing the file listing and not particularly customizable. With Sveta you can do on-the-fly conversions, rip CDs directly to your portable player, and generally maneuver faster and better.

Check out this screenshot to see the interface. The left two columns are my portable, the right column is the file browser to find and load MP3s.

Two tips: use the beta version and drivers, available in the Beta Forum and install the optional file selector so you can browse, tag all the files you want to transfer and then do them all at once.

Not coincidentally, these are products by the makers of the dBpowerAMP Music Converter, one of the most versatile tools available for music conversions and the dBpowerAMP Music Player which has worked quite well (though I remain a FooBar 2000 user for the most part).

I agree that Technorati doesn’t seem ready for prime-time. It’s good service (when it is up and when searches don’t take minutes to be returned and when said searches don’t return obviously broken listings) with the potential to be great if they aren’t a victim of their own success!

I have written to them (without response) three times in the last six months about an anomaly in their link analysis results, specifically the way some blogs own internal self-links (such as navigation links) get included in their Technorati link cosmos. For example, a search for this site’s link cosmos shows 148 links from 51 source… but the vast majority of those are internal links from my own category navigation that shouldn’t be included. At the same time, my new blog’s link cosmos doesn’t seem to exhibit this kind of behavior, listing only the proper 26 links from 20 sources despite also having category links on the front page. Strange…

Looks like the new del.icio.us interface is out featuring something I have been eagerly waiting for: tag combinations!

The look has also been refined with the somewhat annoying date paging replaced by a more intuitive “earlier” and “later” links.

• GmailerXP :: The program allows users to do anything that they can do online, it also combines all the features of the other programs (GML, Gmailto, etc.)

• The Case That Must Not Be Named :: A case mod inspired by the work of H. P. Lovecraft

• Findory News :: Personalized news service

• MSNBC Newsbot :: Microsoft takes on Google News

• Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom :: By Charles Lowe and Terra Williams

• Yawning is catching in chimps :: The contagious yawn is not only real, but those who do it are better people than others

• ChangeThis :: ChangeThis is on a mission: Spread important ideas and change minds. Over the next few months, we’ll publish powerful, rational arguments from leaders in politics and business. These arguments may upset you. They may make you curse. Ultimately, we’re conf

• Linky :: Firefox Extension that lets you open or download all or selected links, image links and even web addresses found in the text in separate or different tabs or windows.

• Flickr: Photos: flapface

• The Information Architecture of Email :: Gmail revealed to me my email behavior– something I hadn’t previously given much thought…

• Wikipedia: Leetspeak :: People who enjoy irony sometimes use leetspeak to draw attention to “secrets” they believe no one actually cares about.

• EmoteMail :: The client captures facial expressions and typing speed and introduces them as design elements [in the email message].