Wikiphilia

I was just discussing with a friend yesterday about the rise of wikis, especially in corporations. My cynical take is that, at least in the context of his company, they were little more than easier to use Lotus Notes databases. Where he works, the I/T side of the house has made it so painful and difficult to set up a Notes database, that wikis are taking over as the place where people can have informal discussions and store informal documentation. Anyway, via the del.icio.us/popular feed, I found: Wikiphilia - The New Illness

Wikiphilia: A mental illness characterized by the irrational conviction that any problem faced by a group can be rendered solvable through installation and use of a Wiki. This delusional ailment has been occurring in increasing numbers ever since it was first identified in 1995. Wikiphilia usually manifests in two distinct phases - the rapturous anticipation of the Wiki's potential in the short post-installation phase; slowly giving way to denial of the Wiki's failure to fulfill that potential in the second phase.

Flickr + Tivo

Via Jeremy Zawodny: Flickr/TiVo: a Tivo HME application which connects to Flickr for photos.

How to Sell Your Book, CD, or DVD on Amazon

How to Sell Your Book, CD, or DVD on Amazon: By having my stuff pop up among the big publisher's offerings for "similar books" or even in reader's lists and guides, my titles gain a greater chance to be seen and ordered. In a certain way, unless your stuff is available on Amazon, it ain't available. In fact for better or worse, the only way you can purchase my books is via Amazon. As a side benefit, by focusing all my sales via Amazon, tiny advances in sales are magnified by Amazon's sales rank, which garner it more attention, more links via recommendations, which increases sales in the hoped for virtuous circle. This is not a way to make money; this is a way to distribute your message.

Turbo under the knife

Friend and fellow member of the ibm.com diaspora, Todd Watson is going in for sinus / sleep apnea surgery tomorrow (24/2/05).

More on XMLHttpRequest

Some more links on XMLHttpRequest, which I wrote about here:

• At Adaptive Path, Jesse James Garrett writes Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. JJG defines Ajax as:
  • standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
  • dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
  • data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
  • asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
  • and JavaScript binding everything together.

  The article continues to break down the differences between traditional web applications and Ajax applications.

• XMLHttpRequest, Ajax, and the customer experience cautions that Ajax is a new technology and that its benefits come from the application of the technology to existing or new user interfaces. If someone's used to one way of doing things on the web (check off form items for example and then search for the Submit button) and we change the underpinnings to use XMLHttpRequest, we need to consider the impact on the user experience.
• Very Dynamic Web Interfaces is a walkthrough and demo of using XMLHttpRequest and Javascript.
• Guide to Using XMLHttpRequest (with Baby Steps) is a nice tutorial on implementing XMLHttpRequest
• XMLHttpRequest Introduction is an introduction to XMLHttpRequest and a number of tutorials, examples, and tools to implement it.
• Movable Type な Blog の全エントリを JavaScript with XMLHttpRequest でインクリメンタル検. My Japanese is poor but I think this is an entry about using Ajax/XMLHttpRequest to perform incremental searches of MovableType entries.

My own work with XMLHttpRequest was on hold for awhile but I've started playing with it again and once I finish my !*@&#^! web site redesign (much easier when you have a team of smart people to work with. Frisket is not so good with PHP or HTML).

Bloglines & Forbes.com rss feeds

I noticed a minor irritating problem with the Forbes.com RSS feeds, at least in their interaction with Bloglines. The feeds are RSS 2.0 format and include a <link> element. Bloglines uses the URI in the <link> element as though it were a <base> URI for all other URIs in the feed, so you end up with links like http://www.forbes.com/news/http://www.forbes.com/technology/2005/02/24/cz_dl_ibm.html?partner=rss for IBM's Growth Engine Sputters. Now, the feed doesn't validate, but the feed validator only marks the <author> tag as being in error. Digging around for RSS 2.0 examples, it appears that the <link> element simply defines the link for the channel or an item, but isn't intended to be a base element, so it appears that Bloglines is in error.

Straits-Times Interactive goes fee-only

I just started reading the Straits-Times online site several months ago but will be dropping it from my reading list after March 15th: ST website to charge for access from Mar 15 - Feb 24, 2005.

I don't mind registering for newspaper sites, I don't mind the various marketing bits of information they ask for and generally supply valid information (not necessarily correct, but close enough). I only pay for two sites now: The Wall St. Journal and the South China Morning Post, and I may end up dropping either or both (oddly, although I've been a WSJ online subscriber for years, I restarted a paper subscription a couple years ago specifically to read the ads).

My readership of sites is driven almost entirely by RSS feeds these days,a dn that was one thing which attracted me to the STI site. While this means I don't spend a lot of time wading throuhg a site looking for articles to read, it does mean I read far more articles (and thus see far more advertisements which are in theory relevant to me and/or the article I'm reading). Now, if STI's costs are out of line they can do one of three things: cease their online operations (unlikely), charge for subscriptions (what they are doing) or raise their advertising rates. I'm assuming they've done a cost-benefit analysis and decided that fewer readers will generate enough revenue to offset the drop in advertising rates, as well that their advertisers refused to pony up more money.

The WSJ online model works (I assume they at least break even, a differing opinio is here) because they have an interested, specific audience. I suspect STI's switch will not bring the benefits they're seeking; mark me as a former reader come March 15^th, 2005.

Anesthesized Turbot

Todd claims to have come through his surgery fine, however clearly he's addled since he posted his email address to his blog. I predict 10,000 variations on offers for Cialis, Viagra, and Paris Hilton's phone numbers in his inbox within the hour.

As well as the occasional Get well Todd!.

I know someone in Playboy!

Ok, perhaps that's misleading. Fellow echoid and friend Jodi Shapiro has had one of her photos of Chris Moneymaker published on playboy.com in playboy.comversation: Chris Moneymaker.

Backstory:

A couple years' back, Jodi flew herself out to Las Vegas and took photos at one of the poker tournaments. As a result of that work she sold one of her photos of one of the players to be used on a poker chip. That in turn led to a gig at the Atlantis resort in January photographing players in a PokerStars.com tournament, which is where she took the shot shown on playboy.com.

No, I don't plan to make x-rated links nor poker links a regular item here, that's what comment and trackback spam is for.

Taxonomies and Tags

Taxonomies and Tags: When it comes to innovation on the Internet, metadata is becoming the new content.

Tags have become the meme of the year, at least so far, writing another chapter in the history of classification systems. Tagging is an old idea, but it seems to be taking off now because some applications provide end-users with immediate benefits. For example, at del.icio.us, users enter bookmarks (URLs) they want to remember, adding a word or two – tags – so they can sort them later. Del.icio.us users can see not only everyone else’s bookmarks, but also all the bookmarks tagged with a particular word. For example, if you care about Emily Dickinson, you can see all the Web pages del.icio.us users have tagged with “Dickinson” or “Emily Dickinson,” a great tool for researchers.

Laurie Anderson @ BAM

We caught Laurie Anderson tonight at BAM. Her show The End of the Moon is based on her two year stint as the first (and apparently last) Artist in Residence at NASA. I liked it, though listening to a monologue for close to two hours can be a bit of a challenge for me (really, honestly I only close my eyes, I was truly awake for the first half hour. Honest.).

Now, thanks to Misha, I am watching Lisa play Katamari Damacy, which I honestly can't describe but this timely writeup at timely writeup at kottke.org does some justice to the game. I mean, basically you roll a ball around the screen trying to make it bigger by picking up items. It's like something I would have played on an Apple // when I was a kid, but with better graphics and an insane Japanese pop music soundtrack. All I can say is this: it's lasting longer in the house than The SIMS did.