While I wish they were broken out into a separate category, Rob Hudson's tutorials on Python programming look quite nice.

In related news, Bruce Eckel is a big Python fan too.

On the off chance that anyone even bothered to look, the formerly pathetic monthly and individual archives of this weblog have now been given a decent presentation.

The CSS stylesheets used are modifcations of Firda Beka's old CSS Colouring Book stylesheets.

Still some tweaking to go though. Recent entries doesn't work how I would like it to for older archive entries, I want to implement a daily archive, and integrate some Mason hackery.

One of the things that sort of turned me off on wikis is their lack of programmatic control. For example, many weblog tools support a remote procedure call mechanism through XML-RPC. Similarly, Movable Type has a ridiculously beautiful Perl API.

But it looks like my wiki hangups may have been addressed by l. m. orchard, who's been hacking modules for programmatic wiki control using XML-RPC. Orchard has code that works with three popular wiki packages: Twiki, UseModWiki, and MoinMoin.

Putting it all together, automated tools can watch personal writing spaces (weblogs) and write into public writing spaces (wikis). Now we just need some smarts to know when to do so.

Rich Salz covers the technical details, plusses, and minuses of RSS. Among a bunch of other issues, Salz highlights one that got swept under the rug in all of the political wrangling: HTML/XML embedded in RSS feeds. Salz points out that the Atom (nee NEcho) format at least cleanly handles this problem.

This is a fairly important issue for RSS as the final result can make it either much easier or harder for tools to deal with the format. However, as discussion within the NEcho community shows, there's not an obvious solution.

The default Movable Type bookmarklets break in Apple's Safari browser. Jen Segrest has a Post-It! bookmarklet that works properly. Over at randomWalks, the bookmarklet has been slightly tweaked to take advantage of selected text.

Note that these also seem to work with OmniWeb, which is now back on my browser radar, since it uses WebKit, the Safari core. OmniWeb now seems sprightlier and still as beautiful as ever. Downside is that it doesn't do tabbed browsing. Way upside is the rediscovery of shortcuts in the URL entry field.

Hugh Hewitt, in a Weekly Standard article, makes a case for official nurturing of blogging within news organizations. Frankly, it's not all that compelling. Using blogs as a farm system exhibits too much effort for widely varying results. Besides, the help can always go free agent or freelance with little or no effort.

Here's the NMH argument for weblogs in news organizations. Kovach & Rosenstiel's highly regarded book, The Elements of Journalism, makes transparency a fundamental property of the journalistic process. Weblogs can be a convenient and cheap mechanism by which a news organization can demonstrate more transparency. A web based ombudsman could react almost instantaneously and in much more depth than the editorial page would allow. Motivated newsroom staff could also use weblogs to be proactive instead of reactive. This can lead to an increased reputation, which is generally more profitable.

Let's see some newspaper bean counter or hard bitten ink stained editor argue against that.

Fuji announced a new megapixel camera with built-in Wi-Fi, according to the Japan Times. The biggest reason seemed to be cable elimnation.

Thanks to Gizmodo

Shabnam Mogharabi, of the Medill News Service (MNS), called me up last week, and did a brief one-on-one regarding blogs. I'm not sure what's more gratifying, that I actually got quoted or that the article is published on the Web using software who's construction I guided. The Chicago Medill News Service uses a homegrown CMS that a series of undergraduate independent studies have built and maintained. It's not a paragon of software development, but it gets the job done.

Even better, I first saw the article in my RSS aggregator, although we're not publicizing the feeds yet. First off, they ain't quite valid yet, and second we need to make sure we don't scoop the MNS clients.

However, now that I've been mentioned in the same article as Dave Winer, it might be time to don my asbestos suit. Not blaming Dave, but he does seem to be something of a heat magnet.

Finally, Mogharabi's story has a nice roundup of Chicago area blogging activities. Lots of local flavor I didn't know about myself.

Memo to self: for vanity's sake find out what clients picked up the article

A FirstMonday article in which the investigators document the extent which the likes of Yahoo!, AOL, and Lycos provide personalization features.

Thanks to WebWord.

Matt Haughey, of MetaFilter fame, uses Movable Type in all sorts of interesting ways. Clearly, I'm also a big MT fan, but Haughey misses another significant limitation of the system: the user model is a little too primitive. For example, I've banged my head against per user information for extensions. Not fun, but doable. This strikes me as something that Six Apart should bake in in a cleaner fashion.

And another thing, can the operation of the template system be described as anything but opaque. The documentation provides surface sense for simple things, but multiple templates of different types can be treacherous.

Memo to self: kwit yer bitchin.

In MIN (Media Industry Newsletter by Steve Cohn), it's revealed that a writing contest sponsored by Glamour magazine, drew 10,000 entrants!.

Just doing a little math, if only 1% of them are any good, that's 100 good chunks of new magnet content. Toss in a kickoff and a wrapup week, and you've got 1 year's worth of engaging material, releasable once a week, for free!!

Even better Glamour didn't have to ante up any archival content. Heck the dang contest was probably a low tech combo of snail mail and e-mail.

I'm telling ya, the gold in that there content is time limited, focused activities around select bits and topics. People everywhere have something to say about something. Just give 'em a venue and don't ask that they do it every day. People got lives ya know!

JD Lasica reminds folks of Gary Price's excellent ResourceShelf web site, focusing on Internet search technology, information systems, and library science.

Of recent interest on Price's site is that the Stanford PageRank crew seems to be cooking up personalized search techniques.

Getting closer to the ability to turn a digital photo into a microblog, and now I'm looking for blogging clients. Lago has a nice rundown of blogging clients for OS X. One noticeable omission is Chronicle Lite, maybe because it's a Java client and not Mac OS X specific. Also, I don't think ThinBlog was included.

Don Park rediscovers "demassification" as John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid termed the effect in a paper called "Borderlands". In short, a physical newspaper has the nice property that if you and I have seen the newspaper, even if it's different copies, we've seen the "same" thing. Thus references to elements of the paper are consistent across its various instances.

This all falls apart for personalized online "newspapers". Eventually we'll discover that these things are a new and different service. Starting from newspaper principles, conceptions, and expectations is fine, but we'll have to make a new understanding of the way they should work.

Caveat: newspapers used to issue multiple editions per day so the demassification argument only goes so far. TV broadcast is harder to demassify, although with TiVo and intermediaries like it probably being cooked up in somebody's lab even that medium is under assault.

Memo to audience: I'll fix up the Seely Brown/Duguid reference when I get back to my office.

aiSee London, aiSee France...

I'm turning into a graph geek but still don't have a good graph visualization tool on the box. A German company named AbsInt produces aiSee, a commercially maintained cross platform, graph visualization application. aiSee isn't free as in beer or free as in freedom, but it looks pretty damn good, and it's not too expensive for academic use.

Mainly parking, but it looks like The Washington Post has put together an incredible Flash based compendium of photographs from their embedded journalists. This could be another great example of multimedia storytelling.

Elliot Borin reports on a new technology that's sounds too damned good to be true: MRAM. Faster than current RAM technologies, non-volatile, and occupying less physical space. Due by the end of 2003. It would seem to be an ideal replacement for RAM in desktop machines much less PDAs and cell phones as mentioned in the article.

However, I didn't see one other relevant factor mentioned: cost. Betcha the stuff ain't cheap.

Just beat the deadline to keep the posting streak alive, but it was due to some good developments.

• Azzari Caillier passed her qualifying exam this week. She's an advisee of mine and currently the furthest along towards completing her degree. The exam committee grilled her for over 3 hours, but she came through with flying colors.
• I've made some progress on turning media objects into microblogs. There should be a demo link coming in a few days.
• I had a blast showing a few journalism students the wonders of Gallery to a bunch of New Media Capstone students. That got them jazzed about thinking of ways to use it in their course project.

McDonald's is planning a big rollout of Wi-Fi in SF and Chicago. According to Glenn Fleishman, a few local area franchisees have jumped the gun already and are providing it for free.

Memo to Chicago Sun Times: I'd link to you but I know you have baked in linkrot.

Update: Fixed up a few character's in GlennF's name.

Two Tims provide good entry points for the recent upheavals and forward motion around blogging APIs. Bray argues that REST is beautiful baby. Meanwhile, Appnel claims that SOAP ain't all that hard. I strongly concur with the former sentiment.

Meanwhile, Joe Gregorio pushes on the development of a certified, standard RESTLog API, and Mark Pilgrim illustrates the API's elegance.

Haven't downloaded yet, but the MT Plugin Manager looks like an extension of the Movable Type application object (didn't know you could do that didya) to provide a nice Web front-end to the installed MT plug-ins. I wonder if you can upload plug-ins remotely (modulo hairy security issues).

Tom Hespos makes a good case for using blogs to cover local news, especially for underserved communities. Three major challenges are presented:

• Content tracking (finding what's important locally)
• Relevance tools (finding locally relevant stuff globally)
• An advertising model (getting local advertisers paid)

By the end of the summer, I think I'll have prototype solutions to the first two.

Memo to self: lock the term "underserved communities" into the talking points

l.m. Orchard has been maintaining a wiki page covering how to merge weblogs and wikis. In particular, he himself has done it for Movable Type.

The BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis, discusses his recent visit to AOL to see their blogging tools. It's been known for a while that AOL was going to give their members blogging tools. From Jarvis' report version 1.0 might not suck and may actually be nicely integrated with other AOL services, e.g. AIM.

As should have been anticipated, phone cameras are leading to a much different form of behavior than traditional cameras or even digital cameras. People really are capturing the moment. Japanese women snapping photos of magazines right in the bookstore and geeks imaging slides right in the middle of a conference.William Grosso asks, "what is a camera, anyway?"

The key distinction of a phone camera is that it's intimately integrated with a communication device. If you investigate the user's mental model, they're not "taking photos", they're "sending messages". Which is why folks focused strictly on the photographic quality of these devices just won't get it.

So maybe Grosso's question should be, "why do we even call them cameras?".

Off to see the Cubs and Cards at Wrigley today. Can't get a much more Americana filled event than that.

Engineered Audio is planning to ship a device that hooks up to a computer's USB or audio out port, and transmits over an FM radio frequency. Sounds like just enough to manufacture your own little, local radio station using whatever content you'd like. Remote controllable from anywhere on the Internet.

Of course some folks note that this sounds like a great idea in theory, but may not actually work well in practice.

Digging about for current knowledge regarding image annotation mechanisms, I Googled across Jim Gemmell's publications regarding MyLifeBits. The MyLifeBits project is essentially a bid to construct Vannevar Bush's Memex. Run out of MicroSoft's Bay Area Research Center, there's a big emphasis on RDBMS technology. Interestingly, I think Gemmell eschews embedding annotations in the actual media.

For some gut reason, this model gives me the willies. If you embed the annotations in the image (easier said than done) if you have the image you have the metadata, and there's no single point of failure. Also, the data is separated from the name of the object. However, doing queries is way easier, and that actually may be a big enough win.

Unfortunately, the relative lameness of embedded image annotation mechanisms is driving me to this mode of operation anyway.

Epiphany moment on the train home today. Take a bunch of media objects, a collection of digital photographs say. Make each one a microblog (riffing off of Don Park's idea of Micro-Wiki's) by having it support the RESTLog API, in addition to its standard representation.

For example, each image can be served as a plain old image, but you tweak its URL a bit and you can post to it. Do a get from another tweaked URL and you get back HTML. Another tweak, and you get the RSS. You can also make each object support TrackBacks for two way linking and annotation.

Now build all sorts of tools using standard Web and WebService toolkits. Mayhem ensues.

Gotta get to work.

About.com has quietly turned all of its sites into weblogs using MovableType, according to Howard Sherman. As he points out, this is a vote of confidence for weblogs in general, moneymaking using weblogs, and SixApart, the producer's of Movable Type.

Apropos of nothing, except UNIX noodling, the commands df and du have a --human-readable (-h) option on most modern unices.

I can't tell you how much joy this discovery brought me. In the days of sloshing around 2.1 gigabytes just for the heck of it, trying to calculate in my head how much space a directory took up, or how much is left on a drive, was getting difficult.

Yet another of life's little victories.

I know squat about RFID chips. Thankfully, Scott Granneman can fill me in on the basics of RFID and the implications of its usage.

Synopsis: Way cool. Way scary. With great power comes great responsibility.

Eric Sigler has hacked up an iPhoto plug-in to post to any weblog tool supporting the MetaWeblog API. More grist for using weblogs as social media ecology tools. Friction to add media becomes negligible.

VMware is launching VMotion, technology allowing admins to "move applications from one computer to another without any interruption in service." according to Robert McMillan.

At first I was really amped about this because I parsed "application" as "virtual machine". Moving applications is pretty boring, (cf. the old UC Berkeley Sprite operating system) although depending on restrictions this at least moves the granularity of mobility up from thread like computations.

Now when we can start sloshing around running VMs on an optical network then the world will change. Think about it. We've got a decent handle on how to manage individual desktop machines. Let's just make that the unit of distributed computation and be done with it.

Clay Shirky's article on the Echo rhubarb, the process underlying the feuding factions, and the contrasting affordances of the collaborative technology applied, is quite good. His discussion is less about the technical flaming and more about the differences between weblogs and wikis. In short, weblogs are egocentric while wikis damp vanity.

The essay hints at a real essence of how blogs and wikis should be married. I think there's one last element that's missing though. While wikis reflect consensus, and they track changes, they don't really track major consensus points. A wiki page can be quite inactive, at which point, you really want to take a snapshot and archive it somewhere, and then the page can become active again, e.g. new consensus is arrived at.

Hmmm, this may be one reason to understand network structure in a social media ecology. If you can model and detect the lifetime of a "story", you can determine when consensus has been reached and "history should be fixed". Of course things can and will change, but it's good to have snapshots of those collective synch points.

Memo to self: do some pruning on this weblog to see if we got Shirky's name right everywhere

Microdoc News is publishing a piece purporting to explain what this blog based media ecology is all about, through the words of bloggers themselves. Couldn't really find a byline, so I'm crediting Elwyn Jenkins since he has a copyright.

Zempt looks like a nice cross platform posting tool for Movable Type. However, I'm curious as to how they get to be cross platform. If it's Java Inside (tm), I wonder if Zempt is pokey.

I've been involved in some interesting meetings with the Museum of Broadcast Communications so I wanted to park their link for future reference.

If you need to get your canuck news on, The Toronto Globe and Mail has a bunch of RSS feeds.

The Center for Hellenic Studies recently hosted Macej Ceglowski, a serious Web hacker specializing in working with non-profits. Apparently, within this very cushy center for humanists, spasms of hardcore geekery break out.

Memo to self: do something cool enough to get an invitation from these folks.