Baseball cards have basically turned into precious metals, according to Noah Schachtman. Now Topps will just lock them in a vault, and people can trade them online in an eBay style market.
Hunch. For this online community, a segment has devoted itself to impartially reporting on transactions, trends, and troubles. In short a free press probably emerged.
Hypothesis, any collection of media artifacts can cohere a community in which a free press will/must emerge.
Phillip Winn's response to Daring Fireball's TrackBack complaints pretty much sums up my thoughts. Combine this post with Grimmelmann's cultural take on TrackBack and you've got reason to get excited about TrackBack.
Memo to self: The Movable Type bookmarklet took it upon itself to ask me to ping the TrackBack URL for Grimmelmann's post. No muss, no fuss. I post and the work get's done for me.
Now I need to dig in and see how it actually discovered the TrackBack id.
John Gruber, aka Daring Fireball, says Take Your TrackBacks and Dangle
Quote: One of Movable Type's most distinguishing features is something called TrackBack. I don't use it for Daring Fireball, nor do I plan to.
Gruber makes some good arguments as to why TrackBack is problematic, but his fallback to referrer logs I find uncompelling. At least TrackBack attempts to raise the level of semantic information, and as others point out, TrackBack isn't conflated with other server access goop.
TrackBack may not be the exact right thing at the moment, but it's at least an attempt at forward progress.
Memo to audience: I'm mainly blogging this as a test of the MT one click bookmarklet, which is reminding me that yes indeed, editing in a browser still sucks.
Masanori Sugimoto gave an interesting keynote talk at CSCL 2003. His work integrates ubiquitous and tangible computing into classrooms and museums. Good stuff.
Others have reported on this, but Adrian Holovaty has actual details on the workings of the BBC's plethora of RSS feeds.
Between the BBC, CNet, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Wired News, you can put together an aggregation with gravitas. Hmmm, there's got to be sports and entertainment out there somewhere to round out this synthetic paper.
Uh oh, now the lawyers are getting in on this TrackBack stuff.
Thanks again to Anil D... oh just subscribe to Anil's Daily Links why don't ya.
Now that the editors at Time (at least online) have written about photoblogging, you can talk to your mom about them with a straight face.
Okay since photoblogs have an official cultural seal of approval, someone needs to hack meta tools to work with these blogs in the abstract. Shoot, post, tell, connect. It could happen in our lifetime.
Thanks to Anil Dash
Just today I was thinking, "Wouldn't it be great if someone had written an MT tag plug-in that ran plain old Perl."
Thanks to Brad Choate's PerlScript Plugin, I didn't even have to go to the LazyWeb. Muy Bueno, although I do have to note it makes my little old PIII server wheeze a bit. Use sparingly.
Just doing a bit of ad hoc querying, I Googled across Kevin Mark's analysis of Shirky's Power Law article.
As a bonus, in the comments section, there's a a link to another weblog crawler: organica. Looks like they have a bunch of weblog data.
Someone should be downloading this data, analyzing it every day, and presenting a dynamic picture of the blogosphere's growth.
Tom Moertel and Bill Hubauer have cooked up PXSL, a shorthand notation for writing XML. PXSL is particularly targeted at XML documents that are heavier on the markup than on the text data. They pull the Python trick of using indentation to indicate nesting, break markup out of the angle brackets, and then force the text data into delimiters. They also have a macro system, based upon PL design principles, baked in.
Interesting stuff, and it actually looks like a better target for higher level tools than XML itself. Of course to my eye, they're simply trending towards s-exprs.
Casey West unearths a few more underutilized gems in the core Perl modules. Interestingly, Perl has a lot of code manipulation tools built in. Macros who?
Mark Newman, a frequent Duncan Watts collaborator in social network modeling, keeps a list of recent publications. This includes what looks like a very promising literature review.
In the continuing pursuit of modeling social media networks, I Googled across "Building Up Social Capital In a Changing World". It's a long paper, but looks pretty interesting.
At the 2003 European Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference there's an attached workshop on social networks and CSCW. The conference is in Helsinki, Finland.
I have to say, I'm stoked about the topic, but not the location. Three intercontinental trips in one year seems like pushing it. However, we must shoulder on.
Michael Yoon was in the heart of ArsDigita at the time it imploded. Along with the horrid VCs, PhilG and Eve tagged Yoon as part of the problem. Now he's getting his side out.
Synopsis: The founders made critical mistakes too, chief of which was building a cult of personality that shielded them from essential criticism.
oddpost is a Web based e-mail client. Now they've added support for RSS aggregation and are threatening all sorts of cool extensions. (If they had a plug-in mechanism, that would be sick!).
Could be useful to introduce folks to RSS aggregation without installing something on their desktop.
iTopik has a decent survey of current blogging tools, including RSS aggregators.
Dave Winer, documents the agreement and interface available for The New York Times archives, specific to webloggers and their tools.
A bit stale, but still useful.
Memo to self: blog that stuff about TrackBack.
Just parking a thought. Wiki's are praised for their wide open nature regarding changes. For certain media, especially news, fixity (thanks John Seeley Brown) is an essential property. The newspaper doesn't change out from under folks and therefore can serve as a communal reference point, whether the actual content is right or wrong.
Lemma: Wikis and journalism are fundamentally incompatible.
Hmmm...
Ed Cone is running a panel on blogging and the media at BloggerCon. I wasn't planning on attending, but now it seems like there really should be some sort of Medill presence there.
Memo to self: check to see if this conflicts with the ONA meeting.
Parking links to photo galleries of Ben Shapiro's trip to Bergen, Norway, for CSCL 2003. Your's truly was along for the ride and makes a few guest appearances.
Memo to audience: trips to fjords highly recommended!
Bluetooth seems to be stabilizing according to Martin Little of Mobitopia. While I was a big Bluetooth doubter about a year ago, I'm starting to come around.
First, the analogy that Bluetooth is a "wireless serial connection" vs Wi-Fi's "wireless Ethernet", brought home what the technology is good for. Also, it's short range which means it can be used for proximity applications. At the same time, Bluetooth is directionless, eliminating IRDA's major weakness. Finally, Little's article hints that the last hurdle to widespread acceptance is starting to be addressed: it's too damned hard to program for Bluetooth!!
Tim Bray (one of the XML inventors), riffs on the business potential of RSS. In essence, RSS holds promise of becoming the defacto event notification format for business information. Win-win all around.
The peril is the rather confused, unprofessional state of RSS "standardization". The entire sordid mess has been well documented elsewhere, but he's partially right. RSS direction is fragmented. However, at this point I don't I'm not actually sure it's work freezing in a standardization process. The only thing RSS has really been used for is weblog change information. More field experience may be required, for these new applications.
I'm parking a few links from Simon Willison regarding search, since I have to run a class session next week on the topic:
Over at Mobitopia, Frank Koehntopp recaps the announcement of Handspring's next Treo. I'd have to get my hands on one to make a firm judgment, but it looks like a tempting XMas gift.
Memo to self: must install much better window management tools on the PowerBook.
Don Park gives a peek inside Laszlo, Java based toolbox for generating SWF dynamically in J2EE applications.
The big inhale (thanks for the term wgg) of Java packages is downright scary, but maybe there's an underlying toolkit for spitting out Flash worth looking at.
Back in the saddle from Norway and man is intercontinental travel a bitch.
Technorati now has a developer's site on its way to building a dev community.
Trawling the Web for information regarding games on graph structures, I Googled across the Complex Networks Reading Group at The Media Lab. Looks like Tanzeem Choudhury helped put the group and readings together.
Currently, I'm at the International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. I've had net access, but between travel, final grading for spring 2003, and submitting a paper there wasn't time for posting. Now that my soul is catching up (cf Gibson's Pattern Recognition), all 2.5 of my readers should see some more activity around here.
On a side note, Bergen, Norway is very beautiful, but is 7 hours ahead of Chicago, and features midnight sun. Try getting over jet lag, when it's only twilight at 1:00 AM.
Speaking of MT bookmarklets, I just discovered that they automatically grab selected text. Learn something new every day. This could form the basis of a convenient pull quote/annotation authoring system. If only editing in a browser didn't really suck.
As an example, I've grabbed some text on Cambridge housing prices from Amanda Paulson at the Christian Science Monitor
In the cramped Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where shelves of Latin American poets spill into Brits and Scandinavians, owner Louisa Solano mourns the old Cambridge, ... "Now Cambridge lacks color."
Hah! The Boston Metro area always did lack color, if you know what I mean.
Memo to audience: I went to college in Cambridge. Better dead than Crimson.
Memo to self: need to find a nice styled quote tag
iBoost has a nice, basic Dreamweaver tutorial Dreamweaver Tutorial.
Frankly I'm just parking this link as I test out the Movable Type posting bookmarklet.
Timothy Apnel has notes up from the ClickZ weblog conference. Denise Howell is also doing a great job of transcribing the sessions, I just haven't trawled through them to pick the best of the bunch.
Directed at shareware publishers, Steve Pavlina has good advice for all folks trying to become more professional.
Leander Kahney documents the Fotolog.net controversy in an article for Wired News. Synopsis, popular photo blogging site goes from free to paid, culture clash breaks out.
Takeaways:
I wonder if Fotolog.net came to the table with any pre-existing content? In any event, this is an interesting case study in rapid community formation.
Jon Hadley has launched moblogging.org to cover mobile blogging technology. While reasonably understated, I think he sells the trend short a little bit. Moblogging might be the first step in blowing up the destkop and turning the personal computer into personal computing.
Phil Wolff comes up with a great tagline: "RSS newsreaders are TiVo for blogs."
Now if someone could get around to doing TiVo for Web news.
This is too obvious not have been tried as of yet, but I'm parking the idea for the heck of it.
Wouldn't a combination of Fotolog.net and PhotoMesa be the bees knees?
Apropos of nothing, it's an odd feeling when you run across your dean in your RSS aggregator.