The inevitable backlash against weblogs is picking up steam. Bill Thompson fires on the blogging a-list, and coins a new term blogeoisie. If nothing else he'll live on for launching that new term.

Curt Siffert has a identified a few reasons why blogging as a discussion tool is pretty poor. Over at iWire, steiny piles on but focuses on how good ideas can get lost in the blogosphere.

All good points, and I'll also add that blogs don't centralize discussion. This means that keeping up on all the elements of the discussion is well nigh impossible.

In the physical world, this sort of discussion does occur between cultural magazines and reviews, literary journals, and scientific publications. However, the number of venues is smaller and the rate of discussion is slower. Thus humans can manage, but barely at that.

Lexar Media's JumpDrive Trio is marketed as a portable SD Memory Card to USB reader. I see it as a convenient form factor for carrying an SD Memory Card in a pocket and then slapping the SD card in an ad hoc device. Such a device could be a PDA, tablet pc, etc. The key is that you don't own it before you show up, but thanks to the easily portable memory in the SD card, you can sign such a device out, and turn it into yours for a short period of time.

Bonus, you can easily attach the storage to any USB enabled device, read any desktop PC.

I'm thinking this is a great mechanism to get handhelds into a hospital, where you really would rather people didn't flat out own a particular PDA due to the potential for breakage. Also, if you feel like upgrading the devices, just ditch them, as long as you keep the key data in personal SD card.

Gallery is a topnotch php based photogallery package. Looks like Gallery is easy to integrate with Movable Type, which would come in handy for this summer's New Media capstone class.

Ray Ozzie is optimistic about "social software" (blech), and even gets back to the groupware and CSCW roots. One differentiator though is that the new breed targets population sizes between tightly knit groups and mass audiences. One of my current refrains is that software is okay at sensing small groups, decent at mass audiences, and terrible at communities/societies. That's the sweet spot for social software.

Prediction, Paul Graham will put together his sequence of essays on computing and programming, including the brilliant recent release "Hackers and Painters", into an accessible book.

Which would be great, because then I could hand it out to undergrads, along with some Norvig, so students would know what they're getting into.

There were actually a fair number of interesting things to post about yesterday, but NMH got overtaken by events: lecture, a guest class appearance, a research group meeting, oh and Matrix Reloaded.

Verdict: need Matrix Reloaded Remixed

Others have commented on various cinematic flaws, but for me the worst part was the godawful soundtrack.

Blogwatcher looks like the kernel of a decent idea. Instead of correlating links, I'd do content analysis on the link destinations. Some sort of clustering or vector space analysis.

Anyhoo, another potential service to toss in the NusRoom.

I have absolutely no idea why anyone would put my measly site in their blogroll, but Technorati reports someone did.

At least I'm in good company, but embarrassed to point out yet another Northwestern weblog right under my own nose.

Memo to audience: well at least I know one nugget of knowledge from my classes stuck!

This workshop is right in the wheelhouse for my work on NusRoom.

I've been fantasizing recently about a "Magic Wand" computing device. The thing would be as small as a laser pointer and have little to no UI. The wand could detect nearby presentation resources, have a tiny (audio/light) indicator of availability, and could send a few simple messages to these devices. Using the directed connectivity (IR) a user could easily specify gestures for specific devices. Combine with Wi-Fi, TCP/IP, a little local storage, some computing and you've got a device that a person can do "ad hoc" interactions with.

A Pocket PC device with a Total Remote attached might fit the bill. Not quite as small as a laser pointer, but good enough for a proof of concept. The Magic Wand eventually should be a fixed function device, but for prototyping a general purpose computer is good.

Or maybe I should just look at the X10 stuff. But the key bit is that I *really* want good old TCP/IP and the new overlay multicast that's really going to change the Internet. And I expect the presentation resources to actually be a bit smarter than your typical X10 device.

Memo to self: they're only 30 bucks, buy one already!!

Mark Pilgrim, taking time out from his busy schedule, has written a Python module to wrap the Technorati API.

Now if I could only figure out what the damn API is actually good for.

Don Park has some misgivings regarding social software, running along the lines of some objections I get regarding NusRoom. Essentially, even though folks could be more informed, people can and still might narrowcast themselves into a stupor.

Ultimately, the only idiotproof system is one only idiots would use, but I think such systems can have feedback mechanisms that encourage positive usage.

Andrew Orlowski, of The Register, reports on Google's announcement to make a weblog specific element to the search engine. Of course, as a noted weblog doubter, Orlowski also takes the opportunity to claim weblogs are highly overvalued by Google.

Can't say as how I agree with the "low information quality of blog infested Google results," quote, but I can see how automatically generated links (e.g. TrackBack), could skew relevance results.

Thinking out loud: folks say Google crawls weblogs more frequently, but is that because they're weblogs? Or because they change fast? I think the latter.

I've been using a minimalist PowerPoint template (Blends) and trying to avoid bullet text at all cost. Now noted quantitative visual information display expert Edward Tufte is going to bring the hammer to PowerPoint in an upcoming book.

Now watch, he'll really slam Blends.

Thanks to More Like This

And thanks to Maciej, I stumbled across another tool for graph visualization, Walrus, from the fine folks at CAIDA.

Maciej Ceglowski is putting together yet another blog crawler.

According to Mary Jo Foley and Microsoft Watch, Big Green is starting to key in on blogging. I'm not sure what's scarier. That Microsoft if moving into the blogosphere, or that there's a magazine devoted to "watching" one software company.

The only really deep thinking about weblogs in Andrew Grumet's essay is the notion of using weblogs as passports/universal identifiers. Intriguing, but he essentially relies on DNS entries to represent user identity.

Otherwise, the piece is a quite good overview of the state of weblogs in 2003.

EInk is moving the world one step closer to blowing up the desktop. Rick Callahan of AP reports on the company's advances in thin, flexible displays. Not a whole lot of detail, but it looks like the technology is past the feasibility test and onto figuring out how to manufacture the things efficiently. Looks like more details to come in Nature.

For my intro programming class I've assigned them the task of generating Kevin Bacon, small world graphs. Of course it would be nice to visualize these graphs.

Conveniently enough, Stephen North and crew have developed graphviz, a layout and presentation tool for graphs.

Over at Poynter, Sree Sreenivasan brings word of MyHerald.com, a personalized newspaper deployed by the Miami Herald. The new twist beyond typical MyYahoo stuff is a connection to a PDF style replica of the print version.

Can't say as I'm too impressed. Then again, I'm a competitor.

Tip of the mouse to: JD Lasica

Don Park has a good idea that could be incorporated into the NusRoom. The aggregator could automagically construct special topic "insets" that are delivered less frequently, but have a bigger chunk size, fitting attention spans and scanning ability better. Via decafbad

Digging around for a task to use as part of an assignment for my course, I googled across this collection of papers regarding the construction of scale free networks.

I wonder if anybody's trademarked the phrase, "googled across"?

In the course of exploring dynamic PDF generation, I ran across a good backgrounder entitled "PDF on the Fly: Tools and Strategies for Automatic Generation of PDF Files" on PlanetPDF.

Jane Ellen Stevens, who I've bumped into on a few occasions, documents Asahi Shimbun's highly successful mobile news features. Key attractors: sports and entertainment.

While I don't particularly agree with Daniel Brandt's take on how to correct the impact of blogrolls on Google, he does document some poor interactions between the two.

InfoWorld has provided a succinct backgrounder on RSS to go along with pointers to their RSS feeds.

Jared Diamond, of Guns, Germs and Steel fame, has written an essay for The Edge Society cataloging how societies fail to solve problems. My surface read is that this essay isn't particularly insightful. The essay mostly consists of anecdotes and I can't discern any real predictive power from it's findings. His major point is that, in spite of four distinctive ways in which societies fail, they've still managed to make quite a bit of progress.

And...?

I have no idea how robust or convenient it is, but putting Scheme in the Linux kernel sounds cool to me.

Chandler is a major Open Source project to be the next generation e-mail/IM application/platform. The project is being run by some pretty major software stalwarts such as Andy Hertzfeld, Mitch Kapor, and Rys McCusker. Kaitlin Sherwood transcribed her notes from a Chandler session at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

On the surface this should be amazingly attractive to me, but I find myself somewhat skeptical. Chandler is buzzword/open source compliant using RDF, Python, Jabber, BEEP, P2P etc. The development team seems really sharp. A very noble endeavor indeed.

But my source of skepticism is twofold. Attacking the e-mail space seems equivalent to directly attacking the Maginot line. Lots of deeply embedded and entrenched competitors, many of whom are quite good. Also, the goals of Chandler seem to have it destined to be jack of all trades, master of none. For example, building on a cross-platform GUI toolkit guarantees it'll be okay on all platforms, but not excellent on any of them, (c.f. Mozilla). If the user experience really matters, cross-platform toolkits ain't the way to go.

Good luck and godspeed guys. Ignore my stop energy.

The editors of The UNIX Hater's Handbook have recovered the copyright to the singularly best book on UNIX ever, and are now making the book available as a free download.

Memo to audience: no smilies for the humor impaired

At the moment, I'm parked in the McCormick Tribune Center listening to Lawrence Lessig speak, courtesy of the Evanston based non-profit Clio Society. Previously I heard him lecture at the World Wide Web conference, where the presentation was simply head down spoken word. In an interesting demonstration of the principles he's discussing there is now a heavy multimedia component, including appearances by Steamboat Willie, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Lionel Ritchie, Batman, Aristotle, among others.

Fair use or copyright violation?

Ubiquitous Wi-Fi in Our Lifetime

And where can I get the slides

A collection of links for software that implements discrete event simulation, gathered by Alan Kennington. I'm starting to perceive NetLogo as not quite viable for the types of systems I'm looking to simulate.

Apropos of nothing, Taylor McKnight has gathered a collection of whizzy buttons for the repurposing.

SixApart launches a MovableType hosting service, called TypePad. Blogosphere echoes.

Am I clueless, or is the amazingly broad First Monday journal completely invisible to the Weblog community?

Probably just my own myopia, but these longer pieces are probably too time consuming for the average blogger to finish.

Allegedly, SFGate's Morning Fix newsletter is quite the bee's knees.

Michael Fagan has put together a compendium of sites that collect breaking news in the Web and blogosphere. It's part of his FaganFinder

Not quite sure what to make about the Social Software Alliance or Social Software in general other than to guess that it won't be as serious as Static Single Assignment.

That's a joke son.