Howard Rheingold on Innovation
BW Online | August 11, 2004 | Howard Rheingold's Latest Connection.
Go read if you think nothing's happening much these days.
1 Comments and 1 Trackbacks | PermalinkWikifying the Blog Continued
After building a plugin for Wordpress to let it crosspost to the wiki, I am now trying to do the same for my version of Moveable Type (v2.661)
My current attempt is to let MT on rebuilding a page check if links to the wiki should be added to a posting or not. I want to achieve this by creating a special tag <$MTWikify$> and adding it to the main index template.
MT seems to not see the plugin, or at least I get neither a response nor an error message upon rebuilding. Scott Hanson has written about creating plugins for MT 3, but that is not my version, and I have looked at other plugins as well, and I seem to take the right steps. Nevertheless it isn't working. If anyone of you would be able to point me to some obvious mistake or a resource that makes more sense than the hotchpotch documentation at the MT-website, I would be grateful.
You can check out the current code of the plugin in the wiki: MTPluginWiki
[UPDATE] Got the code to work now, the part that adds links to the wiki that is. (next step is working on adding content to the wiki from MT)
3 Comments and 2 Trackbacks | PermalinkWikifying the Blog!
In the last post I wondered about connecting the blog to my wiki-space.
Thanks for your responses and suggestions.
I have hacked together a plugin that now connects Wordpress to Wakka-wiki (and with small alterations to Wikka-wiki and Wacko-wiki). Wordpress, even though this is a Moveable Type powered blog? Yes because I have been experimenting with Wordpress, and it turned to be relatively easy to add plugins there. MT seems a bit more complicated, but I will try to do that next.
The Wordpress blog I've set up is an experimental one, about the end of oil as both energy source and carrier, and the move to hydrogen as energy carrier. It is called Hydrogen
The way the plugin works is, for every blogpost that is added to category 'wiki' Wordpress creates a wiki-page with the blogpost-title as a wiki-word. This wiki-page has a link to the blogpost. So I get to decide on a post by post basis whether to add it to the wiki or not. You can see it in action in one of the postings at Hydrogen.
Every time a blogpost is put to the screen Wordpress checks if it is of the 'wiki' category. If it is, links to the wiki-page in view-mode and in edit-mode are added after the link to the comments.
The code of the plugin is available, as public domain material, in the wiki: WikiAdd
Wikifying the Blog?
Having a chat with Elmine, discussing creating links between blogs and wiki's, I came up with the idea of replacing the comment-function in a blog with a link to the edit-mode of a wikipage, that also contains the blogpost.
If you would hack the postingscript of your blog in such a manner that it would create a wiki-page with the same content (or if you'd hack the wiki-scripts to post an entry to a blog, if provided with the right credentials), then the comment function would become an invitation to either add to or alter the original post. Thus opening up a wider range of possible responces. Categories could serve to annotate/search the wiki as well.
I looked at the scripts of wordpress and it seems relatively easy to hack wordpress in such a manner. It probably won't be possible anymore to count the number of comments (but maybe I'd replace the text Comments with Add to this or so), and it will also in time require a better way of coping with wiki-spam.
What thoughts do you have if you play around with this idea? How would it alter your experience or behaviour, if at all? Let me know!
9 Comments and 4 Trackbacks | PermalinkAudio and Videoblogging II
In addition to the last post, I just found out Suw Charman will be audio-blogging for an entire week, to test it out. Or as she says, to find out if it gets less awkward after keeping it up for a longer period of time (more on awkwardness in my previous post on Personal Presence Portal)
Tony Goodson, although thinking it's an interesting experiment too, has his reservations: And then I see (hear!) my first genuine AudioBlog, which Suw Charman is trying out for a week via AudioBlog.com. Just one problem.....she sounds just like my first wife, which is freaking me out a bit!!
Maybe I've been away from Blighty for so long now, that all Poms sound the same!!
Yes the extension of context with voice like this, can create cognitive associations that might surprise you. :)
My initial reactions are mixed:
It's nice to hear someone's voice, as it adds context by way of use of language, iintonation, accents etc. It brings the person behind the blog more to the foreground, especially if you've already met face to face before. But it is also more time-consuming, at least on the consumption side, than reading a text.
My guess is that audioblogging, in this form at least, is less useful for reflection, but might serve very well for quickly recording thoughts. Especially if recording the messages can be done on the road, or in the shower: the places where ideas come to you. On the other hand I never really met someone who routinely used a portable dictaphone. (But that might be due to the fact that there never was an easy way to migrate the recordings to other media, not to the recording itself)
Another use might be giving impressions of places, e.g. by recording sounds with your phone, and then moblogging them. "Hey, hear how the crowd goes wild now this guy speaks about these new audioblogging tools" and the like. Or more creepy "the air alarms just sounded for the second time this night, as you can hear in the background". If immediacy (about which Lisbeth Klastrup spoke on BlogTalk) is a concern or an enhancement of the message's strength, than too audioblogging might well be the thing.
I don't see a role yet, funny enough, for audioblogging to create more f2f-like conversations. With texts we are used to a turn taking format, I write, you respond, maybe I write some more etc. The strength of f2f-conversation is that you can interrupt eachother, introducing new side-roads on the spot, creating a natural flow, and then it works out nicely. But it also means there is no real possibility to really explore all finer details. In texts we sort of sacrifice that for the advantage of being able to work out our thoughts in more detail, to build our argumentation more solidly. Trying to use audioblogging as a sort of middle road in my view does not combine the strengths of both conversation and texts, but sacrifices the strengths of both.
I will follow Suw experiments with interest in the coming days.
0 Comments and 3 Trackbacks | PermalinkAudio and Video Blogging
During the second BlogWalk last May I discussed how to search audio and video sources much like we now Google text sources for specific content with Siegfried Hirsch.
At BlogTalk the expected surge in use of video and audio in on-line communication was one of the topics discussed.
Now Jon Udell starts a series of columns, around the use of AV-media on-line:
O'Reilly Network: Prime-Time Hypermedia
His first column talks about searching in audio files by using phonemes as a basis. He also laments the fact that most AV-content is very hard to link to directly, with which I wholeheartedly agree. He also points out that HTTP is already well suited to jump around in large AV-files, it's just that we don't use it much in that way.
Will be interesting to follow.
1 Comments and 2 Trackbacks | PermalinkTwo Books to Read
Looks like I am adding two books to my reading-diet today:
Dan Gillmor's We Media, which is available through O'Reilly, but in keeping with its message is also released for download on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License. Great!
And second a book by Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream, to be released later this month. During the past 18 months or so I have repeatedly heard, and said so myself, that the strength of Europe lies in leveraging its diversity. Meanwhile most discussions on industry, innovation and education seem to take the stance that we're not good enough at emulating what the US is doing (as if that would make us world class, it would only make us second best at the most: it's the same flaw as in adopting best practices). But while I knew we were doing the wrong things, I also didn't know how to go about 'celebrating diversity'. Hierarchical, and old school industrial thinking get in the way of that.
Rifkin, according to the blurb on the book, seems to postulate that European diversity and culture is much better suited to adapt to a networked society from an industrial one, as compared to the US, and significant steps already have been made. Or in other words how Europe could leapfrog over the US.
From the blurb:
The American Dream is in decline. Americans are increasingly overworked, underpaid, and squeezed for time. But there is an alternative: the European Dream-a more leisurely, healthy, prosperous, and sustainable way of life. Europe's lifestyle is not only desirable, argues Jeremy Rifkin, but may be crucial to sustaining prosperity in the new era.
Reminds me of a conversation I head with a representative of the South African government last year where we explored the notion that Africa's structure, largely based on communities, and also tribal thinking, (and the storytelling and master-apprentice relations that are part of it) could well be a chance to leapfrog past the EU and the US in realizing the potential of knowledge management.
A lot of Africans are totally ingrained with notions that we struggle to give a place in our industrial surroundings. (But it will also require independence from oil to really do that for them, as only that will take their debt burden to the West away and give the continent a chance to break the spiral of poverty that now chains them to our hierarchical industrial structures)
But anyway, I am curious about Rifkins ideas about how to leverage our European diversity better.
3 Comments and 2 Trackbacks | PermalinkSubEthaEdit Enabled Wiki
During the BlogTalk conference last month, Apple-owners in the room collectively took notes during presentations, and then published them in Joi Ito's Wiki.
This was a pretty cool demonstration of what a collective authoring tool can do.
Via Roland Tanglao I learned that at OsCon they used a SubEthaEdit enabled wiki, which allowed direct collective authoring in a wiki-page:
This Kwiki was SubEthaEdit enabled during the convention. If you were using Mac OS X and have SubEthaEdit innstalled, you could have clicked on the icon to edit any page collaboratively in SubEthaEdit.
Like Roland, I would very much like to see this spread. Especially if SubEthaEdit will be available platform independent. That would change the landscape of convention-notetaking.
0 Comments and 1 Trackbacks | PermalinkTesting Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!
This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).
The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) � results and commentary will appear there in the future.
Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate � the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.
The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google (or Technorati) for all blogs that participate in this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)
INSTRUCTIONS
To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).
REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)
* (1) I found this experiment at URL: http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/08/03/testing-meme-propagation-in-blogspace-add-your-blog/
* (2) I found it via �Newsreader Software� or �Browsing the Web� or �Searching the Web� or �An E-Mail Message": Newsreader Software
* (3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://www.zylstra.org/blog/
* (4) I posted this on date (day, month, year): 03/08/04
* (5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 11:00:00
* (6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Enschede, Overijssel, Netherlands
OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):
* (7) My blog is hosted by: myself (server at home)
* (8) My age is: 34
* (9) My gender is: Male
* (10) My occupation is: knowledge management consultant
* (11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: RSSReader
* (12) I use the following software to post to my blog: Moveable Type
* (13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 04/11/02
* (14) My web browser is: FireFox
* (15) My operating system is: Windows 2000
How to Be Creative
I must be one of the two people Suw thought of (the other is in the comments) when posting a link to Hugh Macleod's piece on how to be creative.
For me creativity and innovation are intensively interconnected, hence it's important in knowledge work. If you're wondering how, read the weblog by John Moore (you once had a specific post on this John, but I can't find it), or think of one of my former clients who looked at me after presenting my thoughts and said "You never have done this in this way before?" Yup, I came up with this plan specially for you! :)
Anyway, go read what Hugh has to say:
gapingvoid: how to be creative
A sentence that struck a chord with me was point 6:
Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, "I’d like my crayons back, please."
When I was a little child I thought of the world as a place where all kind of treasure was hidden just for me to go and find it. In elementary school that was hammered out, and the world became darker for it. When I left the beaten track due to depression ten years ago, I slowly succeeded in regaining that feeling of wonder when I was a toddler. Got my crayons back as Hugh says.
1 Comments and 1 Trackbacks | Permalink
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