Ted Ritzer: BizBlog

ZON Dollars Where the Virtual & Real World Collides for Good in the World

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 23:36:47 GMT

ZON DOLLARS CONCEPT-JAN 1, 2007

Dear Google Org, Amazon and Linden Labs People:

I submit this idea for your consideration:

It has been posted to the Internet via Google docs, its URL is:

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcjvvpr5_2frhqm6

ZON Dollars Where the Virtual & Real World Collides for Good in the World:

The idea for ZON dollars has its roots in three things I read as the final moments of 2006 played out:

1. Allision H Fine's wonderful new book: "Momentum-igniting social change in the connected age.", which can be purchased at Amazon. 2. Amazon's new project that uses 37signals Ruby on Rails to build a new application called Unspun , which is based on an application Amazon has called the mechanical Turk. 3.An article called: "What is Second Life?" Of course, the reference to a virtual currency comes directly from Second Life's "The Linden dollar".

I guess the challenge delivered by Allision Fine in her book: "Momentum" is how do we harness technology and the economy to do good?

ZON dollars is my attempt at doing just that through the creation of a virtual currency that at its core involves both voluteerism and doing good throughout the world.

ZON dollars can only be earned by:

1. individuals or corporations donating to recognized charities(those that can issues tax receipts) for conversion into ZON dollars, for the sole purpose of motivating people to do good. through the use of those ZON dollars. 2. doing virtual work through participating companies like Amazon's Mechanical Turk Service, a portion, determined by the worker goes to charities in the form of ZON dollars, while the remainder goes to the virtual worker, to be used as they see fit. 3. corporations who are so confident of the worth of their product that they openly invite comparision by consumers, donate ZON dollars to encourge concensus rankings of their product using Amazon's new Unspun service. People are encouraged to vote on the best products i in those categories, and the ZON dollars are distributed to the charity that the sponsoring corporation names when they open the community concensus on their product category.

ZON dollars can be converted to:

1. real currency for use to purchase goods at Amazon.com or via Google's new ecommerce system. 2. they can be converted to Linden dollars for use in Second Life.

So I guess those are my inititial thoughts related to the ZON dollar concept, I will now publish this, and also email the concept to the above named entities that could actually implement the concept, a. Google.org, Amazon's Unspun & Second Life.

As Allision Fine's book title says, I wonder if this concept will:

'ignite social change in the connected age"

Sincerely

Gregers Ritzer-January 1, 2007

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 06:29:47 GMT

Will direct sales of attention data disintermediate publishers and Google Adsense? Looks like Seth w. My old friend Seth Goldstein just announced his new company, ROOT Markets. If first met Seth in Silicon Alley back in 96. He was running an interactive agency called SiteSpecific. While other folks were building web pages he was doing advertising campaigns. He was the cover story for the first issue of Silicon Alley Reporter in October of 1996.Seth's a brilliant guy, no doubt. He has often explained my various businesses successes and failures to me in very complex terms. I would respond &q... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Ray Ozzie is blogging again

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 02:10:38 GMT

Ray Ozzie is blogging again at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/rayozzie/

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 01:57:17 GMT

BBC: Blog picked as word of the year. Slow news day. [Scripting News]

nixMoneyMachine-Sticking it to the Status Quo!

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 18:16:36 GMT

nixMoneyMachine-sticking it to the status quo!

this new category, came about as a direct result of my disgust with a recent headline about Microsoft releasing a product which has been called an iPod Killer! Fuck it, I have had with this kind of BS, where monopolies that don't have an innovative fiber in their being, watch the market and wade in after an innovator like Apple creates it out of nothing, and then ends up losing it, just because of the monoolie's sheer size and money reserves!

Microsoft did this against the Mac, then against Netscape! Do we as consumers have to keep supporting greedy monopolies!

I remember when Mosaic first came out and for me the Internet was a place where the little guy could innovate and create a decent living, and in some cases create fortunes based upon creativity, hard work and luck! The iPod Killer headline is so cynical, and it assumes that the only thing the consumer cares about is money, and that the only thing the producer concerns themselves with is money too!

Well how bout this, why don't we come up with some truly innovative business models that put the power in the hands of the content producer, and in the process create cheaper content, get more people producing digital content, and get more developing nations into the digital economy as well!

Accoring to Robert Young found of Red Hat:

"You can't compete with a monopoly by playing the game by the monopolist's rules."

Well fuck the old models, the old rules and the old approach to operating systems, software and digital content!

I have just had it with this bullshit, and this is what nixMoneyMachine is about, proposing new economic models to stick it to the status quo!

Stay tuned!

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 17:50:29 GMT

P_BLOG - 1.0b17. PHP+MySQL weblog system with uploader & analyzer [VersionTracker: Mac OS X]... [Disruptive Technology]

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 17:30:43 GMT

I gotta say that this title, about a Microsoft iPod Killer for me is depressing, in that wherever there is a market created by a true innovator like Apple, that Microsoft is able to through its sheer size and market dominance, steal that market away from the ture innovator!

Think Mac vs Windows, think Internet browser, Mosaic then Netscape.

The only ray of hope I can see on the horizon is Open Source Business Models, that create new opportunities for innovators!

Microsoft's iPod-Killer: Portable Media Center?. securitas writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Todd Bishop reports on what's billed as an iPod-killer: the Microsoft Portable Media Center line of digital ... [Slashdot]

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 16:41:37 GMT

The popup menu in the right margin of Scripting News now has a link to the Top-100 feeds page. BTW, I think it's really cool that when I take a screen shot that the coffee marks on my screen don't get copied. [Scripting News]

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 07:44:53 GMT

LiteCommerce - Shopping Cart Software For Online Shops and e-Commerce. lightweight, easy to use online store-builder package, WYSIWYG-friendly and expandable with help of add-ons [New Entries at Datamation Product Watch]

Mon, 29 Dec 2003 21:41:50 GMT

Dave Pollard on the blogging process. Radio Free Blogistan missed this back in the summer but Dave Pollard does a stellar job to document what bloggers have learned, without any formal instruction, to do every day and so I add this to the list of pointers we have in our stacks to Dave's consumate job of detailing the "meta" of the blogosphere. [by Christopher L. Filkins]... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Fri, 26 Dec 2003 17:33:25 GMT

Talk About Perverse Irony Brought To You By MIT!

the following Phillip Greenspun article should be a wakeup call for all computer science students!

Well worth considering, as good paying programming jobs go down the outsourced to India hole!

Outsourcing to India in Business Week and at MIT...

Not all of our students will see this cover story in Business Week on the migration of high-paying jobs to India. But most attended a lecture in 6.171 by the folks who run MIT's latest big IT effort: OpenCourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu), which distributes syllabi, problem sets, and other materials from MIT classes (at least one semester after the class is actually given). During the lecture the students learned that, although ocw.mit.edu is a purely static .html site, it is produced with a database-backed content management system. In fact, of the $11 million donated by foundations to support the service, about $2 million was spent on technology and the salaries of folks at MIT who oversee the technology.

The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show. A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them. The answer: "We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren't worth considering."

Students began to wake up.

A PowerPoint slide contained the magic word "Delhi". It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India, either by Sapient, MIT's main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server.

Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built, even by institutions that earn much of their revenue from educating American software developers.

# Posted by Philip Greenspun on 12/1/03; 10:57:50 AM - Comments [22] Trackback [2]

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 18:18:38 GMT

Hitting Shoppers Where They Work. The bulk of that online holiday shopping took place during the work week. At lunch time, of course! [internetnews.com]

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 17:54:48 GMT

Merry Christmas from the Accordian Guy worth repeating:

Stole this file from the above site, cause I think it really does capture some of both the frustration and the joy of Xmas.

All the best from WIFLblog and enjoy the Accordian Guy's Christmas story, and don't forget to visit his site:

the Accordian Guy Christmas story now follows:

Merry Christmas, and I mean it in the nice sense of the phrase

by Joey deVilla on December 24, 2003 12:13PM (EST)

This is from last year (with a little polishing up), but it's worth repeating.

While I do believe that some traditions should be put to rest, I also believe that a lot of tradition-bashers are poor-impulse-control cases. Having abandones any actual tradition or culture of their own, they fill the void with a couple of < href="http://www.utne.com/">Utne Reader platitudes, a mild revulsion for anything even vaguely Judeo-Christian, even if it aligns with their beliefs, a pro-pot slant and a half-formed belief in eye-for-eye karmic payback.

Standing for almost nothing, they tend to fall for just about anything.

Chris Baldwin's summed it up pretty handily -- and perhaps unintentionally -- in a Bruno comic from last year:

To borrow the line about Klansmen and Martin Luther King Day: C'mon, Bruno, how hardcore a secularist must you be to not want a day off?

Of course, those of us who celebrate Christmas would argue the exact opposite: here we took a beautiful Christian holdiay and destroyed it through corportization and "We're white, we're straight, we're sorry!" guilt.

(There's a Randroid who would take another tack and say "here we took a beautiful commerical holiday and destroyed it in usual religious fashion." Haven't we developed some kind of Ayn Rand repellent yet?)

In the end, I believe that intent counts.

I'm certain there is no malice, no implicit "convert or die" message and no forcing of one's beliefs on others when someone wishes someone else a Happy Chanukah, Eid, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Tet or even Festivus, the actions of certain vicious zealots notwithstanding. Balanced minds do not see any implied Hitler overtones at Oktoberfest nor Hirohito/Tojo insinuations at the sushi house, and neither do they see the Crusades in Christmas.

When people say "Merry Christmas", most of them are really saying "Happy Holidays, and I'm celebrating them Christmas-style. You do your thing, and I'll do mine. Come by for drinks."

That what I'm really saying, anyways.

No matter what you believe, enjoy the break from the hustle and bustle of 21st century life. Be nice to each other. Hug someone you love.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 02:23:16 GMT

MySQL Crash Course. Almost every serious web application uses a relational database to store its data. At some point, you'll have to learn how to use them. John Coggeshall explains the basics of relational databases with MySQL. [O'Reilly Network ONJava.com]

Tue, 23 Dec 2003 22:35:34 GMT

Innovation Quote Worth Considering from Fast Company:

for the whole article:

"Sidebar: Getting Innovation Right

If Apple teaches us anything, it's that effective innovation is about more than building beautiful cool things. A few thoughts for innovating well in your own shop:

Not All Innovation Is Equal
Technical innovation will earn you lots of adoring fans (think Apple). Business-model innovation will earn you lots of money (think Dell).
Innovate for Cash, Not Cachet
If your cool new thing doesn't generate enough money to cover costs and make a profit, it isn't innovation. It's art.
Don't Hoard Your Goodies
Getting to market on time and at the right price is vital. If that means licensing your idea to an outside manufacturer or marketer, do it.
Innovation Doesn't Generate Growth. Management Does
If you covet awards for creativity, go to Hollywood. Managers get rewarded for results, which come from customers.
Attention Deficit Has No Place Here
Every innovation worth doing deserves your commitment. Don't leap from one new thing to another. If your creation doesn't appear important to you, it won't be important to anyone else.

Carleen Hawn (chawn@fastcompany.com ) is Fast Company's West Coast bureau chief."

Tue, 23 Dec 2003 20:05:28 GMT

E-Commerce Report: Early Word on Amazon ëStoresí [New York Times: Technology]

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 18:19:14 GMT

XML for the rest of us.

"The relational database is designed to serve up rows and columns," said BEA's Adam Bosworth in his keynote talk. "But our model of the world is documents. It's 'Tell me everything I want to know about this person or this clinical trial.' And those things are not flat, they're complex. Now we have the way to get not only the hospital records and prescriptions but also the doctor's write-ups."

The doctors and bankers will get that, just as the highway patrolmen already do. XML documents, flowing through XML plumbing, can now deliver very real and tangible benefits. For the publishing geeks who started it all, it's a moment to savor. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

By the way, Adam Bosworth said a great many other interesting things in his XML 2003 talk. For those of you not inclined to watch this QuickTime clip -- and in particular for the search crawlers -- I would like to enter the following quote into the public record. ... [Jon's Radio]

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 18:18:42 GMT

The Guardian's A-Team blogger list. [Scripting News]

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 18:17:31 GMT

Jon Udell: "XML documents, flowing through XML plumbing, can now deliver very real and tangible benefits." [Scripting News]

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 23:15:10 GMT

Karlin Lillington reviews Radio UserLand. [Scripting News]

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 06:36:21 GMT

Weblog Eulogy?

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 06:31:00 GMT

The Best of British Blogging

Roland' s new Blogging for $ job at Streamline

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 21:44:16 GMT

from Roland's new job at Streamline:

What is the StreamLine blog about?

by roland on December 16, 2003 03:04PM (PST)

On this blog, I'll be covering what's going on in the blogging and RSS world in a friendly and non-technical manner.

I will attempt to pull a "Scoble" :-) and point to competitors and to blogging and RSS software developers.

For technical stuff, go to rolandtanglao.com.

Comments: 0 | Trackbacks: 0 | Show Details | #

Sunday, December 14

Who is StreamLine?

by roland on December 14, 2003 11:42PM (PST)

For now, StreamLine, is basically me! Of course, we have plans to take over the world and recruit other bloggers in the future :-) !

I have many years of experience in both the software development business and corporate and personal blogging.

I have been blogging since 1999! Check out some of my blogs:

RolandTanglao.com - focused mainly on blogging, RSS and social software like blogs, and Wikis.
VanEats.com - eating in Vancouver, over 200 recipes, restaurant reviews, etc. updated daily since June 2000
Developer.e-xact.com - news, views, and code related to E-xact's e-commerce and transaction processing Software Development Kits and applications

How to Contact Us

Email Roland AT RolandTanglao.com or call me at +1 604 729-7924

Comments: 0 | Trackbacks: 0 | Show Details | #

What is StreamLine?

by roland on December 14, 2003 10:58PM (PST)

StreamLine is our new one stop blogging shop!

Blogs (also called weblogs) are easily updateable websites that anybody (not just techies) can update with a web browser or through email. They are turning mainstream as a way to share the voice of your self or your organization in an informal, conversational style with the world. Most importantly, they are a great way to build a community and conversation with your customers and make money in the process!

StreamLine handles all aspects of blogging:

We will set up a blog for you. Our preferred blogging solution is a hosted blog from Blogware and we are an authorized Blogware reseller. We are familiar with Radio UserLand, Manila, MovableType, TypePad, etc., so if for some strange :-) reason you don't want a Blogware blog we can set you up with whatever you require.
If you need email, a domain name, DNS services or anything else to go with your blog, we will provide that also.
We will teach you how to blog and how you can make best use of blogs and RSS, a new way to syndicate your blog and business process information.
If you need help writing your blog, we can do that too.

StreamLine is not a software development company! We love writing code but would rather minimize writing code and use it only as a means to 'connect the dots' and integrate software and services from other companies to make blogging easier for our customers.

Don't worry if none of the above makes any sense to you. If you are interested in blogging or RSS, call me at 604 729-7924 or email roland at roland AT rolandtanglao.com.

Comments: 2 | Trackbacks: 4 | Show Details | #

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 21:40:53 GMT

One of Roland's articles on his new blogging for dollars blogjob:

Is Time Right For Micropayments?

More micropayment hype. Except that I don't think it's going to be hype forever. Someday it's going to happen.

QUOTE:
NEW YORK (AP) -- An idea that seemingly evaporated along with dot-com mania is back: that the Internet would realize its full grass-roots potential if Web surfers could pay small amounts for tidbits of online content.

Several companies are again betting they can mine gold from ferrying around such "micropayments." Even credit-card giant Visa USA is exploring the prospect.

Boosters believe people could sell countless new creations on the Internet--from essays to advice--if only mechanisms existed to facilitate small payments. For authors of popular content, all those pennies would add up.

The problem, as things currently stand: transaction costs make most credit-card sales under $1 all but pointless.

By giving independent content providers an efficient way to collect money, micropayments could widen the Web's pool of things to see, hear and do, keeping the Internet from being dominated by media giants and other brand-name companies.

"We like to characterize ourselves as E-commerce for the rest of us," says Kurt Huang, co-founder of BitPass Inc., which carries small payments to 100 Web sites and plans to emerge from beta test mode in December. "What we're trying to do is enable diversity."

Posted by Roland Tanglao on 12/11/03; 4:19:47 PM from the General dept.

Link:# Comments(0) Trackbacks (0)

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 21:33:57 GMT

Congrats Roland!!

From Roland's blog:

Blogging for Dollars - I have a job

One day on Skype, I jokingly remarked to Stuart Henshall, that I'd love to blog for money. Be careful what you wish for :-), because on Monday I started a full time position blogging for dollars.

More details later such as the name of the company (which is in flux).
Meanwhile check out the current blogs that I am being paid for (more to come!):

developer.e-xact.com
Geekmail's blog (RSS)

www.rolandtanglao.com and VanEats will continue to be labours of love and are not being paid for by anybody!

8:58:27 AM Comments [ 4] TrackBacks [ 5] Email:

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 16:22:17 GMT

Google begins to spider books. Google is beta-testing Google Print, a new service to deliver search results from books (and presumably other printed material). From the FAQ:

It turns out that not all the world's information is already on the Internet, so Google has been experimenting with a number of publishers to test their content online. During this trial, publishers' content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites.

[Workbench]

Wed, 17 Dec 2003 00:45:45 GMT

RSS + BitTorrent= Answer to Bandwidth Woes. It's obvious that peer-to-peer is the answer for people who want to give away great Internet content without losing their... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 17:33:09 GMT

BTW, I now have a feed you can subscribe to with all the news about weblogs.com. [Scripting News]

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 15:57:50 GMT

UserLand Software, Salon's business partner in the Salon Blogs program, has been in disarray for much of this year, so it's great news that the company is announcing a new management team today.

It'll take a little time to figure out our next steps. In the meantime, welcome to the new gang. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 14:58:03 GMT

New category: Technology/UserLand/Management. [Scripting News]

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 14:51:58 GMT

Meet the new team at UserLand. Scott Young is CEO. [Scripting News]

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 16:45:23 GMT

Canít find the perfect gift for someone special this holiday? Give them the gift of software freedom:

Download the free GNU Knoppix and burn some yuletide cheer! The CommuniquÈ is proud to offer the English edition ISO image of Knoppix 3.3 (2003-11-19), and as an added special bonus download a ready-made CD label in PDF for the 8694 format from Avery-Print (or you can do your own)

Knoppix 3.3 is a fully-functioning multimedia Debian-based GNU/Linux bootable filesystem on CD featuring:

Linux-Kernel 2.4.22
KDE V3.1 with K Office and the Konqueror browser
X Multimedia System (xmms) for MPEG-video, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis
Internet connection via kppp, pppoeconf (DSL) and isdn-config
Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) 1.2
Utilities for data recovery and system repairs, even for other operating systems
Network and security analysis tools
OpenOfficeô 1.1 office suite
many programming languages, RAD tools and libraries
over 900 packages with over 2000 programs, utilities, and games

In short, a complete GNU desktop demo that runs direct from the CD without disk partitioning or installation. They just insert the disk, reboot and enjoy!

note: other localized editions are available at The Knoppix Homepage where you can also download by BitTorrent.

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 07:27:13 GMT

Active Renderer 2 Beta is out. Want to help?. Hi Albert I am now starting the release of activeRenderer version 2.0. We're currently at 2.0 beta 12 and... [Disruptive Technology]

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 07:24:06 GMT

DailyKos's community blogging. DailyKos is a hugely popular left-leaning political weblog with a very active comment section. It originally ran on Movable Type but developed growing pains as the readership (and commentariat) expanded. A few months ago, Kos transitioned to Scoop, the open source codebase that underlies kuro5hin, is designed for community participation and collaborative filtering of content - essentially the group weblog model most often associated with Slashdot. ... Readers have to set up a (free) account and ... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 05:27:11 GMT

Let's help Rogers promote his excellent Radio UserLand book. [Scripting News]

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 14:20:37 GMT

Social Bookmarks Manager

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 03:09:12 GMT

Andreessen Interview Discusses Post-Crash Innovation. kevcol writes "The SF Chronicle has an interview with Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, talking about innovation after the dot-bomb crash, how AOL doesn't ... [Slashdot]

Mon, 08 Dec 2003 00:20:00 GMT

There's been lots of talk on the mail lists about making it easier for users to subscribe to sites. Of course, since we went first with Radio, it's very very easy for Radio users, just click on an orange XML coffee mug, where it's available, and confirm that you want to subscribe, and it's done. No copy-paste. Nothing complicated. If we wanted we could have made the url invisible, but we decided that would be too confusing. Now what's the general solution that works for everyone all the time? This is one of those times when, if Microsoft, Apple and Linux could get together, they could upgrade the Internet in a nice way. Probably just Microsoft alone could do it (the others would have to follow). Choose a port which is the Subscription Manager port. Say it's 5350, a random unassigned port. Then when you want to say "click here to subscribe to this website" include a link that looks like this. Since the OS has the Subscription Manager running on that port, it would confirm that you really want to subscribe, and then add the URL to the Desktop Database (on the Mac) or the Registry (Windows) or /usr/subs (Unix). Or whatever. Some place that the aggregators running on the system could watch. Yeah, it makes sense for some part of the aggregation system to migrate into the OS. If any of the OS vendors want advice on this, let me know. [Scripting News]

Sun, 07 Dec 2003 22:36:12 GMT

"Deep Thinking About Weblogs" by Andrew Gromet

worth a read, here is Andrew's recommended reading list at the end of his "Deep Thinking About Weblogs" aricle:

Overviews

http://www.userland.com/whatAreWeblogs - , by Dave Winer
http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/stories/2002/10/03/personalKnowledgePublishingAndItsUsesInResearch.html - "Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research", by SÈbastien Paquet
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/whatMakesAWeblogAWeblog - "What makes a weblog a weblog?", by Dave Winer

End-user tools

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/Tools/Publishers/ - A directory of weblog publishing tools.
http://backend.userland.com/directory/167/aggregators - A directory of news aggregators.

Programmer tools

http://www.xmlrpc.com/directory/1568/bloggingApis - Blogging APIs describe programmatic interfaces for authoring and editing weblog posts. The result has been a proliferation of compatible authoring tools.

Weblogs and society

http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/EmergentDemocracyPaper - "EmergentDemocracyPaper", by Joichi Ito
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=347932 - "Citizen Bloggers in N.H.?", by Dave Winer, which proposes widespread grass-roots news coverage of the 2004 presidential election by New Hampshire's citizens
http://www.windley.com/2003/05/07.html#a605 - "UEN Tech Summit: Weblogs are Loosely Coupled Conversations", by Phil Windley
http://seblogging.cognitivearchitects.com/stories/storyReader$963 - "Personal Webpublishing as a reflective conversational tool for self-organized learning", by Sebastian Fiedler
http://weblogs.design.fh-aachen.de/owrede/publikationen/weblogs_and_discourse - "Weblogs and Discourse", by Oliver Wrede

Sun, 07 Dec 2003 18:23:44 GMT

Heart of Lightness. Om Malik just gathered a bunch of encouraging thinking from Jacques Vallee, one of the founding fathers of the Internet. (The Heart of the Internet is Vallee's comprehensive history of the subject.) Good reading:What I found most interesting was his passion for weblogs, and why he feels they are going to save the Internet. He sees weblogs as an extension of the computer conferencing concepts he had pioneered."Weblogs are a new form of that and I think this is what the network[pi]s... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Sun, 07 Dec 2003 03:01:24 GMT

Searching along the path of least resistance. Yesterday's experiment reminded me that I've been meaning to spend more time with search engines other than Google. So I visited the Mycroft download page and picked up Mozilla plugins for AllTheWeb and Teoma. It's funny how arbitrary factors can influence your behavior. Mozilla's search box orders the plugins alphabetically. AllTheWeb is thus on the path of least resistance, and I've been using it often. Of course, it's really impressive. ... [Jon's Radio]

Sat, 06 Dec 2003 04:58:26 GMT

2003 Weblog Awards

Fri, 05 Dec 2003 05:28:54 GMT

Web mindshare calculator revisited. My old web mindshare calculator has been updated for the Spidering Hacks book. The original version from 1999 used AltaVista to measure what I called the web mindshare -- that is, the number of indexed inbound links -- for a collection of sites in a Yahoo! category. The new version is updated to use Google. Cool! That project was one of the first things that really got me thinking about what Web services would inevitably become. Here's how I described it in my book:

In effect, every web site is a scriptable component, and the Web as a whole is a vast library of such components. You can invoke these invidually from any scripting language that can issue HTTP requests and interpret the responses.

What's more, you can join components to achieve novel effects. For example, I've used Yahoo! and AltaVista in combination to measure the "mindshare" of web sites in specific categories. To do that, I wrote a Perl script that uses Yahoo!'s namespace API to unroll the subdirectories under a node of the Yahoo! directory tree, yielding a consolidated list of URLs belonging to some category, such as /Science/Nanotechnology/. Then the script feeds that list of URLs, one at a time, to AltaVista, using its CGI API to ask, for each site, how many other pages in the AltaVista index refer to that site. The ranked list of these citation counts measures what I call the web mindshare of the sites.

Yahoo! wasn't designed to produce an unrolled list of sites in a category, but its web API can be made to do it. Likewise, AltaVista wasn't designed to count references to each of the sites in such a list, but its web API can be made to do it. These two macrocomponents, driven remotely by a 100-line Perl script (see http://www.byte.com/features/1999/03/udellmindshare.html), can be joined to create a new application that measures web mindshare. [Practical Internet Groupware, Chapter 8, Organizing Search Results]

... [Jon's Radio]

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 04:17:11 GMT

MS blogging tool?. Have you been curious as to what a Microsoft blogging tool might look like? You can check one out at... [Disruptive Technology]

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 04:26:29 GMT

Hierarchies, Blogs and Channel Z. I'm looking forward to learning more about Channel Z, the hierarchical categories Dave Winer and several other folks are working... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 02:36:34 GMT

I moved the Recent Categories list onto a separate page. Too much screen real estate. Added to the directory. Thanks for the email. Great ideas. Good to know there's so much interest in this humble weblog. [Scripting News]

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 02:34:46 GMT

Lots of good stuff today on OPML-DEV. We found out how Amphetadesk, NetNewsWire and Bloglines use attributes in subscriptions files, for reading and writing. Stan Krute is collating the new data. [Scripting News]

Making Blogs Different-another Winer Concept

Sun, 30 Nov 2003 21:25:28 GMT

Making Blogs Different

the following article was posted by Dave Winer, and is important reading for creating a 21st Century approach to grassroots news reporting, gathering and sharing! Jeez, aren't we all tired of the same old same old, that a handful of technology companies own everything, and no individual or small company can compete!

take a read of the follwoing article of Dave Winer:

At the meeting with Dave Sifry and Kevin Marks last week, we had a long discussion about doing development in the open. I said that it was really important that we do so. I told Kevin, on the drive down to San Jose, that I feel we're at a turning point in the weblog world, either we're going to be like every other hierarchy that's ever been, with secret deals, lots of impediments to progress, eventual stagnation; or we're going to overcome that. I've been through this before, many times. The early days of the Apple II market held great promise, then the IBM PC, then the Mac, then the Web. And so it goes. Nothing ever seems to change. Either you're in or out, and if you're out, sometimes you can't even tell until it's too late. I don't want to be part of that. So if Sifry has competitors, I want them to know how to be compatible with me. Same if I have competitors. So what if it helps the other guy. There are worse things. Anyway, with that preamble, Dave and Kevin, check out the category element on this feed. It tells you all you need to know to understand the context. Here's a screen shot in case that link goes 404 (very likely).

Sat, 29 Nov 2003 23:54:24 GMT

RSS Enables Simple 'Headline News' on the Run. I'm beginning to envision the future of "headline news" -- RSS style on handhelds. This is a new Treo 600,... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 03:02:53 GMT

Jeff tries to guess what Dave's up to.

Jeff Sandquist is trying to guess what Dave Winer is up to. He has a great idea. Instead of putting the onus on weblog writers to add metadata to our posts (I hate putting titles on my posts, for instance, or even clicking a box when I post) why not give that power to readers? Let them add the metadata that will make weblog posts more useful to more people.

By the way, I added a title to this post, but not to the others. Just so those of you who are reading in RSS news aggregators can see what it looks like when I take the time to do that.

[Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog]