Tuesday, April 29, 2003

It's Time to Shift Into Overdrive What happens when mass storage leaves microchips in the dust? J. Bradford DeLong explains in this commentary from Wired magazine. [Wired News] 1:39:54 PM

Sunday, March 16, 2003

Social Software's Emerging Norms Clay Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups. When the internet was strange and new, we concentrated on its strange new effects. Earlier generations of social software, from mailing lists to MUDs, were created when the network's population could be measured in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions, and the users were mostly young, male, and technologically savvy. In those days, we convinced ourselves that immersive 3D environments and changing our personalities as often as we changed socks would be the norm. That period, which ended with the rise of the Web in the early 1990s, was the last time the internet was a global village, and the software built for this environment typically made three assumptions about groups: they could be of any size; anyone should be able to join them; and the freedom of the individual is more important than the goals of the community. The network is now a global metropolis, vast and heterogeneous, and in this environment groups need protection from too-rapid growth and from being hijacked by anything from off-topic conversations to spam. The communities that thrive in this metropolitan environment violate most or all of the earlier assumptions. Instead of unlimited growth, membership, and freedom, many of the communities that have done well have bounded size or strong limits to growth, non-trivial barriers to joining or becoming a member in good standing, and enforceable community norms that constrain individual freedoms. Forums that lack any mechanism for ejecting or controlling hostile users, especially those convened around contentious topics, have often broken down under the weight of user hostile to the conversation [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 7:01:43 PM

Monday, September 9, 2002

Transition in perspective. I really like the exchange between Kevin Burton and Mark Pilgrim, which Dave Winer quotes today. In particular, this comment from Mark: ... [Jon's Radio] 9:25:19 PM     RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters. Mark Nottingham’s tutorial “explains the features and benefits of a Web format called RSS, and gives a brief technical overview of it.” [ranchero.com] 9:22:50 PM     Controlling the DOCTYPE and XML declaration (XML.com) [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] 9:12:11 PM     Creating XSLT extension functions (XML Developer) It figures that an article comes along right after you finish creating the same thing. We just completed an extension function to access a Documentum docbase. (the royal we that is - meaning someone else on my team). It allowed us to maintain links to particular items within the docbase inside of an XML document.[IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] 8:16:15 AM

Monday, August 5, 2002

A statement is not a conversation (XML.org) But then an interesting thing happened. The difference between a statement and a conversation dawned. No amount of beautifully crafted statements adds up to a conversation. A conversation requires ebb and flow, the passage of time, you need a dance.... To start with, various bodies just rolled their own conversation languages to get around the problem. They had to bite off all the age old nuggets of reliable messaging, sequencing, transactional integrity, and so on. All over the map, the same problem -- "the conversation problem" -- was solved over and over and over again. [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] 8:07:44 PM

Thursday, July 11, 2002

New Version of Sablotron Ginger Alliance announce Sablotron 0.95 (xmlhack). New features include support for all of XPath and XSLT along with adoption of some exslt functions. esxlt:document allows the creation of multiple output documents with a single XSLT, for example. [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] 7:35:36 AM     XNS Technical Specifications v1.0.. XNS Technical Specifications v1.0. We've been asking for this for over a year. Is it a coincidence that Liberty Alliance is announcing on Monday? In the past there was speculation that XNS might be the basis for Liberty Alliance. [Hack the Planet] 7:26:19 AM

Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Sorting in XSLT (XML.com) [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] 9:59:34 PM

Tuesday, June 18, 2002

Boxes & Arrows: Foreseeing the future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush. It is because of this article that Bush has been hailed as the conceptual creator of "hypertext". The article is at its most innovative and interesting in the description of how the memex device was to work for the reader. [Tomalak's Realm] 6:04:21 PM     And the first thing that's added is background images FOP 0.20.4 release candidate available (XML Apache Project) [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] 5:52:12 PM

© Copyright 2003 Peter Loats. Last update: 4/29/03; 1:40:40 PM.