Monday, April 1, 2002

Transclusion, Ted Nelson, and Xanadu. A correspondent asked about my use of the term transclusion. I said I thought it came from Ted Nelson and Xanadu, and that I was using it correctly, but that I'd check and make sure. Here's Google's #1 page on transclusion. I think I got it right. We transclude images on the web, but not typically documents. And it's not surprising that we don't, or haven't until now. Documents that didn't have the ability to be transcluded in a collapsed state, and then gradually revealed, would be overwhelming. It's really interesting to see Sjoerd Visscher, Joshua Allen, and presumably others I don't yet know about, pushing the envelope on ways to manage accordian structures in the browser. It's going to be important, I think. Trivia note: Dave and I were present at the Open Source convention, in 1999, at which Ted Nelson released the source code to Xanadu. This was the first time Dave and I met, I think. We sat side by side in the terminal garden, blogging the event -- me to my BYTE.com newsgroup, Dave to Scripting.com. We had so much fun Dave missed his panel. Here's the article I filed on the convention.   [Jon's Radio] 7:52:15 AM     Group discussion and instant outlining. I've done more than my share of threaded discussion, and I'm enjoying the reprieve from it that I'm getting with these more indirect modes of blogging and instant outlining. Nevertheless, I can't help but imagine a group outline for the kinds of discussions that should be directly interactive, and should yield a central and canonical transcript. Think of a newsgroup-style outline that nobody (or else maybe only a moderator) can reorganize, where everybody can contribute new nodes and edit their own nodes, but where nobody can edit other peoples' nodes. Result: a brainstorming environment that centralizes communication in those cases where you want it centralized. Parts can be taken out, massaged/rearranged/edited, and put back in as new or revised commentary. This would not be a substitute for the narrate-your-work metaphor, which I completely understand and have advocated often. Rather, it's complementary to that style. Sometimes meeting transcripts really do need to appear all in one place, for the convenience of current and future participants. Outlines can preserve context much better than email, because they retain state and because they can transclude. But the collective state of a set of individual outlines is not anywhere visible. In general, it can't be and shouldn't be. The model of many individual spaces, messages sent to these spaces, and people subscribed to the spaces, is really powerful and important. Sometimes, though, there's still a need for spaces that are explicitly group, not individual, in nature. Group blogs exist already. Group outlines doubtless will emerge too. The human protocols are pretty well understood, but interactive outline editing will bring new challenges and opportunities. [Jon's Radio] 7:49:36 AM     Teams that communicate with care. Dave writes: Teams that communicate with care... That's it in a nutshell. If you had to boil all this down to five words, it's for teams that communicate with care. Email can be used to communicate with care, but it's hard work. Radio aims to make email's best practices easier to achieve.   [Jon's Radio] 7:45:01 AM     "Paolo at eVectors wrote up his deployment of the Radio Community Server.  Every person at his company uses Radio on the desktop.  They publish personal weblogs to the Intranet via an RSS server.  They use Radio categories to publish topic specific weblogs.  Their Intranet server aggregates RSS feeds from the multiple employee weblogs (both their main weblog and their category specific weblogs).  The Intranet server also integrates data from their accounting system (this could be generalized to extend to any source of application specific data that is aggegated centrally via web services), hosts discussion groups, manages task lists, and serves as centralized document store.  Their Intranet is a portal to all the information, people, and feeds that are available.  Nice."  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] I'm going to have to give Paolo's setup some serious consideration to see if it (or something similar) could work at SLS. I don't know that it would work for the extranet, but perhaps it could be one piece of the puzzle for the intranet. Question: what languages would I have to learn to truly understand Paolo's diagram and to be able to tweak it to do what I want at SLS? SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS...? [The Shifted Librarian] 7:37:59 AM     Adobe.  A scalable vector graphics plug-in.  Check out the airplane demo.  Nice. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Check out http://radio.weblogs.com/0101319/gems/cropmap.html and http://radio.weblogs.com/0101319/categories/svgViaRadio/. Radio is a great tool for creating SVG. The map also has links for each field that lead to more detailed data for each field. This summay inludes a timeline and a graph of water use over time also generated by scripts in SVG form. I will have a demo of the complete farm management system (Farm.Web.$Sys) up on my web site soon. (I am in the final stages of getting the system working for a large triabal farm) The complete system is written in Radio scripts. Russell Gum [russ@pmax.com] [apple] 3/31/02; 6:54:36 AM [Russell Gum: SVG via Radio] 7:21:26 AM     SVG Map built with Radio. Check out this SVG map built with radio and updated via scripts and the database. This is the main user interface for our large farm system management software which is starting beta testing. Note you will need the free SVG viewer from Adobe to view this. [Russell Gum: SVG via Radio] 7:12:14 AM

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