I was using Bloglines. Nothing wrong with it all actually. It is actually a great news reader if you want to use one. I’ve just decided I just want to go back to reading the news on the sites themselves. And yes this means I’ll be going back to reading just a handful of sites a day. It’s not the quantity of connections that matter but the quality.
Month: November 2005
Journal View vs Summary View
Interesting. I was just thinking about my last post, trying to find a good example to show the difference between a blog journal view versus a summary view and I think I found one that is quite common. If you’ve ever used Flickr, you know that its photo stream format is very similar to a blog format. You can post a picture every day describing what is going on in the picture along with the post. Even more so, you can tag each post so that others can find your information on a global level.
However, at the same time, you can take a selection of these photo posts and group them together into a photo set which is nothing more than this summary view that I’m talking about. By doing so, you are again tagging your information but at a different more local and meaningful level to you. These posts could be in sequence right after another in the same time frame or they could be spread over years. For example, I could have a photo set summary of my travels in Mexico which would probably be in the exact same sequence from my daily posts. Yet, at the same time, I could also create a photo set summary of selected photo posts of vacations that I have done from around the world over the span of my life.
Therefore, in creating my summary view how I wish it could be, it would nice if it could follow the same logical format as how Flickr handles these summaries or groups. When you are viewing a photo set summary, your next and previous navigational elements relate to the summary view you are in. Therefore, in my journal blog, if I had a summary view talking about my best posts that talk about culture, I’d like my summary view’s previous and next nav elements to follow the flow of the summary view instead of following the flow of the journal posts (which is how most blogs systems work today).
How to achieve this though is the question. I mean right now it is partially there. When you look at your journal filtered by category, the previous and next nav buttons relate to the those specific journal entries relating to that category only as well. Yet the problem right now (at least in Squarespace anyways) is that I can’t make that category view as a separate module so that I can add a page header to it (describing the the summary view). Even more so, it would be nice if this initial summary view could give you a brief excerpt on each post (kind of like how Flickr shows you a thumbnail view of the photos in the photo set).
Imagine you just heard about an awesome new computer game that is coming out and a friend tells you to go visit the game’s product site to find out more about it. So you enter in the web address and up pops the site. Hmm, strange you think. The game product site is nothing more than a discussion forum. Ok, no big deal you think, I’ll just read some of the latest posts to find about the game.
Very quickly you start getting frustrated because the latests posts do talk about the game but none of them give you a good overview of what the game is about. So you decide to continue reading the forum posts. After an hour, you think you’ve learnt more about the game but you STILL aren’t absolutely sure what it is about. Finally you throw your arms up in frustration and leave the site because you can’t find the information you need.
What am I talking about? Blogs. The thing that tons of people use everyday, yet they still don’t give us a good grasp or overview of what a person may be talking about on the blog, especially if you are new to that blog. Think of it like a summary or synopsis of the best posts aggregated, filtered, and grouped for your review so that you can quickly know what the blog and author are talking about. Sound like Squidoo? It is to a degree but instead of manually creating your Squidoo page, you’re dynamically creating these summary pages via the blog system itself.
I don’t know about you but I’m already seeing a ton of uses for these types of pages or views. I know a lot of people who are frustrated right now because they may be looking for work or may be wanting to communicate their ideas to other people (both of which I’ve experienced myself in the past). Well I honestly believe these people are so frustrated with blogging because a normal blogging format doesn’t really help them because it just shows their stream of thoughts. If they want to communicate why they would be a great hire for employment or why their ideas are great then they need to find some way to aggregrate, filter, and group their best thoughts on their site, even if they have to do it manually. Why these summary viewpoints are extremely important is that they provide a solid foundation for which people can quickly and easily understand what a person is all about, without having to traverse the person’s entire stream of thought to do so. And as you can already guess, yes I’m working on this for my own site.
When I’ll actually have something up is another story though. And actually in mentioning the word “story”, you could also thing of these summary viewpoints as exactly that. Stories that are comprised of a collection of events, organized and formatted for easier understanding.
Google’s Connected Communities
Robert Cringely has a very interesting post about Google’s upcoming usage of shipping container-sized datacenters distributed around the world.
Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.
Wow, this is ingenious because it relates so well to this connected communities idea I’ve been talking about in the past. The idea here provides a global solution for Google by focusing on a local level. Each local datacenter addresses the needs of each local area and connected together they achieve a global solution. There is no way this speed and efficiency could be achieved if all of these datacenters were grouped together in one location in some big massive centralized datacenter. By distributing the datacenters around the world and creating a network with them, they have not only achieved far superior speeds but also much better fault tolerance (since other datacenters can pitch in to cover a neighboring area if something goes wrong with one).
This approach mirrors exactly with a connected community of people. Through the use of decentralization, they all work and address their needs on a local level but in doing so they are also able to solve problems on a global level, often at a speed with which they could never achieve through the use of a centralized approach.
Nancy White just reminded me of Magnatune and I’m glad she did. Here’s what she had to say (and I couldn’t agree with her more).
They let you listen to any and all of their music for free. If and when you want to buy, you can download or download and get a physical CD. You can burn your downloads. You can GIVE COPIES TO THREE OF YOUR FRIENDS. You can podcast their music. And the split with musicians is 50/50.
Imagine if all music was sold this way? Amazing indeed.
As noted in her post comments, my favorite musician right now on Magnatune is pianist Rob Costlow, specifically his song Bliss (M3U audio) from his album Sophomore Jinx.
I definitely need to do some more exploring though, as I haven’t browsed through their selection in a while.
Oh, I almost forgot. This approach that Magnatune is taking is something I talked about a few of years back. I call it the “give model” (versus the normal business “take” model) and it touches upon my notes of In Giving You Make Yourself Stronger. You want to reward the artists for all of the great music that they are giving you as an investment in them. In doing so, you’re giving them the ability to sustain themselves, so that they can continue doing what they love and you can continue enjoying their music.
A Facet Of My Life
I woke up this morning feeling more “whole” than I have been in a very long time. I think the reason for this is that on Friday when Sandra and I went out for a walk, I popped into my favorite fantasy and sci-fi book store in town, called White Dwarf Books, that I hadn’t been into in a very, very long time. I decided I wanted to indulge myself in getting another book to read, as I haven’t read anything in while (with my last book being Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince which I had read out loud with Sandra). Anyways I decide to grab a book with a myriad of titles to it called Scion of the Serpent, the first volume of Anok, Heretic of Stygia, part of the Age of Conan Hyborian Adventures series (which will also be a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game next year), which is set within Robert E. Howard’s mythical world of Conan of Cimmeria. Anyways, obviously I enjoyed it because I finished it Saturday night, only a little more than 24 hours after I bought it.
The interesting thing that I noticed though after finishing this book is all of the other memories and interests from my past that swelled up into my mind. It was as though this book became a beacon that illuminated many of the thoughts and interests that lay hidden and forgotten in the dark recesses of my mind. It also illuminated the fact that I have been way too focused on my research and work related to the Web. There is nothing wrong with being passionate and focused about something but there is a lot wrong with being so focused that you become blinded to all of the other things that make your life enjoyable and interesting. In a sense, I had become very monolithic in my outlook which is the very thing that I’ve been communicating to avoid by emphasizing diversity. Thus I, myself, haven’t been practicing what I’ve been preaching.
Therefore, with all of these thoughts and feelings within me this morning, and feeling more whole than I have been in a very long time, I sat down and scribbled out my diverse interests that I believed made up me. What I found very interesting in doing so was that my interests themselves almost formed an ecosystem in themselves as many interests interconnected with other interests and were interdependent of each other. Of course when I started seeing this, I laughed because my life itself and everything within it almost seems like one large ecosystem with many different sublayered ecosystems all interlinking within it. It was kind of like looking at the universe as a whole with all of the galaxies within it then zooming in to our galaxy to our solar system to our planet to my country to my province to my city to my neighborhood to my house to my body to the organs that make up my body and then to the very molecules that make up my body parts. In the end, all you see is everything interconnecting and interdependent upon everything else around it which makes you realize that everything is connected, be it physically, mentally, or even spiritually.
So now I have these scribbled notes in front of me showing my diverse interests. Again, interestingly enough, while initially drawing my interests down I noted that certain interests bordered others. With this in mind, instead of writing out a vertical list of interests, I instead created a diagram more like a sun with a circle in the center being me and my interests radiating out from it. As I drew in my interests, I placed them strategically so that the interests radiating out were almost like a circular prism of varying colors flowing from one another. Yet in drawing this sun-like diagram, I realized it couldn’t be just two dimensional but needed to be three dimensional as well. No matter how well I placed my interests, certain interests still wanted to border upon others. Then I realized what I was looking at and how it related to a common expression I had been using in the past.
That common expression is “this interest is a facet of my life”. And therefore, what I was looking at was a gem that represented me with each facet being a different aspect or interest of my life. Even more interesting with this approach is other strange comparisons you can make from it. For example, research in data storage is pushing the boundaries of two dimensional storage mediums to three dimensional ones through the use of holographic data storage. And therefore, when you look at you yourself (or your life) as a gem, it allows for immense complexities and depth as you aren’t just looking at the surface of the gem but through it at many different angles. In effect, each corresponding angle or reflection of angles makes up a different aspect of your life.
And yet even in realizing all of this, one major problem still remains. How the hell can you easily represent all that I am, all of the diversity of who I am, on a single website which is what I would like to achieve? For some reason Seth Godin’s idea of a lense somehow seems to relate, as each lense that Seth describes is in actual fact just a facet of me or my life as this gem. By turning the gem in my hand, I can look through each different facet of it and see something totally different each time. And yet at the same time, all of these different views all comprise me as a single person. Oh to be able to design like nature with such simplicity and yet such infinite complexity at the same time! 🙂
The Interdependencies Of An Ecology
I just reread Douglas Rushkoff’s latest excerpt from his book that I had posted earlier about and I was stunned when I realized I had missed the following in my initial read.
So let’s be clear: this is not a business book. Or at least it’s not just a business book. For your career is not your job and your company is not its balance sheet. Your most personal choices are, in fact, your business choices. And your business choices may as well be your civic choices. Whether you realize it or not, your product purchases and brand loyalties express your politics, and your relationship to money says a lot about your understanding of time, of power, and of belief. It’s all one dynamic picture.
That’s why I’m going to ask you to look at commerce, communications, civics, and community as if they are all part of the same system – an ecology, really, of interdependent activities and needs. There is just one thing going on, here. Pretending that each aspect of your existence or your enterprise can be compartmentalized is, itself, a product of the Industrial Age thinking I’ll be asking you to abandon, and the surest path toward forgetting what it is you might have once, originally, hoped to accomplish.
Why am I stunned by this? Because it relates to my discoveries about permaculture. Nothing exists on its own, as everything is connected. Just as the world is an ecosystem, so to is the Web. The sooner that businesses start realizing this, the sooner that they can change and evolve.
Remembrance Day
Today is Remembrance Day in Canada. Do you remember what it is for?
Fooling Around With Design
I’m getting tired of my simple blue with green design and I’m looking for an even simpler design. I’m looking at using minimal amounts of color as possible in my design, so that the images I include with my content stand out even more. Enjoy the messy sandbox.
Change From The Inside Out
There’s a great post on Boing Boing talking about Douglas Rushkoff relating to his new book entitled Get Back In The Box: Innovation From The Inside Out. Here’s a quote that leaped out at me when I saw it because I’ve felt exactly just like Douglas in dealing with companies in the past who just don’t seem to get it.
That’s when it hit me: What this fellow needed was not to hire companies who could market like craigslist but to be more like craigslist, himself. That is, simply understand what specific product or service he’s really offering, and then do it as well and expertly as possible. That’s not what he wanted to hear. No, he wanted a new marketing campaign to define his business for him, from the outside in.
Exactly! A fancy ad campaign can’t hide what your customers can see about your business. If you want to be different, you have to start acting different. Changing your company’s culture from the inside out is just one way of doing this. Yes, it’s means taking risks but do you really think you can innovate without it?