Whoa, ok I’m impressed. It looks like Greg Costikyan is starting his own indie label for independent game developers called Manifesto Games. I’ve always admired Greg because he’s one of the few people in the gaming industry who is direct and honest about the issues occurring within it. I seriously hope his efforts pay off and he can create a community of independent game developers that will seriously bring some fresh air to the staleness within the gaming industry today.
One other thing to note. I seriously believe that if my “connected communities” idea was operational today that this would be the perfect opportunity to use it upon as it would allow a large group of decentralized independent game developers to work collectively on common goals from each of their own sites. But that’s why it is so important that the system and idea be as flexible and open as possible, so that it can work with any exceedingly large group of people on any goal or project.
Fifteen years and I still love Sandra as much as the first day I set eyes on her. Actually it’s funny because the other day I was writing my post on Finding Meaningful Relationships with regards to structuring and organizing my thoughts on this site. Well after I finished the article, I sat down for dinner and looked over at her strangely. Although she noticed the strange look, she didn’t know what I was thinking at the time. While looking over at her I had realized, once again, how much meaning she was bringing in my own life and how lucky I was to be in a relationship with someone as wonderful, beautiful, and as caring as she was. Thanks hon!
An indepth analysis review of Six Apart’s upcoming Project Comet blogging solution based upon the DEMOfall presentation video including (blurry) photos with accompanying descriptions as to what Project Comet aims to achieve.
Ok, finally found some more detailed information on Six Apart’s Project Comet and it is taken from Mena Trott’s own demonstration of Project Comet at the 2005 DEMOfall conference. The frustrating thing is that the video is slightly blurry so it is difficult to see what you are looking at. First off here’s a quote from the DEMOfall conference site that describes what the demo is supposed to be about.
Project Comet is a significant re-engineering of this pioneering blogging tool, providing greater control, flexibility and privacy in a workspace that lets you aggregate, store, publish and share any type of media asset. This new release illustrates the deep knowledge Six Apart has gained as a leader in the blog software market, and sets a tough new standard for other blog sites to follow.
Alright on to the analysis.
Ok this is the external public view of a Comet website. It looks like they used Mena’s Dollarshort website as an example (although it isn’t live because this site hasn’t been updated since June 13, 2005).
A couple of things to point out in the (blurry) picture. The header area has a picture of Mena with it. You’ll see a lot of this, especially in the backend, which uses small thumbnail portraits of people beside their related content. It makes it extremely easy to see who is talking about what.
The left main content area shows Mena’s posts grouped by day. Each post has a title above it and I think tag/topic information below it.
In the top right corner you’ll see what looks like a tag cloud similar to what Technorati or TagCloud does. In this case though, I believe this is more of a “topic” cloud which shows things that are of interest to me and what I’m talking about. I believe these are the “multiple streams” that Six Apart mentioned on their website about Project Comet.
And finally off to the bottom right you see a listing of books I believe that Mena has been reading. Now one thing you can’t see is the heading for the sidebar info. For example, the heading for her books reads something like “Books I’m Reading” with reading as a link to her full listing of books she’s read.
Ok, now to the backend area of Project Comet where we see the how this community aggregation of a network of people works.
Again in the top right corner header area we see a picture of Mena indicating that this is her aggregated view of her friends and family in her network. Beside her picture it looks like there are some menu options as well. Maybe they relate to her profile settings, not sure.
In the middle left we see what looks like the lastest four photo albums (or maybe photos) posted by people in her network. On the middle right, we see the latest media (i.e. books, music, movies, etc) that people in her network are reading, watching, and listening.
Below that in the bottom right, we see the latest blog posts from people in her network (and note the portrait thumbnail beside each post to easily see who has written what).
Finally in the bottom left corner, I think we’re seeing the most active conversations or maybe topics within her network, although not 100% sure since the text is so small.
Now we see a post being created with the main post entry area on the left and on the right is the “media asset” library (that they mentioned in the initial quote I wrote at the beginning of this post). I’m sure each of those different items on the right are different media types (i.e. photos, music, movies, books, podcasts, etc).
Here is the Photo “media asset” library open which we can then select an image and then drag and drop it to our post we’re writing. Yes, this is the drag and drop aspect of Comet that they mentioned (although in the demonstration he highlighted an image and clicked the insert button (or whatever it is called) on the bottom right of the dialogue window to insert it into his post. I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to drag and drop from this library window as well though.
One thing that is very important to note here with regards to their dragging and dropping is that I doubt you will be able to “drag and drop” photos from your desktop directly into your post. Those photos need to be uploaded first somewhere into your library and then from there you can drag and drop them into your post. Actually Squarespace, the web publishing platform that I’m using right now can work in the same way. I can drag a photo from any web page and drop it directly into my post editing window. The image has to be online somewhere for this to work though.
Oh one more thing to note about this as well. These media asset libraries are basically just TypePad lists and photo albums with some more functionality added to them (i.e. sort by date, maybe see related posts tied to item, etc). So in the sidebar, as shown in their example, you are still seeing the latest books added to her TypePad Amazon Book List but somewhere on their I’m sure they’ll have the ability to click on a book and see the post that relates specifically with that list item (a book in this case). Or what they may do is use the Sidebar Title link again. Maybe when you click on the link in “Books I’m Reading” it takes you to a listing of your actually posts talking and reviewing the books you’ve read. This kind of makes more sense, as the sidebar TypePad list is just the current RSS stream of books you’re reading but the collection of journal posts would be all of the books that you read (with the topic stream name of “books” for them I’m assuming, which could also be accessed from the topic cloud in the top right corner of your site).
This is a photo of an image that has already been inserted in the post being dragged and dropped in the upper left corner of the post. If you look real closely you’ll see the outline of the image in the center of the post, including the black cursor, as it moves across the post into the upper left corner.
After getting the image and content where they want it, they selected some attribute information in the bottom left (note the popup selector list with the black cursor selecting something). I believe what they are doing here is selecting the appropriate stream topic that this content should be associated with. If I was talking about my cat, then I’d select “pets & animals” from the list (or create a new stream topic).
And here’s the completed post now being shown on the site’s front page.
After inserting the post, they clicked on one of the topics (in the stream topic cloud in the upper right corner of the page) which took them to this page which is a list of posts from her various family members (including herself) on the topic of “pets”. Note the right sidebar maintains pretty much the same content as the homepage (i.e. topic cloud, photo albums, and books being read).
What I’m not sure about this “dynamic view” as they called it, is whether this is what would be seen to the public or to just Mena. I’m assuming in this case it is what would be shared with the public in total. I think the more private information (say the stuff that only her mom wants to talk about) is shown in the backend only. Not 100% sure on this though.
Now remember before I mentioned before about the sidebar content titles have links on them (i.e. Books I’m Reading). Well this example shows a sidebar title being clicked. Again I’m not 100% sure but I think the title is something like “People in my Family”. Because when they click it, they get the view below.
The final shot from the demo. This is after the sidebar title, as I mentioned above, had been clicked. It shows another “dynamic page” of everything that Mena’s family is talking about. Again note the right sidebar content doesn’t change though, as it is still just showing Mena’s photo albums and books she’s reading, not her entire family’s photo albums and books they’re reading.
A final thing to note, each of these “dynamic pages” is almost like a “weblog” in themselves, which is what Six Apart was hinting at. In addition though, I still have the funny feeling that you can take these content topic streams and use them anywhere, even on another site. For example, let say Mena is a hardcore gamer who has a topic stream that talks about gaming. Well if she was in a clan, I’m sure she could create another weblog with it’s own design for her clan and stream her gaming topic stream to it, not to mention all of the content streams from her other clan members as well. Voila, you now have a “dynamic site” using content streams from different people in your network.
But what if she didn’t want this gaming content on her personal site? No problem, she still creates the content in her backend panel but it just isn’t shown on her personal weblog but instead on her aggregated community clan weblog with her gaming friends.
David Weinberger has a small quote from Aristotle that talks about the being of ideas and meaning of ideas. What I found interesting in this was the definition of the word “meaning” and how it relates to “meaningful”. Meaning can be construed as expressing something which in turn relates to our feelings. Even more so, I was interested in the definition of meaning with regards to something that is “significant”. But that’s just it though, isn’t it? I may find something meaningful and significant from my viewpoint but you may not. Even each local culture may put a greater emphasis and meaning on things while others in the rest of the world may not. A good example of this would be the sacred cows in India.
I think we need honesty. Just as we need Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Apple to recognize their truth, we must deal with our own. We have abused the economic system and channeled money away from the technology we say we love, and into the hands of hucksters and carpetbaggers who promote complicated self-serving memes.
Starting many many years ago, I urged Microsoft and other technology companies, to adopt a different poise with respect to the community of developers and users. Microsoft had outgrown its self-image of “scrappy upstart.” In the mid-nineties, Microsoft was anything but that. Some phrases that might have made more sense: Lumbering Giant, Awkward Adolescent. Adjectives: self-absorbed, unfocused, off-topic, dangerous. Dangerous to it itself, and dangerous to everyone else.
The following is what I believe Six Apart’s Project Comet will entail (and a lot of it equals the approaches that I’ve been researching myself). I started writing this out earlier today and it kept getting bigger and bigger in detail. Too big actually. Therefore, here is the extremely short version (which is still lengthy).
Instead of breaking a single blog down into parts using category tags, think instead of creating small focused micro-blogs or “streams” that are connected together (like the strands of DNA) into one overall encompassing blog. Yes, we’re talking small pieces loosely joined again. These streams can be anything and everything. They could be a micro-blog specifically focused on web design, cooking, restaurants, movies, music, books, your podcasts, documents, whatever! The idea here is to break down your thoughts into these basic building blocks of streams which you then combine together to create your entire “river” of thought. Of course what was stopping people from doing this before in the past (as I tried to do it myself more than few times) is some way of connecting or aggregating these streams (which TypePad now has incorporated within their system).
What’s the big deal? Why break content down in these streams? Well since they are the basic building blocks for a website or blog, you can mix and match these streams anyway you choose and even more importantly you can create multiple dynamic blogs on the fly to better suite their intended targets. For example, lets say I talk about web design, gaming, cooking, travel, and then the typical stuff like movies, music, and books. I decide to create a stream for each of these topics. From the backend management tool, I just manage all of these separate streams from one location. From the front end though, my visitors actually see three different websites that I’ve dynamically built using these streams. My web design site uses a techno design and template to show off my web design, movies, music, and books streams. My social weblog utilizes a stylish lounge design and template to show off my cooking, restaurants, travel, and music streams. And finally my gaming blog utilizes a kick ass gaming design and template to show off my gaming, movies, music, and books streams. In effect, I’m using the same content streams but reconfiguring them together in different ways to match my target audience.
Of course the next step is community aggregation. Let’s say I have couple of friends who also do web design but they have streams that talk about gaming, movies, music, and books as well. I think their content in these streams is great so I ask them to collaborate with me on it, invite them to my gaming blog via the backend system, and voila their streams (which they manage from their own backend panel) are inserted and mixed with my own stream automatically. Now we have a group weblog on gaming that is starting to kick ass with our combined content. Whoa, wait a minute were doing so good that we start getting decent traffic. Wow, it looks like a lot of traffic. So we decide to throw up some Google ads to see if we can make some money. Wow, we do! Hmm, but how do split the money we make? No worries, the system has already figured that out for us by calculating how much we’ve made and dividing those funds proportionally between each stream based upon the traffic and popularity of the content from each one.
I think you can figure the rest out now with regards to how families would create their own private dynamic sites with their collective streams on pets & animals, books, movies, and so forth. Also, to start doing working with streams right now yourself (no matter what blogging software you’re using), all you need to do is divide up your content into these micro-blogs (like different channels on a TV set) and then find some way of aggregating your latest content from each of them on the homepage of your site (either via server side scripts software or maybe something like FeedDigest). BTW one of the nice side effects of this approach is that not only do you get a focused feed for each stream but you also get a separate focused feed for the comments for that stream as well.
With the strike of single match to light a candle in my den, a feeling of warmth and home surrounds me with the sight of it. With the smell and sound of the igniting match, thoughts of camping out in the woods as a kid beside a crackling fire come flooding into my mind. Therefore, with but a single simple action, I have become connected to so many meaningful things relating to my life. This is exacting the feeling and experience I want in linking my thoughts on this site. A single thought or experience should allow me to go back and see all of those meaningful thoughts that relate to it. How to do this is another story though. 🙂
SIX APART / MENA’S CORNER / IN DEFENSE OF BIG (RELATIVELY SPEAKING)
While visiting Mena Trott’s weblog yesterday, I stumbled across a picture that showed a Six Apart office scene of people sitting around a table, chatting it up, while behind them, on a wall, was what looked like an assortment of randomly printed pages all grouped together beside one another on the wall. Of course, while these pages may have looked random, they obviously related in some way, which is why there were grouped together. In fact, what this image made me realize is that we are constantly trying to find meaningful relationships in everything we do every day.
You see after seeing that picture above, I immediately thought of FilmLoop which is soon to be released software that will allow you to not only loop (or group) a series of images (possibly into a story) but you can also get other loops from other people using the system as well. Therefore, I could get loops from my various family members and they would be constantly updated over time showing an ongoing story of what is happening with them. Again what is being done here is a loop (or stream) of different images grouped together to show a meaningful relationship and/or story.
Finally I realized where this was all going and the meaning of these seemingly random thoughts that I was trying to put together myself into some sort of meaningful relationship. What I’ve just described above relates to tagging. More specifically, it relates to why tagging just never seemed to work for me and why I couldn’t ever figure this out until today. The reason being is that while tagging does categorize and group related information, a lot of the time I find that the information isn’t meaningful and is therefore often useless to me. Sure I can look at all of my tagged “Web 2.0”, “Technology”, or “Culture” posts, yet when I look at them all, even though they all related, they still look like a series of random posts that don’t connect meaningfully with one another.
You see I want information, that when grouped together, shows a “meaningful” relationship in some way that is like reading a story of my ongoing journey of discovery. I don’t know how to do describe it any better than this, other than to say that when I look at items that have a meaningful relationship with one another, it almost seems as though that grouped information is alive with life, whereas when I look at generically tagged information, it seems sterile, dead, and useless to me.
Just to give you a small example of what I’m talking about here, I went to see a couple of movies at the Hollywood Theatre last night with my wife. They were March of the Penguins and Mad Hot Ballroom which were both excellent movies (and probably the best movies my wife has seen in a long time she said). March of the Penguins was more than just an enjoyable movie for me though because the story told within it connected and had a meaningful relationship with what I’m talking about here on this site about culture and connectedness. So for someone else viewing the movie, it was just an enjoyable movie that they would have tagged with “movie” on their website. For me though, it answered some thoughts I had and raised a bunch of new questions in my pursuit for understanding people, their culture, their communities, and their relationships in interacting with one another. Again, while someone may tag that as “people”, “culture”, “communities”, “relationships”, everything I’m talking about here relates to how people can utilize the Web, with possibly existing and newer technologies such as Web 2.0, to collaborate and communicate with one another on common world goals. Therefore, you could also add on tags such as “Web”, “collaboration”, “communication”, “technology”, “Web 2.0”, “World” and maybe even more that I’m not seeing.
Now if you add up all of those tags to define what I’m talking about in a single post, do you see the absurdity and uselessness of having them all? The more tags you have to add to specifically define what you are talking about, the less useful those tags become. It is like the Zen master telling you the absurdity of trying to describe a beautiful setting sun. You can’t because the more you try to describe it the less justice you do to it. The beauty is in observing it in it’s entirety. Therefore, to relay that beauty and feeling you would need to do it in such a way that it is communicated as quickly and with as few words as possible. This reminds me of another great movie Contact when Jodie Foster’s character glimpses for the first time the amazing and beautiful sights of stellar constellations up close and says, “They should have sent a poet.” Indeed, for only a poet could describe something so amazing and all encompassing in so few words.
So how do I describe or tag a collection of meaningful and related posts in as few words as possible? Instead of giving it a generic tag, do I give it a story title instead? I mean we’re not talking about just generically categorizing a group of thoughts but threading them together in an ongoing story of exploration and discovery. I’ll definitely have to think about this some more but one more interesting thing to note though. Is it just a coincidence that when you talk about something meaningful to you, it is more often than not something that is very emotional for you as well? Again, this relates to my statement before of wanting to “feel” connected to the world. More importantly though, maybe we just want to “feel” more connected to those even around us in our daily lives (i.e. friends, family, and lovers).
Hehe, wait a minute. I just noticed something both funny and interesting. Go back up and look at that Six Apart office picture once again. Noticed how I’ve highlighted the sheets of paper on the wall and dimmed out everything else in the room? Well reverse it now so that the people in the room become highlighted and are the focal point. What do you see? I see a group of seemingly random and diverse people all grouped together in a meaningful relationship working on something of emotional importance to them.
