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The mayfly project 2002

Posted 07/01/2003 under

For the third year the Mayfly Project (2002) is running. All that it asks of you is to describe the year 2002 in twenty (20) words and submit them to the list.

This is a very reflective process individually, and it is also an appealing experience to read other people’s lists. A word of warning though, don’t read anybody else’s words until you have thought about and submitted your own. This is only a personal view but I would not have liked mine to be influenced in any way.

So what were my twenty words I hear you ask? Here they are;

royby [ w ] [ gold coast australia ] 07/01/2003 02:24

life, death, sex, existentialism, love, bliss, depression, passion, cynicism, belief, wisdom, imprudence, images, language, loan repayments, weather, paranoia, discovery, rhetoric.

Mine was the 699th entry by the way.

mayfly 2002

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Linked: The New Science of Networks

Posted 06/01/2003 under

Currently reading “Linked” by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and I am intrigued to discover that as early as 1736, the Swiss born mathematician Leonhard Euler began an immense branch of mathematics known as ‘Graph Theory’. It is this graph theory that is today the basis of our thinking about networks.

My intrigue does not lie with the discovery of graph theory itself, but with the fact that Euler began solving problems using graphs with collections of nodes connected by links. Up until now I had assumed that nodes and links, the fundamental basics of hypertext, were a relatively new element that was a result of computerization, (see hyper-narrative under ‘definitions’).

Barabasi goes on that we are all nodes linked together to form fascinating networks. I read on?.

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Popdex : the website popularity index

Posted 05/01/2003 under

Popdex is described as “the Website popularity index” and has been developed by Shanti Braford, a programmer who graduated from Washington University in St Louis.

Shanti is keen to develop Popdex still further to find out if a sites popularity can shoot to the top of the list if little known sites are linked to it, or can the ranking be measured in terms of the importance of the sites that are linking to it. I have to assume here that ‘importance’ would mean a site with x number of hits per day or whatever or with x number of sites linking to it.

Interesting concept.

http://www.popdex.com/about.html

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Taking Ideas Seriously

Posted 02/01/2003 under

Can we distinguish political choices from philosophical truths? Seyla Benhabib discusses this and more in this review of “Heidegger?s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl L?with, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse” by Richard Wolin.

Benhabib comments; “Too often these days we reduce philosophy to confession and intimacy to kitsch precisely because we live without a sense of the democratic res publica. No amount of voyeurism and biographical judgmentalism should distract us from engaging with unsettling questions.”

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University, and is author most recently of “The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era”.

bostonreview

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Interested to know what type of American books were published 1999-2001?

Posted 02/01/2003 under

Over the three year period, fiction is the most published category with a total of 42,856 books published, an close on its heels is the dual category of Sociology/Economics at 42,299 publications. This is American book publication only, I wonder if the averages are simliar worldwide.

americanbookproduction

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Using in-room chat as a social tool

Posted 01/01/2003 under

Clay Shirky reports that recent use of chat room technology in a meeting situation changed the interrupt logic that normally occurs when 30 or so people are involved similtaneously. Shirky reports that;

“Group conversations are exercises in managing interruptions. When someone is speaking, the listeners are often balancing the pressure to be polite with a desire to interrupt, whether to add material, correct or contradict the speaker, or introduce an entirely new theme. These interruptions are often tangential, and can lead to still more interruptions or follow-up comments by still other listeners. Furthermore, conversations that proceed by interruption are governed by the people best at interrupting. People who are shy, polite, or like to take a moment to compose their thoughts before speaking are at a disadvantage.

Even with these downsides, however, the tangents can be quite valuable, so if an absolute “no interrupt” rule were enforced, at least some material of general interest would be lost, and the frustration level among the participants consigned solely to passive listening would rise considerably.

The chat room undid these effects, because participants could add to the conversation without interrupting, and the group could pursue tangential material in the chat room while listening in the real room. It was remarkable how much easier it was for the speaker to finish a complex thought without being cut off. And because chat participants had no way of interrupting one another in the chat room, even people not given to speaking out loud could participate. Indeed, one of our most active participants contributed a considerable amount of high-quality observation and annotation while saying almost nothing out loud for two days.”

Article available here…

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Yoga Trumps Bingo as Centers for Aged Try New Approach

Posted 30/12/2002 under

“Fredericka Mabon did not really want to have bingo at the Lenox Hill Senior Center at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan. No knock on bingo, but elderly people hunched over bingo cards brought to her mind an uninviting image of old age. The game fed a stubborn stereotype of senior centers.”

The article goes on to say that the elderly do not care for the word ‘senior’ anymore. They would rather yoga and exercise classes than bingo and that they did not want to have somebody come in and talk to them about cancer, nor did they want a bereavement group set up.

Some may say that this sounds like avoidance tactics, or that this group is in total denial. I say that this is the type of group that I would rather hang with than other more morbid let’s show you the way to die groups.

todaysheadlines

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Boxes and Arrows: What Is A Controlled Vocabulary?

Posted 28/12/2002 under

Interesting and relevant article. As a species we find it all too difficult to communicate effectively between one another, and this dilemma is particularly relevant when it comes to communicating via electronic media. It is difficult if not impossible to convey to our ‘listener’ what our underlying feelings concerning that which we are writing about. This often leads to confusion and misinterpretation.

“The most effective communication occurs when all parties involved agree on the meaning of the terms being used. Consequently, finding the right words to communicate the message of your website can be one of the most difficult parts of developing it.

When we converse, we speak in ?natural language.? This is language in all its raw, rich, gooey glory. When we organize our information and label it however, there is so much richness, variance, and confusion in terminology that we often need to impose some order to facilitate agreement between the concepts within the site and the vocabulary of the person using it.

This order can come through a controlled vocabulary. Amy Warner defines a controlled vocabulary (CV) as ?organized lists of words and phrases, or notation systems, that are used to initially tag content, and then to find it through navigation or search.? This means that a CV is a type of metadata that functions as a ?subset of natural language?(Wellisch); it is not how we normally speak. Using a CV is also a way to overtly display relationships among the various concepts that your site covers in order to increase findability. The most basic, and often overlooked, form of controlled vocabulary is a consistent labeling system. If you are careful to call the same thing, or the same concept, by the same name everywhere on your site, you are using a very simple controlled vocabulary. And you’re also ensuring that your users start developing a mental model of the information they can find.”

What is a controlled vocabulary

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Configure this!

Posted 19/12/2002 under

I discovered a long time ago that if you want to learn something, the best way to go about it is teach it to somebody else. If teaching it is not an option, then the next best way is to simply pull things apart and put them back together again. This sometimes causes an amount of angst when there are a few parts left over and the main item is re-assembled.

Discovering how the preferences work within pMachine has been a prime example of pulling things apart and trying different ways of going about things.

I’m pleased to say that pMachine is a pleasure to work with. Just takes a bit of time to figure out what things are for (if in doubt read the instructions is great advice here). I always liken any software applications to crossword puzzles. When you commence a puzzle by an unknown author what you are really trying to do is not so much solve the clues, but learn to get inside that persons head to discover what they were thinking when they wrote it. Once you have determined the way they think, life becomes much easier.

Not that I can claim to know how the builders of pMachine really align their thought processes. Rather that I now know a bit more about the process by which they have built this software. That’s all.

Cheers

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royby.com under review.

Posted 08/12/2002 under

A weblog about weblogging is reviewed by Keith Morris. Keith maintains his own weblog site at http://www.giparty.org and conducts reviews for both Bloggy Opinions and Blog Critics.

You can read Keith’s review in ‘more’.

http://www.blogcritics.org/
http://www.bloggyopinions.com/main.html

~~ 12/04/02 ~~
A Weblog About Weblogging

This weblog was created and is maintained by he who calls himself Royby. The site doesn’t reveal much about this character other than the fact that he will be celebrating his birthday on the 10th of December. Happy Birthday, Royby!

Royby’s site was “primarily built as a research site for Communication & Cyber Theory at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia… about the phenomenon that is weblogging.” It contains quite a bit of useful information about blogging, with links to blogs and also resources for bloggers. It is maintained using pMachine, weblogging software much like Movable Type and Blogger. I had never heard of it before I visited. Sure enough, there is a link to pmachine.com over on the left side of Royby’s blog (it is a blog about blogging, isn’t it?), along with links to other weblogging applications. This is a topic I find quite interesting, personally. I am always looking for new ideas to use on my own site.

The layout is fairly simple; your typical dashed border surrounding the main content, with links on either side. I’m not familiar with the templates that ship with pMachine. This layout does have a sort of prefabricated appeal to it, though a peek at the source code suggests otherwise. It is a piece of cake to find your way around, and the color scheme is pleasing as well.

There are a couple things I didn’t agree with. Along the right, there are a couple of dead links. Dead links bad! There is also some content that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with weblogging. Finally, the content doesn’t portray a very personal view at all. I would like to know what is in the head of Royby. What does he think about the things he is finding around the web? Other than that, I’d definitely recommend this site to someone who is interested in new blogging ideas or resources.

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