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The unseen connections on the net Too many people when doing simplistic data analysis on the net try to scoop up all of the details available to them easily (blog postings, links, social bookmarks, friendster-style friends) and assume that they can construct from this data a model of how people are actually connected. Overly simple metrics become a proxy for quality or connectivity. The truth of networks is that there are ties in all kinds of directions from people to objects to ideas and back again. All manner of interconnections are done through private channels, unseen to the outside observer, and plenty of connections are visible only if you are in the same room at the same time. Data people often just don't get it - the real important connections on the net are the ones you don't see. "I'm still using this OPML blog as a rapid buffer for mental dross." Les Orchard's "Morning Oatmeal Notes" is about using the net for getting ideas out of your head and into space before they disappear. I've been criticized recently for having some of my thinking be too visible - I'm not sure quite yet whether to listen to the critic, or to silence the critic and follow the path the thoughts are going down until someone else finds them. The mental dross does need to have some way to make it out in some format, and an obscure blog might be the right approach. It's really valuable to have a capture spot that I can go back to in context, and getting things out online means they don't have to be stuck just in my mind anymore. That leaves the useful parts (the sidebars that are on my screen that you don't see) all that more useful. Google Mail + Chat = Crazy Slow Well, my Google Mail has been "enhanced" by having chat added in, and while I welcome the idea of an integrated chat + mail client the execution of this one leaves a bit to be desired. For one thing, the whole busy mess is very slow to run, making it hard to actually zip through my email quickly and get messages out of the miasmic stacks that sometimes describe my inbox. Is there any way to turn chat off? After all, I have Adium running already and would rather have speed than completeness if that's the choice I'm presented with. Using Pearl Comments to keep track of detail for a site design I'm using Pearl Crescent's "Pearl Comments" plugin for Firefox (and IE) to keep track of commentary on a site design. Cooperating commenters with the plugin can make simple or detailed notes on the pages I'm working on, and as the detail accumulates you can mark individual notes as in progress or done. It's ever so handy to have commentary sidebar within your browser, in part because the voice that people adopt when they are commenting on the side has a markedly different tone from the back and forth volley of email or IM. Comments on the side are just that much more civilized. (This may just be part of my enthusiasm for marginalia). Design for a greasemonkey script for the NY Times Every time you are on the Times Select page being asked to cough up a bunch of money for some old fishwrap, link through to your local library who has an archive of all of those newspapers back to 1851 for free. OPML Editor and Spotlight I'm trying to write in the OPML Editor, and one of the things I'm quickly growing to rely on in the Mac is using Spotlight to find bits of text I've written or discovered and repurpose them. If I write something down and can't find it, I pretty much have to write it again to have those thoughts again. It doesn't appear that OPML documents are properly being indexed into Spotlight, not at least as far as I can tell. I've put some people's names into files, and they don't show up when I search for that name. Sorting out the desktop One of the odd side-effects of the Mac's user interface is that it's easy to have all of the windows from one application open at once, and relatively harder to peg three or four windows from three or four different applications and have them all work interchangably. This then lends itself to me working solely within the context of a single application, and not switching rapidly between them. If like I did for a long time you have a web browser as your main front window, you tend to mostly browse. Click-click-click looking at things, and it's extra work to find a window you can edit in. I'm therefore trying out the OPML Editor as a new front window, one where the default assumption is that you're writing most of the time, and if you do want to search or email or read or browse then that's something extra. We'll see how it goes. I'm not really after a new outliner. The tool I'm really looking for lets me edit multiple streams of text in parallel, and displays them side by side on the screen. When I write in my little notebooks I manage to get 4 columns across, with nice hand-drawn graphics, on the page - my computer should let me do that too. It wouldn't be inappropriate for the text editor in that tool to be an outliner (why not, if it's fast and flexible enough it would be handy). But the layout to match my pen and ink really doesn't want to be the typical blog style. The sidebar has to be a lot more dynamic, and really it's not so much a piece of static navigation as it is a place to drop things that don't really fit in the middle of the main discussion. Indeed, my hack of hacks to get around that limit is to put my usual sidebars next to this bit of publishable text, just by making some long skinny OPML editor windows. They won't get published, but they do let me think off to the side and not make the main text go astray. Paper airplanes with Saul Saul and I did a nice round of making and flying paper airplanes. We got the patterns from the net and I folded them up so they would fly. The results were much better than the ones I made just from randomly folding, and I'll need to learn these new complicated folds to be convincing again in a pinch. We made a paper helicopter too. Mechanics of the whole thing. Les Orchard is writing about how he's using the new OPML Editor and how fast it is to make the turnaround from idea to post. I'm all for things that don't take much added effort to go from keyboard to net, so it has to be worth at least a try. Let's see if I can make a complete round trip from post to view - yup, and wow, that was fast. The blogroll is not quite working right - somehow it thinks I'm linking to Scoble, but I really want to point at Les Orchard. Hm. OmniOutliner offered to open the blogroll.opml file, how kind of it, and that seems to have messed it up. It's not obvious how to make it do the right thing now. Let's see what anyone has to say about that.... I'll need to figure out how to fix the header graphic, which is not really what I'm after ("Dewey Defeats Truman"). Ah, that was pretty easy, it's in Community / Your OPML Weblog. There's hints I'll need a new OPML.app, better grab that one too. |
Last modified: Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 3:00 AM.
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