Sunday, June 11, 2006
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Monday, February 13, 2006
The latest one I'd expect to podcast is podcasting and asking for feedback (in Italian). First: you have to keep up, I'm enjoying your show big time. Secondly, you're right in making one show per week and keeping your shows short, a few people are owner of their time to the point they can spend an hour listening to a single podcast. Finally: I just found out it's inevitable to listen to your friends when they're podcasting! 
Fcuk comments compaign 
I'm seeing more and more bloggers take position against local comments in weblogs. Latest is Matt. Couldn't agree more, I've always been against the idea of local comments, the centralization of information they make, the way they stimulate flamers' frustrations and stalkers' deviations, the background noise they add.
To commenters: I'll say it over and over again: wanna say something about this weblog? Start your own blog and write there linking here. If you want to contact me privately there's a handy link at right on all my pages. I won't ever let you write on my walls, sorry.
To bloggers: if you support local comments on your weblog, what's the difference between your weblog and a forum? Your weblog is a forum where you're the only user authorized to start a thread. Doesn't it sound wrong in some way?
Update: Paolo is on the subject again and Dave is linking to him.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Tags, folksonomies, meta-data and people's lazyness, utility and fun
Marc Canter, who's one of the strongest promoters of structured blogging, in response to Dave Winer's comments admits that "Nobody wants to attach tags, categorize, define their posts as something specific or even THINK about what they're doing - first. It's a "shoot from the hip" socieity". But Marc is sure we need tags, folksonomies and meta-data.
The cornerstone of the discussion seems to be people's lazyness on one side and possible automation on the other. I am for the automation. I think most people wouldn't care to attach meta-data to posts just like (or even more than) they don't tag posts. But are we sure people don't tag posts just because they're lazy? I'm not lazy and I don't tag posts. Dave doesn't tag anything and Marc says about him "well this is not a man anyone would call lazy".
The reason must be elsewhere. As I said I'm not lazy and as an evidence of that I tag very carefully my del.icio.us posts. I do that because the better I do that the easier will be to find out old bookmarks and having fast and simple access to pages I bookmarked months ago is key to my productivity. That must be the reason, then: self-utility. I tag because it's useful to me, I probably wouldn't if it were only for the social value of del.icio.us tags. The beauty of it is that through my personal utility, my posts create social value when the tags are mixed with all other del.icio.us users. Automation.
There must be more anyway. People don't only do what's useful for them. People also do what's simply fun. Ask yourself why most people blog. Is that for the utility of the information they add to the world? Or for their personal utility? Hmmm, I don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong here but I think most people blog because it's fun, they simply enjoy doing that. I don't have fun posting to del.icio.us, it even bothers me sometimes, but I do that for my utility so I'm ready to pay the price. On the other hand I blog for fun and I want to enjoy all the time I spend doing that: tagging is no fun for me and has no personal utility. (In addition, I don't think it's socially useful without a general agreement on how to tag but that's another story). Attaching meta-data to posts wouldn't be either, except when I'll start a blog to cover a very specific topic. Even more, choosing a title for my posts is something I don't always want to do, and that's why I use the OPML editor to blog simple, single-paragraph posts or links as they come.
I'm ready to admit that many bloggers out there are not...as socially lazy and selfish as I am and they would be happy to spend time tagging and attaching meta-data but are they statistically significant? My suggestion to anybody working on web publishing tools: try to create things that give users fun and/or personal utility. Start from that and do (automation, automation) what you can to classify the information that comes out. Dreaming of a world where everybody wants to go the hardest way just because they're being semantically correct will simply let you down.
Friday, January 13, 2006
On Dave's Wordpress Blog: "The mystique of desktop web servers". Good explanation of the whys and pros of keeping a web server running on your machine. On Scripting News he adds: "The problem with remote "managed" servers is that sometimes you can't get to them when you need to". That's true but the solution to this problem is so simple, just read on...
Local databases, IMAP servers and our peace of mind
My most quotable friend yesterday said:
"A little web server integrated to a scripting environment can do magic. The challenge with distributed little web servers is where to store the data. [...] What I would love to have today is a system where I can deal with the data I have to manage locally with all the advantages of running a local highly integrated application, but where all the real database management is done by a pro somewhere else, where it cannot get corrupted, broken or lost."
I can remember discussing this more than once with Paolo and agreeing on IMAP being best way to handle email: data is stored somewhere online where somebody is paid to take care of it but all user operations take place locally, in a fast desktop application that gives the best user experience.
Desktop clients that connect to remote data services are nothing new or special. What's makes the difference is the local database: email is downloaded and cached, changes to the online data storage can be made offline and then synchronized as soon as possible. If the local caches corrupts or gets lost it just takes a new sync to restore it.
The key is the synchronization technique. While an IMAP database (read: an IMAP account with its folders and messages) is typically accessed by a single user, many database application could hardly be kept in sync when multiple users do lots of offline operations at the same time and only sync later. This is probably the main reason why this approach is not very common across client-server applications.
A scriptable web application server is a different thing anyway. Either accessed by a single user or multiple users in a local workgroup, the local server would be the only client of an online counterpart managed by a team of pros. The online database acts as the master, the local one as a cache for all operation, like with IMAP. The synchronization runs in the background thus cutting the typical latency time of online applications to zero, as far as the user perception is concerned.
I've no knowledge of similar tools existing on the market and that's a real shame, considering the relative ease of implementation. Many problems could be solved by simple web hubs sitting at client location and the centralized storage would keep them safe (and us professionals peaceful!).
