In early 2003, I had lunch with Richard Gabriel for the first time, and I explained to him my desire to uncover common collaborative patterns across different disciplines, starting with Open Source communities. Richard recommended that I read William Langewiesche‘s American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, a book that described the dismantling of the [...]
In my manifesto for collaborative tools, I cited Backlinks as an example of a common, yet oft-overlooked conceptual construct in collaborative tools. Those who know me well know that my strategy for implementing some of Doug Engelbart‘s ideas (which I crafted over three years ago) has always been to create simple, concrete tools that could [...]
Last weekend, I posted some notes on Markup Free Auto Linking Wiki. The idea is that instead of relying on user syntax for identifying and linking to Wiki pages, the Wiki could do a linguistic scan of the text and link words based on a site-specific ontology. (242) I posted my notes mainly as [...]
The latest release of PurpleWiki has mucho changes. The most visible is customizable look-and-feel using templates (see PurpleWiki:Templates), but there are a slew of other important changes as well. (23X) Thanks to a growing user base (which included many folks who tested the beta code in live environments), many bugs have been eradicated. The [...]
On Monday, I found myself in the middle of a car chase. More importantly, I saw Amber Alert working first-hand. (23L) I was driving south on 101 to Campbell from Redwood City for lunch and a slew of meetings. As I drove through Mountain View, I saw an Amber Alert on an electronic billboard, [...]
November is just around the corner, and like many folks who care about the upcoming election, I spent this gorgeous day campaigning… for my friend, Stephanie Schaaf. Steph is running for city council in Mountain View. She’s very active politically, especially about environmental issues, and will make a great city council person. She’s also running [...]
Identity Commons is looking to hire a Perl or Python scripter. Details are here. Contact Fen Labalme if you’re interested. (225)
Adina Levin quotes Peter Kaminski: (21Y) “Time together in person is too important to spend working.” (21Z) Reminds me of something Paul Visscher and Jason Cook told me when I had dinner with them a few weeks ago. I was asking about the hacker community in Dayton and whether folks ever got together [...]
Face-to-face gatherings are very good at generating a large amount of enthusiasm and momentum. Unfortunately, that energy usually dissipates soon afterwards. (204) Here’s what generally happens: Folks leave the event exhilirated, but exhausted, and return only to discover a daunting pile of work. By the time they’ve made their pile manageable, the only artifact [...]
