Dirk Riehle told me a funny story at WikiSym about Google’s swimming pools. There are two, they’re about 10 feet long, and they’re “endless pools” — the equivalent of a swimming treadmill. What’s really funny is that Mountain View required the company to have an on-duty lifeguard for these little pools. Apparently, it’s quite a [...]
At WikiSym 2005, we had a BoF on Wiki Standards, organized by Stephan Schmidt, coauthor of SnipSnap. Discussion was spirited, as you might expect, but I think we accomplished a great deal. (JY4) We began by reviewing a list of things that could be standardized, which was old hat for a lot of folks [...]
WikiSym 2005 was awesome. Massive props to Dirk Riehle and the program committee for throwing an outstanding event and drawing tons of great, great people. With Wikimania last August and WikiSym this past week, the Wiki community is really starting to gel. And it’s about time. Can you believe Wikis are 10 years old? [...]
With WikiSym about to start, I want to close the loop on an obscure Wikimania item I posted last August. I mentioned something about Fleischbutter. Several folks emailed me asking what it was. (JX8) It’s exactly what it sounds like, folks. The literal translation is “meat butter.” More information is available here (thanks to [...]
Identity Commons has a nifty new logo: (JX4) (JX5) More info on Identity Commons is available at: (JX6) http://www.idcommons.net/ (JX7)
At BAR Camp, I ran into Kragen Sitaker who had an idea for a variant on Purple Numbers called Queer Numbers. Kragen recently blogged the idea (spotted by Matthew O’Connor). (JWJ) In brief, Purple Numbers are wonderful, assuming the author has generated them. If the author hasn’t, you can use a proxy, such as [...]
Evan Henshaw-Plath thinks that Purple Numbers are ugly. He’s not the first. (JW1) A bit of history. The original Purple Numbers were a dark purple. Then Murray Altheim came up with a brilliant idea. Let’s make them lighter! So he did. That was better, but it wasn’t enough. (JW2) As Chris Dent and [...]
Scott McMullan uncovered this great quote on the craft of building, one that’s as applicable to software as it is to buildings: (JVV) The Craftsman type of building is largely the result not of elaboration, but of elimination. The more I design, the more sure I am that elimination is the secret of beauty [...]
Open Sources 2.0 is out. Contributors include yours truly (my chapter’s also available online), Mitchell Baker, Doc Searls, Steven Weber, Sonali Shah, and many, many others. Buy it today. (JVL) (JVM)
A few weeks ago, Evan Henshaw-Plath was explaining to me his epiphany about 43people, where an aggregation of different services tied together by Social Networks was starting to look very compelling. He then said that the next natural step for the folks at The Robot Co-op was calendaring. If anyone knows about calendaring, it’s Evan, [...]
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