It's Thanksgiving in the US. What am I thankful for?

Not being at war at the moment.

The looming shadow of war changed my Thanksgiving plans. A family member, a naval aviator, is being deployed from the Pacific to the middle east before year end, and couldn't join us. I hope for peace.

My freedoms and the ordinary people who protect them.

My liberties are ensured by people who uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. Librarians, the ACLU, the kid who won't pray in school, voters. For doing your little bit, I thank you.

The economy.

Thanks for the life lessons in humility and determination. My BS detector has been scrubbed clean and retuned. So much of what I know is wrong, unproven, or both. It's refreshing, if occasionally embarassing, to challenge all of my education and assumptions.

I'm thankful everyone I know is not going hungry. Too many children in the U.S. will go to bed hungry tonight. And millions around the world risk death by starvation. I'd like to see an end to famine in my lifetime.

My family.

The older I get, the more they matter. My brothers are in love with good women. My father and sister are happily married to to great people. My extended family, cousins, et al. They enrich my life.

My health.

Still got it.

The people I meet.

You're included. The whole blogosphere and fellow Ryzers (land of the schmooze). Kloggers, and lefties, and journos, and people of faith.

The Canter Crowd. Der UserLanders. The World of Human Capitol. Foresight Senior Associates.

The brilliant strangers I meet on Oakland's and Berkeley's streets, alleys, and gutters.

My neighbors.

I live in a marvelous apartment building in the Adams Point neighborhood of Oakland. The 40+ households would make a strongly flavored, fragrant, complex soup. They don't know it but they keep me real.

My armorors.

Some people bleed code to create the many tools I use daily. The UserLand crew. Microsoft. Intuit. Thanks for being creative, following your intuition, and making products that save lives, bring people together, and help us earn our daily bread, find our voices, and discover meaning. Thanks.  

Thanks, y'all.

Susannah Breslin, The Reverse Cowgirl, gets it! She groks video blogging, the converged client, disintermediation of media conglomerates, smart mobs with video cams, how comic books are a key to understanding all "thin media".

I want to have Susannah's children.

GooglePeople tries to answer "Who is...?" questions by parsing Google search results. Stars indicate GoogleQuest's confidence level, 4=high.

Who hates Phil Wolff?

Dave Winer * * * *, Chris Locke * *, Phil Wolff * *, Jonathon Delacour *, Robert Scoble *, Doc Searls *, Louis Aragon *, Tom Graves *, Samuel Beckett *, Phil Taylor *, Mark Pilgrim *, Jeff Ward *, Evan Williams *, Jason Diesel *, Steve Nash *, Phil Cubeta *, Marc Weingarten *, George Sessum *, Frank Paynter *, Eliza Wee *, Carmine Gallo *, Andie Miller *, Alex Wolff *, Willem Dafoe *, Tony Bowden *, Tom Shugart *, Tom Jones *, Tobey Maguire *, Tim Layden *, Terrence Trammell *, Terence Wei *, Sheila Lennon *, Sharon O'neill *, Shannon Campbell *, Shane Mcchesney *, Seth Godin *, Scott Johnson *, Samuel Johnson *, Ray Sweatman *, Peter Parker *, Peter Dale Scott *, Norman Osborn *, Norm Jenson *, Michele Smith *, Michael Webb *, Michael Farber *, Melissa Morrison *, Martin Jensen *, Lewis Caroll *, Leigh Montville *, Landon Bradshaw *, Kristy Kowal *, Kevin Garnett *, Ken Kesey *, Kelli Anderson *, Kath Dawson *, Karl Martino *, Karl Kraus *, Joseph Hogue *, Jordan Cooper *, John Pilger *, John Hiler *, Jill Walker *, Jennifer Balderama *, Jason Thompson *, James Monaco *, James Joyce *, Jakob Nielsen *, Jack Schofield *, Henry Fielding *, Halley Suitt *, Gretchen Pirillo *, Grant Wahl *, Gideon Strauss *, George Partington *, Gary Turner *, Eric Norlin *, Douglas Ord *, Douglas Kellner *, Dorothea Salo *, Denise Howell *, Deirdre Bair *, Deborah Branscum *, Dawn Olsen *, David Weinberger *, Dave Rogers *, Dane Carlson *, Dan Steinman *, Courtney Shealy *, Christopher Locke *, Chris Meirick *, Brent Simmons *, Bill Guest *, Bill Connolly *, Austin Powers *, Anita Bora *, Andy Chen *, Andrew Goodman *, Andrea James *, Alex Golub *, Alan Schneider *, Alan Keyes *, Adam Vandenberg *

RageBoy I could understand, if he really knew me. Kind of cool to draw the ire of great communicators like James Joyce, Lewis Caroll, Willem Dafoe, Ken Kesey, Sam Beckett and Tom Jones.  

But I hate myself? How did they find out? Where's my shrink's number...

These questions only returned low confidence results.

"Who invented the weblog?"

Shelley Powers, Aaron Swartz, David Payne, Alaina Browne, Stevie Wonder, Sean Palmer, Ray Tomlinson, Mia Farrow, Hart Island, Erik Himmelsbach, Ben Franklin

"Who wrote the first weblog?"

Mark Anderson, Doc Searls, Thomas Jefferson, Jose Mercury, John Hancock, Kathleen Freeman David, Joey Ramone, Harry Potter, Ed Kleban, Andre Durand, Will Leitch, Wayne Robins, Vincent Youmans, Tony Pierce, Tom Shugart, Tom Poe, Toby Cecchini, Tim O'reilly, Tim Grierson, Susan Kitchens, Steven Spielberg, Stephen Sondheim, Sheila Lennon, Scott Rosenberg, Sam Ruby, Rebecca Blood, Phil Wolff, Phil Windley, Paul Boutin, Paul Andrews, Patrick Wilson, Mitch Ratcliffe, Mike Sanders, Mike Mcbride, Mickey Kaus, Matthew Thomas, Matt Welch, Matt Ragas, Matt Jones, Mary Wehmeier, Lou Josephs, Lisa Rein, Kurt Foss, Ken Layne, June Cool, Julian Borger, Judith Burton, Joshua Allen, Jonathan Steele, Jonathan Larson, Jennifer Balderama, Jason Gross, Jakob Nielsen, Howard Greenstein, Halley Suitt, Glenn Reynolds, Gary Turner, Frank Paynter, Francisco Chronicle, Eric Raymond, Eric Norlin, Eric Hansen, Denise Howell, Dawn Olsen, David Williams, David Weinberger, Dave Ely, Dave Barry, Dan Pink, Dan Gillmor, Dan Bricklin, Chris Pirillo, Cathy Rigby, Buzz Bruggeman, Bryan Field-Elliot, Brent Simmons, Bill Quick, Bill Finn, Ben Hammersley, Audrey Gillan, Ann Salisbury, Andrew Sullivan, Amy Wohl, Alan Reiter

Not really.

Who works at UserLand?

Mark Paschal, Jon Udell, Paul Prescod, Dave Winer, Robert Bierman, Phil Wolff, Dale Pike, Sam Ruby, Mark Pilgrim, Jon Schull, John Patrick, John Burkhardt, Jeremy Bowers, Jake Savin, David Wragg, David Brown, Dan Geiser, Brian Jepson, Bo Orloff, Bill Humphries, Andrew Wooldridge.

I don't, although some folks have asked.

The White House's Office of Management and Budget Circular No. A-76 (Revised), will be published on Friday in the Federal Register. This will open 850,000 federal government jobs to private sector competition. This means firing half the federal workforce. This includes all government work deemed a "commercial activity," from secretarial duties to building and grounds maintenance.

This is no ordinary outsourcing. The institutional values of public service are fundamentally different than business. Fairness, integrity, patriotism, accountability and the public trust inform day-to-day behavior. Affect how we feel about government workers.

Privatizing is an end run against work rules. Rules that protect these values and our workers. We've learned from a history of bribery, cover ups, shredding, abuses of power, kickbacks, nepotism, political bias, corruption, punitive personnel actions, incompetence, hazardous work places, unpaid overtime, compromised quality, sexual harrassment, sexual discrimination, racial discrimination, monopoly. Bush considers the rules that protect the American people and the federal workforce "bureaucratic," an interference in absolute executive power.    

This is a Republican attack on these values and these lessons. An attack on civil service. An attack on worker rights. An attack on unions. An attack on the people served. How we deliver services can be as important as what we deliver.

It can be OK to outsource. But slashing budgets and low-cost bids don't assure service innovation, service quality, service delivery, and service fairness.

Dubya and Cheney are abdicating management responsibility. If you have a problem, don't pass the buck. Fix it.

Madeleine Begun Kane:

"Privatize This!"   A good friend of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous, has come up with a fun, clever challenge he/she calls "Privatize This." It relates to the Bush Administration's latest union-busting effort -- its plan to privatize about half of the federal workforce by "contracting out" 850,000 jobs.

Here's my friend's challenge:

As good Americans, we can help this effort by proposing private firms that might perform various public functions. Here are my public/private suggestions:

• EPA's hazardous waste cleanup could be contracted to Proctor & Gamble, maker of Bounty, the "Quicker Picker Upper"
• IRS tax collection work could be performed by The Mob
• The staff of the White House could be replaced by the cast of NBC's West Wing

Let's have your suggestions ... if the Administration is taking comments, I'll submit our collective suggestions as a comment on this privatization proposal (as my own private citizen comment, without identifying individual submitters).

Why am I telling you this? So you can rise to the challenge, of course. Please email me your creative suggestions. I'll send them on to my friend to use anonymously, as indicated, and I'll also post the best ones here. Please send them to me at madkane@madkane.com with "Privatize This" in the subject line. And let me know if/how you'd like to be credited on my site (with your name and/or website link, etc.) I can't wait to read your suggestions!

How much of this is pushing retirement obligations from the government to the privatized workers? Getting obligations off the books?

This changes the federal government's competition for workers with the private sector. As boomers retire in the next five years, many of these jobs will be filled indirectly (via contractors) instead of as direct hires. I'm not yet sure of the long term consequences.

[a klog apart Shrubbery]

Bryan Bell:

Vernon Wesley Bell died peacefully at home surrounded by his loving family on November 4, 2002. ... Vernon was born December 10, 1927, in Keyport, New Jersey, the fifth of William and Alice Bell's eight children. He graduated from South River High School in 1945. He joined the Army Air Corps and was stationed near Ogden, Utah. It was there that he met the love of his life, Berniece Anderson, at a Memorial Day picnic in 1947. They were married January 30, 1949. ...

His was a life unquestionably committed to his beloved wife, his large and loving family, his colleagues, his students and his faith--which he lived out every day of his life. His love of family included not only his children and family back in New Jersey, but also those many people he and Berniece welcomed into their home and hearts over the years. No one was a stranger to Vern. He was well loved by all who knew him for his irrepressible humor, his unflappable nature, his integrity and character, and his kindness. We will cherish all our wonderful memories of his--from his impish smile to his firm honesty, from his devotion to his wife and family to his ability to never take himself to seriously.

More...

28183  blogs in the BlogStreet directory. I wonder how fast it is growing

Spidering for blogrolls and RSS, BlogStreet generates my Blog Back Report (blogs linking to mine) and a Blog Neighbourhood Analysis (blogs with similar blogrolls). RSS Discovery shows my rss feed in clean html. The blogspace search feature may replace DayPop a little bit.

The Radio universe has at least 50K users, and there are probably more than 500K bloggers. How many are in Blogdex or the other community sites?

Can anyone suggest a tool to help with managing the product wishlist?

Hopefully web based and affordable, it would support:

• Brainstorming, capturing the zillion ideas and wishes
• The fleshing out stage, elaboration of the original ideas, grouping and categorization of those features, annotation with high level effort estimates and marketing priorities
• Multiple users, so engineering can put up estimates, everyone can comment, marketing/customers can prioritize; pushing data entry back to contributors.
• Staging and assignment to projects/products/releases.
• Search, status, and reporting

So much of this is done in Word and Excel, there has got to be a better way.

Experience? Suggestions?  AIM Y! @Ryze  

[a klog apart project management]

The Shifted Librarian is thinking about Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for libraries. RFIDs work by sticking little chips on things you want to track. When exposed to the right radio signal, a chip broadcasts a little bit of data for a short distance. Really big in logistics where they want to eliminate all sorts of time spent on inventory, statusing, and clipboards.

My paranoid fantasy...

So we stick RFID tags in every book, starting at the publisher; ISBN Inside(TM). I check out of the library and go about my life.

I'm walking down the street and get scanned. The police are scanning the street for people carrying the Anarchist's Cookbook. Cult members accost me because I'm carrying Judaica. Merchants tailor signage. Republicans stone me. Beggars ask for more money.

These are books inside my knapsack, my pocket, my car; hidden from view.  

If the books I'm carrying are hooked up to my mobile phone profile, you might get just-in-time book salons and lunch meetings. Lovely Smart Mobs stuff.

But privacy doesn't stop at the library doors.

Just something to consider.

John Robb cites research by Peter Schwartz' GBN:

The overwhelming message was the antipathy non-Americans now feel towards the US. And Americans just weren't seeing that at all. There was no war on terrorism anywhere outside the US. In fact, there was a clear perception that the US was the problem. The scenario that everyone else was talking about was how could you constrain the US, not how could you defeat terrorism. So there are completely different perceptions of the world.

This is like a cigarette company relying today on the brand it established two generations ago.The world changed, people have new information, and they are more skeptical of spin.  

It is not enough to be America. We need to engage all our external stakeholders. Cluefully. Even gonzonomically.

Time to renew voice of america. Fund libraries. Sponsor student exchange programs. Give blogs to the starving people of a dark continent. Send Rageboy to any of the evil empires. Build hospitals. Send drugs.

Listen.  

I have a Leonid hangover from getting to bed at 6am.

Worth it.

It was like being inside a puffed up souffle, darkness pierced by blazing light ripping where a chef slashes it open.

Close your eyes and see phosporous-hot streaks across your eyelids.

I know what an invasion from Mars will look like, ships too numerous to count flashing too fast to see across a night sky.

Fragments happily careening through the cosmos for eons, only to run into our gravity well of a speed trap, coming to life  for a few seconds before becoming dust.

I had a sense of moment; generations will be born and die before nature's clock brings the meteor shower back. Reminds me of being in a Richter 7 earthquake, a bloody riot.

We had print-to-fax a long time ago. Why not Print-to-Blog? Weblog as printer driver!

Make it so I can post from almost any app.

Most apps have a document object model on the sending end. I think there are components that render to html. We have the programming hooks on the receiving end. What's left? 

[a klog apart Blue Sky Radio]

Spectacular meteor shower won't return until 2098: "The Bay Area is due for an astounding meteor storm Monday night and early Tuesday -- a light show that astronomers say won't be equalled until 2098." [Google Technology News via Juha Haataja's Unversal Rule]

I dutifully bundled up, grabbed coffee and fresh donuts, and drove Sacramento way.

For an hour.

Ditched by a cow pasture past Travis Air Force Base. No street lights for miles. Waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark. And waited. And waited. No night vision. Eyes were fine, just an extra large pizza pie of a full moon. Bright enough to play solitaire. Away from the San Francisco city lights, the full moon made it seem like daylight. Scattered clouds but not enough to get in the way. On the eastern horizon, (Sacramento?) city lights polluted the horizon.

No shooting stars.

Gave the sky an hour, and made it home by 3:45 in the morning. Still caffeinated. Dozed off around 6am.

And read the Leonids are really coming tonight.

So I'm forging on, doing it again tonight.

Sometimes push works better.

For your nightly email of updates to Phil Wolff's "a klog apart", use the form below and Bloglet will get it to you. Click here if you're a bloglet regular.

I use  to get about 20 feeds sent in one big html mail every night. Clean formatting. Easy to read. Easy to admin.

TiVo spells the end of "event" television. Meetup.com says, why not get real fans together?

Meetup with other local fans of the Bartlet White House. Talk about Jed, Abbey, Josh, Donna, Charlie, CJ, Toby, Leo and Sam. What's next?

Other meetups that look like great excuses to ...

• Have Fun
• 24
• Anime
• Harry Potter
• Kuro5hin
• Learning Spanish
• MetaFilter
• Weblogger
• Talk Shop
• Nanotech
• Temp Workers
• Film Industry
• Mobilize
• Abolish the Death Penalty
• Democratic Party
• EFF Supporter
• Iraq Crisis
• No War With Iraq
• Protect Freedom
• Wi-Fi

Around the world, local meetups convene at the same time on the same topic. You sign up, vote for a local venue, and turn up.

Compare this to Ryze events. Also has an RSVP function, but less geographic organization. And not a subscription to an ongoing event. 

The monthly meetup warm-ups (venue vote, rsvp, and reminder) convey a sense of belonging. It helps seeing the same people on the same topic month after month.

 [a klog apart community]

Anil:

It's time to create a tool that's designed for the job of viewing, managing, and publishing microcontent. This tool is the microcontent client. ...

The primary advantage of the microcontent client over existing Internet technologies is that it will enable the sharing of meme-sized chunks of information using a consistent set of navigation, user interface, storage, and networking technologies. In short, a better user interface for task-based activities, and a more powerful system for reading, searching, annotating, reviewing, and other information-based activities on the Internet. ...

My cryptic summary:

• Searching, improving by searching in context, a la semantic web. Search that understands structured data (yellow pages, auctions, flights, job listings). And that learns new contexts, new semantic structures, as needed.
• Aggregation, not just of news microcontent but also of other structured data (yellow pages, auctions, flights, job listings). And learning new contexts, new semantic structures, as needed. Actively and passively.
• Authoring, actively and passively. Blog posts, metadata including annotations and comments, and other structured data.

I met Bret Fausett at Digital ID World. Brett asks about the idea of a .blog top level domain (like a .com or .net). Lots of good comments; here are mine.

I concur with the general objections stated before. The central identity of blogging is that a human voice (sometimes a small tribe) is found in one place, instead of being scattered in many large community sites.

That said, what creative ways could we exploit a .blog tld?

Might this help with search?

In a world of microcontent, could DNS help each post be unqiuely identified or found? If so, would DNS take part in update notification, perhaps helping with threading of conversation?

I know a number of people who blog anonymously or pseudonymously. Could the registrar help assure privacy of domain ownership?

Assuming everyone will get at least one personal domain for blogging, this could be a very active registry. Compared to businesses, they have short lives too.

Blogging is a form in transition.

Personally, I think blogging as a form will merge with all the other forms of digital expression. With email and IM first. With voice/video conferencing, streaming videos, browsing, and PowerPointing later.

Watch it change:

• as more people blog from their foto-mobiles
• as devices start to blog ("My car's day")
• as audiobloggers create radio shows and videobloggers create televsion programming
• as Sims characters start to blog.

Moving forward, see a convergent software client emerge.

Source: evanwolf group, 2002.

A lot to shovel into one bucket.

Why bother?

Synergy and Usability.  

Synergy because each of their abilities are horizontal and complementary to to the other functions. This is why spell checking rolled into word processors.

Usability, because with great design, learning one feature makes it easier to learn and do the next. Once you learn spell check, any sort of text editing or proofreading tool is a snap. This slashes the incremental user burden of new features. So spell check, for instance, can cross into spreadsheets, presentations, email, even project management tools without taxing the new user.

What else do you need from a converged user experience? What are our collective design goals?

Simplicity. Unity. and Adaptability.

The surfaces presented to a user will adapt to each medium and form. Perhaps I need a storyboard for planning a video; maybe it can also be used for planning a presentation, an extended blog post, an interaction with a customer. Are you presenting on a computer projector, a video stream, or paper? The software should understand how to adjust.

The converged client should also adapt to people. A person's culture, experience, goals, interests, and skills. This is hard as adamantium, but it is what allows robust tools to work for most people in many situations. Some people need help and wizards and automatic spelling correction (think Microsoft Office), others need directly manipulable affordances (think Kai's Power Tools). Small children need different environments (Power Puff Girls) than teens than adults. Grokking world cultures and subcultures, and reflecting those in software, is a fine art.

Adjust to hardware platforms. How do you incorporate the strengths and limitations od the PC fat client, game box, TV set top, and thin clients on the mobile phone and web browser?

Embrace specialized content. Some database tools can automatically generate editing screens and menus and even workflows from data structures and definitions. We need to do the same thing, but across many kinds of content and activities. From blogging movie reviews (with extra metadata and internal structure) to IM conversations guided by scripts. 

A constraint: Adapt while preserving and leveraging the user's prior knowledge, skills, and abilities.

So.

Contrast this with Anil Dash's microcontent client. I'm seeing the converged client as a conceptual superset or framework for building microcontent clients.

Can you imagine the plumbing?

You'd want to design for:

• Flexibility
• Interoperability
• Extensibility
• Scalability
• Polylingual

Your architecture would need:

• Shared services. A common chassis. 
• Open APIs. So third party's can connect, communicate, and interact with the client.
• Plug-in sockets. So tool makers can add their own features and extend the client's abilities.
• Standards support. To increase interoperability.
• Heavy transcoding. Transcoding is a fancy term for converting content from one platform to others. The converged client will have to handle a wider range of content than most. From story outlines to storyboards. From audio tracks to text subtitles. From IM threads to blog posts.

So what?

We're on our way. Blogging tools are starting to interact with email and sounds. PIMs are managing contact information across multiple applications. Community and collaboration features are as critical to games as traditional gameplay.

I'm calling it: 2003-2005 will see many clients converge, weblogs among them. The challenges? Immense. The rewards? Many and rich. The fun? Deep and lasting.

[a klog apart klogging]

You finish your music demo.

You send it to BigCo records.

Their lawyers send it back (painful experience with lawsuits)

Bad for you (no breakthrough).

Bad for the company (no innovation).

What to do?

Go to TriggerStreet.com.

The detailed registration process takes care of legal issues.

The community reviews script and short film submissions.

Objective feedback.

Real work product, not just rumor mill.

Everything gets reviewed, no old boy bias.

Innovators emerge.

Talent and money swarm.

A million visits this, its first week.  

Online Community as Intermediary.

Disintermediating agents and screeners.  

Brought to you by Kevin Spacey and Budweiser.

randomWalks

Peg Phillips, who played Ruth-Anne on the Northern Exposure series, died Nov. 7 at the age of 84. NPR remembered a collision of their two worlds, when Ruth-Anne landed a commentary on All Things Considered and real-life host Robert Siegel introduced it. synergy before its time.

Laurence Simon:

Not a single ounce of bullshit in that woman.

CBS's PR flaks released some sort of statement. Who gives a fuck what they think?

Heart, Mind, and Strength weblog:

IF YOU DON'T HAVE A DREAM, HOW YOU GONNA HAVE A DREAM COME TRUE? [Woodeene Koenig-Bricker]11/12/02

So you think you are too old to fulfill your dreams?  Think again.  Incidentally, I spent a day on the set of Northern Exposure and got to meet Ms. Phillips who was every bit as much of a character as Ruth-Anne. Into your hands, we commend her, O Lord.

Margaret "Peg" Phillips, a retired accountant who took acting classes at age 65 and won fame as the tart-tongued shopkeeper Ruth-Anne Miller in the television series "Northern Exposure," has died. She was 84....

Phillips appeared in at least eight movies, a number of television commercials and made guest appearances in such TV series as "Seventh Heaven," "Touched By An Angel" and "E.R."

She appeared with Shirley MacLaine in "Waiting for the Light" (1990) and in the made-for-TV movies "How the West Was Fun" (1994) and "Chase" (1985).

Born in Everett, Phillips overcame polio, peritonitis, a ruptured aorta and, at age 81, a broken hip and wrist from being hit by a car.

Gerry McGovern opines in MarketingProfs.com on measuring the value of content vs. live interactiont. Scale, geography, ease, speed, accuracy, precision, cost.

And Bradford DeLong points to the need for more reliable industry and Internet forecasts to inform investment in the November 2002 Wired. Overblown forecasts overbuilt fiber.

Together, they build the case why We need a census of blogspace. 

redmonk blog

Hire Scott Anguish: Scott Anguish, proprietor of the excellent Mac OS X and Cocoa resource site, StepWise, is available for Cocoa programming, WebObjects programming, and other consulting and writing.

You can read Scott's work in Cocoa Programming.

"So if you have a programming need, and you can find him, maybe you can hire - Scott Anguish."

[aka bloggers for hire]

A friend of mine asked: how many webloggers are there? This is like "How big is the Internet?"

I searched through Nua and a dozen other internet sites and haven't seen any research on the size of the blogosphere.

I ask you:

1. Do you have an educated guess?
2. Do you know of any prior work in this area?
3. Can you think of a methodology or two to create useful measures of the number of bloggers and the number of weblogs?
4. What related questions would you want answered?
5. How might you use this information?
6. Pitfalls to avoid?
7. Would you join a BlogCensus.org to provide and share stats?

My wild stabs:

1. Do you have an educated guess?
• Not yet.
2. Do you know of any prior work in this area?
• No. I've looked.
3. Can you think of a methodology or two to create useful measures of the number of bloggers and the number of weblogs?
• Some vendors host weblogs and have relevant stats. We could add those up.
• We could look at download and registrations from the top 5 vendors, and add fudge factors to cover other tools and disadoption rates

4. What related questions would you want answered?

• LiveJournal.com, has a statistics page: (numbers as of 10 November 2002)
• Total users: 770910
• Users that have ever updated: 635168
• Users updating in last 30 days: 280213
• Users updating in last 7 days: 200543
• Users updating in past 24 hours: 72587
• Gender:
• Male: 201452 (36.3%)
• Female: 354085 (63.7%)
• Unspecified: 131153
• Account Type
• Free Account: 718109 (93.2%)
• Early Adopter: 14282 (1.9%)
• Paid Account: 36718 (4.8%)
• Permanent Account: 1218 (0.2%)
• Country of origin (Mostly English-speaking)
• US state of origin (California, New York, Florida, Michigan lead)
• Age distribution (mode=17)
• Client usage (90% web)
• Activity: posts by day overall (147k posts last Wednesday) Per-person would be interesting too.
• New accounts per day (eyeballing a chart it looks like 900-1400 new LJ users per day, averaging about 1100)
• I'd love to know:
• How many entries have ever been blogged? (the cumulative number of posts).
• How many links in posts? (excluding blogrolls and navigation)
• What blogging tool or service they're using?
• Blog lifecycles:
• How long to bloggers of various stripes blog?
• How many change hosts? Change tools?
• Why do people abandon blogging?
• Is there a critical mass, a minimum number of posts per day/week/month that separates those that blog from those that fail?
• Of people who take a break, how many start again?
• Number originating within a company or operating behind a firewall
• Connection speed (does broadband make it easier to blog?)
• Payload distribution. How many people include pictures, sounds, flash games, or movies? How many bytes are home pages?
• Syndication. What percentage syndicate their sites?
• Duplication/Overlap:
• How many blogs per person?
• Do you post to them equally? How many are updated daily/weekly/monthly?
• How many tools do you use?
• What ancillary tools do you use?
• Graphics and other media
• News readers
• HTML editors
• email clients
• blog-specific search (daypop, google)
• blogosphere navigation (blogdex, blogtree)
5. How might you use this information?
1. As a blogger.
• Always good to know where I stand in relation to the pack.
• Trends might tip me to new capabilities
2. As a consultant or IT leader.
• Make better choices about deploying blogging and community tools
• Use the "bandwagon" sell when appropriate
3. As a blog tool maker.
• Understand the markets I serve vs. the ones I don't 
6. Pitfalls to avoid?
• Hype
• Irreproducible results
• Bias - vendor, country
7. Would you join an BlogCensus.org to provide and share stats?
• As a user, with anonymity.
• As a vendor, sure.

What say you?

Online Journalism Review via poynter.org via Boing Boing Blog.

Tunisia jails, reportedly tortures popular blogger and online journo. The notion that Tunisia's less-than-democratic government is unfriendly to outspoken journalists is nothing new. But according to a story in OJR by Andrew Stroehlein, Tunisian authorities have recently expanded their policies of anti-free speech brutality to their first online journalist. Web publisher Zouhair Yahyaoui was arrested, allegedly tortured, and sentenced to two years in jail for "spreading false information" through his blog and news site TUNeZINE.

Jason Kottke is spending a month (?) in Paris. He seems to be appreciating the city of lights through his stomach, much to my vicarious delight.

From Thursday:

Except for the horse meat tartare
    I don't know what the hell we ate the last time we were here, but the food we've had the last few days in Paris has been nothing short of almost perfect. You can easily get food this good in San Francisco, but it's significantly more expensive, too Californian (would you like avocado with that?), and not quite as good. The secret ingredients are butter and cream.
    Addendum: This afternoon for lunch, we stopped at a little cafe not unlike every other cafe in Paris. Poulet et scalloped potatoes for 11 € (VAT + service included)...best chicken I've had in awhile. I hardly needed a beverage it was so juicy.

From last Sunday:

So good it'll make you wanna croque

    A croque monsieur is a sandwich consisting of two slices of white bread, ham, cheese, a bit of cream (or cheese) sauce, and yet more cheese melted over the top of it after the whole thing has been grilled. I somehow missed this miracle of French cuisine the last time around, but am taking full advantage of it now. I've even written a little song about it, quite unintentionally. It just popped into my head and every time I see le croque monsieur on the menu, I can't help singing it:

Croque Monsieur, Croque Monsieur
uh huh huh**, Croque Monsieur
(repeat)

A chart topper for sure.

** The "uh huh huh" here is what I think of as typical French grunting (gathered mostly from misrepresentions of snooty French characters in movies and cartoons), a sound that when followed by a "monsieur" could be thought of as playfully condescending in tone.

Meg  Hourihan is there too.

Le Colimaçon
44, rue Vieille du Temple
75004 Paris
48€ for two (one appetizer, two entrees, one dessert), with 1/2 bottle of wine

Wonderful dinner last night at Le Colimaçon right down the street from our apartment. I started with chèvre chaud aux figues, a salad of mixed greens with warm goat cheese melted on toasts accompanied by fresh figs and tomatoes. The balance of the figgy sweetness with the vinaigrette was absolutely perfect and every bite, especially when accompanied by the warm cheese, caused me to exclaim, "this salad is SOOO good!" For my main course I had confit de canard, a moist and tender drumstick and thigh of duck with cripy skin and juicy in its own fat. (For those keeping track at home, my vegetarianism suffered a fatal blow with my meal at the French Laundry and has never fully recovered.) This was accompanied by two cakes of grated potatoes and was rich and salty and moist and tender and simply wonderful.

I can't believe we simply stumbled into the place while wondering down the street looking for dinner. We selected it for two simple reasons: reasonable prices (under 20€ for entrees) and co-ed (the Marais has its share of gay bars and clubs, many of which seemed to be "going off" on Sunday night as we looked for a dinner place). If you're looking to eat in the Marais, I absolutely recommend this place for dinner. The only disappointment, which was slight, was the tarte tatin, which seemed less good only because I make it often at home. I'm looking forward to going back again, maybe even tomorrow!

Make me hungry for French food. I have to swing by Oakland's own Trio Bistro and Grill for some informal eating of hearty food with American portions at Lake Merritt.

From Seb's Open Research:

Wired has a list of books that are similar to Smart Mobs. Related books include:

• Digital Biology by Peter J. Bentley, 2001
• Beyond Chaos by Mark Ward, 2001
• Emergence by Steven Johnson, 2001
• The Moment of Complexity by Mark Taylor, 2001
• Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, 2002
• Nexus by Mark Buchanan, 2002
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, 2000
• Six Degrees by Duncan J. Watts, 2002

The Wired article summarizes the main contribution of each book. The general theme is that the role of the connections between objects in emerging networks can account for everything. Remember back to dynamic systems, differential equations and probability, no, well these are the basis along with biology for a new generation of patterns and ideas. [David Crow]

Do we need a book on emergent behavior in the blogosphere? On klognets?

Design hero Alan Cooper's advice.

Politeness isn't saying "Please" and "Thank you".

Polite software:

• is interested in me
• is deferential to me
• is forthcoming
• has common sense
• anticipates my needs
• is responsive
• is taciturn about its personal problems
• is well-informed
• is perceptive
• is self-confident
• stays focused
• is fudgable
• gives instant gratification
• is trustworthy

Cooper explains this tao of interaction design. I can see doing walkthroughs, testing the experience against these criteria.

Klogging calls for sharing information and klogs help with narrative, unstructured information. What about with structured information?

Stepping up to fill a gap in UserLand's Radio, eCriteria.net offers a web-hosted database to complement your blog. Not the first database service provider, but it may be the simplest. Standard, premium, and enterprise packages. DeadCellZones provides lookups by location.

Why isn't this built in to Radio? I want to blog a structured book list and book review using my writing tool. Sometimes. Movie reviews with a check box for "4-stars" and an auto link to the iMDB.org site. As part of a blog post. Syndicated with that post.

Why isn't this built in to manila? It runs on the frontier database and could easily do this work. Search my blog for movie reviews starring ...

Is this so far from the blogging vision that you can't include it?

I asked a fellow Ryzer, a PR veteran, what he thought of the ideas behind Rageboy's Gonzo Marketing book. "Frankly, I thought Cluetrain Manifesto was a waste of trees.... They guy sounded like a cranky hippie, not a real marketing consultant." 

Here's my description of Gonzo Marketing.

Lots of garbled rhetoric, a few gems here and there. This was Locke applying Clueful thinking to a practical business problem.

Key observations:

• Orgs communicate poorly, impersonally
• For every marketing or PR person with an axe to spin, a firm has dozens or thousands of employees, each with their own voice
• Authentic voices connect with customers in ways that are real, deeper, and longer lasting [sounds like a breath mint!]
• Organization boundaries aren't firm, fixed borders; they are open and porous since workers have outside lives and interests and minds of their own.

So:

• Sponsor tools, like bulletin boards, weblogs and listservs, so that everyone in your company can publish to the web. To the public web. Separate places for internal use too.
• Don't put restrictions on content beyond "be legal". You want to encourage people to blog about their interests and work, so their passions come through and they find their voices.

One example he gave: Enough folks working at General Motors were interested in gardening to create a vibrant community. They branded themselves but GM had a quiet and clear "sponsored by" logo. They drew others interested in landscaping and gardening. The discussion fora produced suggestions about improving the design of the pickup to better haul the bags of mulch etc. that these homeowners often do. New features, better sales. Side effect: within this community you got to know people through their online personality. So you felt safe asking them questions about your car or truck. And people did; person to person, outside of the usual channels. And GM workers were pleased to represent their firm, answered questions without scripts, and became agents of GM customers trying to find their way through the bland polished exterior corporate wall.

In the world of journalism, the idea is that out of 200,000 employees you should be able to find a handful that have deep knowledge on exactly whatever you want to talk about. Someone is the expert on tire wear in mountainous country for your Denver Post article. PR teams are usually experienced as a barrier (delaying but usually ineffective) to sources. The gonzo marketer (gonzo referring to authentic, personal voice) embraces this: exposes and acknowledges the diverse humanity of his firm.

Macromedia is trying something almost along these lines, a pilot I think. Each of their product ombudsmen (5 I think) started public blogs, writing about updates, new releases, common problems, competitors, most of it triggered externally by readers and and other bloggers. No draft-edit-review cycle; straight to web. (Sean Carton article)

Also the notion that when bloggers from your firm start hanging out online with the public, you create opportunities for new partnerships and alliances with the employers and friends of all those people. Might lead to joint ventures, communities of practice, sales, who knows.

My take:

Not intellectually rigorous or proven by evidence/experience. But the model appeals to me.

So is it hogwash? [I shudder to think where that term comes from.] Or clueful?

Anonymous at Blogcritics:

The pain! The pain!

CNN.com - 'Lost in Space' villain Jonathan Harris dies at 87 - Nov. 4, 2002.

Bummer. Lost in Space (the TV show, not the silly movie) was one of my favorite shows when I was growing up. I remember, once, when there was smoke pouring under the door to our apartment because the basement furnace caught fire, I got mad at my mother for making me leave the burning building. "But, mom! It's Lost in Space!"

Danger, Will Robinson!

Goodbye, Dr. Zachary Smith. imdb

[a klog apart Obituaries a la Blog]

51 or 49, Some Things Stay The Same. You may take the House, or the Senate. But you'll have to pry Britney from my cold, dead hands

Drafted in the spirit of motor voter and other civil rights laws, Californians spiked this version of Election Day Voter Registration. The opponents raised fears of fraud, even getting that word into Proposition 52's title. The con arguments are specious.

I think the three real reasons it died:  

1. Race discrimination. Don't want those darned immigrants voting.
2. Class discrimination.  
3. Procrastinator discrimination. We managed to get our registration in on time.

The Green, Libertarian, and other small parties siphon votes from the big two.

Did the small parties affect the House and Senate election results? Change the balance of power? Put control of the Presidency, House, Senate, and Judiciary in one party's hands for the first time in U.S. history?

The Independence Party seems earned votes equal to the margin of victory in Minnesota (but I have no idea if they come from the left or the right). Missouri is very close, and the Libertarian and Green parties drew the margin of victory there too. South Dakota's Libertarian vote is also equal to the margin of victory. 

I'm starting to appreciate the value of parliamentary politics. More inclusion for the little parties; they can throw their votes to the big party of their choice. Votes for the small party aren't thrown away, just invested. And the interests of the fractional parties are represented. Greens + Dems forming a voting block, Reform + Republicans form another, Libertarians swing both ways (depending). More voices in congress, maybe better problem solving.  

 [a klog apart public policy]

Would you pay $45 a year to address:

• Employer snooping into email, chat, shopping, file storage, music downloads.
• Fear of vague Internet risks (identity theft, hackers, cookies, profiling, viruses)
• Inconvenience (banners and pop-up ads)

Primedius offers three products to make you personally "cyber secure." From their site:

• WebTunnel (protecting your browser experience)
• Private anonymous surfing anytime, anywhere.
• Encrypted Traffic: Encrypts all traffic between your
  computer and the Primedius servers using SSL.  
• Works in Corporate Environments: Surf/Chat at
  work without your boss tracking you.
• Disable Censorship: Surf any website without being
  blocked by Corporate and ISP Proxies.
• Prevent monitoring: ISPs and network administrators
  cannot monitor or log your surfing.
• Download Media: Download mpeg, avi, jpeg, gif,
  mp3 and other files anonymously and securely.
• Hide IP: Shield your computer and prevents websites
  from 'harvesting' your computer's IP address.
• Kill Popups: Stop annoying popup windows.
• Ad blocking: Saves bandwidth by preventing
  advertisements from being downloaded.
• Control Cookies: Restrict life cycle or completely
  delete profiling cookies.
• SOCKS support: Use chat applications like MSN,
  Yahoo from work privately and securely. Also supports
  some other applications that can connect using SOCKS.
• Shop Online: Shop online sites with added privacy.
• Prevent Snooping: Prevent hackers from snooping
  on your browsing session.
   
• Primedius Email. Highly secure spam-free, virus protection, and user-specified filter options, simple to use
   
• InforSafe. X-Drive with encryption on high availability and redundant storage.

Competitor, sort of, is Anonymizer.com.

Is there a market?

Does Radio work with this type of security system?

[a klog apart technology]

David Fletcher wrote:

Governor Leavitt just introduced the new rollout of jobs.utah.gov, a website designed to reduce unemployment throughout the state.  The rollout was done at UPS where 200 new seasonal jobs are available, all online through the website.  Not only can people get online to search and apply for jobs, but employers have all kinds of functionality to view the applicant pool.  The Department of Workforce Services has also created online services for managing unemployment insurance for both employers and unemployed workers.

My questions re: jobs.utah.gov. 

• Do you automatically sign up everyone receiving unemployment insurance?
• The private sector duplicates the job order and resume bank features of your site. You don't charge for your site's basic services. Have you had feedback from industry about the competition?
   
• Do you accept cross posts from other job boards?
• Do you have to be living or doing business in Utah to use your board?
• Like most sites that ask users to fill out forms, I'd expect dropouts, a substantial failure-to-complete rate.What's your rate? What lessons have you learned?   
   
• Are your resumes reposted to America's Job Bank?
• Do you support HR-XML and automated job submission? The SIDES protocol?
• Do you expose search results as RSS for inclusion in other web sites? For example, the Alcoholic Beverage Control Department could list their openings on their home page without typing them twice. 
   
• Did you build your job board from scratch? What tools and sources did you use?
• Have you made your system open source, so other organizations can use your code?
• Do you see DWS being rebranded as jobs.utah.gov? 
   
• What have you done to make your system attractive and competitive with Monster and HotJobs?
• Given your quick start, what do you know about your early users? How many are in greater SLC vs. the rest of the state? Do they fit any particular age groups, occupational categories? 
   
• Other states have done this. What have you learned from their experience?
• How long did it take you to build? 
   
• What features that you really wanted didn't make it into Release 1?
• What user and usability testing did you do?
• How do you plan to market your site to draw job seekers? How will you draw employers? 
   
• What do you mean by job matching? How is it different than search?
• What database software are you using? What kind of hardware platform?
• Which office gave you the federal grant to build it?
• Did you build it in-house? 
   
• This being government, who signed off on final release?
• The fact sheet says jobs.utah.gov. is "part of a larger case management and employment exchange operating system." Can you describe the what it hooks up with and the integration?

[a klog apart staffing]

Don Strickland quotes Browning Ware:

Faith is the translation of difficulty into the language and action of hope. Faith receives, endures and transforms unattractive, even devastating, episodes and passages by the confidence that one's life has meaning that is grander than any awesome adversary. The substances of that meaning reside within us and our circumstances, but its fuller realization races beyond us.

Wiser travelers than I report that faith's potential pulses within us, but its source emanates from beyond us. It rises from springs of reality that are deeper than we are deep and reaches towards images of hope that we have not yet envisioned.

~ Browning Ware, Diary of a Modern Pilgrim

[a klog apart Obituaries a la Blog]

 

AK AL AR AZ CA CO CT DC DE FL GA HI IA ID IL IN KS KY LA MA MD ME MI MN MO MS MT NC ND NE NH NJ NM NV NY OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VA VT WA WI WV WY Incumbents (going into the November 5, 2002 Midterm Election) Governors Republicans 27 Democrats 21 Independent 1 Independence 1 Total 50 Senate Republicans 49 Democrats 49 Independents 2 Total 100 107th House Republicans 223 Democrats 208 (vacant offices) 3 Independent 1 Total 435 November 5, 2002 Midterm Election Results (undetermined = to be elected) Governors Democrats 10 Republicans 4 (undetermined) 36 Total 50 Senate Democrats 36 Republicans 29 Independent 1 (undetermined) 34 Total 100 108th House (undetermined) 435 Total 435

  The top row was before the election, the bottom row is during the election, stay tuned for after the election.  

Ross Mayfield blogs a pretty useful S+B article on social networks. 9 networks:

1. Trust
2. Advice
3. Communication
4. Work
5. Social
6. Innovation
7. Expert Knowledge
8. Career Guidance and Strategy
9. Learning

And:

• They run in parallel.
• They affect each other.
• There are patterns of emphasis among them.
• State transitions (evolution of emphasis) are predictable and can be influenced.

I need to read the original article and work my way back to original sources.

I've never understood mandatory sentences. Guidelines, maybe. Punishment should fit the crime, but not all crimes and criminals are equal. That's why judges and judgement are so important. California's Three Strikes law

The U.S. Supreme Court announced some of the cases they are hearing, including a test of three strikes. San Jose Mercury News. Miami Herald.

If you care about Roe V. Wade, the death penalty, civil liberties, you should care about the composition of the Supreme Court and the federal appeals courts.

Vote.

Cory Doctorow's review of Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs points to mobile phones (and their kin) as enablers of ad-hoc organization. An adhocracy is an organization with little or now structure; the opposite of bureaucracy.

I forgot about this. A quick peek in Chris Jarvis' Business Open Learning Archive points to Mintzberg's 1988 work on adhocracy, its formation, behavior, strategy, governance, and pitfalls. Responsive to customer and environmental factors, Mintzberg sees adhocracies as driven by operational concerns. More tactics than strategy. I don't want to quote his whole abstract, but it is worth reading the 3 screen-fuls.

This speaks directly to internal klognet behavior. Strategists in klognets are "pattern recognisers who adopt broad guidance on corporate intent and look for a strategic pattern emerging from their product/customer environment." 

 [a klog apart community ]

Phil Windley, CIO for the State of Utah, shares an insight.

I started to develop a vision for what an employee web site ought to have. ... The more I look at it, the less I see the difference between the kind of site a shared service organization like ITS or Fleet might build for its customers and the employee facing web site for the organization (like Innerweb).  They ought to be one and the same.

How clueful.

Remember "Markets are Conversations" from the Cluetrain Manifesto?

Add:

• "Labor Markets are Conversations" and
• "Workforces are Conversations"

 [a klog apart  staffing]

TVEyes sucks speech-to-text of most major radio and television networks. In real time. Type keywords. TVEyes alerts you when they are spoken. via IM, mobile phone, or email.

Now if they came as an RSS feed...

I like the clear product line definition: 3 keyword watches are free; all you can eat for $50 a year; and a value added pro edition.

They're assembling a massive repository of television history. And it is a private asset.

They're also selling this to people who record phone calls. Customer service departments, intelligence agencies. 

[a klog apart technology]

I'm skimming Rollings and Morris's Game Architecture and Design: Learn the Best Practices for Game Design and Programming.  I've always loved the challenges behind game design. The creative storytelling and experience design appeals to my arts and letters side. The modeling, simulation, code craft, rendering, networking etc. appeal to my inner geek. Some of the hardest work, the best in software, is done by game makers.

I have a lot to learn.

As a kid I took apart games for the Univac (written on punch cards and paper tape) and for the DEC RSTS and RSX operating systems. I learned lots of algorithmic thinking and six or seven different programming languages.

Infoworld caught CTOs learning from gaming technology. The cover package: CTOs learn to play a rich-media game.

• Enterprise Play: 

The gaming industry is a cauldron of technology innovation as companies heartily compete for billions of dollars in revenues from devoted users. But what's more, enterprise CTOs are taking notice of technologies coming out of this maturing "adolescent" industry. Game developers and publishers are solving complex issues amid a proving ground for technologies that can solve real-world problems -- making advancements in collaboration, peer-to-peer networking, and data delivery. Gaming is getting serious.

Gamers demand speedy data delivery, complex and realistic graphics, and interactive computing -all delivered seamlessly and via a variety of channels for a variety of platforms. In short, they want the best of what information technology can provide. And as gaming industry spending is expected to reach nearly $12 billion in 2002, according to Framingham, Mass.-based research company IDC, the incentive is there to provide it for the ever-growing number of gamers.

• Playing the broadband market shows enterprises learning about peak download management from gaming firms.  

• Entertaining links interviews a VP at EarthLink about their response to gaming traffic (peering), streaming (caching), wireless (keeping options open).

• Chad Dickerson writes "The show must grow on."  

As IT delivers more of the infrastructure for business communication, the CTO's role as orchestrator is increasingly critical. Whether the "show" is a streaming video news feed from Afghanistan on CNN or a Webcast auction from DoveBid, many of the IT requirements are essentially the same: thorough capacity planning, near-100 percent uptime, carrier redundancy, and delivering a high-quality customer experience.

Enterprises adopt late. All this coverage is of biz buying mature tech; technology the gaming biz piloted 2-3 years' ago, that the pornography business has evolved for a decade.

I'm excited by the innovations in work process, look and feel, gameplay, game balance, player cooperation, characters and plots, planning and software engineering.

The X-Box may become the enterprise PC replacement product in two or three years. Imagine how fun, how social, how gripping we can make tools for work! No, I mean it!

[a klog apart design]

So klognets are little ad-hoc communities in blogspace. Suppose you want to support and nurture them? What do you do?

Sift Online Communities Insider posted these key roles and tasks to the Knowledge Board's Communities of Practice SIG.

Amongst the key roles of the community management function are:

• A visible custodian of the user's experience on the site
• A focal point for the creation and development of both content and functionality
• A driver for 'added value' content and services
• A source of leadership, standards and 'netiquette'
• A pro-active stimulator for interest, engagement and participation
• A co-ordinator of partner relations, contributions and offerings
• A public champion for the site
• A strategic thinker capable of visioning, planning, reviewing, measuring and developing the community

Depending on the nature, role and audience of your community, the tasks associated with community management can be individually identified:

• Strategic planning
• Content management
• Member relations
• Value creation
• Event scheduling
• Partner relations
• Driving revenues

More details on each of the tasks, enough to create a job description.

As klognets are embraced by project management culture, project workers will step into these roles and do this work. Expect a variation of this description to become a project communication checklist.

[a klog apart community]

Michel Ickx wrote about Networks of Learning for the Knowledge Board last year.

Students are putting together, themselves, the material which will enable them to learn and to create true operative and ad hoc knowledge. [Phil: Sounds like klogging, doesn't it?] ... In our workshops for networking and collaborative work we go one step further. We reintegrate knowledge and action as we go. we call it "Learn-Do". ... The scope is to create ad hoc knowledge in order to control new processes oriented to more creative objectives, selected and agreed by the team.

You remember more of what you do than what you see or hear. 

You get rapid feedback on how well you learned and the quality of knowledge work.

Now, if the group of students develops its own knowledge and puts it into practice, isn't the group the best judge? Shouldn´t it decide which level of excellency has been attained or not? And also the level of performance of its members? Shouldn´t those members express, in all transparency, their level of preparation and success, without the need of judges or "experts", since they did not learn from those masters? This leds us to develop a group C.V., or “Multi-CV”.

A group curriculum vitae! What a brilliant idea!

Some implications:

• Rethink the design of "skills" databases in job boards and performance reviews.
• Rethink what we teach kids to include skills for collaborative learning.  
• Remove obstacles to self organization.
• Devalue and amortize archived knowledge faster. Manuals, documentation, curricula.
• eLearning services must push curriculum development and grading to the students.
• Merge education and action into one process.
• Make Learn-Do a continuous activity.  

Learn-Do. A process for klogging.  

[a klog apart klogs]

hi my name is sam,
i draw pictures, from your titles. send me a title, or any thing else you want to talk to me about to: sambrown@explodingdog.com

Some drawings are silly, others profound. All delightful.

Sam is building conversations in a unique way.

No reason you can't apply this to other media, other work.

CAD drawings. Caricatures.

Singing a song. Narrating a voice over.

Copy editing. Headline writing.

Writing lyrics to a song title. Shooting a video to a song.

Problem assessment. Library reference. Tech support (we've seen stuff like that).

Sam's conversation is short: title and response. Some of his conversations seem to be recursive: new titles that result from earlier drawings.

That's fun. Simple. Like his drawings.

But there's room for more.

Can you see a blog that puts 60 seconds of music to each Exploding Dog drawing?

Another that builds a poem on top of that?

Someone else that finds three news stories that complement the rest?

Another that migrates these to Flash animation?

Make it easy to migrate all sorts of work product into blogs.

To be aware and sensitive to ripples of presence in my social fabric.

[a klog apart klogs]

anil dash:

I wasn't going to write about it, but I can't seem to stop thinking about it, so maybe writing it out will get it out of my head... I'm surprised just how affected I am by Jam Master Jay's passing. You probably already know, if you didn't before, that he was the DJ For Run-DMC. Jason Mizell was also a husband and father of three children.

The thing I can't get past is that, from his hands, to my ears, there was a sound that changed how I saw music.  more...

[aka obituaries a la blog]