Threads on Twitter Pages

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

If you’re like me and still use the Twitter web interface for at least some of your tweet consumption, you might like this great little [[GreaseMonkey]] script: “Nested Twitter Threads” by Pratham Kumar.

When you’re reading tweets on the Twitter site, the script recursively grabs the previous messages in any @reply threads on the page, and inserts them in-place on the web page.

nested-twitter-replies-pratham-20090223

Because Twitter doesn’t actually track threads, Nested Twitter Threads has the same problem as other Twitter threaders do, that it uses the most recent previous post as the reply, but it generally works okay, and having the thread right there on the Twitter page is really super.

Via Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb (who also has a link there to more info about Greasemonky, if you need that).

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Franke James – Dinner with a Stranger

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

“If you got an email from a stranger, who said they’d donate $200 to a charity of your choice if you had them to a vegetarian dinner, would you say yes?”

That’s the question Franke James answers for herself, in her dinner with a stranger blog post.

It’s a great story, and if you haven’t seen Franke’s blog, her graphic blog posts are worth it just for the visual presentation.

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Blogging Again

Friday, February 13th, 2009

I haven’t been blogging in a long time.  I’m going to start again.  Wish me luck!

I want to try something a little different than just well-formed posts with good narrative.  I plow through lots of interesting stuff in the course of a day; perhaps I can capture some of that into my blog.

I’ve gone back and forth wondering if the topics and formats I might post might be too diverse or miscellaneous to make a good, readable blog.  I thought about posting to multiple blogs, or in different formats like a tumblelog, but I think I’ll just stick to one blog and one wiki for now, and see how it goes.

Old archives: I have a number of posts and wiki pages from years past archived, which I’ll go dig up and add to the new archives here someday.  But not right now – first I’ll get cracking on new entries.

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Music and Progression

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006

I was telling a friend about Pandora, a magical Internet music service that can tell what kind of music you like.

You have to give it a little bit of a push to get it going — you tell it an artist or a song you like, and then it starts playing more songs like that. As you go, you can tell it which songs you really like or don’t like, and it quickly adapts to keep you listening to music you like. Pandora knows which songs are similar because they’ve had professional musicians score each song on a wide variety of variables to fingerprint it. The method is much more precise than grouping by genres, or even by artists — sometimes an artist will play something out of genre, and Pandora’s method easily picks that up.

When I first tried it, I was amazed for good number of hours — it’s very cool. I was sure I was going to subscribe.

Pandora’s music database is pretty extensive, but I did start to hit the edges of it. The real killer, though, was that while it did a good job of playing a certain kind of music, it didn’t know how to vary the mood (what Muzak used to call “stimulus progression”) — which ended up being very fatiguing.

I abandoned Pandora, and looking for something with similar gratification qualities, played with last.fm for a while. Not quite as amazing, but it was still really cool to type something like “jpop” into the keyword search and just listen to a certain kind of music. I heard some things that were just okay, and some things I really loved, but in any case, music I would have never heard before.

I’m looking forward to when these services get a little smarter, like a human DJ, and can shape a progression of mood, and also know how to surprise and delight me with things that aren’t the same as before, but that I still like.

(So I can keep track: adapted from a post to Words-L, “Re: Have we talked about…”, 2006-01-24.)

Continued reading >

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On Asking Questions

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

I wanted to collect together a couple of random things about asking questions on the ‘net. I don’t have comments, just want to get them out of my Firefox tabs and think about them again later. :-)

Spartanicus, in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets:

“Welcome to usenet, post a url here and you may find that we will discuss
the problems with it. If that includes what you were asking about,
consider yourself lucky.

We don’t raise these issues to put you down, but to draw your attention
to real problems.”

Mark Pilgrim,

Why we won’t help you if you haven’t validated your HTML.

Eric Raymond,

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

Adina Levin,

The Raymond Rule, coining a term for making sure to exhaust all resources on your own before asking for help; we’ve had some interesting discussions on the sociology of this, related to geek/non-geek and gender.

On words-l, we’ve got an opposite tradition, encapsulated by the acronym “IMFTATL” (It’s More Fun To Ask The List). Asking questions, even obvious ones, and getting interesting answers and comments is a good social bonding there.

Continued reading >

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Web Monday Silicon Valley

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Tim Bonnemann transplanted the best of the informal tech get-together from Silicon Valley to Europe, and now back again!

Tonight we had a very successful Web Montag Silicon Valley at Socialtext Headquarters in Palo Alto. About 35 people showed up, and listened raptly to cool demos and talks:

All together, the talks made a nice portrait of the future of the web and hypertext. I had a flashback to our recent Wiki Wednesday, too, when Jeremy Ruston did his great TiddlyWiki demo — it fits right into the same next generation web presented tonight.

I started notes on SubEthaEdit and Mark Wubben joined in, and I’ve posted the notes to the Web Montag wiki: Web Montag 14.08.2006 Silicon Valley Notes. I apologize if I didn’t get your name right; if you were there, please edit the notes to improve them! :-)

Continued reading >

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Wikimania Day 2 – Yochai Benkler Plenary

Saturday, August 5th, 2006

Benkler summarized his book The Wealth of Networks for us, in 30 minutes. :-) (You can link from there to the book’s wiki, and PDF or HTML copies of the book to download.)

The punch line of course is that networked computers enable peer production; he goes further and says we’ll have greater individual human agency, and that social sharing and exchange give us the opportunity to re-shape and improve our economies and more importantly, our democracies, over the next 30 to 50 years.

In the Q&A afterwards, we had the beginning of an interesting debate. Jason Calacanis asked Benkler about the Calacanis-Benkler disagreement. I’m not sure they’re disagreeing as much as talking about different things. The moderator, Andrew Lih, cut short the discussion to make sure we could get to the next speaker on time, but it was the beginning of an interesting electric moment; it would be great if someone could get Jason and Yochai together to debate and discuss at length in some other venue. They’re both bright, and at the core, good-hearted, and because they see the world from different points of view they’ve got good productive friction.

Continued reading >

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Wikimania Plenary – Larry Lessig on Free Culture

Friday, August 4th, 2006

Lessig, of course, rocks. He gave a great plenary, which I can’t do justice to in a blog post. It’s worth finding video of the session to see it, though.

The storyline: The 20th century, with its read-only labor, culture and politics, was weirdly totalitarian. The 21st century is a revival of a different (normal, given history) way to organize and produce within society. To fulfill this, we all need to practice free culture, and demand support of it.

He talked about a new thing, the problem that the various free culture licenses are not interoperable yet. (Interoperability – value diversity and opportunity over control.) This causes problems because it creates islands of free content that can’t be mixed together. So he suggests we set up a body — he recommends the Software Freedom Law Center — that can certify licenses as “close enough” and then have the various license providers add compatibility clauses to existing licenses so derivative works can be relicensed to a “close enough” license.

Out-takes, quotes:

  • commodity layers invite competition
  • PD-Wiki
  • Written language, words, is the Latin of our times. The language of the people today is video.

Continued reading >

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Wikimania – Chris presents BarCamp

Friday, August 4th, 2006

“BarCamp – the wiki of events”

Chris Messina is presenting. starts with some background about himself, and then how BarCamp got started.

First there was Foo Camp at O’Reilly’s campus in Sebastopol. Foo pioneered the ad hoc camp, but after a couple of iterations, not everyone could fit any more; O’Reilly’s space wasn’t infinite.

Tantek Çelik, Andy “Termie” Smith, Ryan King, Matt Mullenweg, Eris Stassi, and Chris wanted to have their own event, if they couldn’t make it to Foo Camp.

Tools: blogging; email & lists; IRC & IM; plazes; wiki

Plazes was where Ross and Andy bumped into each other, and Ross volunteered the Socialtext offices, so now they had a venue.

6 days

6 people

no experience

volunteers + $2500

= 300 people – $8.50/person!

= a really good time

Everything was documented on the wiki.

The rules of barcamp:

  • talk about it
  • blog about it
  • if you want to present, write your topic and name in a presentation slot
  • three word intros (
  • as many presentations at one time as the facilities (and even surroundings) allow for
  • no pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists, no PowerPoint
  • presentations go on as long as they have to, or until they run into another slot
  • if this is your first time at a BarCamp, you HAVE to present, or help someone else present

The Grid: a big, interactive sheet of paper with smaller pieces of paper taped on it

A culture of inclusivity – everyone participates, including remotely.

It spread from there — 30 or 35 barcamps in the last 11 months!

Future: BarCamp Earth on the 1 year anniversary — be there or be square.

I ask a question: how can you inject a little BarCampness into a staid, existing conference? Chris talks about BarCampSanFranciso, which was run right after Supernova. Kevin Werbach, the Supernova organizer, contacted Tantek and Chris to . Other examples: BarCamp Etech, OSCamp at Oscon, a pre-session at TED.

Chris says BarCamps end up being locally-focused and energize local communities.

Question: how well does BarCamp translate to other cultures (non-geek, for instance). Chris says it will translate well because it has already, and talks about a bunch of different kinds of camps that have happened (I didn’t type the list, darn). Event registration, Mollyguard, Wild Apricot.

Question: plazes? Chris gives a short demo.

We talk a little bit about wikis and camps. BarCamps feel a lot like a physical wiki; everyone gets involved in every part of the conference, including sessions, cleanup, etc. On the other hand, wikis have had trouble scaling, staying pertinent between events, etc. (there’s room for growth and innovation here).

BarCamp is a Community Mark. There’s no legal standing for this, but the community defends the mark. “Community response protects the mark.” “Sort of the Creative Commons of trademark.” There can be hacks of the mark, like BarCampTexas, which are okay if the community thinks they’re okay.

Question: how do you keep the local community energized after they get jazzed by a BarCamp? In 6 months, or a year? Chris and Tara talk about different local places where the community keeps it going, but it happens much more frequently, every week or every month, with dinners or other get-togethers.

Related: tequp, BrainJams, Coworking (getting it started so people can participate now, figuring out the way the expenses get paid, the “business model” if it could be called that for an open sort of org, later)

Continued reading >

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Wikimania Starts – Jimbo’s Keynote

Friday, August 4th, 2006

Jimmy Wales is giving the Wikimania keynote. He started to good effect by showing a video of Steven Colbert talking about Wikipedia and editable reality, which was a funny way to kick things off. (I happen to be sitting in the front row between two friends and superb bloggers, David Weinberger and Ross Mayfield, both of whose fingers are flying as they write up a blog post; I’m taking advantage of the situation to try to get a little bit better blogging myself.)

Jimmy talks about Wikipedia news from this year, and new Wikimedia stuff:

  • article milestones, in hundreds of thousands of articles in each of a number of language
  • the Seigenthaler incident – Jimmy deadpanned, “Apparently, there was an error in Wikipedia.” Of course, it was a nasty error, but it got fixed quickly; he talked about having to be on CNN to explain why Wikipedia might have errors, and how they’ll also get fixed. He shows a great graph comparing CNN and Wikipedia’s traffic at the time; CNN goes down, Wikpedia goes way up
  • the good news of the Nature article comparing Wikipedia favorably with Britannica
  • but also, he talks soberly about the background of the Nature comparison; Wikipedia got a little lucky in the comparison, because they picked science articles, not culture or something, and Wikipedia got started with geeks; they only evaluated errors, not writing style; and they picked articles that were roughly the same size as Britannica’s, instead of stubs. Wikipedia’s going to keep getting better, though
  • Wikimedia Foundation is up to five employees
  • Brad Patrick, general counsel and “interim CEO”
  • Wikia funding, they were careful to pick investors, and let “a significant portion of our investment funds authorized to be used to support Wikimedia”
  • Campaigns Wikia
  • Wikipedia being the first element of the content repository for One Laptop Per Child
  • board approving Wikiversity
  • creating a formal Advisory Board, to interface with other institutions and the rest of the world
  • Socialtext and Wikimedia working together to integrate Wikiwyg, our open-source what-you-see-is-what-you-get Wiki editing interface into Mediawiki. He told a sweet story of a friend who could have made great contributions to Wikipedia, but found she couldn’t because of the wikitext interface; he thinks Wikiwyg is going to be really important at helping more people contribute to Wikipedia. Right on!
  • quality initiative – concentrating from growth and concentrate more on quality
  • for instance, working on WP:BIO, better policies and taking a strong stand against unsourced claims, especially negative claims
  • better image inclusion policies, especially concentrating on using freely-redistributable images
  • “stable versions” – something that’s had a lot of thought, especially in German Wikpedia. simultaneously achieve two goals: let anyone edit things at any time, but also having a good stable article version for general public view. “One of the most important things we can do” to improve quality and the experience for general users.
  • update on his 10 things from last year. I’m going to let other people blog each of these, but during the update of one of them, Jimmy said something funny, just the phrase “mission accomplished”. He said, “I guess I shouldn’t say that — it used to be a perfectly good English phrase, and now it’s ruined.” He paused, and then said that maybe it does fit: “Mission accomplished but there are still skirmishes every day.”

There’s time for one question: the policy of not having commercial information providers. I beg you to let vendors have one paragraph summaries about their products and services. Jimmy says this is sort of like the biography situation, and may take similar policies, and that this sort of decision is up to the editors and the community, of course.

Oh, time for other questions. Support for stable versions in the Mediawiki software itself? Jimmy says to talk to the tech folks like Brion and the German technical folks, but there’s just some simple support required to flag an article’s stable version. Jimmy emphasizes again that stable versions is something folks should really talk about here, because it’s really important, and suggests the technical folks do the simplest, quickest thing that would work, instead of trying to get a perfect solution right away.

The next question is about the ability for e.g., Wikiversity to promote the reputation of people who are good but wouldn’t usually get respect. Jimmy gives kind of a general answer, but compares free culture / wiki culture to the interstate system; it’ll change the rules and as a result, society.

A good keynote, lots of good updates, and Jimmy’s got a nice friendly, funny style.

Continued reading >

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