…is not the only thing that computers and submarines have in common:
“The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim” – Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
Category: Blog watch
CTRL-D: Hypergene have got blog.
New required-reading for the revolution. The Hypergene collective, who a couple of years back authored the prescient, provocative and still-inspiring “Amazoning the news” whitepaper, have got themselves a blog.
Tagline: “News from the bottom-up: All about Participatory Journalism – how audiences are changing the future of news and information.”
>>CTRl-D
Tanya Pixelcharmer has dug up a bunch of stuff on ‘Social Informatics’. Queued.
Webb Ex Machina
Matt’s on a remote Scottish island, enjoying a holiday without his iBook. So how come he’s still posting morsels to his blog? As Tom points out, the timings of the posts is suspiciously non-human.
Webb’s talked about setting up BlogVatars before, and it looks like he’s gone and done it. Nice.
Blogwalking
Towards a toolkit for smartmobs. Geoblogging/swarming/referring-mining and other little mindbombs in this post:
“A strange little idea I had on the way home today: Movable Type on a Sharp Zaurus equipped with wireless ethernet? Or maybe Bloxsom if/when it has static publishing? Just use rsync to publish whenever the thing finds itself on a network, wireless or otherwise. Maybe that happens while you’re out Warwalking – better yet, maybe that wireless network detector you cobbled together autoblogs what it finds while in your pocket.
But, beyond that, I wonder what else having your blog in your pocket might give you?”
» 0xDecafbad: Zauri, BlogWalking, Smart Mobs and other oddities [thanks, Marko!]
1-800-HOW-AM-I-BLOGGING
Lee and Paul, the Jay and Silent Bob of client-side code have been cooking up some excellent stuff.
Paul wrote a plug-in for MoveableType that performs statistical analysis on the words in each blog entry, including measures of readability.
Lee has taken this and now outputs a little bar-graph measure of how readable each post on his blog is. Lovely!
One lazyweb idea:
- take a RSS blogroll/subscriptions list
- take all the feeds, run them through a statistical word analysis and apply readbility index.
- pump out a little graph/blogroll to your site of who is being readable that day.
Other thoughts on this as a feedback mechanism – how will this affect Lee’s writing? How could you marry this readability information with more subjective measures, such as reader-ratings, or frequency of posts (e.g. if you’re liveblogging from a conference, or taking notes live on a PDA as Lee often does, you might want to compensate)
Smart and sexy-looking.
Interconnecting
Matt Webb had three weetabix this morning. He’s just posted a summation of stuff on ‘semantic/social substrate’ that’s been bubbling away inside him for a while.
Tying-in old Webb hits such as the isomorphic nature of interfaces, with some new material like the loam-thing, and the now-popular pub-riff: ‘how to make blogchalking actually work’:
“I’d like to see a grand conversation between the authors of publishing tools pinning down the properties weblogs need to fulfil their potential, and then building these in invisibly for the user. Because weblogs have yet to expand as much as they will, and when they do their course will be hard to change. The future has to be built now, in this microcosm, in this monobloc.”
Petafloptimism 
