Categoria: Web & Interfaces

A long article by Clay Shirky about Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality has been creating a great buzz in BlogLand these days (see insteresting reactions by Dave Winer or Mark Pilgrim)

While I find interesting the observation about power laws on a wide range of community as BBSs, mail-list, newsgroup and websites compared to weblogs I notice that a real serach for causes of inequality is missing. Clay observes that for the sole reason that a first blogger is linked by a second blogger, a third blogger is inducted in linking the first one.

This of course can lead to a sort of “automatic fame” in a pyramidal way but it misses a point: the content of the majoriry of the bloggers' posts is news.

News are not in an infinite number every day (even though there are many) so when the well-known bloggers have posted the same news references the game is over, at least for newbies. Lazyness, shyness and other reasons prevent the less-known blogger to say something new, to search for a not-so-referenced news or to create something original, even only by commenting that news.

In other words, being a blogger means having something to say and it is not so easy when the blogger world is so largely populated and you are a newcomer. News aggregators are a great tools but often they could transform you in a mere news-firer, not an original content producer.

This is why I mean my blog as my personal notebook, for 3, 5 or 3500 readers, it doesn't matter 🙂

HelloWorld is a project for a Desktop replacement. It looks very interesting (check the screenshots), something I would definetly like to play with. What I'm wondering is how much will it take to move from one visual metaphor to another. In history of computing it has never happened: we moved from command line, which was not visual, to icons, windows, menus and trash cans back in 1984 and we are still here, with just a few more colors and soft shadows behind our windows. [via MacSlash] [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

I tried to forget this news before Paolo's post reminded me of it. I'm afraid I can't avoid to try this new multi-media/multi-source way of looking at my virtual desktop. 🙂

Un'interessante riflessione di Mark Pilgrim

Auto-content. Why does this cite-link-quote (“hit-and-run”) style of weblogging need to be a manual process at all? Why can't I just click an “auto-content” button and have my software automatically generate a list of, say, a dozen interesting links and quotes culled from my aggregator subscriptions, “neighboring” sites, sites discussing the hot topics of the day, and mainstream articles reporting on a small hard-coded list of additional topics? (678 words) [dive into mark]

mette in evidenza l'eccesso di automatismo dei meccanismi di weblog: tra notizie, trackback e altre amenità, propone di eliminare del tutto l'intervento umano.

Ecco la rassegna stampa più completa che il mio news aggregator mi ha offerto:

SQL virus reports.

7AM Pacific. Heard a report on NPR that some kind of Internet-wide denial of service attack is underway. They quote Microsoft saying it's serious. If you have more information, esp Web pages I can point to, please post a comment on my Radio weblog. Thanks.

Reports: CNN, BBC, Slashdot, Beta News, Google.

Freedom.Org: “Quick fix is to firewall port 1434/UDP traffic, and reboot the affected SQL servers.”

Slashdot: “If you run Microsoft SQL Server, make sure the public Internet can't access it.”

Beta News: “The attack used a buffer overflow to execute code on a vulnerable SQL Server, causing that system to randomly seek out other computers to infect and in the process consume massive amounts of bandwidth.”

Anne Bradstreet: “If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”

[Scripting News]

Dive into Internet-no-more-free

Premium. Announcing “Dive Into Premium”, a subscription-based service to get the most out of “dive into mark” and other sites in the “Dive Into” empire. Click here for more details on this exciting offer. (173 words) [dive into mark]

Reading this full lenght parody is making me really ROTFL! 🙂