I’ll be presenting Thursday evening to the Berkman Blog Group. It’s kind of an honor, since I really don’t see myself as one. I associate with bloggers, I befriend them, I research their methods… and I hope they don’t mind if they accept me as different.
Language/Structure
Presenting some sloggership at the Berkman Blog Group tonight, 3/13/2008
by Jon Garfunkel on March 13, 2008. Internet Language/StructureAn XML Schema for the News Experience
by Jon Garfunkel on November 5, 2007. Media Language/StructureIn an ideal publication, every online article has a consistent URL format, which remain permanent, and every article allows threaded comments. In reality, few major newspapers follow these simple rules. This alone partly explains the popularity of weblog and CMS platforms like Drupal (used here), which support these. (Incidentally, Clark Hoyt announced yesterday that the Times will be supporting comments on every article.)
CodeZoner
by Jon Garfunkel on September 9, 2007. Media Language/StructureOver the last year I’d learned through my work on compliance software about the Global Rules Information Database (now organized under the Object Management Group’s Governance Risk & Compliance Roundtable).
BPM, SOA falling to the LCD (a case for lowercase)
by Jon Garfunkel on June 26, 2007. Language/StructureI work in an industry segment where our software revolves around not one, but two, TLA's (Three-Letter Acronyms). They are BPM (Business Process Management) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). The headline writers in the trade press love them, the names sometimes just function as "Brad and Angelina" due in the celebrity magazines. If there is room in the cosmic plan for Brad and Angelina to stay together, why not BPM and SOA?
Intellipedia Oversight
by Jon Garfunkel on March 26, 2007. Language/Structure United StatesI had some questions for the Intellipedia project, the wiki-based, open-editable encyclopedia for use in the U.S. intelligence community.
I’m a bit late in responding to Clive Thompson’s article Open Source Spying in the New York Times Magazine from December. Naturally the subtitle "Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?” caught my eye, due to my work in teasing out the different claims of technology boosters claiming to have solved the larger problems of information retrieval. Case in point? It’s not just the ability to find information; I was able to find the article by giving Google the search terms Thompson Times Magazine. I also needed to evaluate the quality of that article, and whether any information was out of date. That problem is hard (ie., not yet automated). The blogs, by themselves, don’t do anything at all to solve it. The favored blog search engine, Technorati, lists 341 blog posts linking back. How do I find the needle in that haystack? (Wikipedia was at least helpful by suggesting related sources for Intellipedia.) The general problem of a blog community as an echo-chamber I have discussed at length in the New Gatekeepers series of two years ago.
Deval Patrick’s Issues
by Jon Garfunkel on March 25, 2007. Language/Structure Politics MassachusettsI caught wind before the weekend of Governor Deval Patrick’s bid to freshen up his image by unveiling a new website.
Dan Kennedy asks why he didn’t do it on Mass.gov?
I suppose it’s simply easier for him to post the information there. And the discussion on Blue Mass Group basically confirms this. But let’s look at the details:
The LetterVox: a proposal for handling letters to the editor
by Jon Garfunkel on June 27, 2006. Media Language/StructureDo Process: Notes from the Beyond Broadcast conference
by Jon Garfunkel on May 18, 2006. Broadcast Language/Structure
Notes from the Gilbane Conference on Content Management
by Jon Garfunkel on May 14, 2006. Internet Language/StructureHere’s a write-up of what I learned in the sessions at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management in San Francisco two week ago.
It is not a complete account for a number of reasons. First, I was unable break the laws of physics and attend every session. Second, I didn’t take as detailed notes as I should have, but this exercise should encourage me once again to do so. Third, I’m reserving some information for the entity that sponsored my attendance to the conference, my employer.
Conference Markup — techniques and technologies
by Jon Garfunkel on May 2, 2006. Media Language/StructureIt inevitably follows that in becoming a man of letters– a title which should encompass both "personal publisher" and "freelance researcher"– one has to keep in mental shape by going to a conference every now and then to meet and greet. This impulse is checked only by the need to anchor oneself at the home office to actually get some work done. My home office shared my interest in my going to this particular conference, the Gilbane Conference on Content Management, so I ventured to San Francisco for the opportunity to do so.
Constructive Media
by Jon Garfunkel on April 20, 2006. Media Language/StructureWhen I started the civilities project over two years ago, my aim was to put forth a cohesive theory of communications media to underlie my software work. I called the theory constructive media. The ensuing research has helped me validate it, which, for the passing time, was more important than selling it. I have not till now revisited the original definition, so I will preserve that on its own, and replace it with the definition here.
RSS Quest: In the Middle… 2001-2004
by Jon Garfunkel on January 23, 2006. Internet Language/StructureToday, a typical publisher demonstrates their RSS savvy by the amount of flavors they support, including RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom– not by the depth of richness of metadata that comes with the feed. None offer support for categorization, threading, discussions through RSS. Blog posts represented in RSS feeds remained really simple. And that was Winer’s vision. Most of the personal publishing that reached millions on the web derived from his style of weblogging (the pure journaling/diary-writing developed independently later, according to chronicler Rebecca Blood).
RSS Quest: In the Beginning, 1999-2001
by Jon Garfunkel on January 23, 2006. Internet Language/StructureIn March 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape introduced RSS as alternative way of bringing content to users; it stood RDF Site Summary or subsequently, Rich Site Summary. Just how “rich” it would be– how much structure through the RDF Resource Data Framework to employ– was open to discussion. The basic premise of syndication was to deconstruct web content content into its logical components: headline, title, publication time, author, content, in order to be re-assembled by the user. It was a bit of a fluke for its time: websites were trying to be ever more flashy and interactive, and RSS undermined that experience somewhat.
The Yin to Social Software’s Yang
by Jon Garfunkel on November 15, 2005. Language/StructureLast night I stopped by the Symposium for Social Architecture, sponsored by Corante and the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School (I hosted one of the panelists, and another one crashed on my couch following a red-eye flight from San Francisco). The “social architecture” up for discussion is really about social software, which has proved to be a very useful term for framing contemporary Internet technology. I was curious about how it should apply for businesses and other community of practice, and whether it is all-encompassing. But first, I wanted to make sure I had a complete understanding of what the term has meant over time.
Evolving Community at Radio Open Source
by Jon Garfunkel on November 1, 2005. Broadcast Language/StructureSummer of Ignorance turns to Fall of Media
by Jon Garfunkel on September 20, 2005. Media Language/StructureI’m returning from my summer break away from writing. As I hinted three months ago, I’d be on a bit of a break for a while– work had gotten pretty intense, and I was in the process of moving across town (which caused two outages of over a day last month: one by my poor planning, one by Verizon’s mistake in fixing my phone line), and then setting up the new place. And I wanted to get some normal sleep.
Choosing the architecture for a community website
by Jon Garfunkel on July 1, 2005. Internet Language/StructureNormative And Narrative — Styles, Platforms, Usage
by Jon Garfunkel on June 17, 2005. Media Language/StructureMistakes were made: can we change site syndication?
by Jon Garfunkel on June 12, 2005. Internet Language/StructureFixing a Blog In Time – Bob’s response
by Jon Garfunkel on June 7, 2005. Media Language/StructureYesterday I posted the article Fixing a Blog in Time, which was a little experiment in reading a particular blog, and trying to understand how it covered 26 different posts over a period of a little over two weeks. I chose Robert Cox's The National Debate. I did not make fully clear, with each post, how much I was mixing my initial impression of reading it with subsequent understandings. This begs a larger discussion about the tradeoffs inherent in impressionistic news.
Bob sent me the following response via email this evening. I post it in full here with my brief reactions interjected.
Fixing a Blog In Time
by Jon Garfunkel on June 7, 2005. Internet Language/Structure
How to do online interviews?
by Jon Garfunkel on June 6, 2005. Media Language/StructureInterview with Brian Keeler of ePluribusMedia
by Jon Garfunkel on June 5, 2005. Media Language/StructureLessons Learned: Two Hundred Posts
by Jon Garfunkel on June 2, 2005. Language/StructureIt’s now my 200th post. My hundredth post was a year ago. It took me five months to get to that first hundred. I don’t expect to keep up that pace in the next year. But I have a hunch that many of you– my regular readers, which includes 54 bloglines subscribers— would like me to. I really want to get back to the coding that I put off a year ago. I’m looking to people to help contribute editorial content. I’ll explain in the next part what I’m looking for, but I just want to expend a few words sharing with you how Civilities has evolved. Plus links to thirty-one pieces, some of which you may have missed.
The New Gatekeepers
by Jon Garfunkel on May 17, 2005. Media Language/StructureThe New Gatekeepers Part 1: Changing of the Guard
by Jon Garfunkel on April 4, 2005. Media Language/StructureFirst in a series on The New Gatekeepers.
Social Media Scorecard
by Jon Garfunkel on March 29, 2005. Internet Language/StructureQuestions for Participatory Media
by Jon Garfunkel on March 27, 2005. Internet Language/StructureComparative Studies of Blogs and Other Online Journalism
by Jon Garfunkel on March 15, 2005. Media Language/StructureDeconstructing Blogs: Presenting Blogger Archetypes
by Jon Garfunkel on February 24, 2005. Internet Language/Structure
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