Ruminations, Haunts, and Errors

Even before we packed up and moved, I had been finding it increasingly difficult to keep the commentary flowing here due to an ever-growing backlog of items that might be worthy of comment. Various time pressures over the last two months have only made that backlog bigger, and thus even more daunting to attack. Previously I looked to del.icio.us, Flock, various Firefox extensions, and Google Reader in attempts to tame the tide, and more recently I’ve taken Google Notebook and NewsGator for spins. Yet still I find that each has some significant flaw that prevents me from bending the tools, individually or collectively, to my will.

Last night, in one of those just-before-sleep epiphanies, it occurred to me that I can lay a good portion of the blame on the trends of the last few years. It may sound as if I’m pawning off my lack of tool wizardry (or writing discipline) off on the coders, but in fact I’m actually absolving them somewhat for their failure to meet my expectations.

What I’ve been seeking is a way to take various links, shove them off into a nice semi-private corner somewhere with notes (or not) and tags (or not), and then export it all to a format for final editing and posting once a critical mass of ideas has formed from those tidbits and my wandering thoughts. Seems simple enough, right: that’s essentially how essays, lectures, dissertations, and novels have been developed for centuries. Trouble is that this workflow seems to run counter to the prevailing wisdom that the most important things are to get everything out there now and completely in the open. Now, I’m all for transparency, openness, and discussion in various realms, but most people would consider it rude (at best) to simply blurt out every single half-baked thought as soon as it comes to mind; it is far better (not to mention quieter and easier to handle!) to release to public scrutiny thoughts that have been developed and strengthened after some review and comparisons with other facts and ideas. Yet this seems anathema to many of the blogozealots who are driving the technology forward, as they ridicule the ‘quaint’ traditional-media types who–gasp–wish to collect and analyze facts and opinions off in a quiet corner before publishing stories, insisting instead that it’s far better to just get it all out there right away and let the ensuing fracas sort things out.

So, against this backdrop it’s no wonder that the current tools to scour and repopulate the web, for all their Atom/CSS-compliant, pretty AJAX goodness, are much better at generating information than insight. I think the problem has been a focus on links (and labels, more recently) as vital entities at the expense of the conceptual and temporal connections between them, which is sad really because the true power of what Berners-Lee begat was not the hyperlink itself but the ability to connect ideas more quickly easiliy than had been available before. Would that the developers crafting the next revisions of all these tools I’m trying to figure out take to heart the idea that people are looking for a way to collect stories and images not merely to craft a collection but to see new meaning emerge from that collection.

It’s now been a month since I switched over to Google Reader, and as could probabaly be expected I’ve found various behaviors annoying once the novelty wore off. I suppose a lot can simply be chalked up to its beta status, and certainly there have been new and nifty features added (like the scriptlet that now shows the last few starred items in the RHE sidebar at left).

However, as I struggled to wade through a backlog (nearly 800 from just two days!) of items last weekend, while still ruminating on an article on tagging from SXSW, I found myself mildly irritated that these two salient components of the web-as-platform wave are still so sorely lacking in perhaps the most useful measure from the human perspective: semantics. Some examples of where the current common tools are appallingly lacking:

• The meaning of ‘updated’. Every newsreader seems to have some concept of an update. Yet they seem to be lacking the fundamental concept that an update means the previous version of the item is obsolete. Perhaps 10% of the aforementioned backlog in my newsstream could have been zapped if only the tool were smart enough to clear the cache of the obsoleted items. Okay, perhaps the real fault here lies in either 1) the RSS spec, which doesn’t really define any temporal or informatic relationships between items, or 2) news sources that simply spew out new items without establishing relationships among them. Yet the web has had a long history of toolmakers programming around deficiencies in specifications and content providers, why not this one too?
• Cross-posting duplications. Another 10% of my recent backlog appeared to be duplicate postings of items from different but related feeds, e.g. the general-news and sports feeds of the Tribune. I lay this annoyance squarely at the feed of the newsreader providers. All aggregators cache the feed data, so scrubbing an item from the ‘unread’ category in one stream when the same item has been read in another should be a no-brainer. Hel-lo…hash table, anyone??!?
• Tag relationships. The primary brilliance of tags vs. categories is the ability to generate (and update) metadata on the fly without having to first go define a schema for it. The secondary brilliance is the natural way that they can be searched in a logical way (a la SQL). However, I wish there had been some more forethought about tag relationships, particularly ways to formalize relationships among tags than just between tags and items. Anyone using del.icio.us or Flickr for a few weeks probably comes to learn that managing the tags becomes a project unto itself; some will no doubt tout the tag cloud, but I find this next to useless–merely eye candy for novices–since it provides no information about the semantic connections between the tags. I have always been one to categorize ideas and look for the connections–indeed, often the insight gained from the relationships is more important than any of the underlying information individually–so I find the inability to manage tagged relationships in what I would consider an effective manner to be stifling.

Hmm, I suppose such gripes might be better directed on sites monitored by people developing the various tools. But these items would seem so fundamental to the whole web-as-platform, involve-the-users ethos that I can’t believe I’d be contributing anything novel. Has no one considered them before? Are they really that difficult to implement?

I had been using Bloglines as my feed aggregator for a while, but over time I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with it. Their interface for adding and managing feeds is quite nice, and they even rolled out some nifty updates last weekend…but to my dismay they continue to focus on the feeds and not the posts. I’ve long wanted the river-of-news style for posts; this style tends to group posts from different feeds that cover the same topic, and thus reduces the time taken in skimming over the duplicates. But the worst offense has to be the way read-vs.-unread posts are handled in Bloglines; c’mon, guys, opening a feed does not mean that I’ve read every single post, and there’s a third important state: read-but-I-wanna-do-something-with-it-later.

(Yeah, yeah, I know, whine whine whine. I’m sure if I shelled out some bucks there are probably some nice fancy aggregators that do all that and more. But…really, the things I mentioned are fairly straightforward. Are they truly that hard to implement?)

Last night I discovered Google Reader, and I’ve switched because the don’t-be-evil fellahs look to have nailed my three wishes above. The interface needs some work–it’s mildly klunky, looks like the GUI team was dominated by Trekkies, and knows of no other weblog tool but blogger.com–but it looks to me like they’ve focused on the right things. Time will tell if this will become The One or if it will just a bridge to when Flock is ready.

The prospect of moving in the next few months has made apparent just how much five years’ worth of life in one apartment has led to overflows in our closets and storage spaces. My list of links has gotten the same way. In both cases, rather than categorizing and sorting into the major areas, the easiest place to start is to examine the little trinkets that have little connections other than my own sense of Hmm or Ooh or Heh…

• The Edge Annual Question 2006: What is your dangerous idea?
• New Scientist SPACE - Features - 13 things that do not make sense
• Breakthrough of the Year 2005: Science Online Special Collection
• Seed: The Other I.D. (Incompetent design)
• SkepticWiki - The Encyclopedia of Science and Critical Thinking
• Cosmic Calling Card?

• Universe Today - What’s Up 2006 - Download it Free
• National Atlas home page
• IVR Cheat Sheet by Paul English (Interactive Voice Response telephone systems)
• Services Guide for Windows XP (Hopefully Vista will turn more off by default.)
• FairVote - Home
• Penguin Warehouse, Inc. - Buy a Pet Penguin Today After the sensation of March of the Penguins, they’re everywhere! Liz is adamant that she was vehemently pro-penguin long before they became trendy. I wonder what the next fashionable critter for advertizers will be.
• Top 100 Wines 2005
• Error Message Generator
• 25 Mindnumbingly Stupid Quotes of 2005
• What Makes a Good Web Font
• Kids vie for coveted preschools House-hunting begets considerations of school systems, kinda nice to see that at least some Chicago public schools are getting good again.
• Yahoo Email + RSS Integrates Blogs Recent improvements in the mail-reader paradigm seem to make it a natural fit for newsfeeds, far better than some of the aggregators I’ve seen (at least the free or low-cost ones).
• Human Space Flight requirements for Crew and Space Flight Participants Ordinary people going into space used to be the stuff of escape and adventure. Now it’s the subject of FAA regulations covering 123 pages. Reality isn’t nearly as fun as sci-fi.
• Ramp creates power as cars pass

As happened last year, we were foiled in our attempts to obtain single-game tickets for the 2005 season. Of coure the biggies (Red Sox, White Sox, a few Cardinals games, Ryno’s number-retirement ceremony) sold out by lunchtime on Monday…but even more frustrating were some of the issues in attempting to get tix against lower-profile teams. Methinks many could be addressed with some simple, easily-implemented fixes:

• The ticketing system needs to indicate, on the front page, not just that tickets are available in a seating section but also the biggest block of tickets available.
• While randomly choosing persons from the virtual waiting room, rather than just a first-come-first-serve method, does provide some degree of fairness to those who simply can’t afford to keep open a browser session all day, it would also be fair to incrementally increase the probability of a person’s being selected the longer he/she goes without getting in.
• Wrigleyville residents should get a chance a little early (a week? three days?) to buy tickets for one or two games before the rest of Cubdom; to ensure fairness, perhaps they must show up in person and show a photo id.

Needing an updated set of spectral data for my dissertation research, I found a nearly perfect source in the BaSeL Interactive Server. Since getting the data set I wanted would require filling out the form several hundred times, I wrapped my brain around WWW::Mechanize and wrote a nice Perl script to do the tedious stuff for me. Whee, worked like a charm.

Poking around the site, I found in it its usage statistics that in the few hours that I grabbed data, I hit the server more than it had been in the previous eleven months combined:

Well, I’m pretty sure that the author put the server out there so people like me could use it. I’ll make sure to give him a nice acknowledgement in my dissertation when I finally finish the damn thing.

Why oh why did the standards committee decide that the value of the id attribute in CSS (and subsequently XHTML) couldn’t start with a digit? Generating element ids using serial numbers seems like a pretty common and sensible way to go, but apparently not if you want strictly valid documents. Sigh.

Whee, after a couple years of fiddling and hacking in fits and starts, I’ve finally gotten the JavaScript and CSS in order for the new version of my webpage. Yay. Now I just need to fill in the rest of the links, but at least it should be more maintainable now.

I’ve never been much of a diarist, but I thought it might be interesting to start jotting down my random thoughts…cyberspace might be a better place for them than cluttering up my own head! Perhaps someone might even find them interesting.

Make no mistake, I intend this as a one-way conduit of information. Don’t like it? Start your own blog. :)