We still need a way to explore and resurface old blog posts

Six years ago I wrote about browsing the blog blacklist and the need to resurface content from old blog postings. Today, even in the supposed twilight of blogs [1], I was again reminded how much we need a tool for excavation of old posts. I can think of at least one way do it (standard metadata for blog history, random selection of past posts based on internal and external inbound links) but there are probably several.

Maybe something for a future blog renaissance to tackle. Or if Feedbin is looking for a new feature set …

- fn -

[1] On the one hand I accept that RSS and blogs are vanishing, on the other my Feedbin stream is a rich and engrossing as ever, covering hundreds of sources.

Beyond Simplenote: I still want a graph layer (concept map) overlay for my memory augmentation notes collection

I still want a graph layer atop my notes.

Yes, I want my personal locally stored data unlocked memex. Since the passing fad of the web is now, you know, passing, maybe I’ll get one.

Maybe someone will play with this now that there’s not much point in doing another searchable memory augmentation app. Apple and Google each have their “good enough” solutions. Those solutions have scary data lock issues, but for their vendors that’s a feature, not a defect. (For the record, I’m still on Simplenote/nvAlt, despite the extremely very insanely annoying search bug in the Simplenote Mac client. [1])

The idea is as old as time. Each open data format note has a title, a body, tags, and a unique identifier. The app maintains a separate data store of noteID pairs (relationships, no directionality or additional relationship attributes necessary).  When viewing a note one sees titles of related notes. There’s a UI for viewing the graph that also treats tags as nodes [3], and a UI for editing relationships.

The key is that the individual notes remain separate files and the note-note store is plaintext/rich text as well. [2]

One day…

PS. I think this was kind of what Gopher did. 

- fn -

[1] My own extended memory collection has moved through DOS text files, FileMaker Pro text base, PalmOS Notes, DateBk Memo, AvantGo files, Outlook Notes, Evernote, Google Notes (killed!), Toodledo Notes/Appigo Notebook,  and Simplenote/ResophNotes/NotationalVelocity/nvAlt. No wonder I’m a nut on data lock issues and distrust Cloud solutions for extended memory even as I use them. Also: Before Simplenote, Palm Notes, iOS Notes, Keep, EverNote and OneNote there was Tornado for DOS. 

[2] Remember when Mac Classic gave every file its own unique ID? Those were the days. How to get the unique ID for the notes is the trick for a plaintext implementation especially across platforms. With rich text one can bury the unique ID in the metadata. Unique ID could be an IP6 URI.

[3] Remember when graph data visualization was a thing? That was the early 90s I think, around the time of VRML and MCF/RDF.

See also: 

(This is started out as a tiny post but I kept finding more old material I wanted to think about …)

• All I want for Christmas is a graph (mind-map) … on App.net 11/2012 discussion of this on ADN.
• XMind: Impressions and comments on the mind mapping market 11/2012. I buried the lede in this post, the discussion of the graph layer for a Notes collection is buried within. I gave up on XMind because client-side Java died.
• Tinderbox, Simplenote, MindNode and data freedom 10/2011. Earlier version of this plea. Lists some Personal Information Managers I’ve known. My plaintext/rich text standards love is born of much painful experience.
• Escape from Outlook Notes - ResophNotes, SimpleNote for iPhone and Notational Velocity 7/2010
• Cloud data: Should I trust (Simplenote) Simperium? 8/2010. Only while nvAlt works.
• Before Simplenote, Palm Notes, iOS Notes, Keep, EverNote and OneNote there was Tornado for DOS. 
• Taking note: Tornado Notes Lives—Sort of (an entire blog on note taking. I just subscribed!)
• Escape from Outlook Notes - ResophNotes, SimpleNote for iPhone and Notational Velocity 7/2010
• Palm/Palm Pilot: Personal Experiences and Tips: my old Palm Pilot web page. For nostalgia.
• Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators: Evernote as Memex 7/2008. (Evernote is still in business!)
• Gordon’s Notes: xanadu and Gordon's Notes: memory management
• Full text search and digital prostheses: new email, new mind 7/2008 - A few years after full text really went mainstream. This doesn’t seem to show up on in our productivity stats, which is more than a bit curious. It is almost as if digital tech is simultaneously increasing and decreasing economic productivity, so we see only the delta.
• The Mundaneum 2008
• Mac NoteTaker for PalmOS with TextMate 1/2006 (oh, the pain)
• Palm to iPhone - the summary 8/2008
• Farewell Palm I didn’t get rid of all my old PalmOS gear until 2010
• The rise of software rental (aka software as service) 2/2010
• Moving Palm notes to Toodledo via CSV file - what worked. (Hard!) 9/2008
• Google’s IQ boost is only beginning 12/2009. Even as I wrote that Google was making a hard turn into evilplusness. Now it’s the AI assistant moment.
• Project Memfail: Tackling my search space problem 9/2013. I rely on my Notes as pointers to other stores but I still need Google’s increasingly shaking custom search engines.
• Thinking tools 2014 - holding steady but future unclear 5/2014. Two years later it’s basically the same toolset, but I created kateva.org/sh as a backup given ADN’s expected lifespan.
• Why we need to retire at sixty 3/2010. Memory augmentation is not an option.

Strange loops - five years of wondering why our corporate units couldn't cooperate.

Five years ago I tried to figure out why we couldn't share work across our corporate units.

This turned out to be one of those rabbit hole questions. The more I looked, the stranger it got. I knew there was prior work on the question -- but I didn't know the magic words Google needed. Eventually I reinvented enough economic theory to connect my simple question to Coase's 1937 (!) theorem, 1970s work on 'the theory of the firm', Brad DeLong's 1997 writings on The Corporation as a Command Economy [1], and Akerloff's 'information assymetry'. [2]

Among other things I realized that modern corporations are best thought of as feudal command economies whose strength comes more from their combat capacity and ability to purchase legislators and shape their ecosystems than from goods made or services delivered.

Think of the Soviet Union in 1975.

All of which is, I hope, an interesting review -- but why did I title this 'Strange loop'?

Because I used that term in a 2008 post on how Google search, and especially their (then novel) customized search results, was changing how I thought and wrote. This five year recursive dialog is itself a product of that cognitive extension function.

But that's not the only strange loop aspect.

I started this blog post because today I rediscovered DeLong's 2007 paper [1] as a scanned document. I decided to write about it, so I searched on a key phrase looking for a text version. That search, probably customized to my Gordon-identity [3], returned a post I wrote in 2008. [4]

That's just weird.

 - fn -

[1] Oddly the full text paper is no longer available from Brad's site, but a decent scan is still around.

[2] There are at least two Nobel prizes in Economics in that list, so it's nice to know I was pursuing a fertile topic, albeit decades late.

[3] John Gordon is a pseudonym; Gordon is my middle name.

[4] On the one hand it would be nice if I'd remembered I wrote it. On the other hand I've written well over 10,000 blog posts. 

See also: 

• Gordon's Notes: The Modern Firm - a review 4/2012 ties some of this together. That 2008 paper was a gift that kept on giving!
• Gordon's Notes: Browsing the blog backlist - we need a new app 6/2012. Reading that old blog posts of mine reminds me that we still need a tool for resurfacing old blog posts.

Why I love app.net (ADN)

I joined App.net ($5/month or $36/year) about five months ago. Although it's fundamentally a messaging infrastructure it's currently marketed as an ad-free social network.

I paid $50 at launch, and my account was extended when the cost dropped. That was money well spent; I expect to subscribe as long as they are in business. I love App.net because ...

• It has a very robust ecosystem of tools and services including multiple Mac and iOS clients and multiple web apps. I use Wedge, Netbot, NoodleApp and Appnetizen and will soon try Felix. There are multiple integration points to my Pinboard feed, including IFTTT support. Most of my posts start with Reeder.app [1] then go to Pinboard and turn into App.net posts via IFTTT.
• The community I interact with on app.net is exceptional. More on that below.
• I love the mission: a public (pay) communications infrastructure and related services that I purchase. I love paying for things I use.
• The app.net development team is delightful. I mean that literally; it's a joy to see them play and build on the platform - like @duerig's early stage Google Reader Share alternative, Patter-app rooms and private messages (EdChat) and vidcast shared video commentary.
• 128 characters is stupid. 256 is not twice as good, it's eight times better. (Though URL characters count, so I use URL shortener services)
• I'm 50+ and this is a relatively young community (though plenty of 40+ too). I'm old enough to enjoy that. The only young people I otherwise interact with are my kids (10-15) and their friends.
• I have the (illusion) of helping build something good without, you know, actually having to do anything. (Hence the illusion bit.)
• No advertising. Of course that doesn't mean no marketing; it means I choose the marketing I want)

The real hook for me, however, is the community. I follow a very smart and mutually respectful group of people. The conversation reminds me of Google Reader Shares, some of the BBS forums I joined via packet switching networks before there was public net access, but most of all it reminds me of my undergraduate conversations.

 

During my undergrad days I got to know 4 institutions, partly because I wanted to escape from the one I graduated from, partly because in Quebec everyone went to "junior college" (CEGEP) after grade 11. Whether they were elite or accessible I found great conversations everywhere.

 

There were good conversations at graduate school, medical school and residency as well (I spent a long time in school), but the undergrad conversations were the most interesting. App.net reminds me of the best of those. It is, for example, the only place I can learn from the insights of a (gasp) republican.

 

The group I follow is a pretty tough bunch. If I'm sloppy, I get called on it. I love that -- it makes my thinking better. I learn things.

 

App.net won't last forever -- nothing does. But it's a good place now; it succeeds where Twitter failed me. 

 

If you'd like a free trial let me know at jgordon@kateva.org or in comments below -- I can share 3 invites.

[1] Alas Reeder.app may have been sunset. It's very unstable on the iPhone 5. Fortunately there are alternatives I can explore.

See also:

• The Economist's Babbage on two of my favorites: Pinboard and App.net. The Economist doesn't use bylines, but I suspect this is by @glennf.

Microblogging 2012 - Pinboard?

Once every few days to weeks I write a short essay, from a few paragraphs to a few "pages" (remember the page?).  Every few minutes to hours I share a link and a comment from a few words to a pair of paragraphs.

Both forms of writing almost always involve links; they point to a linkable entity.

I have to call the first blogging and the second microblogging because I can't escape the b-word (is there a language in which the name is less painful?).

Whatever the format, I do the writing for same reasons. It's primarily a way for me to learn, think, and remember. I do it publicly because I have the hive-mind communicator gene-set. I want to share the ideas and things that I like.

I want to share -- but sharing has a very important side-effect. Sharing enables indexing.

My extended memory relies on Google Custom Search (oh Google, why has thou forsaken me? I forget too much without you.) Everything I share has an entry in a Custom Search Engine I use several times a day, though recently the embedded ads have become oppressive.

I do the blogging using Google Blogger. I wanted to move to WordPress, but I decided the quality and security issues of an independent WordPress site were too severe for me; I don't have the time. I'm now evaluating a paid account on WordPress.com.

The micro-blogging is a bigger problem. I used to use Google Reader Share - one of the lesser known but most beloved products of the days when Google was Anakin. Reader Share died when Google became you-know-what.

Twitter is too constraining and I don't trust Tumblr. After trying several options I settled on Pinboard because of its business model (I pay), sharing/export options, RSS support and, especially, Reeder.app and Instapaper integration. I use IFTTT to republish my Pinboard 's' stream to my Twitter stream, and I'm now experimenting with using IFTTT to repost them to an archival and indexable WordPress or Blogger repository.

The indexable bit is a Pinboard problem. Pinboard's developer does not love microblogging; he wants to have a bookmarking service. Pinboard posts are NOINDEX by design.

Pinboard has other microblogging limitations. I use tags to create routable streams of shared information. Almost all are part of my primary share stream, but some are special sub-streams for my colleagues or for my own reference and actions. Because of the way Reeder.app works many of these are single character tags. This isn't how Pinboard is supposed to work; tags are supposed to be global - not personal. I can't, for example, show only my own tags in the Pinboard UI.

Lastly Pinboard isn't as reliable as Reader Share was - though almost nothing is. Sometimes, when I post, Reeder.app hangs waiting for Pinboard to respond. (The hanging behavior is a Reeder.app design flaw).

I'd be delighted if Maciej Ceglowsk's Pinboard.in were more of a microblogging platform. I wish I could see only my own tags for example. Above all, I wish Pinboard included an option to use the Atom publishing protocol to create an indexable and persistent post on a blog. I'd double the amount I pay Maciej for that feature.

I don't hold out too much hope. Pinboard is known to geeks, but it's not a big revenue stream. In a crazy world where a small photo sharing site can be worth a billion dollars, Pinboard is almost an anachronism...

... I wrote Pinboard in the spring of 2009 as a personal project, partly out of frustration with a redesign of Delicious that I felt removed a lot of utility from the site, and partly because I had long wanted to have a bookmarking site that would archive my bookmarks...
... The service has stored about 45 million bookmarks as of January 2012, and has just over 20 thousand active users....

... Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. The site uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, and Amazon S3 to store backups....

As a bookmarking service Pinboard is a labor of love. It probably wouldn't do better even if it were extended to be the front end to a standards-based microblogging service - but I hope Maciej will consider the option. There might be some money from current subscribers, and perhaps referral fees if Maciej recommends an optional WordPress service (ex: Dreamhost, WordPress.com).

Someday we'll get back to the original Google Reader Shares vision. It might take a while though. After Palm died we were lost in the desert for a decade before we returned to a handheld calendar, tasks, contacts and notes solution. I hope this trip will be a bit shorter.

Update 4/30/12: Maciej is exploring how Pinboard might be a better microblogging profile, and whether it would work to enable Pinboard indexing. In the meanwhile I've turned off IFTTT posting to Blogger and disabled indexing of that test blog. I'll go forward with archiving my Pinboard posts to WordPress - http://www.kateva.org/sh/.

Communication and collaboration: We have the pieces, but not the puzzle

The geeks of my tribe share two obsessions.

We are obsessed with managing and extending our knowledge.

We are obsessed with communication and collaboration (C&C).

These are good times for us, but they could be much better. We've seen the pieces of the C&C puzzle come and go, almost coming together than spinning away.

Things have gone better on the discovery/notification/subscription side of C&C. We have had email lists and usenet newsgroups (yes, I am old); now we have Atom/RSS Pub/Sub standards, Google Reader (tragically dying), Facebook, Twitter and Google+. There's even Yammer, a corporate clone of Facebook with some G+ thrown in.

Alas, the publication side of C&C has stalled. We have had these pieces wax and wain:

• Vermeer/Microsoft's FrontPage 98 (RIP @1999) -- a true ancestor of the Wiki
• The wiki. I've largely used Sharepoint, which is more than a little similar to FrontPage.
• Blogs with APIs that support rich editing tools (sorry, web tools aren't there yet).
• Onfolio/Microsoft's Windows Live Writer and Red Sweater's MarsEdit (OS X). The former is in maintenance mode (at best), the latter is much less capable but is being actively maintained.

It's frustrating to have the pieces, but not the puzzle. We want a solution that has these features

1. The power and authoring speed of Windows Live Writer/FrontPage 98 client.
2. Content display that support both item based and web-like navigation. We had much of this with FrontPage 13 years ago and you can see much of this in Sharepoint 2007's odd wiki. It's very easy to imagine a set of articles appearing as both a blog and a wiki.
3. Change notification.

Incidentally, we also want this publishing platform to be easily used as a personal platform and a public platform, and we want to the two to optionally synchronize via Dropbox or the equivalent.

Oh, yeah, and it needs to have a published and open API (though it doesn't need to be open source).

This isn't so hard, really. Give me $30 million and I'll make it happen. I promise.

See also:

• Vermeer/FrontPage lives in Sharepoint Wiki (6/08)
• Chaos at Microsoft: the story of Windows Live Toolbar, Onfolio and Writer (10/2006)
• RIP Onfolio - the last of the standalone XP feed readers (9/2008)
• Gordon's Notes: Lessons from Microsoft SharePoint (5/2008)
• Front Page 97/98/2000, Personal Web Server: my old FP web page. Lots of prior art there for better or worse.
• MarsEdit 3.1.3 - Still not Windows Live Writer, but definitely worth the money (5/2010) - it continues to slowly improve. The image management is still minimal and the editor still struggles with Google quirks (WLW doesn't have problems).
• Blogger's text editor: I make another plea for a rational approach to paragraph formatting (3/2011) - I'm not in love with Blogger.
• Project Xanadu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Old ideas aren't necessarily wrong

Update: Since writing this I decided to install the latest version of WLW, which is version 2011. It's dead. I feel the pain of the original Onfolio team. Seeing quality software die is a bit like watching a good kid turn into a career criminal.

Reconciliation May 2011: The posts I won't get to

Reconciliation for May 2011 ...

• Elderly Drivers Fail a Test (NYT) and Some Older Workers, Pressured to Quit, Fight Back (NYT): Why raising the retirement age won't work. Our brains don't last.
• The Blind Use The Visual Cortex To Process Sound (SciAm): I've long wondered about how we evolved the ability to read -- to convert images into sounds. It seems an unnatural use of the brain, even for an animal that must have been good at sign language. Given these latest findings, the ability to read may be just another manifestation of astonishing brain plasticity.
• The Early Days of Eugenics: 1911 SciAm article on Eugenics. "The proper attitude to be taken toward the perpetuation of poor types is that which has been attributed to Huxley. "We are sorry for you," he is reported to have said; "we will do our best for you (and in so doing we elevate ourselves, since mercy blesses him that gives and him that takes), but we deny you the right to parentage. You may live, but you must not propagate."
• Medicaid a Big Deal Too | Talking Points Memo: The real budget problem is not social security or medicare or medicaid. The real problem is that our bodies outlive our brains. Demographers knew this day was coming back in the 1970s. That's when we should have invested in slowing the onset of dementia.
• Third Depression Watch - NYT: The good news is that Krugman is no longer talking about the Great Recession. The bad news is that he's talking about the 2nd Long Depression. (See also: Leonhardt, 2008)
• Frothy Real Estate in Manhattan: $5.5 million apartment
• Reassessing The Cost Of The Post-9/11 Era, Post Bin Laden (Froomkin): Was bin Laden the most successful investor in history? With our help he turned mere millions into a successful trillion dollar attack on America.
• Jann Wenner is my hero - Cringely and The People vs. Goldman Sachs | Rolling Stone: Corporate control of American media - more than you think
• Software Reviewing as it Should Be Done - James Fallows and Zeoli on Tinderbox: A quixotic effort to push the boundaries of Xanadu, but not a word about data lock.
• Inequality Rising Across the Developed World - NYT Rampell: Not only America.
• Quote of the Week, Last Week Edition - Jeffrey Goldberg: Obama's famous quote on birthers, spoken while he was secretly leading the bin Laden hit.

The not-so-vast readership of Gordon's notes - and why I keep posting

I get emails when a reader (infrequently) comments. The author deleted this comment, so I'll keep it anonymous ...

Say, is it not odd that you don't have a bunch of readers reading your blog? You have been writing this since 2003 and nobody comments or reads it? Is this even real?

Oh and I figured out how I reached your blog. I was looking for "nobody reads your blog" on google and a comment from your blog showed up on the 47th page.

Its sad and funny at the same time...

I wasn't able to replicate his search results, but unless we're post AI this was a bio post, not a bot post.

It's a good question [4], but there are a lot of blogs that go unread. So mine is not that unusual. What's unusual is that it's been persistently unread for 7 years. So the real question is - "why would anyone write 5,494 posts that nobody reads?" (@9,000 if you add Gordon's Tech) [1]

The short answer is that I read both of Gordon's Blogs. As I wrote back in 2007 ...

... my own very low readership blogs are written for these audiences in this order:

1. Myself. It’s how I learn and think.

2. The GoogleMind: building inferential links for search and reflection.

3. Tech blog: Future readers who find my posts useful to solve a problem they have that I've solved for myself.

4. Gordon's Notes: My grandchildren, so I can say I didn't remain silent -- and my tiny audience of regular readers, not least my wife (hey, we don't get that much time to talk!) ...

Later, when I integrated Google Custom Search, my history of posts began to inform my Google searches. My blogs extend my memory into the wider net.

So that explains why there are 9,000 "John Gordon" posts.

As to why their aren't many comments/readers, I can imagine several reasons ...

• There's no theme. Gordon's Notes follows my interests, and they wander. At any given time there will posts that most people find boring, repetitive, or weird.
• I'm writing for someone like me, Brad DeLong, Charlie Stross, Emily L and others of that esoteric sort. That's an uber-niche audience.
• I have no public persona (I write using a pseudonym)
• I like writing, but I don't work at writing. I'd have to work a lot harder to write well enough to be truly readable.
• I don't market the blog.
• I update my blog at odd hours, and I'm slow to respond to comments.
• I have an irregular posting schedule.
• I don't right about areas where I'm really a world-class expert because I keep my blogging and my employment separate.
• I often write about the grim side of reality (that is, most of it).

That covers the bases I think. Except ...

Except, it's not quite so simple. It turns out I do have a few readers -- I'm guessing about 100 or so [3], not counting a larger number who come via Google [2], but certainly counting Google itself. Some of my readers are bloggers with substantial readership, and sometimes they respond to what I write.

So I do have an audience after all, it's just very quiet.

See also:

• Strange loops: Google custom and customized search - and a memory blog
• Google's IQ boost is only beginning

-- fn --

[1] Why do I share thousands of items via Google Reader? Because that's a searchable repository of things I find interesting. Another memory extender.
[2] I don't have a stellar Google ranking, but it's not bad 
[3] About 80 via Google Reader alone, where I share these posts.  There's also Emily, who comments over breakfast. A lot of my posts come out of our discussions.
[4] It wasn't clear when I first posted this that I like the question. I think it's a good question and I think it was meant well. Sorry for not making that clear. I've added this footnote.

Update 1/6/11: Based on comment response I probably have more regular readers than I imagined.

How I discover people to follow - on Google Reader

Buzz has been a great disappointment.

It's not all bad though. Google built a lot of Buzz on the Google Reader Shared Item experiments, and as a side-effect they fixed the long broken social bits of Google Reader.

So now I'm enjoying enlisting new unpaid specialists to sort and manage the world's information flow for me. It's like having my own team of incredibly expensive super-smart uber-analysts -- except I don't pay them anything.

Mwaahh-ha-ha-ha!

Ok, so maybe the evil laughter is a bit much. After all, they're free to follow what I share, and we're all feeding the hivemind. It who laughs last is Skynet, as the saying goes.

How do I use Google reader to enlist my witting info-drones?

I look for the "like" link on posts that I like a lot, but that don't have many other "likes". I then click the "like" link and scan the names and associated metadata, looking for people who are different from me -- different nationality, age, gender, profession, etc. Then I look at their shared items. If they've shared interesting things that are new to me, I follow them. I also add them to my special "x-reader" group which allows them to comment on anything I share (should they decide to follow me, though most will not).

None of this worked reliably a month ago, but it works now.

My "People you follow" section is now becoming my strongest information source. I'm able to follow fewer feeds directly, as I now outsource the processing chore to my fellow minions.

Quite nice, really.

Update 3/2/2010: I'm also again trying Google Readers "show in my language" feature to start following non-English "likes". I believe Google's Translation feature is extremely disruptive and amusingly under appreciated. This is how the really big things often come - quietly in the night. Note that the latest betas of Chrome for Windows now incorporate translation services into the browser. I'm looking forward to an English-Chinese-English view of my posts that will allow me to optimize my English writing for English-Chinese automated translation.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

GrandView and idea management software - Fallows and more

A typically erudite post on great software by James Fallows linked to my old page on GrandView, MORE and other lost software gems.

James referenced a host of interesting modern software. Of the list he gave I can personally vouch for the very affordable OmniOutliner (which most closely resembles GrandView) and the terribly expensive MindManager. I'd also add Inspiration, which he omitted. Inspiration is still around, though it's now marketed only to schools and no longer actively developed.

There are several other OS X apps in this domain; Matt Neuburg used to write on this topic and Ted Goranson wrote "About this Particular Outliner" from 2003 to 2008 starting with a must-read history column. (Yes, one day there will be historians of software, who will write doctoral theses about the role of MORE 3.1.)

Today James points us to an excellent Oct 2009 essay on GrandView.

There are so many fine designs in these old products. Perhaps we need software archeologists to resurrect them for modern reuse. If you know of old copies, don't toss them out. Get them onto a hard drive. There will always be emulators to run them.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

The state of social networks: Facebook, Twitter and one other

I’ve interacted with three social network systems. Two get a lot of media attention, but the most interesting one is currently invisible. Here’s how they look to me in December 2009.

Facebook is currently useful, but worrisome. It's useful because it’s been a useful way for me to share family news that (very) close friends may enjoy seeing. Facebook is where I announce that my 12 yo scored a goal in a hockey game, and where my readers would understand that a goal is not always just a goal. Facebook is worrisome because their business model is currently based on exploiting the weakest members of a social graph, and then on selling information and marketing access to the entire graph. It’s remarkable how uninteresting Facebook’s ads are. That’s a bad sign, even thought it says something interesting about the limited predictive value of one's friendships.

Twitter would be more interesting if I had an archaic cell phone with unlimited text messaging, or if I had an interest in the domestic disturbances of celebrities. Twitter’s usage is on the same track as Friendster and MySpace. I don’t think it will last very much longer.

The most interesting social network I know of, however, is one that has very few members, no media coverage, no books, little documentation, no clear strategy, and mysterious privacy and revenue models. This is the Google Reader share and comment graph including the (currently) “like-based” discovery model.

Through the Google Reader (GR) “like” link I’ve identified about six English-language writers around the world who share an interest in topics I want to know about. When I find one who is sharing interesting items I don’t see or know about, I add them to my GR graph. They may choose to follow me or not – that’s not relevant to me. The value is that I can follow what they do.

I add one such meta-feed to my knowledge stream every few weeks. The stream volume does not increase much, because I can in turn drop direct reads of streams my experts cover. Given the uber-geekiness of the GR graph membership the quality of shared items is currently very high, but I don’t see why this approach won’t scale even in the event that the GR graph gets market attention.

The primary risk to this model, of course, is that Google will lose interest. I suspect, however, that this experiment will provide Google with interesting ways to explore and classify the world’s information stream – a mission very dear to their revenue model.

Google’s machine translation is improving every month – I’m looking for my first Chinese-language source. That will be interesting.

The GR graph means Google wins and I win. Maybe, if this increases the value of the world’s knowledge stream, we all win.

I like that model.

See also

• Gordon's Notes- Google reader “like” and the shared discovery process
• Gordon's Tech- Google Reader- Experiments with notes, following and sharing
• Gordon's Notes- Google reader micro-blogging and changes to Gordon Notes
• Gordon's Tech- More of me- My Google Reader Shared Item Feed’
• Official Google Reader Blog- Share anything. Anytime. Anywhere

Update: Of course the day I post this is the day it seems to stop working. I am following about 17 people, but nothing happens if I try to add someone new. Google has been doing something funky with sharing permissions; it's possible that when I "follow" someone they have to approve before anything happens. So it's now more of a "request to follow".

Lagrangian finance and age of wonders

I had a relatively decent physics education for a non-major, but I'm pretty sure it didn't include discussions of the Lagrangian and its use in Newtonian mechanics. So I loved this brilliant exposition of the use of the Lagrangian.

Subtracting potential from kinetic energy? It feels like a measure of how much of a budget is unspent, how much is left to drive deviations from a trajectory...

That feels like finance. There ought to be applications of the Lagrangian to the world of financial modeling.

Once upon a time, that's where the thought would have ended. An idle speculation. Today, though, the answer is a few keystrokes away: google.com/search?q=lagrangian+finance.

73,800 hits. Yeah, looks like there's an application or two.

We don't truly grok the web. Not yet.

Reading my writing translated

I have knacks, but not for language. I still remember a bit of the old country however. Which is why it's neat to try to read a blog post - in French (see the drop down on the right side of this page to translate)

Some of it reads sensibly, other bits less so. Some of the word choices seem exotic.

I expect there's a knack to writing for translation. One would author a post, then do a round trip translation. Identify the parts that, on back translation, don't quite work. Do this a couple of times with your target language. Once the back translation is acceptable, you can be reasonably sure the initial translation works.

This would be fairly easy to automate. I'd like to give it a try if the tools were in place. I'm excited about machine translation, even if it's so far had less of an impact than I'd expected.

See also:

• Google reader: now with translation services

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

iTunes U - the Singularity is behind us

Despite my IOT habit, I've only today rediscovered iTunes U in iTunes 9...

This still brings tears to my eyes. As I (incorrectly - Bill Gates Sr only did the foreword) wrote in 2006 about an early casualty of tech churn ...

The quiet demise of the CD

... I remember reading the book written by Bill Gate's father (yes, his father) called 'The New Papyrus'. It was all about the how the data CD would revolutionize the world. This was before the net became public. I was amazed by the CD back then, and I wrote a letter to a Canadian development organization on how it could dramatically change the delivery of knowledge to what was then called the 'third world'...

iTunes U, Aaronson’s MIT lectures on theoretical computer science, MIT OpenCourseWare, OpenAccess journals and the BBC’s In Our Time are now freely available to a good portion of the world. Even in poor nations, they are likely accessible in many universities.

I beat on Apple and Google all the time, but, really, the iPhone and iTunes U would stun a geek of 1986. We entropics do not appreciate how far we have traveled.

How Microsoft can use Google Blogger's missing backlinks

Microsoft may yet fall to the ghost of Netscape Constellation.

That would be a good thing if Microsoft is merely shattered, and returns as a dozen newly competititive enterprises. We don't want to replace one oppressive monopoly with another.

So, how can we help keep Microsoft in the game? They do have a few options to play -- in addition to a thermonuclear patent attack.

For example, Google won't give me the Blogger backlinks (possibly related posts) I want. This is bad news; those backlinks are a key part of my manical GordonGeek-Metamind interface strategy, aka Project Xanadu. So if Google won't give 'em to me, maybe Microsoft will. [1]

Happily, Microsoft has several ways to play here. I'll outline just one approach, one that leverages Windows Live Writer (my all-OS favorite desktop app) and ties it to Windows Live Search, Microsoft Passport (Live ID), and Microsoft Live Spaces while facilitating an incremental Blogger to Live Spaces migration.

1. Introduce the concept of domain-scoped search to Live Search, just as Google Custom Search can be used to constrain search to multiple domains.
   
2. Write a plugin for Windows Live Writer 2009 that emulates the WordPress Possibly Related service -- call it "WLW Related". When users go to use the new function they'll be asked to enter their Windows Live ID, then to specify groups of domains to search.
3. Windows Live will store this configuration on Live servers.
4. Users will then be invited to optionally replicate their posts to a Microsoft Live Space which they can then create (bound to the Live ID they just created). The advantage of the Live Space will be that the backlinks created there will be dynamic.
5. After initial setup future posts in WLW will always display a dynamically updated set of possibly related posts based on shared labels, and lexical analysis of the post title and body. The possibly related list will be organized by the search domains defined above. All or parts of the list URLs can be appended to the end of a blog post.
6. If users opt for the optional replication of the blog posts to Spaces, they'll benefit there an optional dynamically updating "show related" set of links.
7. Lastly, add an import function to Spaces that works with Google's Blog export data format. This should include dynamic updating of links so that self-referential blogspot URLs are rewritten as needed.
   

In short, Microsoft can leverage their tremendous advantage in desktop applications (Windows Live Writer) to ease the migration path from Blogger to Spaces, and they can provide functionality geeks appreciate -- while thumbing their nose at Google.

Give it a try Microsoft. Maybe I'll switch ...

-- footnotes --

[1] There aren't a lot of alternatives. Apple is busy recreating the mistakes of the 1980s. They're creating a closed software world that's going to compete with Google's (relatively) open alternative. In other words, they're Apple 1984 and Google is Microsoft 1984 (ok, so Google is nowhere near as evil as Microsoft was in those days).

Yahoo can't help either. They're waiting to be acquired. Startups are nice, but they need to figure out a Dapocalypse solution.

WordPress's possibly related posts -- I want this from Blogger

Last July I wrote that I really wanted Blogger to support backlinks.

Well, Blogger still hasn't done anything. Meanwhile, I'm seeing more WordPress blogs using their "possibly related" feature.

Possibly an Announcement -- WordPress.com

... In a feature we’re calling possibly related posts we’ll now try to show posts related to yours a little section at the end. If we find any posts on your blog that are related, we’ll put those at the very top and in bold. Next we’ll show other posts from around WordPress.com, and finally we’ll check if there’s anything in the mainstream media.

The result is a handful of links that should provide you and your visitors something interesting to check out. On blogs that cover the same topics frequently related posts could cause a 5-10% increase in traffic overnight. You could also start to see traffic from lots of other blogs. It’s a bit of an experiment, and we’ll be tweaking it a lot based on your feedback and the data that we collect once everything is live.

Grrrrr. This feature is core to my memory extension strategy [1].

I want a Google Blogger "possibly related posts" feature that follows links and tags and, heck, textual analysis to create entries -- and that lets me choose whether to restrict to my own domains or open it up.

What do I need to do? I'm turning blue ...

[1] If Blogger label views had feeds I'd be able to create meta-tags that spanned Gordon's Notes and Tech. By the way.

Strange loops: Google custom and customized search - and a memory blog

This is a strange loop story.

It began unremarkably. I was finding my own blog posts when I searched on various topics. I felt a bit chuffed -- the GGG (great god google) liked my sacrifices. Often I chose my own posts; since I write in part to extend intracranial memory they worked for me.

Then things got odd. I was getting back more and more of my own results -- often at the very top of a search. GGG likes me alright -- but not that much.

Around the same time, as I discovered new ways to use search against my extended and interconnected memory, I changed my home page to my Google custom search page. Using this page my blog search results were not sorted by date, but rather by GGG assigned value -- the "best" posts came first. Now my extended memories were being organized by Google, searches were more effective, and I leveraged more of my old posts.

The Solipsistic Strange Loop was strengthening, for I was seeing Google's customized search results. The combination of my Google Custom Search Page, my extracorporeal memories (blogs), my use of Google's web history, my location information and my default digital identity have been building a recursive loop of public-private interconnectivity.

As a fringe benefit these web-of-one searches are making a mess of sleazy search engine optimization hacks. It's hard enough to game one set of search results -- really hard to game millions of different result sets.

Where will it go next?

My iPhone lets me take geo-tagged pictures, and it lets me bookmark my location. Inevitably I'll be able to combine the images, locations, time stamps and annotations, and weave them into my extended memory. Custom search means they'll live in a neural network that merges into the GGG metamind.

Interesting times.

Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators: Evernote as Memex

Among Jon Udell*'s Interviews with Innovators is this one with Evernote's Phil Lubin ...

... Phil Libin was the CEO of CoreStreet when he appeared as the first guest on Interviews with Innovators. Now he's back as CEO of EverNote, a company that aims to build the memex, or personal outboard memory, that Vannevar Bush famously imagined in his 1945 article "As We May Think."...

I criticized Evernote recently for a 'complete fail' on the first test I apply to anything that will manage my extended memory -- can I move the data ...

Gordon's Tech: Evernote fails the critical software as service import/export test

...So Evernote is not an option for my Palm to iPhone conversion, and I'd say it's not an option for anyone on any platform until they demonstrate Data Freedom...

Phil Libin responded in a comment:

Data Freedom is vital to our plans. We're serious about Evernote as an "external brain" and that means users have to have confidence that their memories will always be accessible. Part of that accessibility is making sure that users can import/export Evernote data in standard formats with no restrictions. Our current limitations on import/export capabilities are due to developer resource constraints, not any philosophical or business reasons; we can't afford to do import/export poorly because that could muck with your data and flood our support lines. Doing it well takes time.

We're currently testing a full set of Evernote APIs that will give people a lot of options for getting data in and out. We'll roll these out publicly later in the summer. We'll also be expanding the structured import/export capabilities on the local clients, though I don't have a specific date on that yet. We're doing this because data freedom is good for more than just peace of mind - it'll let us build lots of great functionality that we couldn't accomplish with a "walled garden" approach.

Now that I know Evernote is explicitly targeting the Memex/Xanadu vision, I'm even more interested in the product/service -- but I'm also even more demanding.

Even if I trust Mr. Libin completely after listening to the interview with Jon, it's too risky for me to adopt Evernote without a demonstrated, working, export capability. Heck, Evernote could be acquired tomorrow and Mr. Libin could retire the next day! The new owner might be more enchanted with customer lock-in than with changing the world.

Realistically, of course, almost nobody but me is really going to worry about this prior to signing up. Evernote would be silly to divert resources to accelerate import/export -- it's far more important for their market that they enhance the iPhone client.

I'm just sorry I won't get to play with them until they have an export tool. I'll be watching closely though ...

* I'm a longtime fan of Jon Udell's, and I recently had the pleasure of chatting with him. Oddly enough, he sounds exactly the way I'm imagined.

What my blogs are for: memory management and the Google-Gordon geek-mind fusion

[Firefox 3 and Blogger are wreaking havoc on my posts, so I'm now using Safari 3 and Blogger-In-Draft. The original version of this post was messed up.]

I used to think I wrote my blogs as a way to exercise my mind, get my feedback fix, and plant covert memes in the emergent Googlian metamind. Last year I wrote:

...my ... blogs are written for these audiences in this order:

1. Myself. It’s how I learn and think.
2. The GoogleMind: building inferential links for search and reflection.
3. Tech blog: Future readers who find my posts useful to solve a problem they have that I've solved for myself. [I try reasonably hard not to contaminate this blog with too much of my personal speculation or political opinions.]
4. Gordon's Notes: My grandchildren, so I can say I didn't remain silent -- and my tiny audience of regular readers, not least my wife... [Full of opinion, and this is about meme injection]

I still think that's true, but I realize that the #1 item on the list is evolving, and merging with #2.

This is a theme I want to explore more, but it's bigger than one post.

It's an extension of my ancient interests in Personal Information Management (ahh, fond memories of the "PIM-L" email list I ran), my 1997 "Snippets" project, and Xanadu stuff, now built on my increasing experience with full text search of personal corporate multi-gigabyte text archives.

I'm calling this "memory management" for now, and I've added a new tag to my Blogger "label" collection to track this. Memory management includes:

• My private personal (John ****) memory management: tagging, hierarchical organization, cyclic graph links and full text search of my personal and family datasests.
• My public personal (John Gordon) memory management: full-text indexed, tagged, and linked posts (more on the missing backlinks below)
• My private corporate memory management: memory of mine that's legally owned by my employer, and by law stays with them.
• My semi-public corporate memory management: limited to my writing and posting that's visible only within the corporation.

The technology of memory management becomes increasingly important because of two currently irrestible trends:

1. My experience grows far beyond the ability of my aging brain to contain it all
2. My declining cognitive faculties make my productivity more dependent on past knowledge and experience. (I'm older than 25. If you're older than 25 your primary processing faculties are also declinining.)

There's more to come here and in my tech blog about the technical progress on this agend and how this relates to the blogs, but I'll end here with excerpts from a recent Gordon's Tech post. I really want Blogger to resuscitate there moribund "backlinks" feature by making backlinks robust for whitelisted URLs:

Gordon's Tech: My new number one Blogger request: fix backlinks with whitelisted URLs

I've created a new category called "memory management" that will expand this idea, both here and in Gordon's Notes....

... "Memory management" involves personal memory management and corporate memory management, private memory management and public memory management, and an early ... version of gordon-google mind-fusion (one decaying, one growing)....

....Which brings me to my new #1 Blogger request. Fix the backlinks...

... the original purpose of backlinks collapsed due to fraud, webspam attacks, and search engine optimization.

Google has given up on them for all but very high end blogs, and one of their defenses has been to block backlinks within blog domains (to reduce search engine optimization and link farm fraud)....

... but backlinks are an aspect of what we used to call "backward chaining" in inferencing systems. In people-speak they allow one to explore semantic connections (insert obligatory semantic network, xanadu, memex, etc reference) to antecedent or precedent posts.

This capability is a strategic component of my personal memory management obsession.

So I want Blogger to create a new sort of backlink -- to posts that are within domains that I specify. I would create a set of whitelisted urls for my blogger account, and links from those urls to a specific posts would always become backlinks. I could remove them if I wished of course.

To avoid linkfarm abuse Google would exclude this type of backlink from their value estimation algorithms...

... As of first posting a search on "URL backlink whitelist" returns no meaningful hits. I wonder when that will change...

The Mundaneum

I demand an investigation.

I demand an inquiry.

I want to know why the %$!$ I've never heard of the Mundaneum Project ...

The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web

...Using 3 by 5 index cards (then the state of the art in storage technology), they went on to create a vast paper database with more than 12 million individual entries.

Otlet and LaFontaine eventually persuaded the Belgian government to support their project, proposing to build a “city of knowledge” that would bolster the government’s bid to become host of the League of Nations. The government granted them space in a government building, where Otlet expanded the operation. He hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph — a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance.

As the Mundaneum evolved, it began to choke on the sheer volume of paper. Otlet started sketching ideas for new technologies to manage the information overload. At one point he posited a kind of paper-based computer, rigged with wheels and spokes that would move documents around on the surface of a desk. Eventually, however, Otlet realized the ultimate answer involved scrapping paper altogether.

Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the 1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934 book, “Monde,” where he laid out his vision of a “mechanical, collective brain” that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network.

Tragically, just as Otlet’s vision began to crystallize, the Mundaneum fell on hard times. In 1934, the Belgian government lost interest in the project after losing its bid for the League of Nations headquarters. Otlet moved it to a smaller space, and after financial struggles had to close it to the public.

A handful of staff members kept working on the project, but the dream ended when the Nazis marched through Belgium in 1940. The Germans cleared out the original Mundaneum site to make way for an exhibit of Third Reich art, destroying thousands of boxes filled with index cards. Otlet died in 1944, a broken and soon-to-be-forgotten man.

After Otlet’s death, what survived of the original Mundaneum was left to languish in an old anatomy building of the Free University in the Parc Leopold until 1968, when a young graduate student named W. Boyd Rayward picked up the paper trail. Having read some of Otlet’s work, he traveled to the abandoned office in Brussels, where he discovered a mausoleum like room full of books and mounds of paper covered in cobwebs....

How did this all go missing? Twelve million index cards? Everyone just forgot about it?

What else from this era has been forgotten? (For relatively modern variants, see these links).