Leonard Witt’s blog and PJNet got a great facelift.
So did Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0 courtesy of bokardo.
Doc Searls recently moved into new digs.
Steve Rubel is contemplating a move to WordPress.com from TypePad (I think his reasoning is flawed and so are most of the folks leaving comments for him).
While Rafe recently upgraded to MT4 . I need to get around to doing the same.
Speaking of Scott Karp, he’s launched an interesting new journalism service.
Bill de hOra posted an interesting question the other day, that has to do with mapping views to requests, cleanly, in a RESTful way, as Sam Ruby framed it:
it’s easy to forget that Servlets were Java’s response to CGI, way back when. Here’s is the link for Stefan’s entry:
http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2007/08/15/java_web_frameworks.html
I’m wondering how would one produce a URL space for a blog style archive, using Servlets+JSP, and do so in a way that isn’t a CGI/RPC explicit call? That is, the URLs don’t end up like this:
http://www.innoq.com/blog/entry.jsp?id=java_web_frameworks
with one constraint – “just a servlet” that pulls java_web_frameworks.html direct from a “2007/08/15” folder on the filesystem and byapsses JSP is out. All the response is to be generated via JSP. Would we need to a create framework, however ‘micro’?
In Django world, answering such a question is rather easy. And for PHP hackers, you’re probably saying, hey, use .htaccess to route requests, but in Java, this question becomes a bit more complicated.
A Java developer would want solve two problems here: enable “clean” RESTful URLs, and do as little Java coding as possible by distributing responsibility for defining views to a templating language. Hopefully empowering someone who knows just HTML/CSS to work their magic. The benefits to such an approach can’t be underestimated. We we went down such a path at Knight Ridder with the Cofax CMS and it empowered a lot of creativity with little resources on hand (lots of folks know HTML/CSS/JS, few know Java).
Carbon Five discusses an approach that decomposes path info into parameters for Spring MVC controllers: Parameterized REST URLs with Spring MVC. This solves problem one. It still routes requests to a Controller defined in Java, and I’ve seen far too many not solve problem two, which leaves a design where you have a Request, that maps to a Controller that maps to a single View. But this leaves you with an *excellent* foundation to solve the second problem.
Sam Ruby points to URLRewriteFilter as one possible solution. This potentially solves both problems.
Stefan Tilkov explains how to decompose path info and use RequestDispatcher as a solution. In Sam Ruby’s comments, I suggested just such an approach and it’s worked great for me in previous (and current) projects. This potentially solves both problems.
BTW, if you’re interested in a templating language, outside of JSP (and who isn’t?), consider FreeMarker. A huge project I’m helping design and develop is having terrific success with it and Spring MVC. Real magic starts to happen when you decouple Requests from Views. A shortcut to this in Spring MVC is implementing a RequestToViewNameTranslator.
Yahoo! has relaunched it’s local search service. It better surfaces community driven participation and feels far more like a destination than before.
Screenwerk: Yahoo! Refreshes, Redesigns Local.
They still haven’t gone as far as I expect them to one day do – integrate Flickr, del.icio.us, and Groups, and Maps into a cohesive whole, but the potential is there.
On the other side is Google, which recently launched its Business Referral Representative program.
Google will now pay you as an independent contractor to collect information on local businesses, telling them about Ad Words, and submitting them to Google Maps. You can read more about it from here and a recent SearchEngineWatch article.
Despite the information and communication revolutionary time we live in, Americans remain in the dark about our world.
Pew released a survey back in April detailing Americans knowledge of current affairs, comparing the status quo to that of 1989.
We’ve had a literal explosion of new media and communications services and tools come into being these past 15 years. They have completely reshaped how we get our news and how we connect with our communities.
Social Networks, Blogs, RSS, News Aggregators, Email, Email Lists, Message Boards, Websites, News portals, the Web, the Internet, Cable network 24/hr. news, talk radio, online magazines, collaborative news filters, algorithmic news filters, the list goes on and on.
You would think with so many choices, so many avenues to get informed, we’d actually be better informed.
You’d be wrong.
On average, today’s citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago. The new survey includes nine questions that are either identical or roughly comparable to questions asked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2007, somewhat fewer were able to name their governor, the vice president, and the president of Russia, but more respondents than in the earlier era gave correct answers to questions pertaining to national politics.
In 1989, for example, 74% could come up with Dan Quayle’s name when asked who the vice president is. Today, somewhat fewer (69%) are able to recall Dick Cheney. However, more Americans now know that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is generally considered a conservative and that Democrats control Congress than knew these things in 1989. Some of the largest knowledge differences between the two time periods may reflect differences in the amount of press coverage of a particular issue or public figure at the time the surveys were taken. But taken as a whole the findings suggest little change in overall levels of public knowledge.
The survey provides further evidence that changing news formats are not having a great deal of impact on how much the public knows about national and international affairs.
I’m among a bunch of folks who tend to trumpet online services as a cure-all for our past lack of information awareness and communications access.
On the opposite side of the bench have been those who have sounded alarm after alarm about how our ever growing media-and-communications-scape will fragment us ever further and result in ever tightening echo chambers, making us less informed about subject matter as a whole.
Turns out both perspectives are wrong.
Here we are, with so much new technology, so much new media, transforming the way we live our lives, and yet we are as informed, as ill informed, as we were in 1989.
Related:
Newsweek: Dunce-Cap Nation
Wired: Infoporn: Despite the Web, Americans Remain Woefully Ill-Informed
Tim Berners-Lee, as quoted by Jon Udell in a piece that greatly influenced me back in the day, called the web “a shared information space through which people and machines could communicate.” . The original piece in which Tim Berners-Lee said that is still up for all to read, titled “The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future”. I found the piece by typing the quote in Google. Give it a try.
As we share our knowledge, collectively with one another, across blogs, message forums, email lists, and any other services that permit indexing, and reinforce that knowledge via hyperlinking, we are, collectively, building a space that benefits humanity.
It is this collective space that helped me learn what I needed to learn to build a career.
And all this happens, not because of altruistic reasons, but because the architecture of the Web empowers, via the hyperlink, a certain form of communication and collaboration.
The conversations that occur on Facebook, and on most social networking services, happen in the public-private.
In places not indexed by Google, not indexed by Yahoo!, yet are public to selected communities that have access and privilege to them. Gated communities. Islands.
Certainly, there has always been places out of reach of search engines (and there will always be a need for some), but until the last few years, the call from the digerati was to surface these databases of knowledge to the public, behind whatever proprietary walls that may have kept them out of reach. Whether they be newspaper archives, or email lists.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot celebrate when it comes to social networking services. I’m a participant in more than a few, to be sure.
But if they come to define the Web, as they are to some in the media, then I fear we are taking a great step backward.
I’m in the process of writing a piece on Philly Future, about it’s future, titled, “Philly Future, is it in ‘the dip’ or in a cul-de-sac?”. If you’ve read Seth Godin’s “the dip” you would immediately get the reference.
The thing is, every time I start to write it, I can’t help but feel demoralized.
Depressed. Run down. Beaten up.
If I think about how things are at PF right now, it is full of unexplored and sometimes broken promise. It’s taken all the free time I’ve had just to keep it running.
It doesn’t meet my personal standards for what I expect a great service to be. And I’m never satisfied simply running in place. So things there need to change.
With my day job being as full tilt as it has become (in a good way, my team is building something to be proud of, I hope to share more sometime), with my body as wracked with pain as it has been on and off, I’ve felt stretched for time as I haven’t since I was maybe ten years ago, when I still working at Sears, putting all else aside so that I could learn software engineering.
Shoot – the pain is so frustrating that I haven’t played my guitar longer than five minutes the last six months. I’m good at managing it. I’m functional. And I’ve improved quite a bit since I earned the herniated disk. And for that I am thankful. I’m not forced into surgery they way some are.
But sometimes I find myself spinning.
The great thing – the unbelievable thing – is that I’ve learned that it’s easy to get centered again.
Sometimes it’s simply hearing a friend’s or my brother’s voice on the phone. Sometimes, all I need to do is turn to my wife, my daughter, and even my dog on the couch and smile at my blessings as my heart fills.
As long as I have that – I have everything in the world 🙂
Happy Birthday to Doc Searls.
For all those folks who think innovative thinking about the web is for the young, well Doc has just turned 60 and has been greatly influencing how to think about the Web for as long as I’ve been out here (which is pretty darn long, I can remember Dave Winer announcing Doc’s blog’s launch).
Thank you for sharing so much.
Others: David Weinberger, Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer.
I believe that the Web comprises a living representation of human nature and desire. Our hopes, dreams, wants, needs, joys and hates. Our need to connect with one another. The Web, simply put, is made of people, and the hyperlink is a representation of that.
I realize this makes me sound like some kind of hopeless hippie stuck in 1998, but the proof is all around us.
Jeff Jarvis puts it like this:
Local is people. Our job is not to deliver content or a product. Our job is to help them make connections with information and each other.
I could have just as easily quoted Howard Rheingold from the mid-nineties.
Real successes on the Web have shown an understanding of this, whether you call these sites, services and communities Web 1.0, Web 2.0 or whatever – it doesn’t change – and it won’t change – unless something significant happens to the underlining architecture we all participate on.
So when I read the next three pieces that Mathew Ingram says (when you take into account Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere) reflect a trifecta of failure we can all learn from, it simply reinforced that belief for me.
Center for Citizen Media: Dan Gillmor: Citizen Media: A Progress Report (where are matters now? where are they headed in the future?)
Mark Potts: Backfence: Lessons Learned (great reflections from a Backfence founder)
Wired: Jeff Howe: Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned (certainly not a failure – there is a lot here to be learned from – and what was produced – and continuing to be produced – is to be proud of)
Previously:
PressThink: Guest Writer Liz George of Baristanet Reviews Backfence.com Seven Months After Launch (she nailed it didn’t she?)
Even more previously:
In my opinion, “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” is still the most important book to read about the Web. It will make you realize that on the Web – participatory media happens. All the ideas, features, and concepts we thread through it, we try and trumpet, won’t change it. We can either recognize it – work with it – realize it’s a wondrous, powerful thing – or try and re-invent it or usurp it. The later leads, eventually, to failure. As the record shows.
(note – I was an advisor to NewAssignment.net – so you can take what I say with a grain of salt. however, all you need to do is dive in and you’ll see some impressive, thought provoking work has been put together by everyone involved)
Sorry for the sudden lack of conversing and blogging as of late. My day job has been keeping me really busy. That, along with physical therapy (which has stalled btw – I’m going to try epidural steroid injections next), has really been kicking my ass.
In addition to all this, the past month or so, Philly Future started to crash uncontrollably. Drupal’s aggregator isn’t built to scale, in terms of size, as I have painfully found out. It took some major indexing, cache tuning, and aggregator module tweaking, to stabilize things. Along the way I learned quite a bit about MySQL and Drupal. Enough to know that I need look for a replacement for the aggregator or majorly refactor its database usage. Even so, I plan to submit the improvements I made to the community. They’re going to give us a few more months I think.
Some days I still can relate to Chris Gardner’s character in “The Pursuit of Happyness”, where instead of traveling a myriad of buses, perfectly timed, each day to negotiate making it to my place, the job, or school, six hours on public transportation, now it is balancing work, home, health, and passions like Philly Future. A far better situation. But still not enough time to do it all.
Whether you are interested in the social software/media as a toolset for activism and participatory politics, or reporting the news, or simply community, there is something for you in Digby’s speech at Take Back America 2007. Take the time and give a listen to her today: