If you are Dutch, Belgian or otherwise Dutch speaking. Check out the new Zef.nu. Not only does this website have an incredibly cool URL, it’s also my Dutch website and contains none of the geeky stuff you find here. Before it got hacked it contained only personal stories, now it’s quite different.
Ik zie jullie daar! En als je geen Nederlands spreekt ben je een sul, hihihi ;)
I was just having a look at my referrer logs and found some referrers to an older article of mine, from 2004. Still amusing today :)
The Church of XML:
XML is female. Of course she is. XML is beautiful, XML is sexy, everybody wants a piece of her, and everyone can have a piece of her. But XML is not to own, XML is all about sharing. Perfection is also one of XML’s properties. Perfection on a higher level. It’s not about verboseness, it’s not about efficiency, it’s about openness, sharing and most of all: love. You don’t need condoms if you’ve got XML-DOMs.
Posted on February 10th, 2003: Welcome to my weblog:
I just installed my weblog, here I will post all kinds of stuff, you’ll see what’ll come.
5 years ago today.
Everything has to end.
For those who didn’t read IT Conservative, feel free to browse the archives. I had a good time writing it. But there’s simply not enough time.
“I’m stunned that it’s taken this long,” said Mr. Lyons, 46, when a reporter interrupted his vacation in Maine on Sunday to ask him about Fake Steve. “I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I’ve been sort of waiting for this call for months.” Mr. Lyons writes and edits technology articles for Forbes and is the author of two works of fiction, most recently a 1998 novel, “Dog Days.” In October, Da Capo Press will publish his satirical novel written in the voice of the Fake Steve character, “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody.”
Quite frankly, he doesn’t look at all like someone who would write a blog like that. Here’s Fake Steve’s response.
As you may have noticed my posting schedule changed a bit, before it was at the very most once a day (sometimes once a week, or even couple of weeks), now it’s sometimes a couple of times a day. Trying something, we’ll see how it works out.
With this change I also switched to a new design for ZefHemel.com. I use InSense, a very pretty WordPress theme with some changes to suit my needs.
The first thing I thought when I saw Twitter was, “meh, how is this new?” As so many people, I didn’t see it. But as time passed and people just can’t seem to stop talking about it and it even appeared in the financial times, me too started to see the power of this idea.
Twitter is a kind blogging system, but smaller, messages can just be 140 characters. They’re more like short SMS messages. This length is no coincidence: you can put messages on your twitter page by SMS texting it to some number. Twitter is extremely simple. All you can do is write a message:
Beside that you can add other Twitter users as your friends, the messages they write will appear on your home page as well. Other than that you can follow people (basically that is like a non-reciprocal friend or something). You can send and receive updates to and from twitter over the web, SMS and Jabber/GoogleTalk.
Soon it will also be able to send messages to individual users and that opens quite some potential. Nik Cubrilovic:
With this new functionality we can expect to soon see a number of services similar to those you can find at other SMS services such as Mozes. Services like weather (d weather 94027), news (d news headlines), search (d google nik) and much more. The advantage that Twitter has is that it is a generic communications platform with social networking components. It can be accessed with SMS, Instant Messaging, the website itself and a plethora of applications that have already been built to read/write to Twitter. For potential service providers, Twitter has a rapidly growing base of users who originally signed up as a way to communicate with ‘real’ friends. These users have already registered their email addresses (for email in/out), mobile phones (for SMS in/out) and IM handles (for read/write via IM).
This idea maybe has too much potential for one company to run the game, Twitter already is very slow as it is. Therefore people such as kosso and Dave Winer wonder if we shouldn’t create an open source twitter and standardize the APIs and let different Twitter “clones” interact with each other. Personally I would say: yes, we should standardize some kind of API, but I’m not sure if an open source twitter would be necessary. It would be kind of interesting to see what kind of companies would pop up implementing their own twitter-like services, that hopefully will be able to interact with other such services through the standard interface.
I spent much of the day thinking about Twitter and its potential and I do believe it’s huge. I have quite some ideas on improving this whole twitter thing and stuff you can do with it. I might just try out something myself, will have to see. Once again, interesting times!
Incidentally: my Twitter page.
A good reason to let people in your company blog is for PR reasons. Putting a human face on your company really improves how people view your company. You show that it’s actually made of people with opinions and views, rather than money hungry MBAs. This worked wonders for a company like Microsoft. They were (and to an extent are still) seen as an evil empire, but that has improved a lot over the past years because many Microsofties started blogging. People such as Robert Scoble, who even wrote a book about it, is a good example of this.
This idea is not new however. Today I read something interesting in a book I’m reading for my studies: An Illustrated History of Britain (by David MacDowall) about Queen Victoria of England (page 144) who was a very unpopular queen, until 1868:
One important step back to popularity was the publication in 1868 of the queen’s book Our life in the Highlands. The book was the queen’s own diary, with drawings, of her life with Prince Albert at Balmoral, her castle in the Scottish Highlands. It delighted the public, in particular the growing middle class. They had never before known anything of the private life of the monarch, and they enjoyed being able to share it. She referred to the Price Consort simply as “Albert”, to the Prince of Wales as “Bertie”, and to the Princess Royal as “Vicky”. The queen also wrote about her servants as if they were members of her family.
Of course there was no Internet back then. Electricity was barely invented. But still, she wrote openly about her issues and the people she dealt with. It gave insight into her life. And it worked. She became very popular.
So Queen Victoria may be one of the front runners of what today we know as corporate blogging, or rather: royal blogging.
With blogging going mainstream, do we still really need forums in their current form? I think it might be time for a shift.
But before I begin talking about that, let’s define what forums and blogs are to make the differences clear.
A forum is a place, a website, where people with similar interests gather. People start topics to talk about, others can reply to those. Topics are usually categorized into boards on certain subjects.
A blog is a website written by usually one person, sometimes a group. Sometimes an idea is brought up, sometimes a question is asked, sometimes a question is answered, sometimes visitors are just pointed to interesting ideas or discussions. Blog posts can be categorized. Some bloggers blog about one subject, some blog about a wide variety of subjects.
Both forums and blogs allow for discussion. Forums centralize the discussion on one site, blogs have distributed discussions which are made traceable through links and trackbacks.
When I participate in a discussion on a forum and I think I have something notable to say (which is longer than a couple of lines) I have to decide if I post it on the forum itself, or if I post it on my blog where a broader audience will read it. Sometimes I double post it or link to my blog post on the forum. I feel that if I put a lot of effort into a forum post it will quickly disappear in the loads of other posts and the effort seems lost, that’s why I like posting it on my blog. It’s easier to find things back and to keep a record of the things I write.
Sometimes I find out about somebody who often has interesting things to say, I would like to know what this person writes, not just on one forum but everywhere.
What if we would post everything we had to say on our own blogs? Would it be possible to recreate the forum experience (easy to follow discussions, only one place to go for topical discussions) with the content coming from blogs? Could we get the advantages of both blogs and forums at the same time?
Well partly this is already happening. If you look at ‘Planet’ sites, sites that use the Planet software, such as Planet Java and PlanetRDF, these take a first step into that direction. They aggregate feeds of blogs that talk about one subject. The blogs itself doesn’t have to be purely about one subject, it’s just the posts that are in one of the blog’s categories (related to the planet site) that are being aggregated. Many pieces of blog software support this, like WordPress. If you would only be interested in posts about my personal life, you could subscribe to this feed for example, which only lists posts in my “Personal” category.
So what you have on a planet site is basically a big group blog of people talking about the same topic. Great, but still not hardly as convenient as a forum. What we want is grouped discussions, a view on how the discussion started and evolved from there. On these planet sites discussions between the bloggers take place but they’re not easy to find as it’s simply presented as a long stream of posts with no easy way to see links between them.
A site like TechMeme takes a more clever approach. What TechMeme does is aggregate a number of blogs and see what they link to. If they all seem to link to one particular page, that’s apparently something important that’s being talked about there. This popular page (or one post linking to it) is promoted to being a main article and the other blog posts linking to it are grouped with as discussion of the main article. The more people link to the article, the higher it ends up at TechMeme.com. The result of this is actually very interesting. It is very easy to see what’s hot on technology blogs right now. And it feels a lot more like a forum already.
I wonder, wouldn’t it be possible to generalize and improve this idea a bit?
Say you’re very interested in poodles. You got friends who share your obsession and you want to set up some kind of place to discuss them. Instead of starting a regular forum each of you start a blog. This is easy and free. Everybody can start one at for example Blogger. Then you create a website for your poodle website and install this new kind of forum software, that I’ll call Forum 2.0 software for now. In there you can add all your friends’ blogs and it will automatically poll them from time to time to see if there are new posts. The new posts are republished on this central forum and if links between the posts are found a thread-like structure is created from them (a bit like TechMeme). As people in this small blogging club link to posts more they are ranked higher. It now becomes very easy to track discussions about poodles now. As new people find out about this forum they want to join in. They can easily add their blogs too.
In the future it would even be possible to query sites like Technorati to find blogs outside the list that are linking to posts of listed bloggers. Additionaly features can be imagined here. Digg-like features that are also present in forums, like rating topics. Maybe even allowing users to post on their blogs from inside the Forum 2.0 application (this is possible with the different weblog APIs available), this way people don’t even have to leave the application to respond, the forum experience can be exactly the same as in a “Forum 1.0″ application. Still the actual posts are stored on each of the people’s blogs.
In this way you no longer have to cross-post on forums anymore either. You just add your blog to each of the forums you’re interested in and your contributions will appear there automatically.