yeah, baby. i ran 6 miles today and it felt good.

interestingly, it seems that besides myself there are a goodly number of people wondering about the etiquette surrounding foaf friend declaration. while it's mostly a social and not technical problem, it's precisely the sort of thing that will keep foaf from reaching any kind of critical mass.

An Inquiry into the role of weblogs in online community building.

"Given the vast differences between conventional forms of virtual communities, such as MUDs, and weblogs, it is surprising that the idea of weblog communities has been accepted by so many people and with so little resistance. Thus, the existence of weblog communities should be investigated, if only to uncover how and why the weblog can support the activities normally associated with online communities."

while it's not perfect, ever wonder why google still kicks ass? people. the point is proven nicely as Ovidiu Predescu gives us a glimpse at a new employee's first impressions:

"The scale of the deployment is just beyond any imagination, it's hard to imagine a system more complex than this. The interesting/scary thing is the current system is still expanding...

The work environment is very free, engineers can contribute to internal projects as they wish. The cool thing is that most ideas that you see on the public Web site are driven by engineers. This freedom is something I enjoy very much, as I don't like being constrained by a particular project.

In short I'm having a lot of fun."

cameron chronicles his 24 hour essay marathon on the topic of social networks. too bad he didn't post his answers, 'cause i bet they'd make for some mighty fine readin'.

What Is PhoneBlogger?

"PhoneBlogger is an automated voice application that first asks you for info about which pre-configured blog you wish to post to. After collecting the necessary information, PhoneBlogger records your audio message. Finally, it posts a blog entry that links to the recorded audio."

What is fotolog?

" Fotolog lets you easily put your latest, greatest digital photos on the web in a log format. If friends/family have their own Fotologs, you can see everyone's latest photos on one page."

well, while icommune rearchitects, there's always iHam on iRye :

"Ham on iRye is a set of applications designed to allow you to control iTunes 2.0.3 or higher from another computer on a WAN or LAN network. iHam on iRye lets you control just about every function iTunes provides from any other Mac OS-based computer on your network. Great at parties (use it as a remote jukebox)!"

ross mayfield gathers some interesting, if unscientific, statistics comparing livejournal and blogger.com and starts a ruminating on communication, communities and emergent properties:

"LJ is a closed community from which insular communication is an emergent property. Blogging platforms provide open communication from which community is an emergent property."

i never could figure out why livejournal has remained perpetually on my periphery. looking at the age distribution of lj users, maybe it's simply because i'd quickly be found out as being The Man.

so i'm reading laughingmeme as i'm wont to doing and am enjoying his allconsuming soap client, which is inspired by dj's booktalk. a few posts down, i start getting a little wierded-out because he's written the post i would have written yesterday had i been sufficiently motivated to fully articulate my thoughts about allconsuming. i didn't get it. it seemed like this thing on the periphery of my understanding, something that seemed like it should warrant further investigation, but it took dj to bring it out of the aether and make it concrete.

kellan also points out something i've been struggling with regarding defining "friends" in these kinds of applications:

"I clicked on the "edit friends list", with a certain trepidation, as I never know the protocols for declaring someone "a friend" in these online communities. Allcomsuming short circuited this problem by asking Google who my friends are: rabble, dru, micah, pseudopunk, and a few names I didn't recognize."

i mean, who is my foaf friend? what are the rules? allconsuming solves the problem in an interesting way, but are there some sort of generalizeable ground rules? as is not unique in the blogging world, i'm acquainted with many people, but does this mean i can just willy, nilly put them in my foaf file ? do i have to e.mail them and ask them if they'll be my foaf friend, pretty please?

anyway, i'm ruminating on this and much more as i'm slowly scrolling through his post and that's when i see that he's linked to me as the source for discovering dj's booktalk and i'm reminded that sometimes the universe has a very dry sense of humor.

mike pinkerton has been posting some interesting and honest thoughts on how safari has been affecting his moral as a chimera developer:

"It's easy to get sidetracked on the "woe is me, we lost again" tangent (especially if you've been at Netscape for 5+ years), but it's time to get back to why we're doing this at all: because we enjoy it. It's fun making a product that more than seven people use. I wish that was 7 million, but I guess we have to set our expectations appropriately. Chimera's not going anywhere, regardless of whatever I post on this blog."

PHP's PEAR on Mac OS X :

"In terms of functionality, [ the PEAR Package Manager is ] similar to Perl's CPAN or Fink for Mac OS X in that using this command line utility you can browse, install, update, and remove PHP packages from a central, remote PEAR server to your local system. Installing, configuring, and using the PEAR Package Manager on OS X 10.2 is the focus of this article."

i wonder if all the naval gazing about a blog rapture , bloggerdom ho-hummedness , blogging-newness-wearing-off and renewed commitments to getting back to basics are related to the blogosphere subconsciously trying to deal with the impending release of "weblogs for dummies" .

i remember a similar cyle of activity occuring a few years ago. i think it might have been around the new year as well. much lamenting about focus being lost, concurrent with site redesign after site redesign and a rash of prominent bloggers going on extended leaves of absences. in fact, i think there may have been a site that tracked people going off the air. some came back, some didn't and life went on. i have no idea what it means, if anything. all i know is that i'm still giddy with excitement at the possibilities inherent in booktalk .

dj adams is back from an extended hiatus and, well, blowing me away with the simple little script called booktalk that makes use of allconsuming to provide a nifty little service :

"What booktalk does, crontabbed on an hourly basis, is to grab a user's currently reading and favourite books lists and then look at the hourly list of latest books mentioned. Any intersections are pushed onto the top of a list of items in an RSS file, which represents a sort of 'commentary alert' feed for that user and his books. It goes without saying that the point of this is so that the user can easily monitor new comments on books in his collection by subscribing to that feed..."

it looks like i know what i'm doing this weekend.

hmm. zoe has improved imap support. maybe it'll work for me this time. and in related news jeremy got exim and ssl working with substantially shorter notes than the ones i wrote when i tried to do the same thing with postfix. and truth be told, i never did get postfix to compile correctly on a redhat box. so is it jeremie's use of exim or debian, which made all the difference?