Category: Required Reading

  • PLATO People: A History Book Research Project

    I was checking the look of an earlier day’s page and saw that someone had responded to my link to Rebecca’s essay Weblog History. One thing I realized is that I’ll need to go through old posts and assign categories to them in some cases. (This one needs to get the ‘syllabus’ category for the…

  • Bruce Sterling's Contrarian View of Open Source

    More required reading here for keeping up with the ongoing dialogue in blogspace. It doesn’t surprise me that science fiction writers like Sterling and Cory are playing such a big role in shaping the emerging philosophy of this internetworked world we’re building. I’ve always felt that my hypergeek years of reading sci-fi from Bradbury, Asimov,…

  • I get it

    It just clicked for me. Many facets just snapped together into focus. One, explaining why I post in so many different blogs (channels, brands), that almost promiscuous thrill of starting a new blog at the drop of a hat. Another, some recent conversations with business people who understand blogging and are using its process-flow as…

  • Blogs Giveth and Blogs Taketh Away?

    Ray Ozzie writes about e-mail and blogging taking away when other technologies give back. I recognize the compulsive “system monitor” personality he talks about and so I hope I can look forward to someday hacking my flow as effectively as he describes it. It’s fascinating to read how he’s watched his children adopt IM and…

  • A List Apart: 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web

    New, at A List Apart, Eastgate impresario Mark Bernstein offers 10 Tips on writing the “living Web.” I’m quoting tip number 8 as a cheap way of following the advice in tip number 8: Be sexy You are a sexual being. So are all of your readers (except the Google robot). Sex is interesting. Sex…

  • Blogging, Trust, and Spam

    (via scriptingnews) Some thoughts on the mainstreaming of blogs and the definition of spam in this essay, Blogging, Trust, and Discovery by Bob Frankston. A sample: I find the more interesting change is in the process of discovery. Being heard against the din of all the voices is hard and we have a large industry…

  • Architecture Matters: The Rebirth of Public Discussion

    Ray Ozzie hits the nail on the head, detecting the architecture of the blogosphere and the benefits it confers through decentralizing the content management and enabling people to make the connections: But blogs accomplish public discussion through a far different architectural design pattern. In the Well’s terminology, taken to its extreme, you own your own…