The bright lads at WayPath have implemented an API to their document similarity engine (colloquially known as “more like this”). As slow as I am to code anything, I dunno when I’ll have something to show, but here’s hoping other more quicker minds have a go at it.
Month: May 2003
shaken, not stirred
We had a small earthquake (over in Bremerton, where my niece lives) during the bedtime story hour, just enough to be noticed, but not enough to freak anyone out. I entered a response at the website where they track these things and found that 24 people in my zip code (98115) had also reported it.
I’ll see if I can let the facts slip out tomorrow morning . . . .
business ‘blogs?
ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies, June 9-10, 2003 – Boston, MA
ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo is the first business-oriented forum to address the recent emergence of Weblogs into the business world and their rising importance as a medium of communication. This conference will bring together Webloggers who are pioneers, experts, and technologists. Together, they will present the latest developments, strategies, and success stories behind what is now becoming known as the Business Blog, or B-Blog for short.
Is it a sign of a phenomenon’s maturity when it has a conference built around it?
one million reasons to use WayPath
Waypath Weblog: 1 Million Documents Indexed
As of May 25, 2003:
Days Waypath online: 197
# of weblogs visited: 155,505
# of weblogs in searchable index: 93,747
# of weblog posts spidered: 2,009,512
# of weblog posts in searchable index: 1,067,002
I’m a couple of versions behind: I don’t even have the 1.0 release of the plugin. Go get yours now.
Chad sees the light
Chad Dickerson Incidentally, when I wrote this week’s column (“Beyond Linux”), I wasn’t even thinking about the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit, but using a non-GPL OS like FreeBSD certainly keeps you legally free and clear. The courts might conceivably be able to kill Linux, but not the whole idea of a free high-performance Unix-like OS.
The columns he references is worth a read: it’s interesting to observe how people are torn between wanting Linux or whatever to succeed but still want to keep it to themselves, like that band they saw in a club in their college days. What makes the tipping point between the unique and the ubiquitous? I’ve written about how I find FreeBSD more reliable, stable, and maintainable than Linux, and I’m glad to see someone with Chad’s visibility make people aware of their choices. Isn’t that what Open Source is about? His comments on how far Open Source databases like mySQL have come and how appropriate they are for many uses — buy me a beer and I’ll tell you about a startup I endured that spent hundreds of thousands on Oracle licenses for nothing more than the privilege of saying they used Oracle — are interesting. At what point do you need Oracle or SyBase?
What you don’t know can kill you
If you look at all the outgoing links from English language blogs, only about 1.75% point to a non-English weblog. In the reverse direction, however, the figure is much higher. A full 7% of links from non-English-language weblogs point to an English site.
This means that non-English speakers, on average, link in to our community at four times the rate at which we link into the rest of the world. This is a kind of one-way mirror effect: because English dominates the Internet, we are less likely to to see anything outside our own community, while non-speakers will still be exposed to a lot of what goes on here. In the global conversation, we’re the ones standing at the microphone.
Ben Hammersley put me on to this one.
It is disturbing how insular American culture is. I think the assumption of power in everyone else speaking English is wrong: while it might make some feel smug over how the rest of the world follows our lead, don’t forget, they can talk amongst themselves and we have no idea what they’re saying. It might be no big deal — wait staff joking over the ignorance or unfashionable dress of their customers — but it could also be more meaningful, like the examples described in the linked article. If those storage facilities had blown up, the No Smoking sign would have been destroyed in the blast, and the convenient answer would have been sabotage or terrorism, rather than ignorance of the local language.
I wonder how many native speakers or translators Caesar employed during his imperium?
40 miles, more or less
Another training ride yesterday. I felt tired when I started, and figured I would do 10, maybe 12 miles, just to say I had done something. I got to the 10 mile point, Wilmot Gateway Park in Woodinville, rolled on to the Red Hook Brewery (fortunately located across the river and not too easily accessible). Called my parents in Florida, as I usually do at that time of day, and when I got off the phone, I decided to go just a little further.
I ended up at Marymoor Park, at the north end of Lake Sammamish. That was at 19.8 miles, according to my cyclometer.
The Sammamish trail is much nicer than the Burke-Gilman, much smoother and less congested. The Burke-Gilman has just a few too many roots breaking through the pavement for me, riding as I am on a skeletal saddle and 100 psi tires: by the end of the ride, every one of them feels like a kick in the place one likes least to be kicked. There’s only so much the chamois codpiece in a pair of bike shorts can protect you from.
I found a couple of reasonably fast riders to use as rabbits and keep me at a good pace on the return trip, between 18 and 20 mph, so it went by pretty fast. I feel fine today, though my knees have grumbled every time I have climbed the stairs, and my Achilles tendons have a disturbing rubbing feeling that concerns me. My father broke both of his, about a year apart, at about the same age I am now, and in the throes of physical activity. Hmmm . . . . . it would a real drag to have that happen somewhere in the wilds of Woodinville or Redmond: worse still, on the way to Portland.
making a learning environment
Jim McGee references Ivan Ilich: McGee is lightyears ahead of where I could hope to be in this space.
The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the question, ‘What should someone learn?’ but with the question, ‘What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?’
It’s not the new environment that needs to be thought about this way: the old ones should be examined as well. After all, schools — all schools — are made to serve transient populations, and their needs evolve as the subject matter itself does. Shouldn’t the tools and environment do so, as well?
the relentless march of progress
Happy Fields and Dancing Schnausers: Units of Angst
[ . . . . ] Dad and I began to discuss angst, and we have devised a system by which to rate it. My sister helped to flesh it out, and gave the units their other names. The system follows:
The basic unit of angst is a mope.
Oh, you have to click through to this one: it’s worth it.
why knowledge management matters
Contrast these two paragraphs, each designed to convey the value propositions of knowledge management to an unaware, perhaps skeptical, audience of executives:
1. Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous change. Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings.
2. In June 1995, a health worker in Kamana, Zambia, logged on to the CDC website in Atlanta and got the answer, posted by an unknown associate in Indonesia, to a question on how to treat malaria.
Even if the audience has no experience in health care, they immediately relate better to the second argument, even though it is less comprehensive an explanation of the benefits of knowledge management. The story engages them in ways the factual argument cannot.
I had an email exchange with a librarian at my workplace a few weeks: she has recently been charged with finding ways to integrate technology into the learning process, and I sent her a couple of recent links on KM, thinking they might be useful.
Her reply was that KM wasn’t anything she was interested in. At the time, I was surprised and puzzled, but after reading these two examples, I’m really disappointed. A culture that isn’t even aware of how little it knows about itself is an amazing phenomenon, and not altogether enjoyable.