vanderwal.net

Experiencing Light

Yesterday, Saturday the 3rd of March in San Francisco I had been out in the Richmond District revisiting my old haunts (to old friends, yes I was on Clement street on Saturday driving but it seems to have improved). I went by Green Apple Books, where I may have spent months of my life (it is my 3rd favorite bookstore anywhere, with Powell's in Portland holding the top rung). The mix of new and used and the nooks and crannies that hold great potential to open new doors of understanding are a real gem. I also wandered into Haaigs Deli and Spice where I used to buy bags of spice and loose leave tea to savor.

Comparatively, in and around Washington, D.C. things are far more transient and ephemeral in the community space than in San Francisco. Yes, there is history to no end in and around D.C., but but stores and communities drift with the winds. This 30 minute walk back through places that were core parts of my life and being in San Francsico has changed so very little. The crafts people as store keepers and business people has endured. I was back at home and not wanting to leave that comfort and connectedness to what was and still is. It reminded me of a great piece in the SF Chronicle/Gate from 2003 about the repair of the San Francisco Ferry Building clock. It was such a great San Francisco story of history, craft, and individuals having a part of the whole community fabric. As well the clock was built to continue working for over a thousand years. It is there to count the minutes of more than a thousand years of history, personal moments, booms and busts, and other general and momentous passages through time.

At about 5:20 p.m. (17:20 for clarity) I got back in my car (er, was my mom's) and started driving out Clement into the sun toward the beach to see the 20s street crossings of Clement Street that also held a lot of wonderful moments from the past. From there I turned and went over to California Street to drive back downtown to meet friends for dinner.

As I was driving in the bright clean clear increasingly golden sun was going down slowly behind me. The lighting was the most incredible light I have experienced. It was warm, golden, engulfing, and made everything radiant. It was the embodiment of the golden glow. And all of this was incredibly moving to the point of loving everything great and glorious about everything in life: people, architecture, nature, all made and natural, and all real and imagined. It was that kind of light. A perfect moment lasting through the golden shadows created by the hills all the way down to the end of California Street.

As I reached the end I really had been wishing I had my camera with me to stop and see if I could capture the glory of this light and the crisp blue skies wrapping this beautiful city. But, I remembered a great snippet of conversation I had in Berlin with Malcolm McCollough about reading after he signed his book, Digital Ground, I had read and jammed with PostIts sticking out the edges like a fuzzy caterpillar and highlighted extensively. We talked about the problem of reading a book like that and wanting to read it straight through to have the flow and understanding, but also to read with highlighter and paper snippets in hand so to capture the things I really want to hold on to [there is no good way to read it twice as it has unfolded already and what struck once with significance may not again]. Malcolm stated that was his problem with going to cities for the first time, but rather than an highlighter it is the camera to document and capture the city (which is how I often meet and get to know a city) and he opts to just experience. For that 20 minute stretch yesterday I had no camera with me that could capture the ephemeral qualities of light that were escaping, but my only choice was to live and experience it. I did possibly like no other stretch of time before. There was glory built into that time, woven with history of personal and collective all woven and washed in amazing light.

Coming Farther Out of the Grief Fog

Today along with the past week in California at my Mom's place has finally begun feeling like another of many layers of the grief fog lifting. I was not fully prepared for the reality of taking care of my Mom’s and remainder of my Dad’s affairs. After losing my dad last Summer I was more prepared mentally for the passing of my Mom and her long struggles with good health really making it all seem like is was forever close. Yet, with all that was going on at the same time (move and transitions with work and elsewhere) it was a good struggle.

The trip out to California with my son last week really was good. My mom badly wanted to go to baseball games this Summer at some point with the two of us. She was a long time and die hard Oakland A’s game and my son got to run the bases after the game, then watched the Giants play in SF from a few rows behind home plate, went to see the Sacramento Rivercats play, and finally watched the Stockton Ports from right behind their dugout on consecutive days from funds tucked away for just that the grief fog lifted.

The past few days back (and prepping for another few trips to California to continue to go through and close things out) really started sinking in the wonder of life that has been so far. Watching Milk last evening really brought back many memories of growing up in Northern California and that really odd time of teen years sorting things out at the same time the world around me was struggling with the same thing (not sure the world ever is finished with that journey). The drives the week before from the Central Valley to the Bay Area really brought back many memories and understandings of who I’ve been and where I am.

Today I got out and went to Politics & Prose to look around and there is something about a really well curated local bookstore that you can connect with that brings the senses alive. Politics & Prose really did that for me today. I’ve long missed other Washington, DC area bookstores like Olson’s that had just the right things displayed that tickled my mind and soul bringing them to life. Pulling thoughts and glimpses of understandings (for myself and to share with others) out of the denseness of the grief fog really was wonderful. Politics and Prose had so many things out on special displays that are at the top of my Amazon wish list it really was a dangerous place to be.

Today was wrapped up by watching Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage that chronicled the existence of the band Rush from its creation to current date. My neighbor Tom Just turned me on to Rush in 1980 when he moved into the neighborhood from Chicago. Listening to “2112”, “A Farewell to Kings”, “Hemispheres”, and “Permanent Waves” really struck me from a music stand point, but also the lyrics (I pay attention to lyrics much later than the music, there are some Rush lyrics I am just getting around to listening to in full after 30 some years). But, in watching this movie tonight it brought out the love and passion the band members have for their craft and the depth to which they put their understanding and pushing the edges of it. The discussion of Neal Peart’s loss of his daughter in a tragic accident and then his wife and his struggle to find it all and put it all back together helped cement the breaking through another layer of this grief fog.

In the past few weeks I've been talking with some companies about their products and some are in fairly good shape and needing a few tweaks and pushes in the right direction, yet others are lost in a world of buzzwords and social development memes with little value. I'm really looking to getting my hands dirty again and anxious to clear through the family affairs that need addressing. I also have a good chunk of writing to do and prepping for some presentations ahead.

On a Sunday evening I am ready for this next week to begin and dig in.

Good Bye Mom

On the morning of 10th of June 2011 my mom, Maye Vander Wal, passed away in Stockton, California. She is much loved and missed by those who knew her. I have posted a memorial site for her at http://maye.vanderwal.net where you are free to post memories.

The memorial for Maye will be at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Stockton, California on June 30, 2011 at 10am.

I have been in California tending to her things and I will be splitting time between Maryland and California for June and July.

Deep thanks for all the love and wishes expressed so far, it has been very welcome and humbling. I know my mom deeply appreciates the wishes and memories as well.

This Blog Goes All the Way to 2,000

This blog post (yes, the one you are reading) is number 2,000 in this blog. The blog turned 10 years old on December 31, 2010, but other than a quick mention of it on Twitter, I more or less let that pass.

Starting the Blog (Under the Hood)

The vanderwal.net domain name started was initially purchased in 1997 and was used for a general personal website, of which my links page is a early remnant of that (it is a continuation of links page I had on my personal website initially hosted in Compuserve in 1995) and it has moved to all versions of my personal site since then. The blog was started in late 2000 as it was on my to do and try list and I started in with Blogger while waiting for the New Year’s ball to drop on tv. The first post, is now gone (it was likely the very profound “hello world” sort of thing or “FuBar is testing”. I, like many others who were using Blogger, then a product of Pyra, went through the growing pains of Blogger with its outages (all pages from Blogger were sent via FTP to my site) that meant no new updates could be made using that service. Pyra imploded one fine day and was left with just one employee, Ev Williams to run it with bits and pieces of help until it was later bought by Google. But, I only lasted on Blogger for nine months or so as I had been pulling together a travel blogging tool that would allow me to post to my blog and not have to use FTP.

October 2001 I moved to my own hand build blogging tool that also included a redesign. This has all pretty much stayed since then. In October 2004 the commenting was turned off after I woke to 1400 porn SPAM comments and I deleted the SPAM comments and removed the code for commenting. I had intended to bring comments back at some point in the my own tool, but then comment SPAM got worse my thought was to move to add an external commenting service (none have been satisfactory enough to move forward with). I then have been planning to move all of these posts into another blogging tool that had an easier to manage workflow for editing and also had a good commenting system. That has yet to happen and increasingly I am fine without there being any comments here. I miss the days of old when there were great conversations in a blog’s comments, but those days rarely happen any more outside of four or five blogs I can think of. One of the reasons I went with building my own blogging tool was the ability to have multiple categories assigned to each post to make aggregation of like posts much easier. The volume of content here has made that ease of use, much more difficult to pull off and it is one of the things I am back playing with in a dev version of the tool.

Blog Writing Style Changes

When I look back to my first blog posts that were created in Blogger, I see a huge change in the writing style and content from where posts have ended up today. The blog is named “Off the Top” as it was posting of things that were coming off the top of my head and were just a random collection of things (hence the URL naming for where the blog sits). The rough gathering and sharing of ideas shifted in after the first few months to a longer and a little more serious style. My style shifted a little bit when I moved to my own blogging platform, but the biggest shift was when I added headers to posts in March 2002. The style of the posts went from many short (paragraph or so) posts highlighting of things found and shared for others, but also shared for a future me to comeback to. By 2003 the posts were getting longer and there were fewer posts per day.

Delicious, Twitter, and Personal InfoCloud Ate Content

The changes on blog writing style were paired with other services and blogs easing content out of the blogs pages here. The catchall blog I started with included posts of a sentence or two and occasionally a paragraph or so, changed quite a bit over time.

Delicious was the first to really move content out of the blog here. The small snippets pointing to web pages and putting them in context all fell into Delicious (for a short time I built a my own bookmarking tool, but it lacked the social benefit of seeing others interactions around the same pages).

Twitter altered the site by the quick bon mots going straight there. The short snippets not only disappeared, but the frequency of blogging really slowed down. The posts that still showed up here were longer and more detailed.

This shift was somewhat good as it allowed me to really focus on subjects I was working through. One of the longer early pieces was in 2002 and was not posted in the blog as it was very out of character. When I moved to my own blogging platform I not only set it up to have multiple categories / keywords, but to classify posts as blog posts, journal, or essay. This last classification was statements and short pieces, longer more personal pieces, and essays were longer. Over the time, most everything has been classified as a blog post, but fits my initial framing that these would be called essays.

The longer pieces were also trending to a more central theme that I was working around. The mixing of work and much more fun content was getting a lot of feedback from people reading that it should be separated. That more professional writing also seemed likely to benefit from comments, which were not coming back anytime soon here. At this point I used my TypePad account and pointed www.personalinfocloud.com to it. For quite a while I was cross posting, but that slowed down in 2008 or so.

Where Does This Go from Here?

This blog is continuing on. I have a lot of pent up content that fits well here. I really want to get back to posting things about what I am reading and have a means to capture and share other ideas out. The demarkation of what goes here and what goes over to the Personal InfoCloud blog is a little fuzzy. But, I am fairly sure I am not going to add comments back here on this blog. Watching other blogs the number and quality of blog comments have dwindled, drastically. There are few blogs that have great comment threads anymore, but far fewer than benefit from tools like Disqus that aggregate poor comments (most are not comments and not really relevant to the posts) from elsewhere around the web / internet.

Here is to another 2,000 posts! Perhaps (I didn’t plan 2,000 posts when this started and would have called anybody crazy should they have suggested such a little over 10 years ago).

Learned by Failing: Best Lesson was About Experience

This return back to blogging is hopefully unleashing quite a stack of things both here in this blog, but as well in Personal InfoCloud. It seems I will be using this to discuss personal tools, processes, and life stories that I often recount so to make things a bit easier (not sure who it is easier for, but there you have it).

Going Abroad to Learn a New Way

In 1988 I took my last semester of classes for my undergrad degree at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) in Oxford, England. I did this for a few different reasons: 1) I really wanted to study abroad; 2) I wanted to fill in a gap in my education's knowledge of history around European history; 3) It was a program on the study abroad flyer board at my college; and 4) It was much closer to my college girlfriend who was studying abroad in Lyon, France and I could still speak English (my French I had from an hour a day for three years in Montessori school from age 3 to 5 was more than a bit rusty). These may not be in the order of value I placed on them at the time.

One of the strengths of CMRS was it was run on the Oxford (Oxbridge) system of tutorials. My class load consisted of two tutorials and two lectures each week. Each of the tutorials required self-study (directed by a question given by the tutor and often one to four starting resources) so to fill a gap in one's knowledge and then write-up a six to 8 page paper each week on the subject. This was 12 to 18 pages of writing each week (or that was the aim) after learning as much as possible on the subject.

Learning By Failing the Lesson of Experience

One of the tutorials I had was focussed on the Early Northern Renaissance Art, which covered some of my favorite artists like Albrecht D%C3%BCrer, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jan van Eyck as well as the perfection of symbology in art, use of proper prospective, and incredible attention to detail. This tutorial required quite a bit of reading, but the introduction lectures to CMRS provide insight into gutting a book to help get through the large volume of reading needed.

I was doing rather well, or passably well in this tutorial and then came the last essay for the tutorial, "Compare and contrast the Early Northern Renaissance with the Early Italian Renaissance". I had purchased a two or three of the needed Northern Renaissance art essential books and used the libraries heavily, but I had nothing on the Italian Renaissance period. This being toward the end of term the libraries were rather bare. I read up on what I had in my Northern books and pulled as much as I could from general art history books covering the Renaissance in general. When I had as much as I could pull together for the paper I wrote what turned into a four page paper. It was thin on content, depth, and quality (having put off writing to get more time to find information).

I read my paper to the tutor that week. He was more than a little displeased at the lack of volume, content, and quality. I pointed out that all of the books that were on the list were not available and I pulled from the best resources I could find, which were rather lacking on the subject. He asked a very pointed question, "Have you ever seen any Italian Renaissance art?" I said I had, as I was a fan of museums and the prior summer I had been to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy (among many other art museums around Europe). The tutor asked what differences I could tell him between the two Renaissance. I went into some solid detail explaining the contrasts regarding texture, color palettes, sharpness of detail, focal points, skies, clothing, and many other large contrasts.

The Great Payoff of All My Undergraduate Courses

The tutor looked at me over the glasses at the end of his nose and bluntly stated, "That, Mr. Vander Wal, is an A paper, if not better. But, what you have written is a D paper at best. I only grade on what is written. Let my advice to you be: Trust your experiences more than what is written, as that is how we all advance. Let your own experiences trump that others have written or have not written and you write that down so to document it."

So, there in what was my last paper in my last class of my undergraduate career was the most valuable lesson I had learned in all of my undergraduate collegiate career. All the work and money that went into it was tied up in a wonderful bow that prepared me for the rest of my life like no other. I had many great learning experiences prior to this, but nothing with as much gravitas as this. It gave me conviction to examine and tear everything apart and question it with my own lens and one that had me pay much closer attention to my own experiences while trying to frame everything from experiences to learning from other's experiences where I lack my own.

As If Had Read

The idea of a tag "As If Had Read" started as a riff off of riffs with David Weinberger at Reboot 2008 regarding the "to read" tag that is prevalent in many social bookmarking sites. But, the "as if had read" is not as tongue-in-cheek at the moment, but is a moment of ah ha!

I have been using DevonThink on my Mac for 5 or more years. It is a document, note, web page, and general content catch all that is easily searched. But, it also pulls out relevance to other items that it sees as relevant. The connections it makes are often quite impressive.

My Info Churning Patterns

I have promised for quite a few years that I would write-up how I work through my inbound content. This process changes a lot, but it is back to a settled state again (mostly). Going back 10 years or more I would go through my links page and check all of the links on it (it was 75 to 100 links at that point) to see if there was something new or of interest.

But, that changed to using a feedreader (I used and am back to using Net News Wire on Mac as it has the features I love and it is fast and I can skim 4x to 5x the content I can in Google Reader (interface and design matters)) to pull in 400 or more RSS feeds that I would triage. I would skim the new (bold) titles and skim the content in the reader, if it was of potential interest I open the link into a browser tab in the background and just churn through the skimming of the 1,000 to 1,400 new items each night. Then I would open the browser to read the tabs. At this stage I actually read the content and if part way through it I don't think it has current or future value I close the tab. But, in about 90 minutes I could triage through 1,200 to 1,400 new RSS feed items, get 30 to 70 potential items of value open in tabs in a browser, and get this down to a usual 5 to 12 items of current or future value. Yes, in 90 minutes (keeping focus to sort the out the chaff is essential). But, from this point I would blog or at least put these items into Delicious and/or Ma.gnolia or Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 (this service was insanely amazing and was years ahead of its time and I will write-up its value).

The volume and tools have changed over time. Today the same number of feeds (approximately 400) turn out 500 to 800 new items each day. I now post less to Delicious and opt for DevonThink for 25 to 40 items each day. I stopped using DevonThink (DT) and opted for Yojimbo and then Together.app as they had tagging and I could add my context (I found my own context had more value than DevonThink's contextual relevance engine). But, when DevonThink added tagging it became an optimal service and I added my archives from Together and now use DT a lot.

Relevance of As if Had Read

But, one of the things I have been finding is I can not only search within the content of items in DT, but I can quickly aggregate related items by tag (work projects, long writing projects, etc.). But, its incredible value is how it has changed my information triage and process. I am now taking those 30 to 40 tabs and doing a more in depth read, but only rarely reading the full content, unless it is current value is high or the content is compelling. I am acting on the content more quickly and putting it into DT. When I need to recall information I use the search to find content and then pull related content closer. I not only have the item I was seeking, but have other related content that adds depth and breath to a subject. My own personal recall of the content is enough to start a search that will find what I was seeking with relative ease. But, were I did a deeper skim read in the past I will now do a deeper read of the prime focus. My augmented recall with the brilliance of DevonThink works just as well as if I had read the content deeply the first time.

Return to the Blog and Life

Things have been quiet here? Um, yes they have. The past couple years have been full of changes and struggles. It seemed that just as things were turning from a rough stretch on personal and work front, something would rise up and cripple that forward progress.

This past year it was my dad calling in June of 2009 saying he cancer of the stomach that had spread to the liver. He seemed to improve quite a bit by Christmas of 2009 as he and my mom came back to visit, which was quite wonderful. But, on the return home he started not doing well and they found a tumor on his brain. Things stopped improving after this and it became a bit of a rough road for him. Not paying close attention to my own well being it really had an impact on me. He was my best buddy and I knew time was running short.

In July of this year my dad died and while it was really hard to comprehend and sad, it was also freeing. Not only did that concern and un-noticed energy focus had shifted, but I also had the focus that the safety net of parents love, guidance, and all types of parental support had sifted from a set of two, to just one. But, I realized I still had two feet and put that energy and time back into work.

Time Spent Digging

During the past couple years during all the change and struggle, I've spent a lot of time sorting through the things I am deeply passionate about, which are many and fit wonderfully with the work I do. I have spent a lot of time digging quite deeply into social software and the whys and how it works, but more intrigued where it doesn't with the 90% of the world that make up the mainstream. I have a lot of writing I haven't posted or shared on this, but have some of it in workshops and presentations I have done in the past couple years. That will likely be finally getting posted over at Personal InfoCloud.

Over many years and as part of my formal education I have read much of the usual corpus of social theorists, whom I always finding myself having to set aside reality to embrace the theorists models enough to understand them, but then come back to reality and they don't fit as well as a whole. I've always been mindful of them, but as I have been digging back into my older frameworks of the Model of Atraction and Come to Me Web and how they helped me work through and understand interactions with information on the web and beyond to build and frame next generation services, along with helping others do the same.

This review and digging has lead me to a lot of understandings and realizations around the social web and echos all the years of building, managing, iterating, and maintaining social tools. The same problems always surface, which are the tools don't really allow humans to be social like humans are social with out a mediated interface. But there are basic understanding of how humans are social through tools as mediated interfaces that is counter to many of the ways many of the tools and services are developed and provided.

Now mixing the older Model of Attraction and come to me web frameworks for thinking with the models and understandings I have come to in the past few years regarding social software have really gelled. These ideas will be getting out there and have been the fodder for client work that is resurfacing now that the economy has become out of its dire state (for now).

About that Book

As many know I was writing a book on folksonomy for O'Reilly. That book hit a wall (no, not a Vander Wal), or a few of them and I was notified O'Reilly would not be publishing it. Early in writing it I got stumped by many things that I was seeing as they did not fit any of the social models being touted as core to understanding social in the Web 2.0 sense. It took me about 18 months to deconstruct all of what I knew, what others knew, and get to models I could use to think through some of the really strong values people were finding and the problems that people were having that seems completely counter to "how the social web works&qout;.

Following this there were many changes happening in my personal life that took attention and focus. But, at the same time the services and tools were changing drastically. Many of the really good tools that were addressing the hard problems, but not popular were shutting down. This was also happening for the tools for organizations to purchase and use internally (where my main focus has been). But, content for the book is still moving forward and I am looking for a publisher that fits well for it. Now that SharePoint 2010 has social bookmarking / tagging in it (although a really really rough interface for it) the book has much more value, so people deploying it can have a much better understanding of what is really needed to have it help remove the huge problem organizations face, of not being able to find and refind information they are sure they have when they need it. But, I am also free to blog much of what was heading into the book so it can get feedback and more eyes honing it.

Back Blogging?

Yes! I am back blogging. More non-work type posts will be here at Off the Top and work related content is over at Personal InfoCloud, but also am dropping odd bits in my Tumblr vanderwal blog. I am likely going to change the platform under this blog to something that I did not write in 2001 sometime in the next couple of months (nearly 2,000 post and categories to transfer).

Good Bye Dad

Yesterday, 1 July 2010, my dad passed away in Stockton, California. I am going to miss him deeply, but am grateful for the life that he shared, not only with my mom and me, but the many communities and organizations he cared about and worked in.

I have started a site for his memorial at tom.vanderwal.net. Please head there to leave comments and messages if you wish to do so.

Good Bye Brad

It was only four days into 2010 that the reality of life and its frailty surface to take the air out of my breath. It was the death of Brad Graham a very early blogger (BradLands) and host to the pre-SXSW warm-up Break Bread with Brad. As the article says, Brad died of natural causes at the age of 41.

Brad was one of those wonderful people who seemed to preternaturally walk up to you and say, "I know you" and with in 15 seconds of first meeting him you knew he was right. Brad was a great host when he was on the road traveling, as I joined in on Break Bread with Brad in San Francisco September 10, 2001 and in June in Washington, DC in June 2002 (he assembled about a dozen DC bloggers for brunch and was a great guest and host). Brad was great with stories that had unexpected twists and humor that would have everybody laughing until they were crying. Brad was not only in love with the theater, but one always had a feeling you were part of his always on comedy production and you were the star. He had those type of wonderful gift, you wish you yourself had and wished everybody you knew had too.

One of the things that has been really amazing is seeing MetaFilter, or more accurately MetaTalk - Remembering our friend Brad to witness an impressive outpouring of sorrow and celebration for the joy each of us shared in our life, which was Brad. This outpouring of moments of silence (indicated with a simple blank line or few and a ".") is not only a testament to Brad, but to the closeness we all felt for Brad that extends from only a few minutes or hour we would see him at SXSWi or when we were in the same town with him, but to the enduring power we have to fill those in between moments with digital intimacy to share a story, an glimpse of life, or in Brad's case most often a laugh.

I Too Miss Blogging

Ian said it best in the header for his post I miss blogging. There is so much good in Ian's brief post as well as the linked to Dan Cederholm post WoodPress. Before the thoughtless "15 ways to...", which rarely state anything worth reading. I am beginning to believe that the number lists are not meant for reading and only for SEO hits and ad revenue, which is not anything related to user experience but site owner's revenue experience.

I repeatedly am finding things I blogged years ago in Google searches when looking for answers. Sadly, at some point I had the answer and was prescient enough to blog my thoughts knowing I would need the answer in future years (sticking with that story). I have dumped a lot of snippets into Twitter that I know exist or did, but can't recover (thanks Twitter, well not really).

I really miss blogging and hoping drop things here again and stick with it (yes, been said before). There has been a lot that has taken my attention from here in the past 6 months to a year, including a separation, divorce, dad getting cancer (stomach that spread to liver), thinking we nearly lost him a couple times after collapses, economy ripping apart most of my work, and then seeing many of those things start to turn around. But, what I miss is sharing out snippets of life, understanding, misunderstanding, and half baked thoughts to get feedback.

Yes, get feedback. I know, I know! Comments are still off. Still planning resolving that, but not touching my code again. It needs time, possibly a new host, and some mapping things out.

I Love You Dad

it is in this precious life of ours
that we see
the living
the dying
the loving
the caring
the sharing
the bearing
the seeing
the believing
the comforting
the guiding
and all of the grace we can embrace

it is from these lessons
most wonderfully shared
from a father
to his son
that we do really see
the greatness in life
and the blessings within us
to live each day as a gift
not only to each of us
but to all of us
through the human bonds
of love provided
through everlasting grace

Resurfacing from Long Quiet

Yes, things have been quiet publicly around these parts. Well, that has to do with a lot of changes on the personal side of life that rolled over in the whole of things. In short our house sold, we moved in different directions, I moved office and home (with the lot of things moving to storage for a bit), been to Boston for Enterprise 2.0., moved in to my new place, been through more than my share of installation hiccups, filling in the gaps of furniture that was donated long ago, been to Varese, Italy for the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0, then to Copenhagen for Reboot (w/ two presentations), put on a full-day workshop at FatDUX HQ, returned to unbox (dig for many series of important papers), more installation hiccups, and many many meetings around the move.

Things are finally settling in to a proper flow, but every time I think that disruption of some sort raises its head (the amount of disruption is utterly amazing). I only move about a half mile from where I was living and working. InfoCloud Solutions has a new mailing address: 7831 Woodmont Avenue Suite 324, Bethesda, MD 20814. The actual workplace is nestled in Chevy Chase, Maryland (spitting distance from Bethesda).

Things are now in proper order for full working efforts and soon clicking along at a rate beyond the previous rate.

Hopefully, I will have longer descriptions blogged for the recent presentations. I am in the midst of trying to do massive writing efforts with coordinating Fall travel schedule and new clients coming on board (still room for more).

It is good to be back and settled.

DataPortability Video is Place to Start Understanding

Marchall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has posted a good background about New Video Explains the Basics of Data Portability. The DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix video is under 2 minutes in length and explains the reasons why the DataPoratbility.org group is important. It aims to ease the pain many are experiencing as they use more social media, social web services, social networks, and/or social computing services in their personal and work life.

Control

The biggest piece in this for me is control with translates to services respecting privacy wishes among other desires around trust and control of sharing. As Tom Raftery points out With the rising interest in, and use of Social Networks (FaceBook, Plaxo et al) there is growing unease in what those sites are doing with your data, never mind the inconvenience of uploading all your data every time you join a new site. The DataPortability.org aims to include in its focus data that is "shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools and vendors".

I have been working around the edges on a project whose aim is to respect these privacy wishes. This is one of the things that really needs to be at the core of all services entering into this market segment.

Ma.gnolia Goes Mobile

On Friday Ma.gnolia rolled out a mobile version of their site, M.gnolia - Mobile Ma.gnolia. This had me really excited as I now have access to my bookmarks in my pocket on my mobile. Ma.gnolia gives a quick preview in their blog post Ma.gnolia Blog: Flowers on the Go.

What Mobile Ma.gnolia Does and Does Not Do

First, off the mobile Ma.gnolia does not have easy bookmarking, which is not surprising given the state things in mobile browsers. I really do not see this as a huge downside. What I am head over heals happy about is access to my bookmarks (all 2800 plus). The mobile version allows searching through your own tags (if you are logged in). It currently has easy access to see that is newly bookmarked in Ma.gnolia groups you follow, your contact's bookmarks, popular bookmarks, your own tags, and your profile.

Mobile Site Bookmarks

One thing that is helpful for those that use mobile web browsing is having easy access to mobile versions of web sites. Yes, the iPhone and many smartphone users (I am in the Nokia camp with my well liked E61i) can easily browse and read regular web pages, but mobile optimized pages are quicker to load and have less clutter on a smaller screen. The iPhone, WebKit-based browsers (Nokia), Opera Mini, and other decent mobile web browsers all have eased mobile browsing use of regular webpages, but having a list of mobile versions is really nice.

Yesterday, Saturday, I created a Ma.gnolia Mobile Version Group so people can share web pages optimized for mobile devices (quicker/smaler downloads, smaller screens, less rich ads, etc.). One of the ways I was thinking people could use this is to find sites in this group then bookmark them for their own use with tags and organization that makes sense for themself. The aim is just to collect and share with others what you find helpful and valuable for yourself. This group will be monitored for spam as the rest of Ma.gnolia is (Ma.gnolia uses "rel="no-follow"" so there really is little value to spammers).

Ways You Can Use Mobile Ma.gnolia

This means if you tagged a store, restaurant, bar, transit site, or other item that has value when out walking around it is really nice to have quick access to it. It can also be a great way to read those items you have tagged "to read" (if you are a person that tags things in that manner) so you can read what you want in the doctor's office, bus, train, or wherever.

I have a lot of content I have bookmarked for locations I am work, live, and visit. When I come across something I want to remember (places to eat, drink, learn, hang, be entertained, etc.) I often dump them into the bookmarks. But, getting to this information has been painful from a mobile in the past. I am now starting to go back to things I have tagged with locations and add a "togo" tag so they are easier for me to find and use in the Ma.gnolia mobile interface. I have already added a bookmark for an museum exhibit that I really want to see that is not far from where I am. When a meeting is dropped, postponed, or runs short near the museum I can make a trip over and see it. There is so much information flowing through my devices and it is nice to be able to better use this info across my Personal InfoCloud in my trusted devices I have with me and use the information in context it is well suited for, when have stepped away from my desk or laptop.

I am looking forward to see where this goes. Bravo and deep thanks to the Larry and others at Ma.gnolia that made this happen!

Hotel Brings Back Blog Sentimality from Summer 2001

This trip to Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference (more on that in a post to follow) turned out to be digitally sentimental. As the cab pulled up in front of the hotel on Tremont Street, I realized I stayed in it July 2001 when it was a Wyndam. That trip was special as I had written a bit of code so I could blog from the road and then pull it back in to may hand built pages when I returned. This was a tiny travel blog tool I had knocked out in a few hours.

At that time I was writing the blog by hand in TextPad and loading via FTP. This was after I started blogging in late 2000 in Blogger, which became one person, Ev, and crashed often. I wanted a means to not have to FTP my blog post up when traveling as I was continually finding hotels blocked FTP.

This simple travel blog tool worked well. When I would return home I would copy the blog posts written in my browser based tool (a few text fields and a location drop down) and then FTP the incorporated bits into this blog. It was in October that I built out that tool into a full blogging tool, which still runs this site today. Nearly six years later I am living with my simple tool that works well for me, well I still want comments back on (a long story and a fix that may take more time than I want to spend).

This travel blog tool was also used to blog on September 11, 2001 that I was in San Francisco and not exactly sure when I was going to get back to the Washington, DC area. It is how a place brought back a flood of captured digital memories all from a tiny tool.