"Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: August 01, 2004 - August 07,
2004 Archives"

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: August 15, 2004 - August 21,
2004 Archives

talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_08_15.php#003296
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GeorgeWBush.com :: Official Blog ::
August 01, 2004 - August 07, 2004
Archive

georgewbush.com/blog/archives/week_2004_08_01.html#001385
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This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
August 08, 2004 - August 14, 2004
Archives

thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2004_08_08.html#001 686
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Ask mc chris

Chris TV 3.60

Thanks to Chris Pirillo

After running the bit< /a> about Mr Picky yesterday, I got several emails saying that there are others who say the same thing -- "If Dave's there, I won't be." So it seems likely that Chris Pirillo was under the same kind of pressure when he invited me to keynote Gnomedex, and that makes me all the more appreciative of his support. Thanks Chris!

And to everyone else, listen to what I do at Gnomedex, I'm sure it'll be recorded. People slime me and it's not fair. I work hard at conferences to make sure everyone gets good value. I work for the "audience," a term that needs updating in the age of the blog. There are always a few people who feel otherwise. As they say in France, c'est la vie!

Who is Chris Kohler?

"Chris Bailey"

day by day by chris muir

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"Chris Heathcote"

Chris is Available on Thursday

Chris Barr Is Available On Thursday: I don't even know how to explain this.

Who? Chris Barr is a graduate student in the Department of Media Studies at the University at Buffalo.

What? Chris will perform the actions and events scheduled for him by the users of this web site.

Where? In and around Buffalo, NY.

Some of the things people have scheduled are pretty interesting.

Chris should attempt to do a handstand for as long as possible. Walking around on his hands is an added bonus. As this shouldn't last an hour, he should have the new Mars Volta ablum playing so that he can listen to it for the remainder of the hour.

Communicating with Chris

I've been spending  alot of time communicating with Chris - so this is pretty interesting to me. I guess he's holding judgement on how well I manage our IRC channel - I more or less just say "make it work" - let me know if there's a problem, which this morning - there was.

Hopefully when Chris gets back from class - he'll solve that problem.

:-)

Communic ation Media and Social interactions in projects. I have a lot of things I want to publish here, but not enough time in the day to write them all. However, this one particularly struck my interest.

I'm interested in communication between people. This is part of the reason that I find LiveJournal and other social networking software so interesting - it shows relationships between people simply, and allows communication between them as well. (And if you think LiveJournal isn't social networking software, you don't understand the term: Building relationships and the results of them is a huge part of this site.)

There are a number of different ways that I communicate with people around me. The first is the people I'm physically close to: people who live on campus and near me, that I can actually see in real life. This method of communication is good in lots of ways - quick, face to face discussions can achieve a lot in the ways of interpersonal relationship building. However, it doesn't work very well in technical situations. You can't teach people how to program in a face to face situation. Spoken language can't convey many of the technical needs that learning non-spoken languages requires. Spoken language is great for relationships, but not for technical discussions.

The same applies to phone conversations, but even more so. In a conference call, you can discuss ideas, you can toss around plans, but you can't actually get down to the meat of implementation. I'm likely biased because that's where my work centers, but I'm a coder, and you can discuss high-idea plans over my head all day, but until you get down into telling me what the next feature to code is, and suggestions for coding it, I'm just going to sit and twiddle my thumbs.

Online communications are where this kind of thing. In group based online communications, there are a number of different ways of working through things. Some of the communications methods I use are email, IRC, and wiki-based information storage.

IRC is similar to phone conversations in that it's designed more for social and discussion based issues rather than coding. However, the ability to say "Let's take a look at line $foo in my patch at [link]" and actually discuss function calls, variable naming, and similar topics makes it a quick real-time medium for discussion of possible issues. Implementation ideas can be discussed, and then everyone can just kind of hang out and hack.

E-mail is one of the best methods for patch discussion. Technical patches can be attached, with long explanations of why things are done the way they are. At the same time, you get the group aspect with things like mailing lists, and you can discuss issues back and forth all day. Not the best way to build social relationships, perhaps, but a great way to hack on code. Bugzilla based systems are simply extensions of this - they allow you to do patch-level discussions in a mailing list format, a truth accentuated by the fact that many of Bugzilla's features are based around email and sending it out to people who want it. This is one reason why Bugzilla is a great system even in small setups - it's the forefront (as far as I know) of issue and feature tracking software.

Wiki based storage is great for a lot of things - documentation, general plans, outlining of todo lists, and so on. Wikis are much more of a form of permanent storage - slower than any of the previous methods mentioned, even with things like RSS feeds for Recent changes. Socialtext workspaces avoid this a little bit by creating mailing lists of recent changes that get sent out on a regular basis, keeping people up to date on what's changing in the workspace. However, the social aspects of most communications are almost completely gone.

Social communications exist in many aspects of almost all projects. Whether you're talking real life, phone, IRC, or email, there's always drama. (If you think that things like Zilla avoid Drama, just see some of my discussions with marksmith from a couple months ago. ;)) Wikis avoid this, obviously, but are clearly more of a form of permanent storage rather than an interactive communication medium. For idea discussion, real life or phone is best, but for patch discussion, email is the place to be.

Some people try to separate the social aspects of working on a project from the technical aspects. The idea that this can be done while achieving any kind of reasonable productivity level is ridiculous - you have to be able to interact with the people you work with to get anything done. This is part of the reason why people like bradfitz< /SPAN> don't make the best project managers for large scale projects. He works pretty well on things like memcached where he's the maintainer and the largest contributor to the code, accepting patches from people who have a high level of technical skills. That kind of project is much easier to deal with, because the people act in a professional way - which many people who volunteer their time for LiveJournal do not. They (and I include myself in this) seem to have some kind of expectation of having their code looked at by people who can accept it - and when code is bad, many people don't have any desire to look at it. Managing a project with patches from people who really don't understand the technical aspects of the code they're patching is frustrating, and difficult to work with.

I'm a code monkey - I don't do management well, I'm a drama queen (or have been in the past at least - I like to think I'm starting to move past that), and I'm not the best at interacting with people. But interacting with people, through many of the media describe above, is necessary in so many cases that to ignore social interactions in a project is simply ludicrous. By crschmidt@livejournal.com. [Christopher Schmidt]

Right on to Chris Schmidt!

Chris Schmidt is the young man who brought FOAF to LiveJournal.  He's kicking ass right now - as we speak to bring FOAF to Drupal.

Right on - Chris!  Keep going!

FOAF Tools - Ah, the power of tools. Many people lately have been ragging on FOAF as a kind of tired standard, because there's no killer application for it. To a certain extent, I agree - there's no highly visible use of FOAF in the world right now for the general public. There are a lot of sites out there that offer some FOAF support, but very few of them actually do well at creating something that's useful to the general public. For a format which is so good at storing personal information about people, it seems that a large resource like this really could be used in a lot of ways. I've been working lately on a couple of different ways to make FOAF more usable to the world at large.

In the past, on the internet there were many annoying things. Pop up windows and ads were among them. However, recently I've resolved these issues in my own setup so I only have to deal with them when I have to be away from home. As a result, I've had time to find other annoying things on the internet - like the annoyance of filling out the same profile information on every website on the planet. I have accounts on so many sites that I can't even count anymore, and every time it's the same information: Name, email address, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Jabber, Address, Dog's name as a child. All these fields need to get filled out every time I go create an account at a new site. Now, this doesn't seem like the most effective use of the web. This information is out there! I store it in a machine readable format - yet machines aren't reading it. What's the point of keeping and maintaining an up-to-date FOAF file, if no one but me gets to look at it? This kind of thinking is what led a bunch of social software developers - people who run sites like Tribe, Ecadamy, PeopleAggregator - together. These people saw FOAF as a way to change this. By taking advantage of the formats already available, these sites can build on a strong, open source base of FOAF, and create distributed profiles from it. No longer do I have to type in all my messaging names at every site I sign up on. Simply drop in a FOAF URL, and let the backend take care of the rest. Eventually, you may not even need to do that - simply sign in as crschmidt@livejournal.com, and let authentication between the servers do the rest. It may sound like something that won't ever really happen, but it's happening now, even here on LiveJournal. LiveJournal has a need for this kind of thing as much as anyone else. Imagine no longer needing to fill out all your information every time you want to create an account at another site like DeadJournal or Blurty. Simply drop in your FOAF URL - already provided by LiveJournal - and your information will be filled out for you. I don't know about you, but that sounds cool to me.

Now take that idea a step farther. LiveJournal has friends lists - which FOAF provides. By using these lists, when you sign up at DeadJournal.com, DeadJournal may be able to go through and tell you who matches your data - offering you, from the get-go, a pre-built form of your Friends List at the new site. Never perfect - obviously, not everyone at the old site will neccesarily have an account on the new site, so you can't match everyone. However, such a tool may have the ability to email users and ask them to join their site, as do tools like Orkut now.

However neat distributed profiles and logins are, however, they aren't really a fun toy. Sure, it saves me some effort - and I like the idea, trust me - but it's not something that will really have a measurable affect on my daily life. FOAF is designed to describe relationships, so we should use it for that. One major thing that we use relationship for is to determine how well we know someone. A friend of my friend is most likely my friend. A friend of a friend of a friend may also be my friend. These may be people I communicate with on a regular basis. If I communicate with them online - via a mailing list, perhaps, or via email in general. One of the major problems with email today is spam - how to deal with it, and how to prioritize your email. If you think that you communicate mostly with people among people you know, then you may be able to use FOAF to help you sort your mail. Since FOAF typically includes a "sha1sum" of your email address - something that is unique to your email, but can't be used to find out what your email address is - you can build a database of who the people you know are. You can then use this information to do something to your emails to indicate who they are from. For example, I built a list of all my friends and their friends, along with an email address. Then, every time an email comes in, I check to see if it's from one of them. If it is, then I add something telling my email client to show me who it's from. If it's, for example, from "jessical", a level 1 friend, then I may want to highlight that, or give it priority. If it's from "allex", I may just want to flag it, but not treat it as important - allex is only a level 3 friend. In this way, I can prioritize my mail - people who I know are more important to deal with, while people who I don't know can typically wait. I have some simple example code of how this might work at http://foaf.crschmidt.net : the mbox-protector script builds a flat text database of users in you friends web, while the mailchecker checks an email coming in on STDIN for a match.

FOAF is a useful protocol for both profile data - useful for transferring between sites - and for relationships - building a web of who you know. This is just part of the reason why I took the time to add FOAF support to LiveJournal. As limited as it may be, it's still powerful enough to build these tools, and more powerful tools on the web to make your life easier are always a good thing. By crschmidt@livejournal.com. [Christopher Schmidt]

Chris P. Carrot for President

Chris Abraham: War and Pornography

chrisabraham.com/2005/04/war_and_pornogr.html
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Chris Abraham: Paleoconservative

chrisabraham.com/2005/04/paleoconservati.html
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Chris Abraham: J'Habite Ici

chrisabraham.com/2005/04/jhabite_ici.html
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Chris Abraham: Men in Black (MIB)

chrisabraham.com/2005/04/men_in_black_mi.html
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US Internet Tax Ban - Rep. Chris Cox
(R-Calif.)

mc chris Answers Your Questions

Chris Nolan says I'm "stingy"

Chris Nolan calls me "stingy" with the links. Of course, I don't think I am. Chris, here's some feedback on how you could make it easier for people to point to you. (This may prove useful for others.)

1. Make your RSS feed easier to subscribe to. You have the badges for Yahoo, Bloglines and MSN, but I use Radio. You could have put up a badge for Radio, that would be super-convenient, or just put up a white-on-orange XML button. I tried clicking on your Feedburner icon, but that didn't get me the URL, it offered to save it to my hard drive. And Feedburner is really gross, I don't like supporting them. But sheez, if need-be put the URL of your feed on the page itself. (PS: I was able to figure out where the feed is, and have subscribed.)

2. If you call people names and expect them to link to you, well, don't. Didn't your mother teach you that when you were a kid. Don't stare and don't call the other kids names.

3. You didn't even point to me when you called me a name. At least then I would have seen you in my referer log. And I'm like everyone else, I like flow and I like new readers. I have point ed to you Chris, many times. How many times have you pointed to me? You may be surprised that there are people who's sites I helped build by sending readers to them, who have never pointed back to me.

4. If you've written something you want to be read by Scripting News readers, send me an email with a link. That's what I do when I want to be read by the readers of someone else's blog. I'm polite about it, I don't come out and ask for the link, I say something like "Thought you'd find this interesting" or "FYI" and leave it at that. If I don't get the pointer, no big deal. And I try not to do it too often, so it's seen as a welcome source of a link to the person I send it to, rather than some kind of obligation.

5. I don't often point to political blogs, whether they're written by men or women, black or white, although I do subscribe to quite a few. So maybe what you experience as "stingy" is just a difference in focus.

"Chris Lydon interviews"

The Chris Pirillo Show

Kudos to supreme geek Chris Pirillo for launching his first live broadcast today. Be sure to add his feed with MP3 enclosures to the new "Podcasters" group in FeedDemo n 1.5.

chris jordan photography

chrisjordan.com
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Chris Ware on French TV

Chris Pirillo On Witnessing IE7

Chris likes Blogware

Well - if Chris Pirillo likes Blogware - then I guess it's a hit!

Congrats to Ross and team!

Bl ogWare 0wns!.

I've been through just about every major blog option out there - MT, Blogger, GreyMatter, Radio UserLand, LiveJournal, etc. I must say, even though the template structure within Lockergnome.net is complex, this system is quite simple (at the same time). For novices, there's virtually no learning curve. Though it's difficult for me to pinpoint my favorite option, the "Edit This Entry" link is surprisingly handy! The photoblog integration with e-mail posting capabilities works well, too. Code purists won't appreciate the legacy tags, but (perhaps) one day, I'll spend more time tweaking more than just the outward appearance of this thing. Color me sold.

Chris Shiflett's Blog: PHP and Apache 2
(and FUD?)

chris allbritton is back in iraq

Chris Abraham: Wiki is the New Blog

chrisabraham.com/2005/04/wiki_is_the_new.html
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Chris Sells -- Tour of MSDN

MSNBC - 'Hardball with Chris Matthew' for August 12