What’s up?

just a quick note on the blog, from the start of august, having a contract being postponed to late september (In Italy august is the month when almost everybody is on vacation), I had some time to play with some technology I find quite interesting, but never really had time to try out.

The first is the OPML editor recently released by Dave Winer, which goes into the line of applications started by Frontier and followed by Radio Userland. I think it is the first complete application to build upon the open source Frontier kernel and it could be the killer app for that. It has an approach different from anything else I have seen befor for it puts outlining at the hearth of the system: almost anything is viewed and edited as an outline.

I have now come to appreciate the way it lets me keep a focus on the priorities I have and to organize and develop my ideas (the more i use the outliner the more i feel hooked into this way of working ).

I have done some exploring and hacking of the program (which is open source and contains a big bunch of code to learn from) and the results have been:

• An in browser OPML viewer (here is the post and some examples)
• A small tool with the necessary to turn an opml file into and S5 presentation (here is the post and the example)

On the other side I’ve just started to explore Ruby and Ruby on Rails since it stroke to me as a tool a developer should at least have to know, since having first read of it from the signal vs noise blog. I haven’t done this before because I wanted to do this by trying the tool on an real project, now that I have the time I’ll put some effort into developing a mini system I needed for my consulting job using rails. More on this in the next few days.

Ah… and I’m planning to release the Log4Js library I’ve developed to help debug and trace javacript-heavy sites.

A-lists and the dynamic blogsphere

I’ve been reading about the recent “to list or not to list” debate and Jason Calcanis, in the “The Blog 500” Challenge post, explains well some of the defects of the technorati 100 list.

Blogs are highly dynamic by nature and their being appealing has much to do with this dynamism.

Therefore it has not much sense to describe the importance of blogs as an absolute value. I may well write amusing things this week but be absolutly dull for the next few months.

The “interest index” of a blog has to be measured including a time factor in it.

We can say that some blogs have been more important (interesting) in the last x days, or better in the last y hours.

It would be nice to be able to choose personally the time resolution of the list (last day, last week, last month and so on).

The number of links and number of sources pointing to a post might be marks of relevance, at least they can be a starting point.

In this way we could measure how interesting the things someone wrote in a certain time frame have been for the rest of the blogsphere.

Even more interesting would be to tie the “interest index” to ones’ subscriptions, e.g. by considering only the links going out from the blogs i subscribe to, or by giving a higher weight to those links.

This might result in a personal list or better in a new approach to feeds consumption along the lines described by Scoble here

While the key to blogging is to write things which appeal to you, and you find relevant, the key to reading blogs is to find things that are interesting to you. How to find those seems to be an open problem.

Illusioni ottiche

Le illusioni ottiche mostrano come la nostra percezione sia influenzata dal contesto, le piu’ comuni riguardano le forme degli oggetti ma queste basate sui colori sono alcune delle piu’ incredibili che abbia mai visto.

OPML

I’ve been testing today the OPML (the editor) and I’ve been highly impressed by how easy it is to get started with outlining and how useful it is to organize your ideas and work with a tool like this.
I’ve always liked the idea of code folding when editing source, but i have to admit that you cannot understand how outlining is generally useful until you use such a tool. One of the things that set real outliners apart is the ability to reorganize the document maintaining the underlying structure.
Even if i feel that the tool has some rough edges (e.g. I cannot stand the MDI interface…), I’ll gonna definitely use it for my todo lists and all the project related notes.
Btw my outline experiment blog is here