As those of you who microblog may have noticed (or were there) I attended and went to a cool little bar camp last weekend. It was a small affair in Central Illinois (I also visited friends, which was amazing.) but there were some cool freelancers, and some folks from NCSA, and I think we all learned something from the encounter. Good times.

Since I got back, however, I’ve had a serious case of the stupids. I don’t mean to make an excuse for my lack of productivity. I sat down, I did things that were on my todo-list, I made progress, but I feel like my brain rotted out for a little while there. It’s a strange feeling. In any case, I spent some time on Wednesday afternoon pulling together notes, thinking about things, and writing some stuff. Anyway, the brain seems to have un-rotted. Here’s a brief list of the things that are on my list of things to write about for you soon.

• Oracle’s Purchase of Sun Microsystems

• Co-op business models, and Open Source

  This marks a revival of some of my thinking and writing about economic issues. I’ve been thinking about (and the Sun/Oracle deal brought this to the surface) about how competition works (or is irrelevant) in cooperative business, what role open source and free software plays in technological development

• Jekyll.

  I sort of assumed that after I made the switch to this new content management system that all the people who were interested in it already knew about it. Not so apparently. I need to talk more about this.

• I upgraded to Jaunty.

  …and changed a few things in my system configuration that make it a bunch more lightweight. Still on ubuntu.

  I also need to do some more hacking about on things.

• I should cover other topics that I’ve touched on in the past that I’ve continued to think about, but not continued to write about. Things like git, Awesome, org-mode, my knitting.

At the time of writing, I’ve been going through a rough spot in my (day-to-day) travels and have had some trouble focusing on writing things. I suspect it will pass, but as I’ve been going through my todo list and my brain for things to write about, in the mean time I’ve noted something of a pattern in the way that I lead in my blog posts.

Even though I read something a few years ago that said, basically, the way to be successful at blogging is to write your posts like newspaper articles: strong lead, details to follow, everything but elaboration in the first paragraph. The thought is that this style of writing is the most effective way to reach people and hook them into what you’re saying. Expecting reader efficiency. It’s a good idea.

I’m remarkably bad at this. I blog like I talk, I fear, and so my posts are often bottom heavy and meander around to the point. I know my flaws.

In any case, I think I’ve uncovered a (small) list tropes for the way that I begin posts:

• I mention that something has been on my todo list and then write about something that’s tangentially related.
• I tell some sort of semi-funny, self deprecating introductory story, and get to the point at the beginning of the second paragraph.
• I talk about previous posts that serve as background to the post that I’m writing now. May or may not include links.
• Some sort of abrupt but not all together straight forward beginning, eg. “So I was thinking that…”

Did I miss any?

Happy May Day Folks!

Chances are when you’re reading this I’ve already been to dance the sun up this year (so if the sun’s up, you’re welcome).

In honor of this, I present to you a Morris Dance Video that I quite enjoy.

Notice a few things:

• Mixed set. Looks great. All you nay sayers who think “Morris should be danced in single-sex teams?” Wrong.
• Morris need not be done to English tunes. There is latitude here for some creativity, even in the Cotswold tradition.
• Although in the midwest, we are prone to judging the tradition of Bleddington as being particularly challenging and exuberant given the awesomeness of the Ramsey’s Braggarts team. While it’s not a sedate tradition like, say Fieldtown, there aren’t really sedate Morris Dance traditions, Bleddington can be enjoyed less exuberantly.

And of course, the first half of what remains my favorite morris dance ever, done last year by a Toronto team, Queen’s Delight:

I’ve been reading this is stevenf.com recently, and I have to say that it’s among my favorite current blogs (by people I don’t know). Geeky, but it doesn’t revolve around code snippets, simple, and minimal but in all of the right ways. And a bunch of fun. Anyway he posted an article a while ago that got me thinking called, “it’s my xanadu,” go ahead read it and then come back.

That’s a great idea isn’t it? I’ve been thinking a lot about data management and the way we represent, store, access, and use knowledge on the computer, so stuff like this gets me more excited than it really should, all things being equal. My good friend Joseph Spiros is even working on a program would implement something very much like Xanadu and the system that sevenf described.

First order of business should probably be to explain what Project Xanadu is for those of you who don’t know.

Xanadu was the first “hypertext system” designed that recognized that text in digital formats was a different experience and proposition than analog text. Proposed by Theodor Holm Nelson in the 1970s (with floundering development in the 1980s), Xanadu to be something amazing. It had features that contemporary hypertext systems sill lack. I think everyone has their own list of “things from xanadu that I want now,” but for me the big sells were:

• Links went both ways: If you clicked on a link, you could reverse directions and see what documents and pages had links to the current page. This means that links couldn’t break, or point to the wrong page, among other things

• Dynamic transclusions. Beyond simply being able to quote text statically, Xanadu would have been able to include a piece of text from another page that dynamically represent the most current revision of the included page. For example, I include paragraph 13 on page A (A.13) somewhere on page B; later you change A.13 to fix a typo, and the change is reflected in page B. I think links could also reference specific versions of a page/paragraph (but then users could from page B, access new and older dimensions of A.13).

• Micropayments. The system would have had (built in) a system for compensating “content creators/originators” via a system to collect very small amounts of money from lots of people.

  Needless to say, it didn’t work out. It turns out that these features are really hard to implement in an efficient way--or at least they were in the eighties--because of computing requirements, and the very monolithic nature of the system. Instead we have a hypertext system that:

• Is built around a (real or virtual) system of files, rather than documents.

• Has no unified structural system.

• Must rely on distributed organizational systems (tagging, search engine indexes.)

• Is not version-aware, and it’s pages are not self-correcting.

• Relies on out-modded business models.

To be fair, much of the conceptual work on the system was done before the Internet was anything like it is today, and indeed many of these features we can more or less hack into the web as we know it now: wiki’s have “backlinks,” and google’s link: search is in effect much like Xanadu-Links, using dynamic generation we can (mostly) get transclusions on one site (sort of), and paypal allows for micropayments after a fashion.

But it’s not baked in to the server, like it would have been in Xanadu, this is both the brilliance and the downfall of Xanadu. By “baking” features into the Xanadu server, hypertext would have been more structured, easier to navigate, easier to collaborate, share and concatenate different texts, and within a structure easier to write.

And yet, in a lot of cases, I (and clearly others) think that Xanadu is worth considering, adopting: indeed, I think we could probably do some fairly solid predictions of the future of hypertext and content on the internet let alone information management in general, based on what was in Xanadu.

That’s about all I have, but for those of you who are familiar with Xanadu I’d love to hear what you “miss most” about Xanadu, if you’re game.

Overheard at a Sunday dinner with the family:

`momtron <http://www.twitter.com/momtron>`_: Could you get the Quark [for my potato].

tycho looks quizzical.

`momtron <http://www.twitter.com/momtron>`_: In the fridge.

`dadtron <http://www.twitter.com/dadtron>`_: It’s a yogurt cheese.

tycho: right. I was about to say… They’re awfully small, and besides, they’re all over the place.

`dadtron <http://www.twitter.com/dadtron>`_: Maybe.

`momtron <http://www.twitter.com/momtron>`_ *sighs*

As I was reviewing the note I posted on my reading progress, realized that there was yet another piece of my effort to read more/better that I failed to cover there, but it’s substantive enough to merit it’s own post. The issue? Trust.

I was having a conversation with H. the other day, about reading and how we often find texts difficult to read when it seems like other people have a much easier time reading. Which is kind of funny because we both derive a large part of our self-identity (if not income) from our writing and we both read a lot.

One thing I suggested in the course of that conversation which I had theretofore not properly articulate was that I found writing difficult because I’ve read a lot of difficult stuff around the edges of philosophy and theory that are pretty complex where every word is (seemingly) meaningful. In the process of learning how to read this I’ve learned to not trust myself to understand the words and sentences, to be wary of authorial intentions, and to be afraid of missing important details.

Which is, as you might imagine, not that easy. And it requires slow reflexive reading. So it sort of feels like you’re not reading something as much as you are watching yourself read something.

So my new goal, is not to read faster, I guess, but rather to read less reflexively. To trust that texts have some sort of intentional order that I can understand, and then trust myself to be able to grasp the gestalt of a text (and to read it a second time if I need to,) without supervision or self-monitoring.

At least some of the time.

Sorry for the puny title. I was thinking about the value of writing, and of “literature,” in our world. Lets call it another post in my sporadic ongoing series of amateur theoretical economics posts. Or something.

The overriding theme of this series has centered on thinking about ways to build business models in a way that represents an authentic (and sustainable) concept of the generation of wealth. Basically, to recognize that wealth is created through the exchange of goods and services which themselves have physical costs, rather than through the exchange of money. Business models which are primarily profitable because they’re designed to cause money to pass through someones hands (who can charge interest on it,) seem flawed from beginning to end. Business models that seem to increase wealth without creating something or doing something in the world, seem fraught with problems.

So then, writing.

Writing is, I thing (inspite/because of my obvious bias) something valuable, and something that has worth, but I don’t think the source of its worth is particularly clear. A lot of literary types are convinced of writing’s power to effect change in the world. Aside from rhetoric (essays, etc.), fiction is a powerful vehicle for cultural critique, and for stimulating thought and wonder in any of a number of areas. Writing provides groups of people with shared experience (“Did you read that book? What did you think?") and which is certainly socially productive.

But that’s not business, or at least that doesn’t suggest some sort of sustainable business model. Long term social value doesn’t translate into a publishing industry that can sustainably fund the efforts/lives of writers. In a larger frame of reference, we should be able to fund and support the lives and efforts of artists without much trouble. In a sustainable way.

I’ve been thinking about trying to tie some sort of notion of sustainability into this evolving economic theory. In one respect economies which value worth, are necessarily sustainable. On the other hand, I totally recognize the logical inconsistencies with saying “art has abstract worth, so we should value it; investment banking has abstract worth, so we should abandon it.”

Also in this nexus of ideas, I’ve been playing with another concept (in a story, of course) regarding how much (and what kind) of work is required to keep a society fed/clothed/healthy decreases with regards to effort and time. Technology is a powerful thing, and it means, fewer people have to farm (per acre) to grow enough food to feed everyone, better/more efficient refrigeration means less food gets wasted. Better shipping technology means we can centralize tasks. All this filters into “less energy spent on survival” and thus more energy spent on more… abstract… endeavors. Supporting writers, hell supporting everyone, is an increasingly logistical problem.

I’m not sure that this translates, very well, into some understanding of busiess models for folks who do work in more “abstract” markets. I do know, (and have talked at some length here) several things about the business model for writers today: It turns out that bloggers are most successful (it seems) when their “blog” functions as advertising for “actual” work in some other arenas. That’s not a bad thing, and really I think “real writers” have a similar gig. From everything I can gather, “Authors” make money from speaking engagements, book signings, academic contracts, and the like. Just as a blog serves to create a market; a book contract serves to create authority. The business model works for a certain class of writing people, but I don’t know how generalizable or future looking this might be.

And maybe that’s part of the worth of fiction, of writing in general, and of my work in general: if we have any chance to explore these sorts of ideas, theories, and potentials, it’s going to be with the help of researchers who write about their findings, essayists who synthesize information in novel ways, and the fiction/literary writers who explore the implications and possibilities.

Onward and Upward!

If you ask a science fiction writer about the future, about what they think is going to be the next big cultural or technological breakthrough they all say something like, “science fiction is about the present, dontchaknow the future just makes it easier to talk about the present without getting in trouble.”

While this is true, it always sounds (to me) like an attempt to force the “mainstream” to take science fiction more seriously. It’s harder to be dismissive of people who define their work in terms to which you’re sympathetic.

I’m of the opinion that when disciplines and genres get really defensive and insistent in making arguments for their own relevancy, it usually reflects some significant doubt.

Science fiction reflects the present, comments on the present, this is quite true (and key to the genre), but it’s also about the future. And that’s ok. Thinking about the future, about possibilities, more than the opportunity for critique is (part) of what makes this genre so powerful and culturally useful. To deny this, is to draw attention away from imaginations of the future sacrifice distracts what probably makes the genre so important.