Paolo's Weblog, November 2005

Mercoledì, 30 novembre 2005

Since I started using Ecto I have also started adding Technorati tags to my posts (btw: congrats to Technorati for being still alive and kicking 3 years later :-).

I have been tagging posts on our intranet blogging system for a while using the What+Where+Who approach, i.e. using names of products, places and people to allow tags aggregators to create clusters of posts with some meaning.

This approach works well: check out the OPML tag or the Ecto tags to find some interesting stuff.

I'm not using tags as categories (for example "humor" or "technology"). Or maybe I should say "I'm not using what I think should be tags as what I think should be categories".

How about names? Is it "David Weiberger" or "DavidWeinberger"? The second syntax seems to be more popular, even if the fist one is better imho, to prevent for example a guy named Paoloval Demarin to end up having his stuff mixed with mine. But since this is supposed to be an emerging 2.0 thing, I'm going with the flow and writing names without spaces.

I wish Ecto would be able to suggest tags (even simply picking from the tags I have already used) like my intranet blogging app does.

From time to time I find what I consider strange tags on other blogs and I'm reminded that this hasn't to be considered too serious. :-)

PS: exactly one year ago Dave was wondering about the difference between categories and keywords. Tags are keywords. IMHO.

Technorati Tags: folksonomy, RSS, tagging, taxonomy

3:00:30 PM

comments: trackback:

Bad idea

"Let's check the weather forecast for next week in Paris"

Technorati Tags: Les Blogs

2:36:26 PM

comments: trackback:

Martedì, 22 novembre 2005

:-)

Technorati Tags: B.C., Google

3:01:58 PM

comments: trackback:

Shared outlines, finally

During the first on-line outliners era, when Instant Outlining was what everybody was talking about, we decided that it would have been useful to be able to share the same outline with other users in read/write mode. We started developing a tool, it kinda worked but after a while we dropped the project to focus on other issues.

With SSE supporting OPML it looks like the time has finally come for an application allowing me to share my outlines with my friends, coworkers, clients and partners using my favorite outlining tool.

Technorati Tags: OPML, RSS, SSE

2:34:13 PM

comments: trackback:

Mercoledì, 16 novembre 2005

Ecto: day 2

Starting up Ecto today I got a dialog which was asking me to register or to quit. I thought I had 20 days to test the tool but most probably there has been some kind of conflict with some earlier install of the tool.

I was well impressed by yesterday's use of the tool and I decided simply to pay and keep using it. I like the ease of use of the tags feature, the clean UI, the nice wysiwyg interface. I still have to figure out picture management and a bunch of other things but so far it looks like a very nice tool.

Technorati Tags: ecto

12:10:42 PM

comments: trackback:

Labels!

I only gave a quick look at Google Base. Apparently they are calling "Labels" what we used to call "Topics" and then became famous as "Tags". Yeah, I know, they are not exactly the same thing, there are little differences, in a way isn't this is the real problem?

Technorati Tags: Google, Tags

9:30:18 AM

comments: trackback:

Martedì, 15 novembre 2005

Google flying

While flying back from London last week and looking out from my window I noticed how what I was seeing was similar to what you get with Google Maps and Google Earth. The next thought was how cool it would be using Google Earth while flying on an wifi equipped plane. Then of course I started wondering about a GPS feed available as a web service on the airplane LAN which could allow the development of an application showing you where you are in real time on a google map. Then we landed.

Technorati Tags: Google maps

3:57:29 PM

comments: trackback:

Testing ecto

After a long time I'm testing ecto again.

Technorati Tags: ecto

9:31:21 AM

comments: trackback:

Lunedì, 7 novembre 2005

Uptime

It's not even a record uptime... I think that being able to work heavily on a computer without having to reboot for almost a month is pretty good compared to what we had only a few years ago.

2:40:09 PM

comments: trackback:

IP Roaming

Russ is going to London this week. Me too.

Russ will be bringing his 3G nokia phone. Me too.

He's willing to test to see how 3G roaming works. Not me. Been there, done that, got the bill.

The same thing happened to a lot of friends: you land in a foreign country, everything works just out of the box, the quality of service is good, the bill at the end of the month is huge.

It's hard to understand why IP traffic roaming is so expensive. I mean: let's pretend that we understand that voice roaming is expensive: somebody has to forward all calls from your country's network to wherever you are on the other side of the continent or the planet and this is expensive (it actually isn't since they are moving IP packets, but let's pretend it is). But when I'm using a 3G connection I'm surfing the web. It's not the Italian or the English web, it's the very same web made of the same bits.

The only explanation is that I'm using a service of an English provider but I will be paying my Italian provider, and since the food chain is longer thare are more costs. This would justify a small price increase if they were different company, but actually in my case they aren't: I'm a Vodafone subscriber and surf with Vodafone in the UK.

The bottom line is that I'm not using 3G roaming, just like everybody I know.

10:16:00 AM

comments: trackback:

Sabato, 5 novembre 2005

Guitar Picker

In case of a GAS attack this is a cool page to visit. :-)

6:29:31 PM

comments: trackback:

Mercoledì, 2 novembre 2005

Keeping Macs in synch

Dave's new Mac is on its way. I think he will like the way data is moved from an old Mac to a new Mac. When the process works (it hasn't worked every time in my experience) is a kinda of magic: now you have all your stuff here, now you have all your stuff, down to the tiniest piece of preferences, there.

Working with two Macs I find the clipboard sharing utility a great tool: you can copy an url on one Mac and paste in an email on the other Mac. Just the kind of stuff I do again and again and again.

5:32:31 PM

comments: trackback: