langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2002-03-02

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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Samstag, 2. März 2002

Sieht eintauchenswert aus — Peter Morvilles Übersicht und Terminologieprimer zur Social Network Analysis mit genügend Links für den März und eventuell sogar Teile des Aprils — "We humans are very social animals. It's about time more of us started recognizing this in the systems we design."

Das mich unmittelbar umgebene Social Network betreffend möchte ich (auch auf diesem Wege) meiner Mama alles, alles Gute zum Fünfziger wünschen ... ;-)

2002-03-02-sna

www.infoworld.com/features/feinnovators.html

2002-03-02-snaFeeder

[create Hans Wu]: "Als kleiner Bub hatte ich einen Freund, der allerhand über Technik wusste. Er erzählte zum Beispiel, dass ein gewisser Sendemast auf einem Berg in der Nähe so stark war, dass das alte Bügeleisen seiner Mama Radioprogramm gut hörbar wiedergab. Davon war ich sehr beeindruckt, das Bügeleisen habe ich aber nie gesehen."

2002-03-02-handyEisen

earl 8331 days AGO
liebe gruesse und auch alles gute von mir ;-)

hns 8331 days AGO
Der Ergebnisstand beim Poll in Hansens Geschichte ist sehr vielsagend, finde ich. Er zeigt, dass das, was die Handy-Hersteller zumindest hier in Europa bisher an zusätzlichen Funktion(alität)en angeboten oder visioniert haben, die Fantasie des Publikums nicht wirklich angeregt hat. Was er nicht zeigt, ist dass Musik, Bilder und Spiele sich (wenn richtig implementiert) nicht als Killer-Apps herausstellen könnten.

floritz 8331 days AGO
Auch von mir alles gute!

hns 8331 days AGO
Aja alles gute auch. Wie unsensibel von mir!

David Ness 8330 days AGO
This is the first of two comments. This one is a `bug' report.The other one (which will follow) is some kind of rewrite of the comment that was lost.

The bug report: For at least the second time I have managed to lose a whole long comment, probably by `wandering around' between pages that are `cache' based vs. pages that properly represent the `current' state of Chris' pages. It is a _very_ frustrating thing to spend some time on a comment, and then lose it all---even if it is your own fault.

As a result I have decided, for at least a while, to create my comments completely outside of the web. Then I will cut and paste them in. That way, if they get lost I can just try again from my local copy.

Has anyone thought through this problem? I certainly haven't, but I'd be interested in any ideas as the problem occurs not just here, but everywhere that there are `response' boxes.

David Ness 8330 days AGO
I think Moreville's piece should be taken with the same `grain of salt' that I used for the SixDegrees stuff (perhaps I should go out and buy some fresh salt, I have been using it a lot lately). Moreville's web documents seem to suggest few ideas in addition to that which my friend and colleague from MIT, Tom Allen, used to write about 30 or 40 years ago. There seems to be little new added to Allen's notion of `Gatekeepers'. In all the organizations I have worked in and for, everyone knew who all the gatekeepers were, and drawing it all up wouldn't show anything that wasn't already obvious to anyone who cared.

Indeed, I find all of stuff about `visualization of ideas' to be, at least for me, hype. When I have tried to apply the BrainStorm or MindModel technology to my collections of `ideas', I end up either with a thinly connected desert or with a jungle so dense that I couldn't see a new relationship in the forest
because there are too many trees. In any case, while I sort of enjoy `playing' with the diagrams, I have yet to learn _anything_ from any of them. But then, perhaps that's just the way my mind works.

It strikes me that this is probably a consequence of some aspects of Chaos Theory that I share with my friend Stuart Kauffman ("At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity"). Most interesting behavior occurs along a rather thin `border' between the `too simple' and the `too complex'. The `thought diagramming' technology doesn't help us much with this. It either presents us with way too few `connections' or way too many.

chris 8330 days AGO
David, I know how frustrating losing one's efforts thanks to technical immaturities is. Because I'm spending almost all of my time awake (heh) either building or working with web applications, the first thing I do when I (re-)install anything remotely browser-like is to turn off caching. This has resulted in a sudden drop of Aspirin consumption.

If it's anything I can fix (i.e. fixing it isn't made impossible by browsers, proxies or other intermediaries) I'll most certainly try to do so. Maybe you can give me any more details what "losing your comments" _means_ (it hasn't ever happened to me) — do you get to the login snip? An error message?

A rather easy work-around might be to write everything in the text box and before posting selecting everything (Ctrl-A) and copying it to the clipboard, so that it will be ready to paste should anything go wrong ... (it might well be that your scenario is different from the one I'm imagining).

The Vista visualization helps me to keep the information structure sane, i.e. reveals at once if a snip is embedded in too much (too diffuse) or too little context/neighbourhood. Quite often it also drives me to connect heretofore unconnected snips, when while glancing at the visualization I expect a connection where none has been established yet.

We are bound to reinvent wheels until everything has been read and understood by everyone (which will, alas, hardly ever happen). That phenomenon is especially visible in the software industry, where the duration of one reinvention cycle might have fallen to less than five years.

That's, however, neither too much of a problem (much more an annoyance for long-timers) nor all too astonishing. Lots of idea germs need the right context/soil to grow, the right combination of intensifiers — the VM had to wait until the mid-nineties for mass deployment of rather overpowered computer equipment and the formation of Netscape Communications, the primary product of which would then serve as mass distribution vehicle, taken together resulting in amazing market and mind penetration.

So multiple tries (maybe eben hundreds) are, IMO, a natural on a crowded marketplace.

The same thing might be true in all areas which involve ideas. Unfortunately I haven't been introduced to the ones of Tom Allen yet (if you could supply me with some pointers, be those ISBNs or URLs, I'll be happy to read up, and I'll question Google tomorrow as well, but unfortunately the Web skews the history of ideas badly, making the late eighties and the nineties way too well-represented in comparison to anything that has happened before — "Online or Invisible?"), so I'm rather content to enjoy "repackaged" Morville columns for the moment being, postponing idea archeology until I convince myself that the topic is actually worth my time.

chris 8330 days AGO
Ein Danke BTW an die Gratulanten von Mama Langreiter ;-)

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