Dangers of blogging

So in a blog post from last October which was mostly devoted to mocking Stephen Wolfram, I casually insulted HistCite, a citation network navigation program developed by Eugene Garfield, who basically invented the very idea of citation networks. So half a year goes by and then I get mail from Dr. Garfield complaining about this slander. I was rather taken aback that someone of his prestige would take the trouble to respond to an offhand remark by a mostly-anonymous blogger, but I backpedalled fast and responded apologetically:

Please forgive my offhanded nasty remarks; I have the greatest respect for your work, and I'm honored that you'd take the time to respond.

Google and similar web services have spoiled us (or spoiled me at least) -- we expect everything to be free and instantaneous and very easy to use. I was just wishing out loud for something that would let me see citation networks without fuss, bother, or cost. I apologize for calling HistCite "ugly", what it really is (in my opinion) is a complex tool for a professional information analyst, rather than a simple tool for casual browsers, which is what I was idly wishing for. So much academic work is now available casually to non-specialists now (through Google and elsewhere); it would be nice if the citation relationships were equally available.

Since professionally I work in IT for life science and other areas where information and software costs money, I don't really believe everything can come for free.

Well, that's why I blog with a pseduonym, so I don't have to worry too much about saying nasty things and having it come back and bite me. What else is this for? Still waiting to hear from Stephen Wolfram.

The lesson that things on the internet stay around forever and can come back and bite you is of course not new. When Google Groups made usenet postings from the early 90s part of the permanent public record, it caused me some personal embarassment that persists today. For some reason my dumbest posts still seem to come out on top, I suppose because they produced the largest number of dumb responses.

Halfbakery: the space of web media

I'm trying to figure out why I'm blogging and how it relates to what I'd really like to be doing, whatever that is. What I mean is, blogs are all very well but generating topical chatter is not a big priority for me, also I feel it's pretty useless since there are plenty of other (better) places to get stuff like that.

What I have is a bunch of linked interests and occasionally original thoughts, mostly half-baked, which I want to force myself to write down somehow, mostly so I can keep track of them but I also wish to share them with the world. Someone out there might give a rat's ass. I am at heart a frustrated intellectual who has never been able to pour my thoughts into the standard forms (articles, books, fields, careers) and this new webby world is perfect for me to vomit forth thoughts in whatever half-digested mass I feel like.

This leads me to a half-baked thought on web media which I will present as a handy table, if blogger lets me:

*	Individual	Groups
Chronological	Blogs	Group Blogs
Topical	???	Wiki

Dunno why this table is coming out so funky. Anyway, the point is that what I've always wanted for myself is in the ??? space -- something to keep track of my various topics, let me organize and weave them into something coherent. This all hearkens back to Ted Nelson's call for a decent writing system, from 30 years ago:

As far as I know, there is still not a Decent Writing System anywhere in the world, although several things now come close. It seems a shame that grown men and women have to rustle around in piles of paper, like squirrels looking for acorns, in search of the phrases and ideas they themselves have generated. The decent writing system, as I see it, will actually be much more: it will help us to create better things in a fraction of a time, but also keep track of everything in better and more subtle ways than we ever could before.

[Where is Ted now? According to this page, he's "currently undergoing reinvention".]

So do we have a decent writing system? Not really. I still shuffle piles of paper around. Google and desktop search tools make it easier to find what you have written. There are a variety of outliner and mind-mapping tools that are supposed to help get your thoughts in order, but I've never found them that useful. Maybe it's time to try again, or maybe some synthesis of these tools with the blog/Web 2.0 software world would produce something interesting.


Keywords: web 2.0, hypertext

Blogging software

I was dithering around with the idea of starting this for a very long time, then eventually just did it. Now I'm wondering if I started it right. I'd (in theory) prefer a hosted system that I could hack and customize, but in fact I don't have time for that, and the point of this is to communicate, not be yet another endless hacking project. So maybe Blogger was the right choice. Anyway, somebody thoughtfully complied a table of choices. Unfortunately it isn't dated so who knows if it is still useful. Anyway.

Things I'm already wishing for:
-- tags (for that folksonomic goodness). Actually that's it.
-- trackbacks? Not sure it supports it in either direction.

Things I like: this editor is wonderful, compared to the state-of-the-art the last time I tried this (a couple years back).

Wha? What Happened? Blog?

I just wanted to respond to a posting on the Freakonomics blog. and the sticky features of Blogger seem to have led me to creating a blog of my own! That's impressive marketing, or whatever you want to call it. Oh well, let's see how it goes. I've run a blog under this name in the past (using Movable Type) but gave it up when I realized that being profound on a daily basis was beyond me. But I'm willing to be led down the garden path once more, at the end of which lies, not fame, certainly not fortune, but membership in what passes for intellectual community these days.