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Light bulb turning on

March 14th, 2003

Even Scott himself had to have this lightbulb turn on as it just did for me when reading this description of his epiphany.

I had thought that Feedster was cool but wasn’t quite sure of its killer usefulness. You see, since it’s based on current RSS feeds, its relevance follows a fairly narrow sliding window stretching only a few days at most into the past. After all, Google and the Wayback machine have much longer memories.

The cool thing is, though, many times I have seen something within the past day or so but can’t tell you where. I know it has been on one of the 100 or so blogs I regularly visit, or one or two clicks away from them. Drives me up the wall all the time.

Also, one of the features I love/hate best with Radio is that once I have read something, I mark it and delete it and it doesn’t remain to clutter up my reading. I love that. I also hate that, because oftentimes I hit the delete button and two minutes later wonder who had said that interesting tidbit. It’s too early to go looking on google for it – won’t be indexed yet. Even so, I’d rather search only my sphere of relevance rather than pull in the entire net’s search result.

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Cunning Heuristics

March 14th, 2003

Ben Nolan points me to his Feeder thingmy. Much like Feedster except, I’m told, with cunning heuristics. <Gomez>Oooh, Tish, I love it when you speak freedom.</Gomez>

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*urp* – oops – pardon my freedom

March 14th, 2003

I understand from my wife that if I’m a good boy, I could be in for some freedom kissing. Wow, I’d better stock up on freedom letters just in case. Maybe I should surprise her with a freedom tickler!

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Reintermediation

March 14th, 2003

Ross certainly gets it about the World of Ends. Providing services on a network is all about being an endpoint yourself, but acting as a middleman between the consumer of your service and the value they seek. Tucows isn’t so much a place IN the net that is a source of downloadable files as one ON the net that acts as a proxy whereby a seeker of files can be matched up with a producer of files – an enabler of the two-way conversation.

Since, as David Weinberger discusses, a world of ends means Spam filtering must be done at the ends, that doesn’t mean it has to be done at the terminus of the conversation – interlocutors play an essential role.

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A visit from the flying Doc

March 13th, 2003

Only in town for a couple of days, Doc Searls managed to find time to come and meet with a few of us who could make it out.

Michael O’Connor Clarke was first to arrive. He had a nice adjunct to the World Of Ends discussion – I’ll let him explain it.

Tim Aiello, my partner in crime on many projects, was there.

Tara Cleveland, who when not designing is driving the research for the MACCAWS group, came along.

The Accordion Guy serenaded us with a sweet rendition of (You Shook Me) All Night Long. He also managed to rank high on the nerd compatibility scale with me reminiscing about the Rockwell AIM with its 1802 microprocessor and heat-transfer printer.

Doc arrived with two colleagues from Tucows. I talked with one of them, Ross at length about some anti-spam stuff that Tim and I have been up to. Just added his blog to my subscriptions list. The other, DarrylG, yakked with Tim at length but alas, has no blog to link to.

Interesting conversation was had, some debate. Absolutely no mention whatsoever of foreign policy, thankfully. We should do this kinda thing more often.

Tim took this picture of me with Doc.

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The doc is in the house

March 13th, 2003

I’m arranging to meet Doc Searls about 6pm at The Academy of Spherical Arts near King and Dufferin. Come along if you can.

I understand that there might be wireless available:

Address and map if you follow the link.

I’ll try to get up on blogchat while we’re there if anyone wants to contact us.

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ping pong

March 10th, 2003

Simon notices that weblogs.com pings don’t seem to be working from my site. Odd, I had it clicked on in MT. I’ve clicked blo.gs as well now and trackback and all. Let’s see how it goes.

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degrees of separation

March 8th, 2003

Funny that this evening I happened to be yakking with Shane McChesney for two and a half hours and then check my news to find that Scott blogged about both of us on the same day. Could be eerie coincidence, but maybe it’s the Canadian connection. Umm, eh.