As an ongoing collaborative tools kinda guy (despite ongoing frustration with various issues, tools, concepts or struggles), I was heartened to read the counterpoint to this somewhat perplexing point.

Honestly, every day. Ongoing. Beep Beep Beep. Text Text Text. Work Work Work.

Not only is he starting a new business.

Not only is he one of the members of the Church of Purple.

Trevor's also a fine short film maker (and who can resist the strains of a zither? Really! Lends that slight Allenesque note to the soundtrack, but with that Eastern European undertone)

This guide to common writing mistakes (discovery via del.ico.us) looks to be a worthwhile read. In an age and technical leap where we can publish to the waiting masses (be they the 10 readers of this blog, or the thousands of a blog like idlewords), investing in our ability to use language always pays off.

We don't all have inhouse editors (or the ability to pay editorial consultants). Self-help ahoy!

Also worth noting, of course, is Eats, Shoots & Leaves, currently getting both offline and online press galore.

A weblog (via TypePad) for a conference on Virtual Communities.

Looks like they've made an attempt to address some of the issues faced by business, not just an academic focus. Too bad it's in EUR.

located thanks to BookBlog

This evening I spent a part of my time trying to convince AZ that one of the greatest bands, ever, is The Clash.

This on the heels of my recent noting that Jimmy Guterman is pulling together a Sandinista tribute (and yes, I misspelled his last name the first time around, since corrected).

Then today BoingBoing brings to my attention a bootleg (aka mashup) tribute to London Calling, entitled London Booted - A tribute to the Clash. Many tracks to download, but promising indeed.

Honest. One of the greatest. Ever, even with the shaky credibility attributable to a reading of Marcus Gray, they run well beyond the human flaws.

As a background exercise, reviewing Mark Nottingham's (a name I haven't seen in a while since I did amass unsub from some lists, perhaps foolishly, a year or so ago) Five Favourite Protocol Design Papers looks to be a worthwhile exercise.

Ted Leung pointed them out.

Jon Galloway has some complaints about using LazyWeb.org, which should provide some additional research fodder for my 'how successful is lazyweb' idea from earlier (languishing but not forgotten). If it's too hard, it isn't Lazy

Jon also points to the HalfBakery, which seems to be in a similar vein of distributed discovery.

Another job life or two back, I spent some time working on putting into place a small Ultraseek installation for my then employer. It was a lot of fun, and at the time it really did seem like Infoseek (not yet Disney really) was doing interesting things with search, including taking part in the STARTS initiative to allow aggregation of search results from many engines via a clean interchange format.

But then things changed, STARTS appears to have not moved terribly far since, and life goes on, even as the engines gather data and vend information.

All this came back to me in a memory rush this morning, particularly by an exchange in this ACM QUEUE article on Matt Wells and his search engine (via Slashdot), between the interviewer (Matt's former boss at Infoseek) and his subject:

MW Google is definitely the one to beat. It has a near monopoly on the search market, but that's because it wisely focused on quality search results when everybody else was too busy turning into a portal and neglecting their search departments. Ahem.

SK Hey, it was the thing to do at the time.

MW Yes, well, at Infoseek a minuscule amount of the people who worked there actually worked on the search engine. I thought it was quite a bit unbalanced.

Also on the search tip... James Fallows writes yet again about Personal KM systems. Nothing terribly new if you have read his thinking about this over the last couple years, but interesting nonetheless.

Per Smartmobs, those folks at Intel are doing some interesting work on 'urban computing', methods of dealing with pervasive and wandering tech landscapes... See Jabberwocky: Free tool for visualizing urban social landscapes for the starting point, though the software (handily reported as tested on my phone of choice) seems to have fallen off the downloadables temporarily. New code in May, though....

This may or may not tie back in to the wigle and community networks stuff, about which more links later....

Jimmy Guterman is putting together a nifty Sandinista tribute project, though the formal site isn't up yet, some information is available.

Sandinista is one of those critical albums in my maturing as a listener. It's sprawling, maybe it could have been trimmed by about 5 minutes. My vinyl copy is all beat to hell, and it's still one of my favorite albums ever. It's up there with the Woody Guthrie songs for children my father used to play for me, with the first Leadbelly I heard, and with the too-memorized refrains from so many other albums.

Last night, longish chat with A about various wigle and wigle-related issues...

Attended a decent CAWUG meeting on Subversion - which in turn led me to the Subversion Book to add to my reading folder...

It seems there should be some tie in possible between Subversion, the SVN Wiki, and purpling....

When we were in London last year, AZ and I spent a lot of time wandering and finding restaurants. One such was Wagamama, a fine noodle shop, spartanly decorated, and with a nifty high-tech ordering system.

Little did we know it was less than secure! Why, if I'd known that I wouldn't have gone to as many Caffe Neroes to use their broadband! And saved a few pounds, to boot... Of course, I woulda missed the fine coffee.

Of course, it's the outsourcers fault, per a company spokesperson.... I would still proclaim the soup to be safe, but I'll be paying in cash next time...

Two interesting reading bits from the world of collab today...

One is from our man Chris Dent on adaptive software and Indiana University's Knowledge Base, a paper titled, oddly enough, Adaptive Knowledge Base Development. Chris is blending a number of ideas, my favorites still be small pieces and unintended uses, and applying it to an old friend of a project.

Secondly, and in the same latticework of contacts, Eugene Eric Kim has a piece in the current issue of DDJ (deadtree or paid subscription only, alas) on some of his beliefs of what the core elements for effective collaboration tools are. Much of the discussion is close to that which occurs in the BlueOxen collaboratories, but nicely oriented to audiences less versed in the background.

Combine two of my favorite things.... Paris and Subways, and you get this (found at boingboing) site of panoramic photos of the metro in Paris.

Lovely stuff. Lovely indeed.