Albert Tanutama

Via Infoworld

Battered by junk and reeling under makeshift fixes, e-mail is ripe for reinvention. Positive identification, rather than rejiggered economics, is the key to clearing the clutter from the e-mail channel in the enterprise. To be clear: Privacy and anonymity are values worth preserving on the Internet.

I agreed to what Bill Warner suggested, instead of focusing on caller ID schemes that identify servers, we should reach past the computer to identify the person sending the message – “In a society founded on openness and transparency, one of the fundamental tenets is that people can be identified”.

Via Christian Science Monitor – Blogs: Here to stay – with changes

They’re hip. Influential. But as blogs – or personal weblogs – move into the limelight, they’re also coming under closer scrutiny. And the conclusions are in some ways sobering. Except for a tiny number of blogs that have gained prominence, all this techno-chattiness remains just that: an immature form of communication that has yet to gain traction with the general public.

On the positive side

Though blogs represent only a tiny portion of the content on the Internet, they’ve grown large enough to carve out their own niche, the so-called blogo-sphere. As more people read and write blogs, their influence will keep growing. A blog can have a great deal of career value by demonstrating one’s expertise and writing skills, thus serving as a “reputation builder”

IMO, the powerful aspect of blogging would appear once a blog is included as part of community. Take example of my favorite blogs aggregator, fullasagoog. It forms a community of Flash, ColdFusion, and Web design. These weblogs are really active, with lots of good and interesting posts (tutorial, commentaries,etc), some of them are better than what I can find in books.

Without community support, I think blog will eventually whither and ‘die’. Community gives a sense of belonging. A purpose. Source of motivation. I guess, ‘acceptance’ and ‘recognition’ would be a descriptive reasons of why blogging would stay.

The predominant method of persuasion:
Make the thing you’re trying to persuade people to do seem like it’s only good, and the behavior that you don’t want people to do seem like it’s only bad.

But is it the best way? Scoble shared that he was persuaded to do something using method that he’ll call “the authority method.” It is about “I’m an authority on this topic and I’m looking out for your best interests”

Authority method works for me. There’s only one person who ‘got’ my money. Simply because she listened for my best interest. Guess who that I’ll contact and recommend? I like sales people who are open to the competition, admit where the product is lacking. That what makes a good company. If you know what you’re lacking, you’ll know what to improve. 100% products? I’m pretty skeptical…

From Wired News:

Adherents see the glowing $150 device as pioneering a movement in which data generated by computers will be increasingly expressed not on video displays but in objects that fit more naturally into our lives. The Orb’s power lies in how it can reflect the ease with which humans process basic visual information.

Orb is developed by Ambient Devices. They use physical environment as an interface to digital information, providing constant awareness. The idea behind Orb came out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, where “Tangible Bits” research led by professor Hiroshi Ishii aims to replace computers’ graphical user interface with tangible representations of the data they produce — giving physical form to information.

I think the system is cool. Would it be useful? Well, I found any awareness icons in my system tray is pretty interruptive, i.e. Outlook’s unread messages icon. It would be really interesting to find out How would I react for changes in orb. Would the physical environment have different impact in satisfying the need for action?

Have a look at JD’s brief commentary as well.

Kottke said:

Republishing is a distinguishing feature of syndication. When content is syndicated, the reader is getting the content from someone other than the producer…. RSS and Atom feeds are now largely read directly by people with newsreaders. So, people access documents written in a markup language that have been published on a Web server with a software application. It’s called Web browsing and has nothing to do with syndication.

Agree? Disagree? Indifferent?

The important key is to understand that it is the data contained in an RSS/Atom file which is more specialized and structured than in an HTML file that make RSS and Atom so compelling in comparison to plain old HTML pages.