Solipsism Gradient

Converting this forum into a weblog – and following the recent developments with trackbacks and comments on weblogs – convinced me that there’s a gray zone between forums and weblogs which just cries out to be filled.

For instance, Rael Dornfest just announced that he’s merged comments and trackbacks on his weblog. So his structure now is a reverse-chronological list of his posts, together with a chronological list of comments and trackbacks. The only actual difference is that comments are directly posted to his site (with no copy elsewhere), and trackbacks are excerpts of comments posted to somebody else’s site.

In a forum like this one, the structure is similar. I post stuff which appears in reverse-chronological order. People can post comments directly, or on their own weblog and ping me for a trackback. The major difference is that threads aren’t kept together in chronological order – but I’m working on that. Forum topics are equivalent to weblog categories.

So, a forum – based on phpBB or its competitors – can be viewed as a borderline weblog, with extremes of many collaborators and categories, and a weblog – based on Movable Type or its competitors – can be viewed as a borderline forum, with only one or a few collaborators.

Forum software often has many extra frills like avatars and private messaging, and necessarily invests heavily in collaborator control and moderation facilities. Weblog software is ahead in having trackbacks and RSS feed generation, and is more lightweight (less server-intensive). Both have similar facilities for archiving and searching posted stuff. Both can be seen to have evolved from 80s/90s BBS software – FirstClass, which I worked heavily with a decade ago, is one of the few still available.

Update: Sébastien Paquet is debating whether blogs really foster conversation:

Denham, Lilia and I are debating whether blogs are indeed suited for conversation or if, on the contrary, collective spaces are needed for true dialogue. Ton, you had something to say here, didn’t you?

I suppose when he says “collective spaces” he means forums…

Jeremy Zawodny worries about his input to output ratio:

I go through cycles of productivity like most hackers do. Some days I get a lot done while others are mostly wasted. Some of my productive days involve a lot of output like e-mail, code, discussion, debugging, and so on. Other times it’s a lof of input: reading, listening, etc. Once in while I manage to have a day in which the two seem to balance out and I go home feeling like I’ve accomplished three weeks wort of work.

Yes, these cycles happen to me too, and have in fact been getting more extreme. Before the Internet came up, I was buying 15 to 20 technical magazines per month, and would take every other day off to read all that stuff… even study the advertisements one by one, if you can believe that.

For the last years, information overload from the Internet has been increasing. I don’t buy any more magazines, but reading and responding to e-mail, browsing for news, and so forth has been expanding to fill most of my time. And now weblogging and reading RSS feeds is taking the place of e-mailing and browsing. (My advice: don’t subscribe to more than 150 feeds if you check them every hour, or you’ll never catch up ).

On the other hand, the amount of useful input – that can be converted into productive output – has also increased vastly, so it seems to boil down to a question of discipline. Inspiration doesn’t come by every day, so I usually slack off for periods that vary from an afternoon to a couple of weeks, and catch up again in frenzied bursts of creativity. Turning off the phone and ADSL – or making a trip to somewhere off-net – often works wonders.

Joel on Software also addresses this issue:

But it’s not the days when I “only” get two hours of work done that worry me. It’s the days when I can’t do anything.

…Maybe this is the key to productivity: just getting started. Maybe when pair programming works it works because when you schedule a pair programming session with your buddy, you force each other to get started.

Jason Kottke is asking people to link to (and ping) http://reversible.org/kottke . OK; let’s see what happens…

In case you’re wondering, here’s an explanation about what’s reversible. Looks like the beginning of something interesting…

Dori Smith kindly did a trackback ping test for me. Thanks again, Dori!

It didn’t work; it tried to ping the permalink instead of the corresponding trackback ping URL. I installed a test blog using Movable Type and didn’t find out how to activate the automatic trackback feature (at least, not without reading the manual ).

Manual pinging worked, however, and produced the entry you can see below. Tomorrow I’ll try RTFM and checking up on my autodiscovery RDF lines.

Posted by Guest:
RB’s Test Blog: (Re:#)

Here we go again

Yet another test of the new trackback system on Rainer’s weblog. This one with the MT bookmarklet – which, incidentally,

OK, I think trackbacks are working now. I’m generating the necessary RDF comments so others can autodetect my trackback ping URLs, and I’m posting the URLs themselves in the left margin of each post. These links aren’t meant to be clicked, but copied by whoever is pinging manually. Unlike many existing implementations, trackbacks are equal to comments and will be posted in-line with the normal comments.

I’m still working on automating part of my own pings to other sites, but it’s not a high priority thing… I’m using Movable Type‘s sample standalone implementation meanwhile.

By the way, installing this on Mac OS X (10.2.3) isn’t completely straightforward. The trackback code uses the optional LWP Perl module, which itself needs several other modules. As I’d never messed around with Perl before, it took me some time to find the modules on CPAN and learn the necessary Terminal commands.

I read several tips warning about the LWP installer overwriting /usr/bin/head. This didn’t happen in my case; apparently saying “no” when LWP asks if you want to install test programs skips that part.

Many thanks to Dori Smith for correcting some misconceptions I initially had about trackbacks, and e-mailing me several links about the subject.

Free World Dialup is announcing free worldwide VoIP (Voice over IP) phone service. Any FWD member with broadband Internet can call any other member for free, anywhere in the world. This works with some “software phones” and VoIP gateways like the Cisco ATA-186.

In practice, FWD is working as a registrar to index and map VoIP users; they have nothing to do with the infrastructure. This is, of course, the way new communication services should be implemented.

There are a few catches. The calls work only between FWD members; there’s no official bridging to the “plain old telephone system”… (but see below). You must buy an approved SIP User Agent – either hardware or software. Depending on your provider and connection, audio quality may not be all that great, or there may be audible interruptions.

Recently the ITU defined +87810 as the country code for VoIP calls. Another standard, ENUM is being used to map between VoIP phone numbers and IP addresses. This means that, once established phone companies decide to bridge their old systems – meaning, soon-to-be obsolete systems – over to VoIP, this will be the country prefix to use; all Internet users are in the same cybercountry, of course. So far, only some Austrian residents can dial +87810 to call a FWD from their old phone. It remains to be seen what “long distance” charges will be applied in such a case; to keep charges low, every city should have a local bridge.

Thanks to boing boing for the link.

Mark Pilgrim introduces 100 stories:

They are all original. They are all interrelated. Some of them are over 80 years old.

They are 100 stories of unfamous people.

Only a few of the stories are available at this writing. Fascinating stuff.