Solipsism Gradient

O Zé Megabyte foi um personagem que surgiu em 1987. Para colocar as coisas em perspectiva, Steve Jobs havia saído há dois anos. Jean-Louis Gassée era o chefão de tecnologia na Apple. O Mac SE e o Mac II haviam sido lançados com estardalhaço. No Brasil, a Unitron estava trabalhando no Mac Unitron…

Eu havia comprado, na MacWorld de San Francisco em 1987, um software muito simpático para desenho de histórias em quadrinhos – o “Comic Strip Factory“. Logo depois, um jornalzinho de informática aqui de Belo Horizonte (nem me lembro mais do nome, infelizmente) me chamou para fazer uma coluna mensal; ofereci-me para também fazer uma tirinha. Este é o primeiro episódio :

Alguns comentários :

• O software só permitia fazer desenhos em preto&branco a 72 dpi. O arquivo final era em formato MacPaint (quem se lembra…?) O tamanho era exato para uma página tablóide.
• A idéia dos personagens veio de uma tirinha parecida publicada na época do Apple ][ numa revista chamada “SoftSide”. Não lembro o nome do autor, mas era bem bom.
• Interessante que na época eu já previa a difusão da Internet… a velocidade não era muito realista, confesso: 8 horas para baixar um arquivo de 287MB significa 10.2 KBytes/segundo. Quem sabe o Zézinho já tinha ISDN? De qualquer modo, a “pesquisa rotineira pelos bancos de dados” “depois da meia-noite” realmente parece familiar.
• O copyright incluia Trici Venola e Kurt Wahlner, autores do software, porque eles forneciam fundos pré-desenhados e partes anatômicas dos personagens. Assim ficava fácil para mesmo um não-artista como eu fazer uma tirinha. Só fiz pequenas adaptações.
• O nome “Jaca Plus” já era influenciado pelo projeto Unitron. Parece que chegaram a pensar em alguma fruta nacional mas nenhuma era suficientemente marketável sem piadinhas… outrossim, notem a “pressão das multinacionais”.
• Um dos manuais acima do Jaca Plus tem o título “Hiperjaca”. É uma referência ao HyperCard, que acabava de ser lançado.

De resto, senti que deveria haver um episódio inicial para apresentar os personagens ao leitor. Ficou meio grande. Mas, até que para marinheiro de primeira viagem não está embaraçoso demais…

Jason Kottke looked into his crystal ball and saw what the new Blogger interface might look like.

Cory Doctorow has an excellent analysis up at Boing Boing:

…If the new Gbloogle of a year or two from now is able to treat all blogs as first-class citizens, this is the best news ever for blogdom.

Evan Williams of Blogger talks about “Bloogleplications”.

Paolo Valdemarin comments:

…just like Google is today providing a vital infrastructure for the web, they will probably be able to boost the development of new (open!) standards that are definitely needed and that will help making the blogosphere a better integrated environment. I’m talking about RSS, track back, better commenting system, IM integration and other applications that still have to be dreamed.

Posted by Sérgio:
Gostou da foto, Rainer?

Foi um achado e tanto!

[[]],

Sérgio Stella

www.drsrg.hpg.com.br

Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web is an extremely interesting article by Joe Gregorio, author of Aggie, a .NET-based news aggregator.

Stigmergy, a term coined by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé… is interaction through the environment.

Self-Organization in social insects often requires interactions among insects: such interactions can be direct or indirect.

… Indirect interactions are more subtle: two individuals interact indirectly when one of then modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment at a later time. Such an interaction is an example of stigmergy.

…The World-Wide Web is human stigmergy. The web and it’s ability to let anyone read anything and also to write back to that environment allows stigmergic communication between humans. Some of the most powerful forces on the web today, Google and weblogs are fundamentally driven by stigmergic communication and their behaviour follows similar natural systems like Ant Trails and Nest Building that are accomplished using stigmergy.

This is required reading for any weblogger or user of Google.

A pity “stigmergic” is such a cumbersome word. Gregorio himself misspells it several times. Curiously enough, his article doesn’t allow trackbacks or comments… two of the important new stigmergic resources.

Thanks to Sam Ruby for the link!

The big buzz this sunday morning is the acquisition of Pyra (the Blogger company) by Google. At this writing, no major news source (at least according to Google News) has published anything. However, there’s ample commentary on hundreds of weblogs and on SlashDot.

Befitting the occasion, Pyra founder Evan Williams blogged the news live from a session at the Live from the Blogosphere conference.

Blogger hosts more than one million weblogs, of which a few hundred thousand are actively updated. Half a year ago, when starting this weblog, I did some tests with Blogger but was frustrated by the lack of control over some things, and the relatively frequent downtime.

Tons of commentaries and analyses are already out. Oblomovka makes an interesting point:

Google buys Internet stuff it doesn’t want to go away

also citing Google’s buyout of Deja, a company that archived NNTP newsgroups.

Dan Gillmor has a good overview, noting the recent announcement of weblogging facilities by Tripod (Terra/Lycos) and the possibility of AOL doing the same in the near future.

Nick Denton asks:

…will Google use weblog links to improve Google News? Right now, news stories are selected by an algorithm which counts the number of similar stories, and promotes widespread items. The results are occasionally strange, and usually bland. A system which analyses inbound links from weblogs would produce a much better selection.

Google apparently wants to harness weblogger’s data mining and analysis to improve its own services, a very shrewd move. However, they need to do so without alienating other weblogging companies.

Clearly Blogger-hosted weblogs will be scanned and fed into Google indexes immediately, rather than after a delay that today ranges from hours to days. My guess is that, soon after getting a grasp of what can be done which this setup, they’ll offer plug-ins for software like Movable Type, and URLs which home-built weblogs can ping, to enter information from non-Blogger weblogs into their system.

Ben Hammersley writes:

Google lives or dies on fresh links – and processing the million or so weblogs will give them an awful lot of fresh links a day. No matter where you host your Blogger based blog, the posting will still go through a machine on Google’s network: it’d be easy peasy to scrap each posting for URLs and add them to the spider-now list. Not every link, perhaps, but if a certain number of bloggers link to the same thing in a certain time, Google grabs it. It’s a distributed early warning system for Google’s spiders. One million zeitgeist monitors just signed on to Google’s staff. A bargain for them, whatever the cost.

Update: Tons of comments already out at MetaFilter. As well as more name suggestions: Booger , Goggler…

I wasn’t going to post about the war, but this post by Burning Bird is too good to pass up…

I found out what was wrong. My trackback:ping URL contains a ‘&’ character which was not being escaped to ‘&’, so the autodiscovery routine was falling back to the rdf:about URL, which contains the permalink instead of the trackback URL.

In other words, here’s what the corrected trackback autodiscovery comment looks like now:

<!--
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
         xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
         xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
<rdf:Description
    rdf:about="http://www.brockerhoff.net/bb/viewtopic.php?p=259#259"
    dc:identifier="http://www.brockerhoff.net/bb/viewtopic.php?p=259#259"
    dc:title="Re: Trackbacks are up - I think"
    trackback:ping="http://www.brockerhoff.net/bb/posting.php?mode=track&p=259" />
</rdf:RDF>
-->

This is copied exactly from the Trackback autodiscovery example. The question is, older versions of Movable Type apparently used the rdf:about URL for the trackback ping… so shouldn’t that entry contain the trackback ping URL for backward compatibility, instead of the permalink?

Update: Ben Trott of Movable Type informs me that the rdf:about field should contain the permalink. Apparently compatibility is not an issue…

Update: I was wrong… the & must NOT be escaped. See my post above.

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TrackBacks and AutoDiscovery

Ben has an entry here about TrackBack and auto-discovery. Overall, auto-discovery works pretty well. I don’t concern myself with finding TrackBack URLs unless I notice a site didn’t get pinged. What I dislike, however, is that trackbacks aren’t sent within my site. If I link to a previous article, why isn’t it sent a TrackBack? Why shouldn’t a reader who might stumble on to that earlier article not see that I linked to it in a later article? (Update: This is now working as Rainer has the answer – comment out the line next if $url =~ /^$archive_url/; in /lib/MT/Entry.pm.