GBase and Wikipedia

Asides, Google, Wikipedia

I’ve seen a lot of people suggest with Google Base they’re competing with Craig’s List and eBay, but I see it much more as a play against Wikipedia. When I chatted with Jimmy Wales he said one of their biggest problems was for things that are relatively structured like the wiki dictionary or quotes having hte data in a totally unstructured wiki format makes it hard to work with. He suggested they would go the direction of mediawiki templates and microformats, which is great to hear. Google has come at it from the other direction, giving you a free-form DB to pour your heart into. I guess the question is, will people become as passionate about distribution (what Google promises) rather than working for the greater good of humanity through the Wikipedia.

Thanksgiving Travel Tip

Asides

Just a tip for people traveling this week: get there early! I got there when I normally would (45-60 minutes before) and didn’t make it, thanks mostly to standing in the wrong line twice. Airports are in need of a usability designer far more than any software I’ve used in the past year. I generally fly a few times a month, so I’m not exactly a novice, but this is the first time I’ve been in the middle of the Thanksgiving rush.

Socialtext Spam

Uncategorized, ,

(Rant warning.) What’s it called again when you can’t unsubscribe from a service that sends you email almost every day? This is broken:

  1. I get my daily email about changes in the LoicLeMeur Wiki that I signed up for sometime at Les Blogs.
  2. “To stop receiving or change how often you receive emails about changes
    to LoicLeMeur Wiki, go to: http://www.socialtext.net/loicwiki/emailprefs “
  3. Redirects me to this URL.
  4. It appears that I am logged in. I change my preferences to “Never”
  5. Of course when I go to my settings it shows me as “user78247”, so I didn’t actually cancel my subscription, it just showed a stupid subscription page to me even though it obviously doesn’t have my email address right now and I’m not logged in.
  6. Okay, click the “log in” link.
  7. Type in email and password.
  8. I am now mysteriously redirected to the FOAFnet wiki, which hasn’t been touched in like a year. NO IDEA WHY.
  9. Wait, the top still has a login button, but also a settings button?
  10. Settings takes me to the user page for “user19254”, even though I JUST LOGGED IN.
  11. Okay, click login again.
  12. Now I’m redirected back to the FOAFnet wiki again but this time it shows me as being logged in.
  13. Where the heck do I go now???
  14. I go back to the Loic wiki via the address bar.
  15. It says login in the top right corner again.
  16. I enter my information, and am redirected by to the FOAFnet wiki. I can sense the wiki mocking me.
  17. Okay, maybe if I go back to my settings page where it worked.
  18. It forces me to login to the FOAFnet wiki AGAIN even though I did just SECONDS AGO.
  19. I now am logged in, I click on settings and go to “My Workspaces.”
  20. It only shows the FOAFnet wiki, even though I know I’m a member of the Loic one because I GET EMAILS FROM IT EVERY DAY.
  21. Also now for some reason every Socialtext wiki I try to visit, like this one from Web 2.0 conference, redirects me back to the FOAFnet wiki. (cue blood-curdling scream)

Any suggestions? I would just dev/null them in my procmail, but I prefer not to do that to legitimate companies. At what points could the user experience be improved?

(And yes, I have reported this problem to them. I demonstrated it in person in August 2005 at BarCamp. It’s January.)

Update: Socialtext responds in the comments. “[T]his morning we disabled email notifications for all the public wikis on our site, due to the confusion people had when trying to turn them off.” A thoughtful, effective, and quick response.

New Theme Competition

Asides, Themes, WordPress

Someone is running a WordPress 2.0 theme competition with some pretty sweet prizes. Winners of previous competitions run by Alex have gotten a ton of exposure all over the blogosphere. I think there is so much new functionality possible with the new functions in 2.0 that themes like Regulus take advantage of that it should be a factor in the competition somehow.

Books 2020–2023

Books

I’m a few years behind in posting my book lists, and past few years a good amount of my book reading time shifted to other mediums. I have been rediscovering the joy of books so here’s what I read the past few years as a motivation to myself to pick it up more in 2024.

2020

  1. The Gift by Hafiz
  2. I hope this reaches her in time by r.h. Sin
  3. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
  4. Exhalation by Ted Chiang
  5. Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy
  6. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife
  7. Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
  8. High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil
  9. The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov
  10. What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz
  11. Gideon Falls 1: The Black Barn by Jeff Lemire
  12. Gideon Falls 2: Original Sins by Jeff Lemire
  13. Gideon Falls 3: Stations of the Cross by Jeff Lemire
  14. What if I Say the Wrong Thing? 25 Habits for Culturally Effective People by Vernā Myers
  15. The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor by Howard Marks
  16. Wool by Hugh Howey
  17. Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
  18. Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord
  19. Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony de Mello
  20. How to Know Higher Worlds by Rudolf Steiner
  21. No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

2021

  1. Broken Stars by Ken Liu
  2. The Body Keeps Score by Bessel van der Kolk
  3. Broadbandits by Om Malik
  4. How to be Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi
  5. The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
  6. Billionaire Wilderness by Justin Farrell
  7. Antarctica: What Everyone Needs to Know by David Day
  8. San Fransicko by Michael Shellenberger
  9. Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent by Gabrielle Walker
  10. At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft
  11. Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas
  12. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
  13. Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God by Will Durant

2022

This year I ended up mostly reading AI and machine learning academic papers, attempting to “learn AI deeply” as I asked people at the State of the Word that year. Started a bunch of other books but these were the only two I finished.

  1. 4000 weeks by Oliver Burkeman
  2. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Guin

2023

  1. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
  2. Belong by Radha Agrawal
  3. Excellent Advice for Living by Kevin Kelly
  4. On That Note by Michael Wolff
  5. Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
  6. Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman by Richard Feynman
  7. Permutation City by Greg Egan
  8. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
  9. Damn Good Advice by George Lois

All book years: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020–2023.

Back With Tim

Press

I returned on the podcast with my good friend Tim Ferriss, by my count the sixth time we’ve recorded together, but the very first time we did it in video! Tim asked me to bring five things I’m excited about, five things I’ve changed my mind on in the past few years, and five things that are absurd or ridiculous but I still do, and that ended up being a pretty fun anchor for a two-and-a-half hour conversation, which you can watch here:

Or listen to on Pocket Casts or any podcast player, thanks to open standards:

I ended up having more than five things for each list, especially the excited one, but tried to edit it down. This was a very vulnerable and personal conversation for me, which I think was possible because we’ve known each other so long at this point and Tim made it really easy and fun to open up. We discuss everything from open source to kids to my upcoming sabbatical.

Coincidentally, this was episode 713, which is the original area code for Houston! We didn’t plan that but I think that’s so cool. I’m also going to watch his episode with Kevin Rose who he’s also very close with, I always learn new stuff from those two.