{ Monthly archives }
February 2007
Microformats on ArborWiki
Many of the retail and restaurant pages on ArborWiki now have hCards (in particular, the ones using the new-ish Store template, see all of ‘em here). So does the list of Ann Arbor bloggers, which presents a very minimal card for each weblog.
hCard is a microformat for personal/contact information. A microformat is a slightly more structured way to talk about certain flavors of data on the web. The microformatted blog listing gets us one step closer to ArborBlogs powered by ArborWiki, but maybe there is some other interesting use for this stuff.
Spent a little time in Café Ambrosia with Matt Hampel working on ArborWiki this afternoon. We worked on the above, and Matt also put together a very cool “edit mode comrade” for the Store template, which I’m looking forwards to checking out.
2007-02-26
Fun with inkling prediction markets [3]
Inkling is a Chicago company that runs prediction markets, with a public/demo site (the topic of this post) and various white-label offerings for companies, organizations, and academics who want to run their own markets.
Sports, politics, and entertainment markets are the most common. Ed Vielmetti has been opening some Ann Arbor prediction markets. Markets on the public site tend to be kind of thinly traded. But there’s enough activity that you can trade around for short-term profits. I’ve used inkling for about four days and currently have most of my assets tied up in academy award markets, so I could be in a tight spot tomorrow depending on how bored/frustrated the Oscar judges turned out to have been with this year’s nominations.
You can find out more about prediction markets by combing through the prediction+markets on del.icio.us or reading inkling’s markets 101 guide.
Update 2007-02-28: inkling blog widgets removed, they were using some terrible CSS.
2007-02-25
How to catch a dung beetle in Animal Crossing [1]
Dung beetles only come out on winter evenings — and the Animal Crossing winter ends soon. (If you look, the tree leaves are turning green again, underneath all that snow.) Walk around until you see a snowball rolling around of its own accord. You will observe a tiny dung beetle pushing the snowball. Get out a bug net, nudge the snowball, and catch the dung beetle as it makes its pathetically slow escape. You have one chance, so aim true. Dung beetles sell for 800 bells at the store.
If you really, really want to catch a dung beetle today, there’s a cheap trick. You will always find exactly two snowballs on the ground in your town, and if you destroy a snowball by pushing it into the water or smashing it into a tree or wall or something, it will magically regenerate when you go inside a building and then come back out. So if you had the patience, you could probably do this over and over until you spot a beetle.
Actual dung beetles live on all continents of the globe, minus Antarctica. Here is a fun page for Queensland, Australia farmers on how to attract dung beetles to your cattle ranch, where they earn their keep by eating what they eat.
2007-02-24
Reason n+1 to attend U-M School of Information [6]
Check your e-mail O student comrades — inside track on summer internships, media relations at Coca-Cola!
These roles will provide broad exposure to the diverse strategic issues and opportunities facing global consumer goods companies. These issues might include corporate social responsibility, stakeholder engagement, corporate/NGO strategy, environment, diversity, health & wellness and global aging.
I have a jar. I’m putting one (1) greenback USD into this jar each time I get e-mail about a truly reprehensible job / internship opportunity from the department’s “career” “services” staff. Once I expectorate from the department, I will use the cash to buy oatmeal java breakfast stout next time it’s on tap, you’re welcome to join me.
2007-02-19
Introducing WikiPatterns [4]
WikiPatterns is a new collection of wiki adoption patterns, intended as a resource for folks trying to start or bolster up wikis.
It’s hard to identify the audience for most pattern projects. So far, WikiPatterns looks more like a collection of random observations labeled patterns and not much like a network (a wiki is not a tree, etc.). This is to say that WikiPatterns seems more like Meatball:WikiPractices than an honest-to-Alexander pattern language, which is the more immediately useful and less politically charged analytical tool anyways.
What I’d like to see are specific implementation notes for different wiki engines, since that’s a major tributary into the tool swamp we occupy. (The canonical example is the user: and talk: pages in mediawiki: they’re separated out in Wikipedia since the “community” isn’t part of the encyclopedia, but must be painfully, redirectingly foregrounded in the many mediawiki projects for which building a “community” is actually the point.) A somewhat related activity would be to generate a sort of word magic isomorphic phrasebook by using the WikiPatterns space to clarify, for a given pattern, what the wikipedians call it versus the communitywiki people versus the communities of practice people and so forth.
So far it looks like the WikiPatterns discussion is on the more general situated learning / “community” generation stuff, which is cool. But what are the the really micro patterns which, in a real pattern language, everything else accretes around? The WikiPattern equivalents of Different chairs and Things from your life are likely to be things like The presence of others or Just horsing around — ripe fodder for interaction design improvements in the long slog away from wikiwiki to whatever comes next.
WikiPatterns is sponsored by / advertisement for Atlassian (the Confluence folks), and championed by Atlassian wiki evangelist Stewart Mader, who I had the pleasure of meeting at RCC 2007. Since I believe Confluence is a particularly poor wiki engine, my plan is to use WikiPatterns moreas a resource than a stomping grounds. I wouldn’t want to send folks interested in starting a new wiki to an existing wiki in a confusing, proprietary system whose labeling and navigation is very different from the still-confusing systems they’re likely to use for their own projects. But this is just part of my hobbyhorsical post-wikiwiki fixation and likely irrelevant.
Thanks to Stewart for putting this together, and to everybody who has participated so far.
2007-02-18
Slicehost apologia [1]
Recently have consolidated a few web sites, repositories, etc. onto a single “box” — scare quotes as it’s all bits aboard a low-capacity Xen slice from slicehost. Virtualization is a sea change, and the level of service these folks are offering (for what’s supposed to be a DIY kind of environment) is super impressive. slicehost’s community_indicators are there as well, witness a hoppin’ wiki & the forums.
Rather than an unpaid slicehost PSA, the purpose of this post was/is to act as the standard I think no links are broken but I could be wrong disclaimer. (In addition to moving this weblog off of warp, I switched to a different web server and database, and cleaned up / obliterated some agéd wordpress cruft potentially resulting in Galileo knows what.)
