homoLudens

Closing out this third year of homoLudens and, truth be told,  the
bloom is off the blog. Which is to say that if I’ve discovered anything
this year about writing online it’s that “online” is NOT the best place
for writing that aims at anything other than pointing. I started the
earliest version of this blog in May, 2000. It took about three months
to figure out how to best use it for researching (finding and gathering
links to information), reading (organizing information by topic in an
ubiquitously accessible online cache), and writing (for an audience of
mostly colleague teachers interested in reading about - what else? -
blogging). A blog made the web personally useful. I started a
second, password-protected blog within two weeks of launching the
first. I needed links to private writing and reading. Blogs multiplied
as different kinds of work - journal, travel updates, photo albums,
houseswapping, BAWP, graduate work, school library,
etc. - demanded them. Radio helped for a bit with management of all
those separate sites, but it didn’t help with managing my own research,
reading and writing. It was clear from the beginning that a blog’s
potential as
writing space was matched by its limitations. It’s even clearer now,
three years later.

Along comes Tinderbox. Doug Miller articulates its value while pointing to other ruminations from James Vornov and Ken Tompkins: “Like the Web, Tinderbox presents a whole new
canvas, a new landscape of thought space. Unlike the Web, which is
primarily public and collaborative, the Tinderbox landscape is
primarily private and maps to my own internal thought processes.”

This
is what I shorthanded as a Tinderbox-facilitated 
“intro-net,” a private writing, reading and research space that was
easily uploaded to, and could download from, the web. In less
than a week using only its basic applications, it’s become my
primary writing space. A little testing of it as a note and
bibliographic organizer shows it’ll be my primary researching
and informational reading tool as well. It’s led to less
blogging and more researching, reading, thinking and writing.

Uh oh, sounds like a resolution. And on that note, the annual New Year’s pointer: “Mr. Flood’s Party.” Here’s to ‘the bird on the wing!’

“According to their contracts, expectations and desires, all three
soldiers should have been civilians by now. But Fontaine and Costas are
currently serving in Iraq, and Eagle has just been deployed. On their
Army paychecks, the expiration date of their military service is now
listed sometime after 2030 — the payroll computer’s way of saying, ‘Who knows?’”

This WP story
not a joke at all. During my discharge processing from the
Air Force in 1976, I noted to some Err Farce clerk that my paperwork
puzzlingly indicated that I could be reactivated at any time during the
next eight years.  “Damn right, airman,” he grinned. These poor
schmucks - all they wanted to do was grab some extra cash and maybe
defend the country in the event of an attack. Sure was a hella’lot
cushier back in the days when George W. pushed to the head of the line
for the f???in’ reserves.

First kudo to Tinderbox: It is liberating to be OFF the net while still able to link. Internet, intranet - yeah, yeah; but for pre-writing, intronet is the thing: linking within. And I don’t mean within the hive. Not even within the community. Before anything else, linking within the writing, before
the publication. Blogging, schmlogging: its essential power is in
clicking the “post” button. Like shouting in a Quaker meeting:
possible, but oddly disrespectful of the silence, and of the community. Or like bulk mailing, only without
the minimal
filter of real world overhead: draft, copy, mock up, layout,
printing, envelopes,
stuffing, sealing, stamping, mailing., delivery, discard. But what, if
after the early
blog adopters’ first thrill was gone, there was in addition to (or in
place of) the
digital mass mailing, some sort of localized commitment to a community?
How about targeted pre-publication within a chosen circle, within a
blogging response group? (This, btw, might explain the “plateauing” of
lots of early blog adopters: the ‘blah-blah-blog’ effect.) How ‘writng project“-y.

Tinderbox’s “intronet” doesn’t just line things up in files, either. You
can organize both hierarchically and in less tightly top-down
fashion. This is all complemented by (the anticipated) ease of
promotion to public viewing. (Otherwise known as blogging.) Check it out: “Aliases are one of the most
powerful tools in Tinderbox, and one of the most flexible ways for
organizing your notes in ways that a hierarchy doesnít permit. A note
can have many aliases, or none.” A note, then, is a little like a le
Carre character. Or like a thought. This is waaaaaaay better than what I asked Userland for in the
disregarded request for “multiple department designations” in Manila
newsItems.

I think Mark Bernstein offered to do a “how to” Tinderbox session at
edBlogger SF. Why, oh why why why,  didn’t I take him up on it?
Mark, if you come back to SF in late spring or early summer, we’ll put you
and yours up for free, find you workshop participants and a free workspace get you tickets
to ALL the city musuems, lend you a car (or a truck) for the duration, and take you to a
Bernal Heights bar that has Duval on tap. If that doesn’t work, are you
(or anyone else) doing Eastgate trainings anywhere anytime soon?

Terry Elliot is baying on a wiki scent. I should be sniffing out
Tinderbox and I will, I will, as soon as jetlag eases a bit. Meanwhile,
just what hunt are we on?

We’ve got knowledge and experience about teaching writing. (Doing
it in public, urban schools is what interests me professionally. Sure, private schools and home-schooling
count. Teaching writing isn’t the sole preserve of a democratic
commons.) We know less
about how to teach writing while using digital tools. Blog posting
isn’t writing; it’s publishing. Writing happens before the ‘post’ button gets clicked. Good writing is more than news, more
than pointers, but benefits from news and pointers. Good writing is
re-writing. What digital tools especially help us re-write?

Here are some disruptive challenges from Xanadu’s Ted Nelson’s dated (2000) but resonant essay, Where our hypermedia should really go.
It’s old news to many, but new to me in k-12 land. He argues that
“the real problem [for computer development] is how to create
parallel mechanisms for the deep  consideration of alternative
structure.”

• He bluntly dismisses the paradigm (’big idea’) of hierarchical design: “The point is that we have
  fetishized hierarchy as a kind of structure, thinking that this is a real
  structure, which  is preposterous???”
• Then, describing a Japanese colleague’s request for a database tool
  that would help him do complex historical research, he offers a simple example of the problem with hierarchical structure:
  “???the data
  base guy said to him, ‘oh you need to decide in advance what all of
  your fields are going to be.’ That is how it is in the data base world,
  you have to  decide all of that in advance. I guess thatís how
  they
  feel about theirs. For some of us, ideas keep  changing. You have
  to be able to change those fields all the time.” [emphasis added]
• And finally he pushes a BAWP
  mirror up to my face with these thoughts about writing and what writing
  wants from a digital tool: “Similarly, the problem about writing,
  is about re-writing. Especially
  re-writing???. if you are doing a novel, a book of history, an
  encyclopedia,
  the issue is not the fiddly little stuff you can do on a small window
  on
  the screen. The issue is how to massively rearrange, and keep track of
  large pieces of content. Anybody who has done this knows it has
  nothing to do with word processing [or blogging], as presently
  constituted. It
  has to do with being able to find all of the pieces. Being able to
  keep 
  track of where they were in previous documents and rearrange them.”

more…

Found this departure present on the ‘li-Blog-ary‘ site: “??? referrer log??? leads us to believe that we have been named School Library Journal’s ‘Site of the Month.’???” [galileoLibrary News] Now off to Amsterdam.

Doug Miller points at a Rael Dornfest explication of “similarities between Blosxom and Dave Winer’s Channel Z.” Bryan Bell pointed out Blosxom’s flexibility in this area just before bloggerCon, where I noted to Dave again the value of adding “multiple department designations” to Manila newsItem sites. But what’s most encouraging in Doug’s post is this TB comment: “???This: ‘Append an index.rss and you’ve an RSS feed of the path, day, path/day combination, or specific posting in question’ is a very cool idea??? It’s an idea I’ve also played with for use with my categories here at DSD via Tinderbox, which makes doing it childishly easy.” I’m all for easy.

A July ‘03 post pointed to by Robert Scoble. Swear to BAWP, I didn’t see this before edBlogger’s ‘Writing Process, Blogging Process’ roundtable. Wish I had. “Dave Pollard writes about the blogging process. That sounds pretty good to me.” [The Scobleizer Weblog]
more…

Via Alan Levine: “Related to recent wonderings of Where Have All the Bloggers Gone?, it appears that author William Gibson is blogged out. In Last Postcard from Costa Del Blog, Gibson pens: ‘Time for me to get back to my day job, which means that it’s time for me to stop blogging. I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel??? Maybe it’s the next great slogan for blogging: “low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial”‘” [cogdogblog]

Me too! This present use of digital paper appears as a high speed flurry of post-its and ether airplanes. Scrible, stick, zoom, thunk. Yesterday I listened to this witty reflection on blogging by Andrei Codrescu. Today I read “Weeding,” librarian Thomas Washington’s lament for web-crowded books. “???. The goal is never to go under, never to fully immerse oneself in the contents of the page.” All week at Galileo I’ve been dustily stumbling on the same set of borrowers’ Date Due trails on the front pages of spine-weary classic novels. Sigh - time for a ‘blog weeding’ winter break.
more…

From the LA Times
re: Ahnie’s about face on cutting local government and educational
funding: “Schwarzenegger’s evolving position reflects the difficulty of
both fulfilling campaign promises and balancing the budget.”

“In what may prove a
dramatic reversal of a key campaign promise, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
said Tuesday he is considering suspending Proposition 98, the landmark
school funding guarantee???”
more…