homoLudens

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?