Getting this out late, was busy all weekend.

I listen to a couple podcasts and one of my favorite is the Gillmor Gang. I was listening to his latest one when yet again Steve Gillmor mentioned that we should show respect for Earthlink, which he advertises at the beginning of each podcast. The problem isn't that we should have respect for Earthlink, it is his constant reminder at the beginning of every podcast. He needs to let the advertisement stand on its own now, possibly he should diversify to other advertisers. I'm all for advertisements on podcasts and blogs, I have google ads on my site, but I think the advertisements have matured enough that we don't need a constant reminder about them. What needs to happen now is the continuation of the advertisement movement for the correct context. This leads things to intention vs attention and google ads.

Speaking of which Doc Searls put words to a concept I've been trying to describe for a while now. The idea of attention vs attention vs intention. Where advertisers for a long time now have been spending billions to get our attention. Whether its a billboard or TV or spam alot can go into trying to get peoples attention and sell their product. However most of this money seems to me to be wasted, and in fact not only wastes money but wastes time. My time to view an advertisement for a product I will never buy and companies time in creating flashy advertisements to grab such a low percent of buyers who would otherwise not have bought their product where otherwise a very simple promotional advertisement or blurb that they exist would get a majority of their buyers to indeed buy their stuff.

In recent years we have seen two kinds of movements around attention. One side has been the context movement which is things like google advertisements where the advertisement is geared towards the content of the page itself thus perhaps leading to higher click rate. The other side, promoted by people such as Steve Gillmor and others over at attentiontrust.org, is a sort of vault where click streams or previous buys are recorded in a central place and the potential buyers can at their own will allow other companies to find out that information to be able to show advertisements or promotions that are very specific to that potential buyer.

The last piece to this evolution, as I see, is the idea of intention. When I know I want to buy something I can let vendors know my intention of buying something and they can then compete for my business. It can be as little as I am interested in buying an RPG game or a Java programming book or a plasma screen. It can be sorta vague or very specific and depending on that intention I might be a few advertisements and promotions or many. To me this should be where businesses are heading in the future of trying to get buyers.

On a different note reporters may need to watch out for Bush as he may be attacking reporters on the very idea that they report things.

Notable: Chatology

I've been doing TWI... for a couple weeks now. TWI... is sort of a play on TWIT though I never could cover as much as they do and as good as the people over there could. However, the point of my friday TWI... is to post the various things of interest that I find on the internets every week as well as any comments I've made on other peoples posts.

The guy over at Erratic Wisdom wonders how anyone could not understand the importance of studying history. (My comment: here).

I take this post to heart. Part of the reason for my site is communication with the outside audience. Not necessarily for personal gratification of other people viewing my content, but being genuinely interested in peoples comments about various topics I am interested it. Whether that's some bit of philosophy, science, code, or application I put out there I wanna hear what other people have to say about it.

Doc Searls continues to talk about and advocate the new journalism.

Notable: Chatology

I continue to expand the code for indeepthought and have implemented more of wiki markup. If your curious about wiki markup you can see two competing standards here and here. Which one am I using? Neither really, there are parts of both I don't like and since neither is an excepted standard by the community of wiki I am basically using my own derived form based off wikipedia itself.

Original wonkette Ana Marie Cox continues to make funny and witty posts in her weekly Chatology. Seems the US intelligence agencies can't make up their minds whether to classify or declassify documents. This is a little late, I saw it last week, but I found this page on The Rise & Fall of Object Orientation interesting. Someone posted an interesting response to the events surrounding the cartoon of their Prophet Muhammed at Kuro5hin. Can hydrogren producing mutant algae solve our energy problems? Fox does it again by asking if an Iraq civil war could be a good thing.

Finally, this is an interesting analysis about watermarks and I agree with the authors conclusion that watermarks aren't well suited for DRM. I think watermarks should be used only to find out who shared the file later.

The article code is done so now I can start to go through all the articles and convert them to the new format with tags. I've already redone the projects and about pages. As you can see to the right are the Blog Tags and Archives which is pretty easy to understand I think. It just shows you a slightly filtered list of tags, those with more than one post, for my blog posts. You can see more tags at the bottom of the Blog Tags which shows you a cloud view of all the tags here. The tag cloud is split into two for blog posts and articles.

Which brings me to the menu above. The menu above is all about the articles. I have limited the article tags to mainly 7 tags. The sparce, tags, and contact menu items are not tags. Sparce is a link to the sister project for bookmarks organized by tags like del.icio.us and click throughs. The tags link is the same as the more tags link under Blog Tags. I might just remove this if it makes sense to keep the two tag clouds together on the same page. Contacts is just a mouseover to display my email address in the second level menu. The others are tags and if you click on them will show you a list of articles that I have filed under that tag. If you mouse over them you might see in the second level menu up to 4 or 5 of the most recent articles.

Now here is where the wiki part comes in. Articles are given a unique name which allow me to interlink articles together or link to articles in my blog posts by just calling the article by name, wiki style. Hopefully this will prevent articles getting lost under newer ones. We will see how this works. If I run into the problem of needing more article tags I might have to come up with a different way of navigating through the blog and article tags. I'm trying to make it easy and non-convoluted while maintaining a single web site.

People can of course comment directly on the article page just like the blog posts. The articles themselves use some wiki markup to make it easier to write them some of that will eventually make its way into the blog code. Eventually I hope to create a completely modular site run by a modified wiki markup language and tags.

What is in deep thought?

• The place where the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is answered.

'''What's the answer?'''

• Among other things, 42.

'''Then what's the question?'''

• We don't exactly know but it's been hinted that part of the question is: What do you get when you multiply six by nine?

'''Doesn't six times nine equal 54?'''

• We did say it was only part of the question.

'''Shouldn't the correct question be: What do you get when you multiply six by seven?'''

• We don't think that's a very good question.

'''Doesn't it clearly fit the answer 42?'''

• 42 is only part of the answer so we think six times nine is a perfectly good part of the question of life, the universe, and everything.

'''Ok... but who's we?'''

• Um just me and my web site.

Your weird.

• Hey this is a PAQ, let's keep it to questions and answers.

'''What's a PAQ?'''

• Potentially Asked Question.

Why a PAQ and not a FAQ?

• Well, no one seemes to be actualy asking us these questions but we are pretty sure they want to.

'''What can I do if I don't like this site or for some reason am offended by it?'''

• Leave or get bent.

Ok... uh, so who are you?

• I'm just this guy, you know? I have alot of interests. It's a bit chaotic, but that's what this place is about.

I have many various projects, sometimes too numerous to keep track of. I have two main areas of projects, my personal projects and projects I work on at Tagdot. My personal projects are generally put under the an umbrella project called not [your] everyday Applications or neApps for short. Below are a list of some of my projects and PAQs about them.

neThing/in deep thought

neThing code behind in deep thought. I don't call it a blog because it is intended to be more than that, however most people would call it blogging software. The main features of neThing are the ability to create posts using wiki style code and my own set of extensions. It carries most of the same features as wikipedia such as comparing changes between past history of a post and discussion pages for each post. In addition is an extensive tagging system.

neThing is also a toolbox comprising various tools such as neTodo, neBoards, Sparce, and neCode. I plan to expand the tool set further as time goes on and my needs grow, incorporating more of the projects found bellow as well as additional wiki and logging features.

(changelog)

neBoards

What is neBoards?

neBoards is now an umbrella name for a project comprising 2 parts.

1. neBB - a simple bulletin board. So simple in fact that it is what I call a drop thread BB.
2. neForums - Formerly named neBoards. A highly customizable and easy to use message board.

neBB

What is a drop thread BB?

• A drop thread BB is a bulletin board that can be deployed using a very simple database and script internally OR externally
• The BB script automatically creates a BB based on the URL that called it
• Any page that calls the script (internally or externally) must be supplied the relevant threads and its posts if it is on the whitelist/unless it is on the blacklist
• If the URL (anything before # or ?) is not already known a new BB is created.
• The host of the script is responsible for images and posts on all BBs

(changelog)

neForums

What is neForums?

• As mentioned before. A highly customizable and easy to use message bard.
• It can be used as simply as a drop thread BB can or as a huge message board filled with many forums, topics, threads, and posts.

(changelog)

Why was neBoards changed to neForums?

neBoards is a partial acronym for 'not [your] everyday [message] boards'. In that vein as i've come up with new ideas i've always suited neBoards to them. For a while I have been thinking about drop threads and been trying to think of how they would fit within the neBoards system.

So instead of trying to kludge things together I decided to:

1. Keep the two things apart, except where it makes sense (the most simple neForum is essentially a drop thread BB)
2. Rename neBoards to neForums
3. Umbrella the two together into the neBoards project

What does that do to the roadmap?

Completely destroys it. I became unhappy with the neBoards code at some point. I did not want to completely wash my hands of the code and start over but this fact made me not want to work on it at all. Sometimes I have found taking a bigger leap is easier than taking a smaller leap. By reworking the entire concept altogether I have become both more excited about the project and willing to start from scratch with neForums.

neTodo

Currently there are two projects I am working on called neTodo. One is a Java app the other is was started a while ago which is written in Cold Fusion. The focus of the java neTodo project is to take the Look and Feel of the CF neTodo project and port it. Eventually the online neTodo and java neTodo will be able to sync together. I also intend to extend the functions of both to include task dependencies, categorization (or labeling), better prioritizing, and add a calender for due dates.

(changelog)

Sparce

Sparce is my demo for taking various RSS feeds (right now it uses del.icio.us) and creates a list of links categorized based on your preferences.

(changelog)

B.O.B.

B.O.B. or Bash Oppressing Bytes or neBOB is essentially an alternative Bash or command line prompt for accessing various programs. It is a proof of concept for taking English like commands rather than simple commands that are typical with prompts today. While this is behind what some consider as the step forward with graphical user interfaces it could be a first step to English (or later other language) driven computer operating environments. The next step being an Intelligent program that can understand complex requests for resources in a conversation like basis. This is a future project and not currently in development.

neCalc

A simple command line calculator. Which will take most math expressions as is and attempt to solve them. Examples of such expressions: "1 + 2 * 3", "9 ^ ( 1 / 3 )", and "x * 9 = 18". Most other functions would be handled through slash commands.

neList

Tag based online listing of things. You can tag any item in the list, view by a set of tags only while keeping the depth intact, and can export or import using xml.

neRedBlackList

A specialized version of neList specifically meant for creating whitelists and blacklists. From net addresses, companies, emails, to food. Based on the tag and reasons, anyone could add to the list or export for their own purposes.

neCode

A code repository searchable by meta data applied to the code and the code itself. Can be as simple as large projects with forks and merges. Can attach tags, dependencies within or without the repository, documentation, or other file resources to the code. Keeps a history of all changes made, allows compares and reverts.