Been quiet again, hasn't it?

I'm busy.

Hopefully over in a few weeks though ...

meanwhile, some random news / thoughts :

1) I have a bike! And biking in London is wonderful. Especially if most of your commute is along the canal tow-path. :-)

2) ThoughtStorms is blowing itself out!

Yes! Really!

I used to love that wiki. Now, for the umpteenth time in the last couple of years, it's frozen up on me because of file-system restrictions on the hosting service. Spammers forced me to close it to other contributors. I rarely update it, and then only as a LinkBin. It needs a bloody good refactoring and clean out of old, redundant, information.

And suddenly, I'm sick of it. I need something new ...

What that is, I don't know. My rewrite of SdiDesk in Python is ... well, 5 years late. I don't like all these new fangled wikis with their wysiwyg editors and massive plugin configurations and a markup-languages that I don't know. (Hrrrumph!)

I don't think it's blogging, although, as you can see, I do more blogging that wikiing now.

In fact, I'm starting to suspect that BillSeitz was right and I was clever but wrong in thinking that blogs and wikis couldn't really be integrated due to conceptual rather than technological incompatibilities. I'd love to be able to pool the best of ThoughtStorms writing with Composing / SmartDisorganized / PlatformWars etc.

I'd love refactoring tools to help sift and mine and reorganize my writing from one place to another.

I'd love the power of git or mercurial distribute source-control behind my writing on different devices.

Yeah, but do I love it enough to sit down and write it?

3) Watch this awesome talk by Tim O'Reilly. Good inspiration for anyone thinking what to do next.

Have to say I'm liking my blogs more and more now we have keyword tagging.

I know Blogger was late with this feature, but I'm starting to find that it changes how I think about my blogs. I feel far more confident writing for the "long term" in the blog. In the past I considered ThoughtStorms for anything long lived, and blogs for the ephemeral. These days, really ephemeral stuff goes on Twitter. I'll use blogs for quite serious essays and more focussed stuff. And while ThoughtStorms is meant to be for the longer term stuff, it has, of course, got quite out of date.

I may be revisiting what I said over on ThoughtStorms:WikiLog referencing Bill Seitz, and in many debates with Chris Dent and Eugene Eric Kim.

Briefly I've been saying that you can't merge wikis (which have semantically meaningful "pagenames" as their addresses) with blogs (which have semantically meaningless dates as their addresses) or "purpled" paragraphs (which have semantically meaningless codes) as their addresses, because working in wiki requires the fluent link-making that semantically meaningful pagenames give you and you don't have.

Well, I still think that's kind of true ... but it's also damned useful to have ways of bringing together stuff that you've put on wikis and blogs. (And twitter). Perhaps we can't dismiss the attempts to produce hybrids so easily.

Maybe tagging can help. After all tagging doesn't give a unique ID, but tags are a) semantically meaningful, and b) exist in both worlds (on blogs, and as "CategoryCategory") in wiki.

Update : Interesting to see Chris Dent experimenting with something new.