Neil Gaiman. has advice for Americans: I have very mixed feelings about Americans disliking the French. I'm English, after all. We have… [Electrolite]

Very funny rebuttal by an Englishman. They've disliked the French a lot longer than we have an know a lot more about dissing them. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

I think the whole anti-french bit is just a way for people to ignore other problems…. namely our own leadership

Secrets of the XML gods.

text, code, data

It's the season for confession. First Tim Bray reveals a dirty secret: “a lot of input data these days is XML…in most cases, I use the perl regexp engine to read and process it.” Then Sean McGrath fesses up to his Python habit: “I know I should be invoking a WF [well-formed] parser on the content.xml string but gee Ma, I've got work to do.”
… [Jon's Radio]

tools are tools they are not the end all bee all….

Querying XML in databases. Tom Dyson points out that XPath support for PostgreSQL is in the works. Here's the example he gives:
… [Jon's Radio]

handy

Ross is on a roll!!.

Azeem digs up an essay by Paul Saffo on information overload and new organisational structures, written 14 years ago, to make a case for generalists.

We are in a pickle today because we are trying to manage 21st century information overload with 19th century intellectual skills. For example, we still prize the ability to recall specific information over the skill of making connections among seemingly unrelated information. We have become a society of specialists, each knowing more and more about less and less.  

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Ross keeps the hits coming. Read this. He is right on target. We need tools that support generalists, the people with a wide range of interests. They are usually the ones who love to push information around. I have met some full-on geniuses in my life (i.e.. Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, and Sydney Brenner) and ALL of them were generalists. That is they knew a lot about a specific area but they had the ability to learn a lot rapidly about almost ANYTHING. I sat in with a small informal group and Gell-Mann just talked about trying to decipher Linear B, an ancient language. Sydney Brenner has been at almost every single major biological discovery in the last 40 years (with Crick he demonstrated the existence of mRNA and the genetic code, he developed a novel method to visualize viruses, and provided science with not 1 but 2 major animal models – C. elegans and fugu). The polymath talents of true geniuses can be daunting but there are a tremendous number of people who have similar talents (maybe not as prodigious) that useful tools can amplify. We need more of these. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]

interesting to follow.

Computery grad class. I should be thinking about the summer capstone seminar for the Masters in Informatics program I'll be teaching in May,… [Blog de Halavais]

Hmm, i could see teaching a course like this, but I would make it less determinate, probalby a 4/8/2 split in weeks where the first 4 were conceptual and theoretical, the middle 8 were exploratory along several lines and the last 2 or 4 were project oriented. I've always liked getting students to find and work on something that they are interested in working on and then teaching them through that.

From WorldCom, an Amazing View of a Bloated Industry. We now know in quantifiable, stupefying terms, just how much WorldCom overpaid for the telecommunications network it built. By Gretchen Morgenson. [New York Times: Technology]

For me, this brings about the question of how money in these terms makes people feel? I find it to be somewhat surreal to know that most of that money never existed in paper except as numbers on a tally sheet.

Dot-Com Saviors, Tilting at the World's Ills. In increasing numbers, high-tech entrepreneurs who grew wealthy during the dot-com boom of the late 1990's are working for the global good. By Katie Hafner. [New York Times: Technology]

Yes, this is better than not doing something supportive, but it is interesting to note that the growth of a new capitalist class or the expansion of that class occurs with every major technological development. I'm wondering whether or not this new expansion will transform the class at all, in theory in the long run it will not, but now when you take the expansion of globalization, and the increase in capacity that capital gives one in the global system, you end up with a new transnational class. It could be interesting, or not.

Industry execs claim file trading funds terrorism.

IDG News Service

Does File Trading Fund Terrorism?

Industry execs claim peer-to-peer networks pose more than just legal problems.

Grant Gross, IDG News Service Thursday, March 13, 2003

WASHINGTON — A congressional hearing on the links between terrorism, organized crime, and the illegal trading of copyrighted material produced more complaints about college students using peer-to-peer networks and other governments sanctioning copyright violations than it did evidence of nefarious connections.
[...]
Criminal Charges
Representative John Carter, (R-Texas), suggested that college students would stop downloading if some were prosecuted and received sentences of 33 months or longer, like the defendants in the DOJ's Operation Buccaneer. “I think it'd be a good idea to go out and actually bust a couple of these college kids,” Carter said. “If you want to see college kids duck and run, you let them read the papers and somebody's got a 33-month sentence in the federal penitentiary for downloading copyrighted materials.”

So totally ridiculous it verges on insane. So, is this the first step in the trying to get Larry Lessig arrested as a terrorist?

Found on Dave Farber's IP list. Couldn't find a link to the actual article, so linked to the article in the IP archives. If someone sends me the link to the IDG page, I will put it up… Thanks Milad!
Update: “file sharing” in title changed to “file trading”. Thanks Emile. Fixed the tag.

[Joi Ito's Web]

Ok, well, lets just admit one thing, capitalist economics and everything that sustains it also sustains terrorism, so buying milk supports terrors, etc. using the internet supports terror, etc.

Blogs and Knowledge SharingAlready in January I pr …. Blogs and Knowledge Sharing
Already in January I promised Denham Grey to write something about blogs as a medium for knowledge sharing. Denham and I seem to have different views of the capacity of blogs in this regard (Read his comment on KnowledgeBoard regarding blogs). Promises are often easy, sometimes even lightly, made, and it is in extremely busy weeks as I have been having recently when others fill my agenda that it proves enormously difficult to keep them. However the time has come to start fulfilling some promises, in an attempt to regain some of my authenticity as John Moore would have it. (Yes John, my promise to you regarding links on trust will be as well).

Blogs and knowledge sharing it is then. In recent weeks both Denham Grey as well as Lilia Efimova and Sebastien Paquet have put their thoughts on this in words.
In the posting before this one, I have described my thoughts on listening as the road to obtaining new knowledge.
Taking this stance on listening as a starting point knowledge sharing is what? Sharing knowledge is where a storyteller recounts a story that is particularly relevant to the listener at this time, otherwise it would fall on deaf ears, and no sharing would take place, only broadcasting. Knowledge sharing takes place in dialogues, wether in real time or not, where all parties take on the role of both story teller and listener. In practice this is not often a clear cut case: I acquire knowledge by listening to different storytellers, with knowledge sharing moments on parts of the eventually obtained knowledge. Knowledge sharing is sort of information bartering.

From any piece of knowledge I cannot describe who shared it with me: it is the resulting amalgam of all information inputs on a certain subject, of listening to multiple storytellers. Sometimes I can name influential sources, sometimes I cannot. Learning is mostly a voyage of discovery, a journey of listening, where only in the end, not along the way, I might have something to say on what brought me to my goal. It is an evolutionary process, with no clear view of what will be the red thread and what will be dead-end sideroads at the start. What can help me along on my road of discovery is relationships, storytellers who can point to other storytellers. This is the bartering part I referred to in the last paragraph. This is certainly no clear lineair picture, but that's just what it is: pretty chaotic and semi-random.

I myself quite like that chaotic aspect, it brings on the wonder and magical feeling of discovery I had when I was a 3 yr old, and the world to me seemed like an enormous place with no end of exciting treasures, hidden just so I could have the pleasure of finding them. I had lost that feeling by the time I was 8, and regained it in my mid twenties. So maybe I'm not the person to talk to about the demystification of learning through sharing. Let me just say that in knowledge sharing I think these factors matter: storytelling, listening, the right moment for listening (see former posting: contextual ripeness), dialogue, and relationships.

What do blogs do for me in this sense?
It's a place where I can tell stories. Stories that originate from me, are packaged in the context of me. However I do not broadcast these stories, since I don't think my blog a broadcasting medium although a blog could well be. Ross Mayfield has some interesting posts on different settings for blogs from broadcasting to private channel. (Blogging Bubbles, Repealing the Power-Law, and especially Distribution of Choice)

My stories are stories I use to accomodate my listening, I recount, and thereby interpret and give a place to what I listened to in my own mental context. By telling these stories publicly I also put the information I can barter you as a listener for in the window. This is not something I can do in a forum, or on a bulletinboard, because there it is not only me that determines the context of my stories. In my blog I do, you can retrace my steps by scrolling down on this page, and see the amalgam of impressions that went into forming my opinion for yourself. I think that is important, more important than the actual outcome, to be able to see the road that led there, and which sideroads were passed. So that I, or someone else can decide that it is time to retrace my steps and turn into the sideroad. I hate minutes from meetings that only say what was decided. I can see that from your actions. I am much more interested in what made you decide: a blog works at making those processes visible. Wikis only make the (collective) product visible in comparison, even if that product is never quite finished (and thus fulfilling David Weinbergers 1998 prediction about the end of doneness).

(For a telling example of how listening is determined by the listeners context see Gary's blog where he also refers to Ross Mayfield's blogs on powerlaws and blog networks, but then to illustrate his musings on emergent democracy and the role of trust. I use the same references in a different context. In both instances the listener determines the value of the story, while Ross's context that made him publish it is probably totally different.)

Places where this story was picked up, and commented on:
Seblogging
Mathemagenic
Synesthesia
Making Connections
RU Weblog
Ming the Morpho Mechanic
Ross Mayfield
Stir

This text is not finished yet: I need yet to address relationships through blogging, and what the road of discovery and dialogue look like in the blogosphere. Especially because not all of that takes place on the face of the blog. [Ton's Interdependent thoughts]

this has been an interesting thread, as you consider it more and more, you might come to realize that the issues isn't really knowledge but property and reputation, which has been the core issue for most innovative systems.