Word of the day. Misologist. Hatred of reason, argument, or enlightenment. In clearer terms, a person who wants to win an argument more than learn the truth. I deal with these people regularly. [Paul Thurrott’s Internet Nexus]
I deal with too many of these people myself. All the more reason to appreciate AKMA and the quest for truth that drives his work. While misologists generate quite a bit of heat and noise, you can find those who seek truth if you look.
Today s my second blogiversary, and all day friends have been virtually wandering through, helping themselves to drinks at one of the bars (there s an ample supply of juices and sodas in one of the rooms, for friends who don t drink), making pizzas for themselves and eating other people s pizzas, gobbling up lots of fruit and vegetables, and especially having lots of chips with one of Margaret s spectacular dips (she makes superb pesto, luscious hummus, and excellent guacamole). Wireless all over the place. Interested employers in casual, but animated, conversation with opportunity-seeking blog-neighbors. A stealthy philanthropist and an alert VC listen intently to impassioned descriptions of projects, visions, plans, and ventures. Every now and then, raucous laughter erupts. Furious arguments flare with conflicting certainties, then dissipate in respectful acknowledgment of deeply-felt, well-thought-out divergent convictions. Children of all sorts of ages run among our legs,, and I look out for Si to make sure everyone s having a good time.
The party s so big that not everyone would get along well if they had to hang out in the same close quarters, but that s one of the beauties of digital media: no one has to cross anyone s path if they don t want to. There s plenty of invigorating conversation where you want to find it, and you can just not go where you don t want.
…
Thank you all so very much. Stay as long as you like. It s a privilege to have a chance to visit with you.
Congratulations to AKMA on his second blogiversary.
A wonderful soul who makes the blogosphere a better place and the quintessential example of the wonderful serendipity that the net makes possible. AKMA and I crossed paths initially by way of one of my rude comments which he answered in his characteristically gracious way. Today I count among the many fascinating people I’ve come to know through the net.
change of EDdress. heartfelt thanks to the team at Blogger.com, who helped me set up my first blog (blush), but I have now moved the blog to my own site: .
Happy New Year!
Esther
[Release 4.0]
Will someone let me know when Esther adds an RSS feed?
UPDATE: Roland tells me the feed can be found at http://weblog.edventure.com/blog/index.xml. Thanks!
The Oldest Weblog. A standard definition of a weblog is a series of posts in “reverse chronologic order”. I can’t give you a reference here because the standard online reference sites don’t have a definition for “weblog”
But, as a geologist, I understand “reverse chronologic order”. Reverse chronologic order is youngest on top and older as you go down. This is a stratigraphic order. Younger deposits bury older deposits, so you get progressively older as you dig down. So weblogs view the world in a stratigraphic order.
It would be nice if the weblog folks acknowledge those who have gone before them. The Earth has been recording events in reverse chronologic order for over 3.8 billion years. The oldest weblog is the Earth. [Fluid Flow]
Sometimes the earliest ideas are the best.
Math and physics visualizers. This is a great collection of Java applets for visualizing physics and math concepts. Link (via Oblomovka) [Boing Boing Blog]
I keep hoping that I’ll have time to learn where science has gone since I last had a chance to study it. And to relearn some of the math I’ve forgotten over the years. At the very least, this will come in handy as my boys continue to take harder courses in school and high school. Sure wish I’d had access to these kinds of tools when I was in school.
“Email is where knowledge goes to die”. What a great line. (This piece by Bill French might be the original source.) Via Lilia, who reflects on asking questions in public.
[Seb’s Open Research]
Get’s my vote for meme of the week. I also think I saw a reference to this from Scoble as well. Thank you Robert, Bill, Lilia, and Seb.
Over the weekend I released clevercactus feedexplorer, a simple free app to browse the data from the Share Your OPML commons (thanks Dave for making this resource available!) and choose feeds that you find interesting, then allowing you to save them into OPML files that can be imported into a news aggregator. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and other OSes.
Here is the page with installation instructions and a short user guide.
If you can, take a moment to read the user guide as it explains how to change the sorting, perform searches, etc (Btw, I think the UI is pretty self-explanatory, but reading the doc should leave little doubt as to how to do something :)).
Note: if you have any problems with the installation, please take a moment to read the installation page, as it answers common questions and problems.
[d2r]
More interesting bootstrapping going on around Dave’s most recent experiment
New Technorati Infrastructure beta test!.
Folks,
After 2 months of painstaking effort, I’m proud to announce the new Technorati infrastructure is up and ready for use.
Please have a look, and tell us what you think:
We focused 100% of our time on completely refurbishing our underlying event engine – essentially taking a volkswagen engine out and putting a Ferrari engine in. This new engine sports:
[…snip…]
Please go and use the site – and send us feedback.
Definitely faster and more responsive.
“Tell one, tell all, the invaluable Snopes.com has finally gotten an RSS feed!
Snopes is required reading for people on the Internet. If it sounds too good to be true, if it’s a little too conveniently in favor (or against) your favorite ideological position, or if it’s a little too horrifying to be true, check it on Snopes before you get upset, or worse, spread the claims further. Because you’ll meet someone who has nearly the entire site indexed in their head, and there’s little that’s more damaging to your point then to have it conclusive rebutted on Snopes.
I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Barbara and David Mikkelson (FAQ link substantiating the names) for providing such a fine resource to the Internet.
And it’s darn fun stuff, too.
Pass it along.” [iRi]
Another great RSS resource. Subscribed
UPDATE: the actual RSS feed was at
http://www.snopes.com/info/whatsnew.rss
although all of snopes appears to be unresponsive at this precise moment. I have gotten material from the url and it was RSS
Once again, Judith finds an excellent resource.
social (software) entrepreneurs?….
While performing a ‘social software’ search last evening, I found a paper that was written five years ago on ‘business’ and ‘social’ entrepreneurship.
J. Gregory Dees published this paper, on Social Entrepreneurship, for The Stanford Business School’s Center for Social Innovation. At that time he was the Entrepreneur in Residence, Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Miriam and Peter Haas Centennial Professor in Public Service, Graduate School of Business Stanford University. Currently Professor Dees is with Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.
In this paper Professor Dees gives a brief history of the evolving definition of ‘entrepreneur’:
[…snip…]
Peter Drucker: “the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.” Dees goes on to interpret Drucker’s definition as: “Entrepreneurs have a mind-set that sees the possibilities rather than the problems created by change.”
Howard H. Stevenson, a leading theorist of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, defines the heart of entrepreneurial management as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.”
[…snip…]
In conclusion Dees states:
“Social entrepreneurship describes a set of behaviors that are exceptional. These behaviors should be encouraged and rewarded in those who have the capabilities and temperament for this kind of work. We could use many more of them. Should everyone aspire to be a social entrepreneur? No. Not every social sector leader is well suited to being entrepreneurial. The same is true in business. Not every business leader is an entrepreneur in the sense that Say, Schumpeter, Drucker, and Stevenson had in mind. While we might wish for more entrepreneurial behavior in both sectors, society has a need for different leadership types and styles. Social entrepreneurs are one special breed of leader, and they should be recognized as such. This definition preserves their distinctive status and assures that social entrepreneurship is not treated lightly. We need social entrepreneurs to help us find new avenues toward social improvement as we enter the next century.”
Based on Professor Dees definitions, both borrowed and advanced, of ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ – Who do you think are the ‘Social Entrepreneurs’ of the ‘Social Software’ movement?
As a side comment, I continue to be amazed at the quality and the quantity of great material that Judith Meskill continues to find and share.