Day: March 14, 2004

I don’t think I’ve worried about spelling since third grade. Watching the documentary Spellbound can certainly change your perspective. The movie follows eight children preparing for, and competing in, the National Spelling Bee. I had heard that the finals of the Bee are covered live by ESPN, with very high ratings. This movie shows why. Kids and their parents are consumed by this competition, and it highlights the best and worst about academic achievement. Spelling is hardly the ticket to greatness, but it’s easy for everyone to imagine and understand, so the movie invites just about anyone to participate. If you watch the World Series or the Super Bowl, you don’t feel like you could be part of the action. Watching people spell words, you know you could do some of this, if not with the skill displayed at the national finals. Fun, fun movie… especially appealing for parents. Where’s the line between reinforcing education and pushing too hard? Most of these kids seem to dance on that line.

FYI, the winning word the year of this documentary was logorrhea.

Final note: I wonder whether the filmmakers followed more than these eight kids and just were fortunate to choose one of the winners, or whether all the filming was done after the event? It certainly seemed chronological, with various vignettes prior to the competition. But there are 249 finalists, so choosing the winner (even though she was a repeat finalist) seems fortunate.

Hypergene points out a recent (February 29) study released by Pew Internet & American Life Project, stating that 53 million Americans have produced content online. That’s 44% of adult (18+) internet users in this country. The definition of content is quite broad, but I agree with the inclusiveness. Most of this is about connecting and communicating. As the tools get easier/better, this number will only rise. Most of the content is much like this blog… of interest to the author and a select few (maybe), but in aggregate, it’s pretty telling how many people will create, even when it’s easier to just consume.

I’ve read several of Patricia Cornwell’s mystery/crime thrillers involving the coroner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Last weekend, with lots of travel time to fill, I picked up The Last Precinct off the bargain rack in the Tampa airport. Hardcover, so not perfect for travelling, but at least I was sure that it I hadn’t read it. It was, mostly, the usual page-turner. It took a few dozen pages to get going, and I was amused to realize that I had read the previous novel in the ‘series.’ So, despite my spotty history with the twelve Scarpetta novels, I understood several of the references to earlier events. With the rise of the TV show CSI, I’ll bet these novels got an even bigger boost… although I’ll bet the popularity of these novels helped get CSI on the air. Death is many things, but rarely boring.

We’ve just a weekend to remember. I’m glad I wasn’t in front of the computer until now, after sunset.

Scoble on “Why RSS is more productive than Web” includes several good ideas. None of them are new to me, but perhaps useful to reinforce some points I’m trying to make. I was struck, however, by this item:

3) No looking for “what’s new.” When you visit a site like CNET you need to do a lot of mental work to see what was different from yesterday when you read the site. In NewsGator new things are bold. I don’t need to do any work and I don’t need to pay any attention to old things.

All websites which used vlink (visited link) colors — which is well over 99.9% of them, since it’s the default and it’s smart — have some ability to help you distinguish what you’ve read before… if you click through. Should a website take it one step further, and mark something ‘read’ even if you just see a headline and (maybe) a brief? Avoiding for a minute the difficulties of knowing just what a person ‘saw’ on a webpage that extends more than one screen, and the problem of consistent identification/recognition of a reader… what’s enough of a change to call something old or new? No answers on a Sunday night, but interesting questions.

Steve Gillmor: “automating micro-content routing tends to reinforce the ubiquity of small consumable, searchable XHTML fragments.”

Makes sense to me. But I’ll bet it doesn’t make sense to many (most?). Using that language will never help extend the message beyond geeks. Of course, he’s writing for the geek audience in a geek trade pub, so maybe he doesn’t need to.

Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove Networks, rarely posts to his blog these days. When he does, I’m sure lots of people pay attention, as I do — one more reason RSS as a mechanism for distributed attention is helpful. After all, who has time to check a site that changes erratically? Most of us can barely keep up with sites that change regularly/constantly. Anyway, most of Ozzie’s posts nowadays seem to tie to corporate events, while making a larger point. Fair enough. I care very little about Groove, having (a) never tried it seriously and (b) not wanting to commit to a single platform tool which is, itself, somewhat of a platform. But Ozzie has a track record of being ahead of the curve, and so I read for nuggets of interest.

Today, in conjunction with the imminent release of Groove 3.0, he writes about extreme mobility and its effect on the workplace. He looks at the confluence of recent technologies (laptops, broadband, WiFi, etc.) and points out that the flow of work continues to decentralize.

I’ve been thinking about a subset of that changing flow… information. RSS is accelerating the explosion of information into its constituent parts (ideas! facts! not necessarily mixed well…). Combined with mobility, things are changing. To me, mobility is more about multiple devices in a few fixed locations, than myriad locations. If I can move seamlessly between home and office without disrupting the flow of work and without needing to carry my laptop with me to do it, that’s a game-changer. I’ve commented once or twice before about the complexities of working with just two machines at home. Anything beyond a single repository invites complexity, which is a hurdle. And a lazy world hates hurdles. RSS has its adoption hurdles, too, but they are of a different (lower) level of magnitude. To come full circle, I always wonder if Groove benefits the individual along this axis (simplicity) without requiring full-bore commitment. Not really a driving concern for me to investigate right now, but maybe something to return to. There are also a few links which look interesting in Ozzie’s post, including one to a PowerPoint (I hate downloading stuff like this).