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More on search from Tim Bray last night. Very short, on a topic I’d like to hear more about from him, based on his experience. I know something about this topic from the user end and the product end, if not the technology end, since I worked on the now un-lamented Snap.com / NBCi.com back in the day. I even ran the search team for about six months, although admittedly more in caretaker mode than active oversight mode… but I learned enough from osmosis and listening to agree that “…it’s much easier to offer a good advanced than simple search.“

Someone on the on the online-news mailing list pointed out that Scopeware offers Vision Search, which is what Gelertner was talking about as an interface (screenshot). Scopeware is by Mirror Worlds Technologies, Gelertner’s company.

Fueled by the research and writings of Dr. David Gelernter, world-renowned Yale professor and our Chief Scientist, and Dr. Eric Freeman, Mirror Worlds Technologies was established in 1997 to develop and commercialize the patented technology based on this premise.

This makes the essay seem a bit more like self-serving marketing, at least in its interface ideas — but still provoking, in the best ways.

Command-K is my favorite keystroke combo in NNW… Mark All Unread, on a per subscription basis. It’s about 30 minutes later, and the red number is gone. Until tomorrow, anyway.

I use NetNewsWire Lite to read various news sources, blogs and otherwise. It’s somewhat daunting to start my day’s reading (usually at night, like now) with a big red “211” on the Dock icon. That means 211 headlines unread, from my 51 subscriptions. I fire through most of them, opening Safari window after Safari window until I’ve knocked off all the unread items in NNW, and then I start reading/scanning open Safari windows. It doesn’t take that long, and I shouldn’t feel so compelled to go through it all, but I like knowing the pulse of this “loosely coupled community” (my phrasing). Clearly, lots of interest today… or lots of free time. 😉

A sharp image, from David Gelernter’s essay “The Next Great American Newspaper,” in The Weekly Standard. This pointed vision describes the traditional ‘reverse pyramid’ style of journalism, but he’s more hunting the great beast that is traditional journalism. Style and bias are part of the story, but the larger point is about time vs. space. Newspapers excel as objects in space, but the web, Gelernter says, is about “objects in time.” Of course, I’m immediately drawn to ideas that build on our changing concept of time, and what its value is.

The essay mixes two ideas, one ideological and one technological. First, The New York Times (and New York) needs a cultural/political equivalent from the Right (conservatively speaking). Second, the web is the place to build this newspaper, because time is the defining part of our lifestyles today, and only the web as a medium both reflects and shapes our ongoing relationship with short, sharp snippets of time. And, like the New York Times (online and print), a web newspaper speaks to a broader audience than just New York, although place does still matter.

Instead of writing one longish piece, reporters will write (say) five short ones–will belt out little stories all the time, as things happen. They will shape their news stories to the shape of the news, of experience, of time. The string of aphorisms–prose in stanzas–is a perfect form for fresh and timely news. Perfect also for a nation where concentration spans seem to halve every year.

While this fits the blog metaphor well, I think it also speaks more to the density of our media experience, combined with the poor (if improving) quality of our computer screens. Harder to concentrate when your eyes have to work harder.

The navigational ideas he posits here (“cards” of information in streams) seem to be a return to some of the themes he’s been hitting again and again in his academic writing and professional software career. I’m just happy he’s pushing something different. Whether it works or not, it stretches the brain a bit, just as Amazoning the News did (and does). Hard to be revolutionary in this economy, or maybe I’m just missing the forest for all the branches — let alone trees, but I still hope to produce some of the ideas from the Hypergene thought piece from 2001 in the real-world of 2003 and beyond.

Let’s leave Gelernter with one more quote, a parenthetical line I loved: “Third law of information: The interface is the application. The right picture is everything.” Maybe I should know what the first two ‘laws’ of information are (I don’t… let me know), but I know that selling an idea these days most often need a picture. Words won’t do it. And I can’t draw… an exercise for the reader is whether I can write well enough to overcome that.

…a good search engine for this blog. OK, I’m not really that desparate, but until I can figure out a better month-long archive scheme, I have found myself frustrated by trying to find something I’ve written, after less than three months of posting!

Since I’m lazy, I will read Tim Bray’s series on full-text search, just beginning with background now, and (maybe) then I’ll see if the solution he comes up with is something a non-geek can implement. Otherwise I’ll resort to the Google box like most others. I’ve already changed my robots.txt so that this blog is indexed by polite spiders. I’ll have to see how much extra spider traffic that generates.

Do you remember the TV show “In Search Of…”? If you do, you’re at least a contemporary, maybe older. Except that now the classic Leonard Nimoy-hosted shows run on the History channel. TV never dies, it just finds a new outlet.

Today was a sunny, clear, calm day in San Francisco. Maybe my memory is faulty, but it feels like we’ve had more of those this year than anytime in the last seven years. For those of us who sit in front of a computer as part of a job (in addition to hobbies like this one), good weather on a weekend feels like a hall pass.

What’s more interesting is seeing the drop in the number of blog posts in NetNewsWire Lite. I know many of our sites at work see less traffic on weekends — corporate connections make all the difference — but I might have expected that blogs, done on personal time (?), would be more stable, in terms of posts and traffic, than commercial web sites, aimed (often enough) at commercial readers. I think my assumption is off. I have not done anything scientific here, checking against Technorati or Weblogs.com or any of the minor/major centers of gravity in the blog world. I’ve often wanted to graph site traffic against weather in different parts of the country (too hard to do it for the world) and see if it moves in concert. Tough with a news site, since news really does drive traffic, but I would still expect a connection. I’m not sure how to act on the hypothesis, even if proved true… except perhaps in gauging inventory for ad serving purposes!? Consider this post a reminder to myself for paying attention to this topic. I know I waited until the sun was down to spend most of my day’s time in front of the computer.

Child #2 will arrive sometime soon. I’ve known this for, oh, about nine months. 😉 That said, I admit to still being only ‘mostly ready’ for the arrival. I guess I feel that I’ve been through this before, and I know what to expect. At the same time, though, I’m sure (a) the birth will be different just because and (b) we have Benjamin now, so we have to balance our excitement with the new baby with a sensitivity to introducing Benjamin to the sibling who will disrupt his current existence. Long term, he’ll be happy — I hope. But long term could mean decades, since I know I’m thrilled to be part of a large family now, but there were several years in my youth when I wasn’t quite so excited about that fact. Well, here the new baby comes, ready or not.

Contrary to one friend’s report, the movie Finding Nemo was… well… OK. Not the best Pixar movie. Fun, fine, OK, but nothing special. Enough scary parts that I don’t think Benjamin will see it for a while.

Played as a sub again for the Longshots, Vin’s floor hockey team. Had to play short-handed, and lost 8-5. Going to be sore tomorrow, and tired now. Once were athletes… or something like that.