magpie's shiny things

Today David Seah men­tioned in an almost aside to a post about learn­ing to net­work (a shared weak­ness) that he had read a cou­ple of books by Paulo Coelho and that these were, for him, the right books at the right time.
For me the right book was Coyote Blue by Christopher Moore. I’ve read and loved a ton of CM’s books since then but only Coyote Blue came by at the right moment with the right mes­sage: You are what you are, and any and all attempts to pre­tend oth­er­wise are bound to result in the old man bit­ing you in the ass.

What was your right book at the right time?

I spent a good bunch of time last week try­ing to set up some sort of basic track­ing for shiny and the DH’s blog obser­va­tions. There are ninety-three (gues­ti­mate) WordPress plu­g­ins that track traf­fic (most­ly by look­ing at the site’s serv­er logs.) But there is not one decent review of which ones work well and which ones don’t or even an overview (excel spread­sheet any­one?) of what sort of infor­ma­tion they make out of the raw log data.

Yesterday Google Analytics gave me the shock of my life — I had vis­i­tors. 12 in fact. The result of some tech­no­rati search­es, the men­tion of an Adam Greenfield post and the love­ly folk(s) over at //engtech who came by to see who the hell I was.

I also found out that I had com­ments wait­ing to be mod­er­at­ed. Way wait­ing — like a week. The email noti­fi­ca­tion did­n’t work. Sorry — I’ll watch much more care­ful­ly in the future.

Now if I can just fig­ure out what all those box­es and charts over on Google Analytics actu­al­ly mean…

Happy Weekend y’all.

edit­ed 25.may.07 to change the url for //engtech, who is now ter­ror­iz­ing the web-o-sphere under the name inter­net duct tape. Too cool.

In a recent issue of Forbes mag­a­zine (May 7th, 2007) sev­er­al authors wrote short essays on the nature of net­works. One of which (titled “90 Years of Networks” by Amanda Schupak) includes a nifty lit­tle time line of sig­nif­i­cant events in the his­to­ry of net­works and net­work­ing. In the 1991 spot she includes the following:

Finnish pro­gram­mer Linus Torvalds kicks off open-source move­ment, a sort of wiki of com­put­er code, with a plea for con­tri­bu­tions to Linux oper­at­ing system.

Note care­ful­ly the wording.

Open source is now described as being wiki-like rather than a wiki being described as being open source-like.

Please don’t be tempt­ed to exclaim — but that’s a tau­tol­ogy! a wiki is a sort of open source project. You’d be miss­ing the point. This is about par­a­digm and analo­gies, not about hier­ar­chi­cal typed-classification sys­tems. The more famil­iar object is being used to describe the less famil­iar object. In the view of this writer a wiki is more famil­iar to her read­ers than open source.

That grind­ing sound you hear is my world view rub­bing up against the curbing.

PS I’d love to give you a link to the arti­cle but in the three days since I pulled it up to read, it has dis­ap­peared behind the for-pay wall. pfft.

I’ve been mess­ing about with GTD for about 6 months and the ben­e­fits have been immense: A clean inbox at least a cou­ple of times a week, the dis­ci­pline (and per­mis­sion) to skim and file email with­out think­ing that I need to ack every sin­gle FYI that cross­es my screen, gro­cery lists that actu­al­ly reflect meal plans…

But it does­n’t quite fit and I haven’t been able to fig­ure out why. I work like mad — there’s always some­thing next on the list and I get the wid­gets cranked. Some days… oth­er days it’s just an over­whelm­ing sea of ran­dom tasklets swim­ming around my note­book and fail­ing to coa­lesce in my brain. I end up spend­ing a cou­ple of hours read­ing lol­cats just to avoid the reel­ing sen­sa­tion I get every time I open my con­text lists. Continue read­ing “Getting Too Physical in GTD”

Peter Moreville con­tin­ues to drop peb­bles (boul­ders?) into my intel­lec­tu­al pond. This morn­ing it was Social Network Analysis. A short piece sum­ming up how he found him­self con­nect­ed to a net­work of peo­ple study­ing, well, net­works of peo­ple and how they both inter­sect and build the infor­ma­tion net­works that that they are oper­at­ing in. A tasty overview of his route from a pre­sen­ta­tion through a book and on to sev­er­al peo­ple. You are invit­ed to fol­low along through the linkage.

Why the hell did­n’t I meet this guy when I was in grad­u­ate school? Oh yeah, wrong school — I went to UW. (Yup I have one of the last Masters of Librarianship degrees ever grant­ed. I think it’s cool.)