magpie's shiny things

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.)

In a pre­vi­ous post I talked about Adam Greenfield’s essay “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” as an impor­tant com­pan­ion piece to Moreville’s Ambient Findability.

In his essay Greenfield also describes the haz­ards of allow­ing engi­neers to design the inter­ac­tions between humans and tech­nol­o­gy iter­at­ing the com­mon under­stand­ing that we the users are, at the moment, pret­ty roy­al­ly screwed.

I have to quib­ble with one state­ment that he makes- sys­tems designed by engi­neers always fail their end-users even when (not -unless- as Greenfield says) those users are the engi­neers them­selves. Just ask any­one who pounds code for a liv­ing how they feel about the bug database…