Month: May 2003

Micro-Wiki: a blog post as a wiki

After reading Marc's rocking response to my images-as-blog-comments post, I realized that I was actually describing a wiki masqerading as a blog post: a small stand-alone wiki initially created by a blogger and 'completed' by contributions from others, a Micro-Wiki, if you will.  No one has complained about the ordering of blog comments, so Micro-Wiki is a one-way street too in that contributors are only allowed to add to the post.

Trackback?  That's just an entry in a Micro-Wiki.  Comments?  Same thing.  Endorsements?  Yes to that too.  Thinking about all this leads naturally to structured blog post (fine-grained structure within a blog post) and extensible types of blog post contributions.

Imagine news aggregators that presents you with an updatable list of actions you can take with the selected item (subitem if its structured).  Strutured post allows reader to endorse the product being talked about in the post instead of the post itself.  Woohoo!

Out of Body Communication

Here is a crazy experiment that might reveal something interesting: a meeting where participants talk only via a speech synthesizer.  Obviously speech synthesize has to be really good and have to support multiple voices so participants can identify individuals by their 'synthesized voice'.

The point of the experiment is to measure the effects of separating a person's thoughts from his or her physical body.  While the effect should be most pronounced for the speaker, I think listeners will also be affected.  I am not sure what kind of effects this form of communication will have on individuals and the group, but it sure will be weird.

Anyway, this was just a dump (as in core dump).

Blog Comments, Images, and Audio

I started with an intention to explore ways to lazily increase connections in BlogLand, using randomness as primary means.  Steve Wilhelm (at Reuters?) suggested trackback ticker and random faces appearing in blog search engines.

His suggestions lead me to weird combinations of the concept like Face Tickers (similar to Joi Ito's Random Faceroll except it really [sc]rolls 😉 and Blog Faces (similar to blog comments except a reader is associating a face with a blog post) which lead me to thinking about multimedia comments.

When I read a blog post that I like, I don't always have something to say.  Still, I might like to leave something.  What if I was to leave a small photo of myself that shows up either at the bottom of the blog post or where comments are displayed?  People will see at a glance that so-and-so read the post.  If I did make a textual comment, the image can link to the comment.  Otherwise, the image can link to my own blog.

This feature can be added to news aggregators or to browsers using a browser extension.  Just click a button and a visual representation of your opinion gets added to the article (as a comment for now).  At the same time, link the article could be added to your daily recommended article list published at your own blog.

Although I got sidetracked, I thought this was an interesting enough idea to share.  At least, I think Marc might like it since this idea is in the neighborhood of his visual endorsement stamp idea.  Of course, you can already do this now by inserting HTML into the comment.  But HTML support is not ubiquitously available and those comments usually appear in one-off area like second-class data.

Commercial use of WiFi in Korea

I just read about an interesting use of WiFi in a Korean newspaper.

Old Seoul was much smaller and was surrounded by walls with four gates at each of the compass points.  Areas near the gates (with the exception of the North Gate for obvious reasons) flourished commercely even after the walls came down and gates lost their meaning.  At East Gate (Dong-Dae-Moon) and South Gate (Nam-Dae-Moon), small stores banded toegether and formed large shopping districts which does business practically around the clock.

Hundreds of tiny stores selling amazing array of goods at rock-bottom prices is enough to draw buyers from all around the countries as well as people from near-by countries like Japan and China looking for bargains.  But getting them online was a nightmare.

Nam-Dae-Moon merchants have just agreed upon a plan, with financial support from Seoul city planners, to use WiFi to get every store online, forming a federated online shopping portal.  Orders are received online and forwared to each store via a WiFi-equiped PDA and delivered by a common shipping service.

With all the potential technincal and social problems along with tight $1 million dollar budget, they got plenty of headaches ahead.  But, if they succeed, we should see similar Wireless Market Districts popping up everywhere in and around Korea.

Update: I just had a fiendish thought.  Many of those stores selling similar goods are located near each other to form product-oriented shopping sub-districts in a nice mixture of co-operation and competition.  I wonder if the competition part could spark a WiFi hacker wars by sons and daughters of those shop owners.  With tools like ettercap Joi Ito pointed out recently, a hacker for one store can interefere with online orders going to another store.

Since problems attract solutions, Nam-Dae-Moon project will be one interesting WiFi hotspot to watch.

iTunes Mustic Store Insights

A must read insightful article on iTunes Music Store by Scott Loftesness, a micropayment business guru and one of few people whose views I respect.  Scott starts from a consumer's view and then examines iTunes Music Store business from a micropayment business expert's point of view.  As I said, a must read if you are interested in the business side of iTunes Music Store.  What do I think of iTunes Music Store?  It's not just a hit, but a homerun of the decade.

Bubbly BlogShares

When I claimed BlogShares for this blog on May 18th, there were 5000 shares priced at around 50 cents.  Since then it shot straight up Internet-style and I, intending to keep it affordable, kept splitting it when ever it rose above a dollar, sometimes even twice a day.  Today, mere nine days later, there are 640,000 shares at 70 cents each.  BlogShares is a funny magnified reflection of the dot com years.  Ah, the memories come rushing back.  P/E?  It's 97.73 just now.

Could Dot Com Bubble happen again?  You bet.  IMHO, we are incapable of evolving out of phenomenons like the Dot Com Bubble.  People who think otherwise are just high on intellect.  Same thing with wars, communism, fascism, and jihads/holywars.  In fact, I believe the world has become far more unstable than, lets say, twenty years ago.

Screwed by a Honda Dealer

I just leased a Honda Odyssey, but I think I got screwed royally.  What can one do at this point?  It's obviously not a lemon, so I can't invoke the Lemon Law.  Anybody have a suggestion?  I know I should have been better prepared, but combination of the salesman's smoothtalking, eagerness of my wife and son, and my non-existant shopping skills were just too potent.  Argh.  What bothers me the most is having to look at a blatant reminder of getting screwed every single day for the next four years.

Introducing Chaos to Social Software

I spent most of this morning shopping for a van (Sienna looks at this point).  Feeling drained, I checked my mailbox and found a LinkedIn invitation to connect from someone I don't think I know.  Since I don't have any LinkedIn connections (lazyness), I was glad.

After accepting the invitation, I pondered about what had just occured.  Someone looked me up and initiated the connection.  Cool, but I don't think enough people do that to make a significant impact on a social network.  At least, I am not likely to do it since I am socially lazy.  Yet I enjoy meeting new people.  If there was a way to make new connections lazily, it will make a monstrous impact on LinkedIn and other social software.

Introducing chaos, random connections in LinkedIn, to social software might do just that.  LinkedIn can estimate individual member's interest and simulate chance encounters by sending out mutual invitations to connect.  Different types of connections will have also have to be introduced to make this work.  LinkedIn members must have some control over the random connection feature so they can block it entirely or specify connection preferences.  I am not sure whether random connection feature is an opt-in or opt-out feature though.

While the idea of random LinkedIn connections is interesting, I am more excited about other uses of chaos in social software.  If you got some ideas, let me know.

Say Hello to My Face

I am not really into photography, but I thought it would be nice to show who Don Park is.  So here is a photo taken recently which I am making a permanent addition to my blog.  My wrinkles don't show much, so I think I look pretty young (twentish?  all right, thirtish then ;-).  When I retire, I'll zap those sunspots and smooth out my wrinkles with Botox shots (Oops, I thought you wanted shots in your buttocks, the doctor said) so I can spend my retirement in discos around the world.  By the way, smaller (for inlining) and larger (for worship) versions of the photo are also available.