Blog Neighborhood is a UI metaphor for viewing related blogs.  Today's blogspace is organized mostly by topic (i.e. Java, Flash), relationships (i.e. friends, collegues), or navigation (I am more likely to subscribe to blogs Dave Winer visits because I read Dave's blog).

Blog Neighborhood is a textual representation of blogs a blogger read either by browser or RSS feed.  Essentially, its a vertical list of hyperlinks, each pointing to a blog.  Vertical axis represents time, so blogs I visited most recently are at the top.  Horizontal axis represents frequency of visits limited degradation over time, so hyperlinks to most frequently visited blogs are not indented while rarely visited blogs will be deeply indented.  Axises can be switched.

Here is an example of how Blog Neighborhood looks like:

Scripting News
  Marc Canter
   Lawrence Lessig
Scott Loftesness
   Jeremy Allaire
  Mitch Kapor
    Ray Ozzie
    Don Box

Its primary advantages are intuitiveness (you don't even have to understand it to use it) and compactness (it fits easily in a corner of a blog and simple enough to display on mobile devices).

I forgot how vivid dreams can be with nicotine patches.  For example, I just had this dream where my family had a fatal auto accident (definitely not one of my favorite dreams).  In nicotine patch dreams, I have wider field of vision, deeper colors, sharper images, and longer memory afterward.  Sound quality seems about the same.

We were in our family van, heading north somewhere north of Golden Gate Bridge on Freeway 101.  Ahead of us were long lines of white Ford Thunderbirds, but the traffic was moving well past 60 mph with everyone tailgating each other.  My wife was in the passenger seat.  My son was sitting behind me in a child seat as well as driving behind me in another white Ford Thunderbird.  Then everything stops and our van started plowing through Thunderbirds after Thunderbirds.  While I am thinking, "I guess we are goners," I hear my wife yelling something like "aaaaeeee".  I then realized that she was in the middle of saying "Bye" the long way, so I started on the letter B knowing that I'll never get to the "aaaaeeee" part.  After what felt like hundreds of Thunderbirds, everything turns white and real quiet.  I peek open my right eye and find myself in our bedroom.  Whew!  Welcome to Day 3 without smoking.

Why can't I have dreams where I am stuck in an island with Kathy Ireland?  I'll risk being eaten by Ford Thunderbirds sporting shark fins.

I started reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series when the first book came out.  I have 9 volumes so far, half in hardcover as a proof of my impatience.  The tenth volume, Crossroads of Twilight, just came out.  When I scanned the USENET newsgroups this morning, I found several posts of not only the news about the book's release, but also copies of the book itself!

Because I am stuck between feeling foolish and righteous, I am holding off on ordering the new book as well as reading the bootleg PDF version.  After paying for 9 volumes of unnecessarily long and increasingly tedious series, I have lost all respect for the author whom I feel is taking advantage of people's need for closure.

I quit smoking today.  Last time, a year ago, I lasted for six months.

I am now at a point where I am nervous about blogging my thoughts and activities.  New ideas are still bubbling up constantly, leaving my mental basement constantly wet, but they are all on or near what I have been working on and where it is headed.  I guess its paranoia.  Maybe less coffee will do.

It seems Chandler guys are running into same problems I have.  When you are looking to leverage third party developers, you have to decide whether you are building an application or a platform.  Like the Chandler team, I have chosen to to take the application path, but platform side will still get some considerations as I want people to customize fully.  Even more important than application versus platform issue is the product's ability to incrementally grow.  If I learned anything from Radio, this is IT.

Sash is also slow, bloated, and bewildering.  A simple weblication that should require only a few K of JavaScript and DHTML somehow end up almost a megabyte of download.  Funny thing is that source code (wdx) files are indeed small (a few K) as expected but compressed.  What is the point of using compressed source format when binary ends up being hundred times larger?

Installation of these weblications is even worse.  You have to individually review and grant security rights to them.  Why not just download them into a quaranteened area and then ask when they are actually used for the entire group of weblications?  As it is, they are discouraging people from trying out sample weblications with all the warnings and prompting.  Its like a waiter asking the temperature and ratio of tomato over brocolli in my salad.  Can't IBM afford to have a UI specialist review Sash?

Sash is huge and makes one wonder what is in it.  Even worse is the development environment which seems as big and slow as Visual Studio.  I'll bet most users will gladly trade fancy debuggers in return for ability to directly edit with a simple text editor and test with a web browser.

Put it all together and one ends up feeling that Sash is nothing more than a pile of glittering Trash.  All the neat ideas, potentials, sweats, and dreams that went into it ends up being nothing because of bad amateurish execution.

Several people on my daily blog run are talking about Universal Personal Proxy (UPP) and Web Intermediaries.  What they are talking about is an old idea that probably got started when the Web was first invented.  IBM Sash is almost exactly what they are talking about.  Sash uses JavaScript and DHTML so web developers don't have to learn new languages like Python.  It has a cool IDE for writing weblications.  There is even a Linux port of Sash.  What really intrigues me is why it hasn't taken off.

First off, a typical user has no idea what it is, where it is, and how it does what it does.  A powerful bundle of functionalities means little when it has no space in the user's mind.

Second, transition between a user to a developer is too sharp.  One has to download a large toolkit and myriads of extensions.  Web developers need only a text editor and a FTP client.  Even Python comes with mostly everything in one download.

Third, there is no synergy between weblications.  Having one thousand individual services is less attractive than ten related services that fits within a single paradigm.

There are other problems I see.  Later perhaps.

While blogging is popular, bloggers are still small in numbers and varieties.  There is a large body of potential bloggers who current do not blog for one reason or another.  This is where the Blog Guest idea can play a major role. Blog Guest is a blogger you invite to add contents to your own blog.  While the original Blog Guest idea emphasized cross-posting from fringe bloggers to hub blogs with an eye toward healthy distribution of unique view points and blog traffic, I think the idea is better applied to making it easy for would-be bloggers to join the blogging culture.  With blog softwares and services supporting Blog Guest feature, each blogger can invite his or her friends, family, and collegues to have their own space within his or her blog.  There are many benefitial side effects from bringing your real-world micro-community into the blogspace with you, but I will leave that for later posts.

I have always enjoyed games.  Beside being fun to play, games are fun to develop and game market is one of the most interesting ones.  Yes, competition is fierce and profits are hard to come by if you are relying entirely on creativity, but there is more respect for craftmanship in the game market than in any other markets.  Being recession-proof also doesn't hurt either.  Just look at Electronics Art.

This Christmas, I am playing Bioware's Neverwinter Nights (NWN) which is considered the first true electronic adaptation of Dungeon & Dragon pen-and-paper game system.  With it, you can create your own D&D modules using drag-and-drop and host it on Internet.  Dungeon Master (DM) is supported as well.  You can also craft and script practically anything so you can see what a bazooka will do to a dragon.  Some have taken the spicier route, introducing string bikini and bouncing body parts.  Its an amazing game that is a must for D&D players.

NWN takes a small group approach to multiplayer games than massive multiplayer approach taken by EverQuest or Ashlon's Call.  Since NWN game servers can be linked together to form a massive world, one can say NWN takes the distributed approach where EverQuests takes the centralized approach to multiplayer gaming.  True difference is in the way Dungeon Masters brings the game alive.  Ho Ho Ho.

This afternoon of Christmas Eve, I woke up with a lingering image of a solution that could make legal documents more user friendly.  The image was the symbol of Tao (aka Yin-Yang symbol and used in Korean Flag) shown below.

The idea is to supplement legal clauses (syntax, body, yin) with clearly stated intent of the clause (semantics, heart, yang).  Tao Contracts, legal documents using this approach, should be much easier to understand with little room for misinterpretation.  Legal clauses and intentions should be placed near enough for visual association but far enough to distinguish them apart.

I think the reason I had the dream was because I have been working on digital signature technologies lately.  Digitally signing a document is easy, but digitally signing heart and soul is not…