I’m leading another discussion at the Harvard Berkman Center tomorrow (Wednesday), 6-7:30pm. I’m going to talk about the traditional idea that a properly structured organization of knowledge is neat, and why messiness works so well in the digital age. If what I say mirrors Chapter 8 of the book I’m working on, I’ll talk about the over-simplicity of org charts, Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory, and the “smushy” conception of the Semantic Web. There will be, I hope, a lively discussion that either carefully explains why I’m wrong or entirely swerves around what I’d said.

It’s open to all. We serve pizza. (Map) The session will be webcast here. [Tags: berkman taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous rosch semweb]

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About five or six years ago, I started writing a novel for kids. (I think the industry calls them “young adults,” although I personally prefer “halflings” or “Hey, you, get off of my lawn!”) It’s about a kid who wins $100,000,000 in the lottery but can’t tell anyone. II finished it a few months ago and have shown it to a couple of publishers and a couple of agents, each of whom has wildly praised it as (if I may quote) “Not right for us.”

So, here’s my plan.

I’m going to post an html version of it on the Web for free, and sell a softcover version of it through Lulu.com. Sound like a good plan?

Before I put it up for general release, though, I’d love to have someone take an editing pass at it. I’m most interested in copy editing (= nit picking) at this point, primarily because it wouldn’t be fun to do a major rewrite. (Maybe I’ll post the whole thing on a wiki once I go live with it so that the wisdom of the crowds can do the next round of drafts.)

So, if you’d like to comment on it, let me know (self evident.com) and I’ll send you the current version in Word format. (It’s 63,000 words, which formats to a 220pp 6×9″ Lulu book.)

Also, I’d like to set up a discussion forum for readers once I post the book on its web site. Any suggestions for an easy way to do that? [Tags: my100milliondollarsecret books bad_writing]

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Mark Federman‘s daughter, a high school junior, is doing a project for her World Religions course. She’s using the Web to collect stories about how people age 12-25 have been “affected by their experiences of religion and spirituality.” Her blog is here.

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I’ve turned off most of the safeguards against comment spam because people are still reporting my site is rejecting their comments. If you have problem posting a comment to this blog post (or any other), could you please let me know at self evident.com. Thanks!

LATER: Through trial and error and the patient help of BradSucks, whose music you ought to be downloading and buying, I think I’ve confirmed that the culprit is the keyword urls module of the SpamLookUp plugin of Movable Type. With that module enabled, comments are not put into my moderation queue even if I reset the keywords to the default or remove all keywords entirely. So, I’ve left it disabled for now. If you continue to have problems commenting, please let me know. Thank you!

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From an email going around: “This Coming Wednesday, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.”

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I’m occasionally hearing from people that their comments aren’t showing up. I don’t know why and I’m feeling both stumped and frustrated.

The problem may well have to do with my use of the SpamLookup plugin. I have a bunch of addresses and some regular expressions I block. My grasp of regular expressions is pretty dim, so that’s probably the issue. But it sure would help if there were a log of what’s getting blocked. The MT log only shows Big Events such as my posting something. Any suggestions, other than turning off SpamLookup, which I’m extremely reluctant to do?

Also, I’d like to be able to add some commenters as trusted sources, but I can’t find a way to type in their address or identity to authenticate them; they have to get something posted before their names show up in the list of people to authenticate. Ack.

Help?

[Tags: movabletype comment_spam]

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Hao Wu’s sister has started a blog at MSN Spaces. There’s a translation of the first post here.

You can get a badge for your site here. [Tags: hao_wu]

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Bev Godwin, Dir, FirstGov.gov talks about “Government of the Future: 7 Predictions.”(She’s speaking for herself, not FirstGov.) [Note: As always, I’m paraphrasing. I am sure to get some of what she says wrong.]

Her assumptions: By 2015 [the year the conference is about] people will never not be on the Internet, and access will be provided by the government.

In 2000, there were at least 24,000 federal web sites. There are now at least 40M documents. There are way too many sites. Many are out of date. Her mantra to her group: “Let’s manage the content we have.” If you type “mold” into the FirstGov site, you get 127,322 hits. (There are 3,541 active top level.gov domains. 1,476 are federal. 1,811 are state, county or city. 81 are sovereign nations.)

Prediction #1: There will be dramatically fewer government Web sites and pages.

Prediction #2: The design debate will be over. They’ll all be arranged basically the way newspaper front pages are: Title at the top, color image to direct the eye to the lead story, etc.

Prediction #3: US gov’t sites will have a common look and feel. She points to .gov sites that are wildly different in their format. She believes they all should look basically the same, using usability-tested layout. [Usable but boring.] They can vary in details but have the same navigation bar in the same place, the country logo in the same spot, etc.

Prediction #4: No gov’t Web site will be launched without usability testing.

Prediction #5: “The .gov naming convention will actually make sense to the public.” There will be a taxonomy that’s rational.

Prediction #6: “The public will be able to perform the tasks they want on gov’t websites.” Gov’t should think of it as a retailer of services, not a wholesaler.

Prediction #7: Content will be aggregated to serve the public. It will be intelligent about your interests and needs: It’s time to renew your driver’s license, here’s the contact info about your elected officials, here’s your tax refund status, how long until you can collect social security, etc. [Tags: firstgov bev_godwin ]

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Richard Sambrook, the forward-looking director of global news at the BBC and blogger, writes about how he sees the rise of citizen journalism. His overall point: It’s here, it’s real, it comes in four flavors. [Tags: richard+sambrook media bbc citizen+journalism ]

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Harvard Law School students have put together a pretty impresive — and funny — web site anticipating the future of documents in Massachusetts if the Commonwealth does or does not adopt the ODF for all its state documents. [Tags: odf standards web2 ]

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