Disqus - Friends of changeforge

Re: Free Josh Wolf

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 15:32:52 -0000

Grains of sand make a mighty dune!

Just to make it known: Josh started a blog for news at http://joshwolf.net/blog/ and we're collecting news stories on his wiki at http://freejosh.pbwiki.com/

cheers

Re: AlphaDawg's 'mattic FeedDigest

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:22:27 -0000

From my slap-dash DisqUs badge, just to see things work.

--bentrem

*Oooh*, that "Options" button is right nice!

Re: AlphaDawg's 'mattic FeedDigest

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:28:26 -0000

I commented there before I had corrected the title ... no biggie.

Just now I went through the configuration items ... gall'darn, that's some sweet work done!!

Re: First Meeting of the Working Group

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:54:13 -0000

Marshall Kirkpatrick crafted a nice post about the group at RWW. (In an absurdist twist of timing ning was having scheduled down-time when I went to join. Gotta luv it! *grin*)

IMNSHO there's nothing that more affirms one's faith in human nature than the active presence of principled practitioners.

goood luck to all hands
--bentrem

Re: First Meeting of the Working Group

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:07:13 -0000

@Jake - Future speakers? *ting*

Top of mind: Jon Udell, Joel Spolsky, Dan Bricklin ... is Arno Penzias giving public talks?

(I guess I'm showing my age here. *grin*)

Re: AlphaDawg's 'mattic FeedDigest

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:29:24 -0000

It is kinda subtle ... whereas IntenseDebate huh when I go to that form I see 3 count'em 3 of my avatars ... ID has someone on staff that knows how to blog their trumpet!
BTW: this to see if you get some sort of email notification.

Re: Amazon removes the database scaling wall (Scripting News)

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:40:57 -0000

How nice! I see you have DisqUs enabled ... a certain symbiosis here?

I spent some time pondering carnivorous marketing ... a FaceBook friend sends me a "gift" and/but when it comes to me I can receive it only by installing the app. "Like a swarm of leeches" is how I described that.

Can Amazon's approach be contrasted with "80% of the buzz from 20% of the heavy lifting"? When I imagined scaling my web app (stealth mode) I read up on S3 and shelved a whole set of concerns. I don't owe them (Amazon) cuz they got their hooks into me; I owe them because they've put a serious industry-strength service at my disposal.

--bentrem

p.s. Central Desktop's blog pos on S3 / EC2:
http://tinyurl.com/2dqrmj

Re: Upstate journey begins

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:32:19 -0000

*SideBar: greets*
Hey ... just came across your tweets.

The "lead toys" invasion thang; yesterday saw a doc on pollution from new.industry interior of China ... driving age.old farms to starvation, bankrupting new.wealth aqua-farmers ...
... this morning a radio doc on WorldOfWarCraft "gold farmers"; as usual a few get rich while others work like slaves.

Was thinking what I said to big-wigs/hot-shots/pointed-haired.suits at G7 in 1995: China coast will be Los Vegas-style free-trade zone while interior will be one big hell.realm gulag.

solidarity with the Chinese people

Ya basta!!

--bentrem aka WillowBear aka hfx-ben

Re: Reaction to Obama in New Hampshire and Abroad

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:05:34 -0000

At one point I got a little jiggy thinking, "Dewd, it's not like you faced dogs and water-hoses." Not that I've got the right to think thusly, but the thought came up ... hubris knocks softly and enters silently, yuh know?

But the rest ... just solid. (Compare to Clinton's gestalt; she couldn't manage her /makeup/?! Not mocking ... but that shiet is existential.)
I mean my reactive ass didn't smurk even once ... and I have a plastic bullet by my PC as a constant reminder of what's what on the front-line.

Know what really rocks me? and rocked me again? now and again he slips into MLKJr cadence, and maybe even a bit of an accent, and it's just natural ... as if the words are coming out from his bone marrow.

If the race was always to the swift and the battle to the bold ... but then, from another book of wisdom: "Fortune favours the bold".

Thing to do is to /make it so/.

^5
W^B

Re: Recap of the Working Group’s First Call

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 02:03:39 -0000

Given how well Ning broadcasts changes in the WG context, perhaps if folk just wax eloquent for a few moments and blog some blue-sky thinking that will comprise a concept cloud.

Re: What if our political process became conscious? (Scripting News)

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:32:53 -0000

Listening to a fellow who teaches communications ... he even cited Orwell's gem, "Politics and the English Language" (Remember? Concrete?) ... he was substantially complimentary of Obama's performanace.

That all reminded me yet again of how effective discourse can / should underpin rhetoric.

(FWIW I veered away from "concept mapping" using graphical techniques a couple of years ago and think I've really cracked the nut ... perhaps only a single hand-hold on the holy grail of effective Semantic Web, but at least a hand-hold.)

I'm tempted to invoke Long Tail ... not sure it maps well ... but it's as though the electorate (or some part of it) is sensitive to "sea changes" in candidates' demeanor. And that's gotta bode well for Obama and McCain.

Re: What if our political process became conscious? (Scripting News)

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:34:33 -0000

*2 steps to comment? did what I write just now go as anonymous? HeyHo*

Re: Do you have a sacred space?

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:47:21 -0000

*linked to a rather dusty blogspot!*

Yes, I do. I mean I have a space that I try to ... uhrr ... a space that is ... ummmm ...

I figure it this way: vows are like reminders. Some would say "to be mindful of how we fail, how badly we fail, how often we fail. *Yoiks!! I don't want /them/ standing at the Pearly Gates when I get there to plead my case!* But I'd say they serves as reminders of what I've taken onto myself as values, as core ideals, as principles to at least /try/ to live by.

So that physical space I'm maintained in every place I've lived for ?what? nearly 30 years ... sometimes pretty small and humble, sometimes pretty darned good, usually a sort of work in progress ... it serves to remind me of what I'm trying to bring into my world: a little dignity, a little sanity, a little up-lift ...

We're like whatchamacallit ... the Japanese word for the imperfections that show a work of art to be, well, the work of human hands ... _wabi-sabi_ ... we're like that.

To my way of thinking, that we strive at all shows how deeply in-formed by the good and the blessed we really are!

stay well
--bentrem aka Karma Chopal

Re: What’s left to lose, and what’s worth keeping.

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:54:02 -0000

*another of my blogs ... yes, this one's dusty too*

Can I just chip in one little thing? Ok, 2: I asked a buddy who was telling me about the joy in his hometown back in Guatemala what kept folk going after they crashed so low so often ... heh, peasant wisdom: you can't fall lower than the ground, so it's got some sort of security to it. *grin*

But this came to mind when I read your, "Fire is obviously painful, and, by myself, I won’t survive it." (which, I gotta warn you, is an aweful lot like a self-fulfilling prophecy):
the great psychotherapist was talking to a workshop for survivors of sexual violence. He talked about realization and truth-telling as a wall of fire. "It's not something to get into", he told them, "it's something to get /through/."

Life is a set of hallways and doors ... we aren't meant to live in the hallways, yuh know?

be well
--ben

Re: AlphaDawg's 'mattic FeedDigest

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:30:29 -0000

Testing my badge on http://bentrem.sycks.net/ba...

Re: Prologue is More Than We Are Considering

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:06:51 -0000

I jumped right on this with http://42words.wordpress.com
In comments to a couple of blog posts I pointed out a couple of (painfully obvious) shortcomings, i.e. pages seemed to have been disabled, and categories were totally frabbed.

Lo! and Behold! Those got fixed post haste and at the same time the functional logic was shot right behind the ear i.e. the whole freakin' idea was to show "only most recent from each contributer".
Because (Wooo, lots of people have total control?) some people didn't get it, this was dropped.

So now Prologue is /nothing but/ a theme.

You wrote "Nothing under the hood is much different than blogging." That was not initially true. It was a different functionality.
People didn't get it?
Well fine, people didn't get Twitter ... should we shoot Twitter behind the ear?

I'm very disappointed to see how this turned out.

NB: because it went stright from broken to fixed but de-twittered, we didn't get a chance to grab an interim version, one that had the twitterized functionality c/w pages and working categories.

--bentrem

p.s. boy, there's a really wierd discussion dynamic ... some folk have huge say while others don't even get their comments moderated. this just so you know what I'm talking about when I tweet about "A-list dynamics" and personality politics.

"Don't be lucid and ironic; people will turn it against you saying, ''Ah, you see? He isn't a nice perso.''" --Albert Camus

Re: Catch Me on NPR’s Morning Edition Monday

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:43:11 -0000

I'll easily admit to a deep-seated bias in favor of public radio, but even that has been blasted by the realpolitik of the 70s: while happily ensconced as a broadcast tech with CBC Radio I came to see that the material I was perpetuating during the day was in some specifics rudely different than the stories I was helping develope in workshops and writing groups in my free time ... East Timor comes to mind. So, though I'm no pipe-carrying zealot I shudder deeply when I consider the mechanims of "broad-casting" that isn't user-generated.

In any case, what consummes my time is that notion carried further: that folk can easily have their good energy dissipated through online activity that really achieves no substantial effect. (I keep wanting to work "phatic" into a sentence but the term remains way way too homely!)

What I've been plugging at for years is a framework / architecture that ties online documents together using discussion. Or, flipped on its head, improves discussions' signal-to-noise ratio by connecting it to existing documents. Unfortunately, appearances to the contrary, it's almost impossible for an individual to gain entry. ("Buzz" ... page views ... the stuff of marketing; there's a set of paradoxes here that should enthrall a whole team of anthropologists, ethnologists, and social-psychologists!)

nice to tweet you
--bentrem

Re: We Still Need Better Filters

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:12:45 -0000

*Coming soon!*

I noticed a long time ago that, even when noise sources like flaming were removed, material that was truly operational got swamped. I'm grateful to some long-forgotten source on the web for providing me with the key term: "phatic" ... communicative gestures that are purely social in nature.

The mid-90s, when the web was just coming into its own, was a time of disappointment. All the forums and discussion venues ... more heat than light, even the best ones. Hundreds of thousands of people spending millions of their hours online generating ... what? As for social exchange, well, sure ... generating pages of yada-blah might but fun, but it isn't much more than that.
Around that time, late 90s, concept mapping started becoming productive ... systems like cMap and Compendium and Rationale. Absolutely noise free and about as attractive as a root canal.

I came up with my design after a happy coincidence: I happened to be reading at once both John Willinksy's work on OpenAccess and Jurgen Habermas' on "discourse ethics". I can recall precisely the moment the penny dropped for me.

"Participatory deliberation" is going to be a reality soon, but my worry is this: what business model can support real exchange? Drama makes for buzz ... fun makes for buzz ... can a source of solid unadulterated information make for buzz?
We'll see ... soon, I hope.

Re: What Is The Value Of “Conversation”?

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:07:19 -0000

"Is conversation as important to business as Web 2.0 wants you to believe it is? "
I can't imagine a commercialized/monetized "conversation" being any more meaningful than what you might get out of Eliza. (The AI genius who invented it/her died recently; I regret not having his name on the tip of my tongue.)

Let's face it, a site that's profit-focused will slant every transaction/interaction/exchange to that end, if only getting you to click on an AdSense or eBay or Amazon link. It's completely contrived ... the worst of degraded community formally optimized and systematized. #borg #matrix #oligarchs

On the other hand: real conversation, I mean the sort of exchange you might have in the dark of a lazy night by a campfire after an active day ... the sort of narratives that are lyrically meaningful, poetically revealing ... that's the sort of exchange that folk use to learn about themselves as much as one another ... for my money *snort* that's the ne plus ultra of being sentient.

What I'm attempting with "participatory deliberation" (google that term, go ahead, do!) is to formalize the declarative stuff so it cannot be swamped by flames and such, which (I hope) will make the subjective narrative clearer. So, for example, we could exchange hard-edged data about, say, day-care and latch-key kids, the nuts and bolts of policy decisions, along-side the fuzzy/mushy bits ... like how a single parent being torn apart can be left feedling abandoned ... the beating heart of our civics ... politics as though people matter.

So ...
... there!

:-)

Re: Entrepreneur Interviews at From Scratch

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:07:11 -0000

So, is this the new trick? Bring on a flock of bloggers and have no Contact or Feedback?

WTF "History of Blogging" ...
... are you responding to some salmon-like urge?
Gotta obfuscate?

Gee golly shucks, how's this for a concept: if you're calling your site History of Blogging then why don't you blog about the History of Blogging?!

Thank you for proving every nasty thing I've ever said about yuppies' kidz.

p.s.: it's a spasm: you instinctively realize that SpaceShip Earth has missed its re-entry window and is going to flash/burn. And, being cowards, you're digging into the gnöoistic equivalent of sand.
My contempt for you surpasses my capacity for rhetoric.

Re: In search of agile infrastructure for web applications

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:22:07 -0000

*edited*
This is funny ... working with multiple instances of Firefox, each with multiple tabs, in this window I posted the following comment after huh huh having read about Puppet minutes before, in another tab, without realizing it was you yourself who'd brought it to my attention! Talk about asynchronous communications!

Apologies as required. *grin*

I'm out of my depth here, but it seems to me that Puppet could really have a role to play here, keeping the dev box configuration in sync with the live environment.

Re: What the semantic web is for

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:30:21 -0000

Contrary n8k99 our history is marked by collaboration, whether that's pyramid building or the slave trade. (Good thinking suggests social activity is the reason our brains are as they are.)

But to your point: I've blazed my own trail to some large part in reaction to TimBL's vision, grand dream that it is; rather than striving for a system that would make discoverable every single datum, however trivial, I set out to design a system that would array declarative statements. (E.g. "War is about fighting with the army you have, not the army you wish you had" is fine rhetoric, but it's not subject to reasonable contradiction. "Iraq has substantial WMD capabilities and was connected to those who bombed the WTC" is the sort of statement that demands our concerted attention, along with "Global climate change is a myth created by doom.and.gloom tree-huggers" and "The world was created 7000 years ago by an intelligent designer".)

Re: We're all ops people now

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:57:44 -0000

Thanks for the pointer to Puppet! Most exciting thing I've encountered for quite a while!

Re: Dear Twitter: It’s Over. And It’s for The Best

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 19:47:22 -0000

If you didn't really care it wouldn't really matter to you ... and apparently it does ... so you really care.

Since you really care then it seems kinda cold the stay away.

--bentrem

p.s. see you tonight on TalkShoe

Re: 10 Communications Objectives of Social Media

Bernard D. Tremblay (ben) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:49:05 -0000

I intended to comment before reading Christina Favreau's response, but find myself echoing her sentiment.

This list is surely a representation of commercial ideals, but I'm struck by how it's empty of any sort of social awareness, of what moves individuals to act.

Perhaps that's the thing about mere careerism and mere mercenary opportunism: it doesn't challenge neo-realist myths and fictions. That would explain how that attitude spreads like kudzu.

"Don't be lucid and ironic. People will turn that against you saying, 'Ah-ha, you see? I told you he wasn't a nice person!'" --Albert Camus

And yet I can help thinking that real entrepreneurship is more responsive to actual human motives. (I mean beyond primitive self-interest.)