ISBN: 0316346624

Okay, this is more like a mini-review. I'm not going to pad this up with chapter lists and summaries, or point-by-point examples.

I finally got around to reading The Tipping Point, a book authored by Malcolm Gladwell. While this is a very popular work in the software/management/entrepreneur realms, and has been out for several years, I always seemed to have something more important at the top of the pile (Biztalk Server 2004 Unleashed was a real page-turner!).

This 304-page book kicks off with an example of a balanced system that became unbalanced: Syphilis in Baltimore in the 1990s. This communicable disease was a relatively low-level problem, with a fairly constant number of cases per year, until suddenly it became an epidemic: Over a short period of time the number of new cases increased dramatically. Several theories are presented to explain this - for instance that budget cuts in public treatment and education upset what was previously a precariously balanced system. Syphilis had "tipped".

Much of the rest of the book provides theories on why some ideas or memes tip (often presented in an almost instructional manner - e.g. learn from this to know how to make your ideas tip, which explains why the book is so popular), often juxtaposing it with the syphilis epidemic. Intermixed with this are some basic, overly generic social profiles of the types of people who are instrumental in making ideas tip. These profile types are often supported by the contrast of the ride of Paul Revere to that of William Dawes, where the former was purportedly a connected, influential individual presenting information in the right context, and the latter was not so much.

Ultimately I wasn't entirely satisfied with the book. I often felt that it was taking divergent ideas and trying to shoehorn them into the tipping metaphor. I also got a feeling that some facts were simplified, or perhaps presented out of context, to make them fit his case. The book also gave me the feeling that it needed a few more revisions until it achieved a more uniform, smooth presentation: Instead of a constant expansion and refinement of the central theme, this felt more like a series of papers on a common topic, with some token shout-outs to the common theme to try to pull it together.

Is it a worthwhile read? Absolutely. It's an interesting, entertaining read, and provides a lot of superficial sociology water-cooler expertise. However if one were looking for a better, more supported and consistent read on the fascinating topic of human psychology - in a manner educational to both the compliance practitioners and their victims - I'd instead recommend the excellent Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (ISBN: 0688128165). I suspect that it heavily influenced The Tipping Point, so you might as well go right to the source first.

This blog is ugly.

It started off with one of the stock Radio Userland templates (which, I think, are pretty much universally ugly) and I modified slowly from there, working towards the rather utilitarian vision that I have for this site. I find the sight of frequently used templates - particularly the ultra-cliched common ones (like the typical WordPress templates) - really tiring after a while.

Nonetheless, I've been attempting to update some of the styles as I get the time and inclination, and hopefully it's at least marginally less insulting to your rods and cones. I can confidentally say that it at least passes as legitimate HTML 4.01 Transitional now.

Of course style is completely subjective, and to make the subjectiveness of blogs (or any content page for that matter) a subject of a rant, one of the hacks of HTML that I'm not a huge fan of is the fixed-pixel-width blog - someone made some sort of banner graphic, or had it in their template, so it is thus solidified - their blog is exactly 612 pixels wide. Here I am reading it at 1600x1200, with gigantic swaths of blank space on either side, with the actual content (supposedly the purpose of the blog) filling a relatively tiny panel in the center. Smaller still given that the 3-column format, such that you see here, is often shoehorned into that miniscule 612 pixels.

To add to the insult, the font is usually huge and line spacing cavernous.

RSS should be expanded to facilitate the rudiments of review data, given the extraordinary prevalence of the use of blogs for reviewing purposes. This could be easily facilitated with one new sub-element of item. 

<review>

Having the following attributes

• rating - numeric from 0 - 10, 0 being least. e.g. "10"
• category - from a common, pre-defined taxonomy of categories. e.g. "Book"
• guid - A guid for the item in question, formatted in a category specific manner.

All description and other links are facilitated by the existing RSS schema.

For example.

<rss>
  <channel>
     ...
    <item>
      <title>The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference</title>
      <description>Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.</description>
      ...
      <review rating="7" category="book" guid="ISBN:0316346624" />
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Casey's Food Pit</title>
      <description>Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.</description>
      ...
      <review rating="2" category="restaurant" guid="905-555-5555" />
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

This is just off-the-cuff, as I was thinking of putting up some comments about the book The Tipping Point. Of course RSS took off because of its brutal simplicity, so I kept this as simple as imaginable (without resorting to namespaced schemas or complex structures to facilitate the varying data needs of each domain).

Surely there has to be widely accepted solutions in this space already?

My motivation is that I'm a big believer in owning your own data - Countless sites, including a lot of the Web 2.0 business plans, rely upon the fact that you will effectively hand over data to them, working as a free contributor to build their value. If you've reviewed books on Amazon.com, for example, or a digital camera on epinions.com, you've helped them build their own value. Sometimes this sort of arrangement is worthwhile (I'll happily host my pictures on Flickr because the return is worthwhile), but many times it is not.

Indeed I'd say that a good portion of the blog revolution was users taking control of their own data to some extent. Why post an insightful comment on some random message board, increasing the value to the message board, when there is little benefit for yourself? In the new era others can use your data - RSS aggregators for instance - but they have no monopoly or advantage outside of uniquely and innovatively providing some sort of added value.

As a bit of a follow-up to my Public Retail Gasoline Pricing Database entry of September 6th, I thought it worthwhile to note a very interesting web application that a friend put together (which he was coincidentally working on at the same time, though neither of us was aware of the other's activities in that realm). You can find it at http://www.keeptrackofit.com. It's innovative in the way that it includes Google Maps as a core element of the interface. That makes sense given how critical proximity is to our market choices.

It doesn't fulfill the need for total coverage and absolutely up-to-date pricing - which would only be achieveable through government regulations - but it's definitely another step in the right direction.

conurbation: Dictionary.com Word of the Day. conurbation: an aggregation or continuous network of urban communities. [Dictionary.com Word of the Day]

So is a blog aggregation a conblogation? It looks like that proposed word has indeed seen the light of day before.

[Sorry for the overuse of quoted words and phrases in the following entry, however it is used where text is conceptually, but not literally, true]

For my blogging software I chose Radio Userland. While it uses a web interface to create and edit entries, practically it's a fat client application - I have the pseudo-service running, indicating its presence in my system tray, and I only ever modify entries "on" this one PC. Radio has its own database, and it streams static updates via the local service to the FTP server at my web host whenever I change content.

Pretty straightforward, and it works admirably for my needs.

One of the hesitations I had going this route, however, was that it would limit my portability - many of the hosted tools allow you to author and edit online against remote services running in some large datacenter, from any browser, from anywhere. Of course I could sort-of gain the physical "from anywhere" advantage by installing Radio on a laptop and bringing the laptop with me wherever I went. While that would also give me the ability to work offline (something many of the hosted services don't allow), it still wouldn't help me when working on foreign PCs.

So basically I had to choose between the always available hosted thin-client route, or the isolated thick-client route. Right?

Of course it's never that simple.

Through the magic of VPN and Remote Desktop, I can access this desktop through appropriate "thin clients" throughout the world (appropriate simply meaning "running Windows". Actually, given that there are L2TP and RDP clients for other platforms, pretty much any modern system can act as a "thin client" to this "web service" of sorts, but the easiest and most straightforward are Windows PCs). As my home is connected via an always on, very reliable, credibly high speed wired connection, like millions of others nowadays, it's virtually always accessible. Just as accessible as Wordpress or Moveable Type, in fact.

Well that's only partially true - many locations, sometimes even including coffee shop hotspots, limit you to HTTP(S), presuming that everything that you'd ever want in the world should be available over that protocol. This is obviously a hindrance to VPNing to a remote PC, and it's pretty much the only differentiation between my home "server" and the hosted blog services. Even that is fairly easily surmountable problem however.

I only mention this because many people still have a consciousness gap about the advantages that an always on, high speed connection brings. It really is a great equalizer. I can access and update my blog virtually anywhere (though thus far I've only ever really used remote connectivity to hit publish on an already created entry when I needed to stagger output a bit - I just find home a comfortable place to author entries)

Aside: I mentioned previously that I envision RDP, or something similar, becoming a potential widely-used thin client protocol for "web" services (services from the human perspective rather than the W3C perspective). It would be interesting to see what sort of accessible tools someone like Google could create with such a malleable and fine grained interface technology.

How in the world is Weblogs.com worth $2.3 million dollars? Being a default ping destination for a lot of blog services and clients certainly holds some value, but as it is Weblogs.com is primarily a spam amplifier.