There was a major computer scare this morning with my desktop computer system. I had booted it into Windows to play with some ASP.NET stuff, and just after it finished booting I got the message:

Unknown Hard Error; please save your work. Machine will reboot in 55 seconds.

What the hell is a Hard Error? Is that tougher than an Easy Error? Anyway, after I clicked OK on the one dialog box that remained, the machine rebooted… almost.

In fact, it started rebooting, and stopped at the motherboard's splash screen. As I sat there watching that frozen screen for minutes and minutes, and the hard disk light blinked on and off and on and off—trying to communicate some message of lost hope that I didn't understand—I started to question myself. Maybe it wasn't wise to always buy the cheapest available computer components? If I had spent more than $40 on a motherboard, perhaps it wouldn't have crapped out in so devastating a fashion? Would I be spending my Sunday driving to and from Micro Center and hoping that the data on my hard disks remained alive?

In a last measure of desperation, I slid the cover off of the computer. Perhaps a cable had gone loose. Perhaps some dust landed in a bad spot, shorting some circuit. So I tapped all the important cable connections, and I huffed, puffed, and blew out a LOT of dust.

And miraculously, it worked. I turned the machine back on, and it booted without complaint. I guess I can continue buying the cheapest possible equipment… if I keep my fingers crossed…

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
- R. Buckminster Fuller

On the way to work this morning, just over Arlington, Massachusetts, there was a huge gorgeous 180-degree rainbow. It was nice not having a camera and just wiggling around the car, moving my eyes from one end to the other.

It wasn't quite as good as this rainbow over the Baltic Sea, pictured here with my friend Chris Holmes.

For all mothers in the audience: don't worry, I wasn't driving.

Josh starts off the discussion with a question about what blogging tools and applications might interest information professionals. Randy mentions Air America radio, which has huge comment threads. Lisa mentions office knowledge sharing systems: the ideal, back in her analyst days, would have been a system like del.icio.us with the ability to selectively share things with clients.

New people! Meghan of Megastyles, Erica (new to the Berkman Center), and Adam Gaffin. Regulars include Vernica, Sun, Randy, Josh, Michael, Wendy, Gregor, Lisa, and j.

New topic: Marc Canter, who is interested in "Digital Lifestyle Aggregators," which gather all sorts of microcontent and media. He's currently on a tour promoting these standards and trying to get social network sites to standardize on FOAF. This will give us a chance to invite a speaker to speak for us, nail down a date (Nov 18), set up our audio streaming, etc.

Adam tells us a little bit about how blog comments are weak and incapable of sustaining community. I agree (of course). Meghan talks about how she got a job from blogging(!) and Boston is nice because you can walk around in your pajamas.

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According to Adam Gaffin, this piece of software offers blog, forum, and wiki interfaces to the same content. Perhaps a good place to steal ideas gather inspiration.

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According to this Earth Day Network quiz, if everyone lived like me we would need 4.2 Earths. Apparently I'm even below average for America. I've heard similar assertions from my friends, usually wealthy, well-educated Americans, that we are living beyond the resources available to us on Earth.

It's a shocking statistic, but so what? Wouldn't you expect the wealthiest, most prosperous fraction of the Earth's population to consume more than their fair share of the resources? As long as the whole population of Earth isn't living like I am, it's not a problem, is it?

Of course, there is still plenty to object to in a world where the wealthy have so much and the poor have no peace, no food, no clean water, and no medical care. As living standards improve for the world's poor, we'll have to take care not to place too heavy a burden on our Earth. I'd be really worried if I didn't think the incentives to keep growth in check weren't there—but they are. For example, it's going to be extremely rewarding to develop more energy-efficient vehicles if when gasoline becomes 50 times more expensive.

But really, I'm more curious about a different issue. Why do so many people believe that by not eating meat, and buying organic citrus fruits at Whole Foods for twice the price of conventional fruits at Stop-n-Shop, that they are making a meaningful difference to the planet? Isn't the extra $0.30 per orange just going to fund some executive's yacht, or a longer commute for your cashier? Isn't a lot of the environmentalist rhetoric just a way of buying the false hope that you can make a difference in a world we're eager to make sense of, but truly can't understand?

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The old URLs should now work, even in broken aggregators. Any reasonable aggregator (this might exclude frassle's, sadly, but of course frassle doesn't actually fetch its own feeds over HTTP) would respond to the redirection code and get the feed from frassle.net instead of frassle.rura.org. But since apparently some aggregators can't handle that, this server will now respond as frassle.rura.org or as frassle.net without any redirect. Welcome back, subscribers!

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WebNote is an online note-taking program. It lets you create a tableau, where you can create and edit notes in various colors. You can interactively drag and resize notes, make whatever edits you want, and then save the tableau.

What makes WebNote amazing is that it's web-based. Try it here. The coolest upshot is that you can use WebNote as a collaborative workspace like a Wiki, but giving users more powerful visual hints in the form of colored notes arranged in space.

Still, while I think the idea and code is neat, I'm not sure this is that valuable as a standalone application. I think these notes are most useful as annontative elements on an existing, larger piece of content. In particular, I think it would be a useful piece of interface in a writing workshop. Readers could position notes around a document in order to share questions and suggestions.

Another cool idea would be a collaborative whiteboard space. Here it would be most interesting to combine the annotated tableau with some sort of periodically updating interface. Maybe the notes slide down over time, and fade into a regular blog. But when something is important, you can make a big note and put it right on top. Perhaps a few people can share this and use it as an efficient way to share bits of more and less transient information during the workday. Or you could use it for your own note list. If something important is about to slide off screen, just drag it back to the top of your attention!

It doesn't do most of this stuff yet, but luckily, WebNote is open source too. An inspiring piece of interface work.

[via Napsterization]

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Christopher Allen has a wonderful article tracing social software from its foundational ideas (Engelbart and Licklider) to its current and future goals.

On Saturday, October 30 from 1-5pm, Josh and I will be speaking at a panel called Blogging and Feeds: What Every Information Professional Needs to Know. The panel is sponsored by the Boston chapter of the Special Libraries Association. We'll be preceded by Jessica Baumgart and Garret Eastman. Kris Liberman will moderate.

Though at first we thought we might give a less technical version of our OSCOM presentation [slides], it now seems that we'll be delivering two separate talks.

• Josh will first give a survey of how blogs are used across the universe—from business marketing to topical news to personal journals.
• I'll give a demo of how blogging works, using frassle. In addition to showing off basic blogging, aggregator, and categorization features, I'll show how you can use frassle to build and publish an aggregator for other people to read. For example, you might hand-pick a few feeds of interest to your patrons and feature them on your library homepage. Or you might use frassle's topic-based organization features to automatically select relevant content based on what you and other bloggers read.

It looks like this panel will be a good introduction to what blogs are good for, and how to use that in your organization. Unfortunately, it's not free: $30 for SLA members, $40 for non-members, and $20 for students, retirees, and folks between jobs. Let me know if you're coming from the Boston area and want a ride.

More resources for librarians/information professionals and blogging:

• Weblogs in the LIS Environment, Dr. L. Anne Clyde (talk slides)
• General and LIS Weblog info, Dr. L. Anne Clyde