Fragments of Vision : openpolitics.com

Fragments of Vision

World of Ends got a lot of links a few weeks ago but today I was reminided how foundational the idea of "centrality" is to our world view. We all want to avoid being "marginalized"-- relagated to the periphery. Disconnected. Irrelevant.

Bloggers have words to describe this quest for status:

"A-List"
"PageRank"
"Googlewashing"

Weblogs don't change power laws. Everyone has a voice, but don't expect to be heard right away. I can imagine the Dave Winer's frustration writing about weblogs for years before he got much attention. On the scale of history, 5 or 10 years is a revolution, but to the individual, revolutions can still feel like an eternity.

One of the advantages weblogs have in promoting a cause is the ability to archive fragments of vision. These fragements may go unnoticed for a while, but eventually they'll start to pile up. Some of them will be too abstract or unactionable, but by constantly refering back to these fragements, you could can build something large, one day at a time.

2003/04/06 # Permalink

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Links

Youtube: Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space

I don't like his interface but I do very much like the concept. What I find puzzling is that this paradigm could be implemented using current web standards so why did he make this new program with an interface that's entirely foreign to us.

I don't think Xanadu will catch on but everything he demonstrated will eventually make it into browsers and websites, but at a much slower pace than Mr. Nelson is comfortable with.

Ted Nelson on Tim Berners-Lee

First of all, I think the WWW was a brilliant simplification. As I understand it, and maybe I have this wrong, but Tim Berners-Lee came and we had lunch, in, oh I guess it was 1989, 90, something like that, in Sausalito, and I really liked the guy, and he'd done this very simple thing, and it sounded too trivial to me {laughs} but he certainly was a nice fellow and I expected to keep in touch with him, although I am a very bad correspondent, and the next thing I knew suddenly the thing had caught on.

.. What would I recommend to a young visionary today? {laughter} Very straightforward, learn to deal with short term goals and not delegate.

How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit

And although most communities treat their members with gentle regard, Reddit prides itself on winnowing the wheat from the chaff. It relies on the collective judgment of its members, who click on arrows next to contributions, elevating insightful or interesting content, and demoting less worthy contributions. Even Mills says he was impressed by the way in which redditors "marshaled their collective bits of expert knowledge to arrive at a conclusion that was largely correct." It's tough to con Reddit.

What's the Worst That Can Come of the Bachmanns' Swiss Citizenship?

In 1792, French citizenship was bestowed upon George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Thomas Paine served in the French National Convention.

5 Don'ts of Startups

Don’t scale too early. This is the No. 1 cause of startup failure. Startup Compass has found that 70% of startups crash because they scale prematurely.
Don’t work part time. Sleepy? Get used to it. People who work full time on their startups raise an average of 24 times more funding than those who work part time.
Don’t go it alone. Maybe you are the smartest guy in the room. But solo founders raise less than half the money that two to three co-founders raise.
Don’t ignore customers. Yes, they’re annoying. (What do they know?) But startups that track customer metrics have 400% more user growth.
Don’t forget about the technology. Startups without a tech-oriented co-founder are twice as likely to scale prematurely and have three to five times less user growth.