Knowing .NET

Just the other day, I was so damned sick of not having a persistent object image that I downloaded Cincom Smalltalk. Ah, Smalltalk! It's been years, my old friend... Where were we when last me met? Hmmm... where the heck's the object for a network query?

Anyway, Sean Malloy of Cincom serendipitously visited my blog and pointed out that RentACoder might seem like a great thing if you're a decent programmer who values your time at around $4 an hour. And indeed, there are people filling RentACoder bids and presumably, many of them are living in countries where $4 is a good wage. Maybe I'll have to micro-outsource for real.

Oh, and if you've never used Smalltalk (or you have and it's been awhile) download Cincom -- it's free for non-commercial use! Smalltalk is universally lauded as the language that best facilitates an object-oriented mindset. C++, Java, C#: all are compromises of the pure object "vision." (Good compromises, but compromises.)

10:06:20 PM    comment []   trackback []

Microsoft's Robert Scoble calls himself "a human aggregator": he reads 1400+ Weblogs per day relating to his position as a Microsoft evangelist. (Perhaps everyone reading this blog knows of Scoble, but just in case...)

People who filter hundreds of blogs can provide tremendous value: they relieve readers of a reading burden that few can afford and, by their choice of posts and comments, they foster a worldview. Because they read so much, they can find aspects of that worldview supported and criticized and, in a virtuous cycle, they help establish, grow, and promote that worldview. They can, in short, act as editors.

Or, they can simply post without comment, acting as a clipping service. Clipping services are fine; they still relieve a tremendous reading burden for those who have a need or inclination to monitor a topic. But a clipping service, while filtering for content, should not filter on worldview. Clipping services should not be editorially biased.

Scoble is experimenting with a product that blogposts anything dragged to an Outlook folder and publishing the result as "Interesting stuff found in 1400 feeds." To me, that feed is noticeably less interesting that Scoble's primary feed. With Google, Technorati, and Feedster the day has arrived where we do not need humans to function as clipping services. Even if a feed interjects 1 editorial for every 10 "raw data" posts, that feed has an editorial context for the raw data.

What about Reader's Digest, you say? There's a magazine that speaks entirely via surrogates and yet promotes a worldview. But RD's editorial is hardly an even-handed reflection of the world of publishing: one does not find many articles from The Nation in RD, even as counterpoints to the more conservative articles that promote that editorial worldview. Similarly, with 1400 blogs, it would be possible to create a "Microsoft Digest" blog or an "Open Source Advocacy" blog; such blogs would not contain raw data, but the best-articulated advocacy of the day. I think blogs of that sort would be quite compelling, but that's not the tactic that our prototype "human aggregator" / "blogosphere editor" has chosen.

Clearly, I advocate the editorial function. Personally, I try not to "Post Selected Item" without some sort of commentary. When I can't do that, I notice that it's usually because the item is some technical snippet that I personally anticipate retrieving some other time. I look forward to trying Kunal's "magic folder" but I don't anticipate making that blog publicly visible.

10:30:19 AM    comment []   trackback []