Psybertron Asks

As I posted earlier I’ve been exploring Userland’s Radio tools and Six Apart’s Moveable Type TypePad offering.

Both offer multiple categorisation and both seem to work in that respect.
(Neither offers any categorisation of the categories themselves.)

Radio is a software license fee, with no service hosting – the software runs on your own machine.
TypePad (Pro) is a more expensive service fee , inlcuding hosting of the blogging service as well as the public blog pages.
TypePad (Plus) is cheaper, but has no html editing of your pages – so is much more limited format-and-content-wise.
TypePad has successfully migrated across all my existing blogger content.
(All existing internal permalinks still point to the blogger site unfortunately.)
(Radio has no tools to perform the same trick so far as I can see.)
Radio is infinitely flexible because all the files and s/w are on your own machine.
Radio has few wysiwyg tools so you need to be confident in using XML / RSS / CSS etc.
Radio also means you take on all the web server operation reliability and security yourself.
The point of TypePad (as opposed to full blown MoveableType) is to avoid this server overhead

The remaining problem with either is the fact that I must keep the psybertron.org domain active since there are so many existing links and a great coverage established in search engines, impressive indexing by Google included. My current ISP / Web-site Hosting combination (NTL and Tiscali) works fine and supports much more web-page content under the psybertron domain than just the blog, so it’s not simply a matter of domain mapping to the new blog location. It means publishing to the existing location, and maintaining that subscription too.

I need to think about the pros and cons, not just of Radio vs TypePad, but of staying put and waiting for Blogger (now part of Google of course, see above) to provide categorisation. What would swing the latter, would be if Blogger were to provide some additional features for organising and categorising the categories themselves. Come on Blogger / Google.

Decisions, decisions !

Just read Yann Martel’s “The Story of Pi” in one sitting on one day. The essence is about how “good” a story needs to be to be considered true or, expressed in reverse, there is no truth, only a good story. A recommended read whatever – an unputdownably good story as you “suspend disbelief”.

I had a comment from LanguageHat the other day, in response to my Aryans / Barfield post, (the comment was against the preceeding post in error) and by a strange coincidence I had already blogged a link to languagehat earlier. I picked-up today on a post from that blog about the etymology of the word Caviar. Anyway the gist is LanguageHat’s disapproval of someone who saw a good story as the more convincing etymology for the word. The irony for me is that the more convincing “version” of the truth does in fact turn out to be the better story too. Again, the OED disappoints, despite being essentially correct, whereas the AHD tells the same story so much more convincingly. The original erroneous (but good) story was just badly motivated – a greek bearing gifts.

I think I may have said before that “intent” is a key dimension of any good knowledge model.

Arise Sir Tim [BBC News] via [SmartMobs] via [Kolabora].

Tim Berners-Lee gets his knighthood. Good news amid the current “gongs for short-term-reflected-glory-by-association” fiasco.

Grauniad Survey of Blogging & Tools. I agree with this comment on Blogger [Quote] …. grounds enough to recommend Blogger over all others – and we did. But the last year has seen some interesting developments in the blog space, and after a lengthy spell of stagnation, with no new features being rolled out, Blogger no longer holds all the ace cards. [Unquote]

I have had “categorisation” on my Blogger wish-list for some time.
I’m currently experimenting with a Radio Userland Blog and an MT TypePad Blog too.

Pepys Diary Project. This one is the real thing – won the “best specialist” category in the Grauniad’s survey of top blogs.
Unlike this earlier attempt, which did not prove interesting.

Briton Held in China – Hmm.

Hilary Lawson – Openness and Closure – Interesting debate on BBC Radio 4 Start The Week (29 Dec 2003) with Andrew Marr. Not come across Hilary Lawson before, but previously published work was on “closure” – about the stories we create to describe the patterns we see in the world as closure on the potential mystery, uncertainty and complexity behind them. Our working models of truth. Latest work is on Openness is looking at the extent to which 99% of the world out there remains “open” obscured by the 1% we have taken to be closed – eg by science or accepted knowledge. Also the idea of different stories / patterns for different purposes. Interesting discussion – no real debate – but involving geneticist (Matt Ridley), historical biographer (Linda Colley) and anthropologist / linguist (Hugh Brody) – all the ingredients for a philosophy of truth and knowledge.

Couldn’t fail to recall DNA’s (Douglas Adams’) white mice in the discussion about experiments on small rodents and discoveries about how little difference there is genetically between humans and the rest, and that many others are more complex than humans.

Also liked the “Forest Clearing” analogy for knowledge – the larger the clearing the more trees you can actually see (the more questions there are to be asked) – worth avoiding a deforestation view of knowledge methinks.

Interesting side-issue (in South African land claims) about how far back in history counts as aboriginal in the reality of the past decade. In this case 1913 – is this another 80 year cycle of 3 generations like Kondratiev ?

(Interesting follow-on into the book of the week, Byron Rogers biography of J L Carr – The Last Englishman)

Must add Start The Week (Andrew Marr) and In Our Time (Melvyn Bragg) to my fixed links. The last In Our Time was on the subject of Lamarck and how much of his basic thinking remains true post neo-Darwinianism.

Ontologies of Knowledge In Denial – Geoff Cohen over at Coherence Engine one of many taking delight in the Rumsfeld “knowns we don’t know, etc ” quote, but picking up on the essential truth of the matter – it may be lousy communication, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. He also follows-up on truths we choose not to know – being in denial. Like it.