Coevolving Innovations

Coevolving Innovations

… in Business Organizations and Information Technologies

Is wiki markup dead?

April 2, 2007
3 Comments

Today, I’ve been playing around with beta candidate for Quickr, which is a follow-on to the Lotus Quickplace product … but what a leap ahead in product functionality!

Quickr components 1 to 6

Quickr components 7 to 8

I’ve been mainly interested in Quickr because, in the new announcements on the Lotus family, it’s the product with the wiki. (Lotus Connections has multi-user blogs, but not a wiki. Further, Quickr also has feeds — that should more correctly be called aggregators).

I get the feeling that the architects working on Quickr are a different group from those working on Connections, because the list of “components” feels more like options commonly in use on the web, rather than those used by large-scale enterprises. Maybe this comes from the quick-and-dirty style that Quickplace seems to exude … or maybe the designers just chose to take a different tack.

Although wikis would seem to be new to the vocabulary of non-techies (maybe circa 2005-2006, with the rise of Wikipedia), the original wikiwiki by Ward Cunningham on C2 goes back to August 1996. I had once tried to customize Mediawiki (which is the engine underneath Wikipedia), have a lot of experience with PmWiki, and am now a major fan of Dokuwiki. Along with the original design of wiki technology came wiki syntax (also known as wiki markup, which varies engine by engine), so that instead of writing the arcane HTML syntax1, e.g. to create a unordered list …

[ul]
[li]requires using codes that are unambiguous to browsers[/li]
[li]but that normal humans should never have to read[/li]
[/ul]

… a simpler alternative is wiki markup, e.g.… Read more (in a new tab)

The core, the periphery, and innovation

February 16, 2007
0 Comments

On my last visit to Finland, I again had lunch with Ville Saarikoski. Ville is ahead of me in pursuing graduate studies, and recently defended his dissertation on “The Odyssey of the Mobile Internet” at the University of Oulu last December. His central thesis is that the success of SMS text messaging has retarded Internet growth on mobile devices in Europe, in contrast to the rapid adoption of the mobile Internet in Japan. Ville was interviewed about this idea by Howard Rheingold in The Feature in 2005 , and published an article in the Financial Times in 2004.

Ville Saarikoski, outside Kamppi, Helsinki

iPod Index, versus Big Mac Index

February 9, 2007
3 Comments

iPod cost chart

CNNMoney had a headline that the cheapest place in the world to buy an 2GB iPod Nano was in Canada.

Working from up from the bottom of the list, the next-cheapest locations for an iPod were in Hong Kong, Japan and the U.S.

The iPod is most expensive — by far — in Brazil, with India and Sweden next in line.

The writers point out that, at current exchange rates, the iPod is actually cheaper in Canada than in China, where the product is manufactured. Shipping costs seem to matter less than currency issues, with the U.S. dollar noted as undervalued.

On the other hand, The Economist recently posted its Big Mac Index. This long-running statistic had its 10th annual release in 1998, so we’re coming up to the 20-year point for that measure.

Moderating online communities … and the consequences

January 28, 2007
2 Comments

Chowhound.com has been somewhat famous in the Toronto area, since Jim Leff‘s visit to Toronto was written up in the Toronto Star. I joined the community of diners dialoguing on restaurants in mid-2004, when I was working on consulting gig in the downtown core. The web interface was home-grown and quite ugly, but somehow functional. Chowhound was migrated to Cnet in late 2006, and there were some growing pains, as might be expected in migrating to new technologies.

I decided to give Chowhound another try yesterday. I had a visitor coming into town, and was searching for a restaurant that serves “beef 7 ways” (which translates to “Bo 7 Mon” in Vietnamese). Without good leads on Google, I wrote a posting on Chowhound’s “Ontario (including Toronto)” board titled “Beef 7 Ways, Vietnamese, in Toronto”. I described my quest, with a mention of an unnamed restaurant on Dundas Street where my wife and I had sampled the dish before — but are disinclined to revisit based on a cockroach crawling down the wall. On my feed reader, I can see that the entry was logged at 10:30 a.m.

Checking back during the day on chowhound.com, the entry was unanswered by 4 p.m., so I phoned around to three restaurants, and found that Golden Turtle (also known as Rua Vang) does serve Bo 7 Mon. Based on the web references, we tried out the modest restaurant, and our Finnish visitor enjoyed the meal.… Read more (in a new tab)

Features on the $100 laptop not on your $1500 laptop

January 26, 2007
2 Comments

I was looking at the One Laptop Per Child project — that’s the initiative that has to goal of designing a computer at a price less than $100USD, particularly targeted for education in third world countries. There are some really smart and creative people working on making the vision of an education project real. In fact, I’m impressed that there seem to be some features for a product targeted for children that I typically don’t see on my business-class computer.

1. Neighborhood mode

Neighborhood view mode from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Instructions#Neighborhood_View_Mode

Image: Neighbourhood view mode from laptop.org

iPhone: watch for version 2?

January 13, 2007
0 Comments

In the Stadia class yesterday, I played the first 15 minutes of the iPhone introduction to open up some discussion. Today, I watched the entire keynote address at Macworld San Francisco 2007 by Steve Jobs. (There’s a quicker digest on Engadget, if you don’t want to watch Quicktime). Upon reflection, there’s technological innovation, business innovation, and a potential Achilles heel.

On technological innovation, Apple is a master in user interface design. The most important invention — that surely is patented — has to be the accelerometer. Steve Jobs inferred that using a stylus (as in Palm PDAs, and in the original Apple Newton) would be obsoleted by using a finger, but this really all has to do with pointing precision. If the icon is large enough, a finger works fine on the Palm user interface. However, when we get to large amounts of scrolling, the accelerometer is a huge advance over a windowed slider and is an arguable improvement over a mechanically simpler jog dial (as in Sony devices).

  • RSS qoto.org/@daviding (Mastodon)

    • Feb 27, 2025, 04:08 February 27, 2025
      Peer reviewed article on "Rethinking work, with the pandemic disruption: Metatheorizing with world hypotheses and systems changes” with #SusuNousala published in International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, after 2 years in revisions, #RyanArmstrong editor https://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/rethinking-work-with-the-pandemic-disruption/
    • Feb 19, 2025, 12:53 February 19, 2025
      Thinking about #SystemsThinking contribution for March 15, towards October in Toronto.> The intent-to-submit period for papers closes on March 15, 2025. This is a two-stage process: no new submissions will be accepted after March 15, and final submissions are due by 23:59 GMT on April 30. https://rsdsymposium.org/call-for-systemic-design-contributions/
    • Feb 19, 2025, 01:45 February 19, 2025
      Audio recordings + 2 GenAI summaries of Evolving Styles for Learning Systems Thinking at #SystemsThinking Ontario @ocad with #StephenDavies @daviding@daviding.com , moderated by #ZaidKhan https://coevolving.com/blogs/index.php/archive/evolving-styles-for-learning-systems-thinking/
    • Feb 16, 2025, 14:10 February 16, 2025
      Types of use of Gen AI cites poster session by IBM Research. > We describe current LLM usages across three categories: creation, information, and advice.Michelle Brachman, Amina El-Ashry, Casey Dugan, and Werner Geyer.2024. How Knowledge Workers Use and Want to Use LLMs in an EnterpriseContext. In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors […]
    • Feb 16, 2025, 13:36 February 16, 2025
      Maybe Gen AI is better for those who trust it the least. > Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship. Our insights reveal new design challenges […]

  • RSS on IngBrief

    • Installing WordPress Studio on Manjaro Linux
      In 2024, WordPress Studio was released, making installation on a local computer simpler. The instructions were modified from MacOS to Ubuntu Linux, by Daniel Kossmann, “How to install WordPress Studio in Ubuntu Linux” | Jun 15, 2024 at https://www.danielkossmann.com/how-to-install-wordpress-studio-ubuntu-linux/ I already had NVM installed, but in Terminal, with the result “command not found”. In the […]
    • Notion of Change in the Yijing | JeeLoo Lin 2017
      The appreciation of change is different in Western philosophy than in classical Chinese philosophy. JeeLoo Lin published a concise contrast on differences. Let me parse the Introduction to the journal article, that is so clearly written. The Chinese theory of time is built into a language that is tenseless. The Yijing (Book of Changes) there […]
    • World Hypotheses (Stephen C. Pepper) as a pluralist philosophy [Rescher, 1994]
      In trying to place the World Hypotheses work of Stephen C. Pepper (with multiple root metaphors), Nicholas Rescher provides a helpful positioning. — begin paste — Philosophical perspectivism maintains that substantive philosophical positions can be maintained only from a “perspective” of some sort. But what sort? Clearly different sorts of perspectives can be conceived of, […]
    • The Nature and Application of the Daodejing | Ames and Hall (2003)
      Ames and Hall (2003) provide some tips for those studyng the DaoDeJing.
    • Diachronic, diachrony
      Finding proper words to express system(s) change(s) can be a challenge. One alternative could be diachrony. The Oxford English dictionary provides two definitions for diachronic, the first one most generally related to time. (The second is linguistic method) diachronic ADJECTIVE Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “diachronic (adj.), sense 1,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3691792233. For completeness, prochronic relates “to […]
    • Introduction, “Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2”, edited by F. E. Emery (1981)
      The selection of readings in the “Introduction” to Systems Thinking: Selected Readings, volume 2, Penguin (1981), edited by Fred E. Emery, reflects a turn from 1969 when a general systems theory was more fully entertained, towards an urgency towards changes in the world that were present in 1981. Systems thinking was again emphasized in contrast […]

  • Powered by FeedBurner

     Feedburner

  • Recent Posts

  • Archives

  • RSS on daviding.com

  • RSS on Media Queue

    • What to Do When It’s Too Late | David L. Hawk | 2024
      David L. Hawk (American management theorist, architect, and systems scientist) has been hosting a weekly television show broadcast on Bold Brave Tv from the New York area on Wednesdays 6pm ET, remotely from his home in Iowa. Live, callers can join…Read more ›
    • 2021/06/17 Keekok Lee | Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 2
      Following the first day lecture on Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 1 for the Global University for Sustainability, Keekok Lee continued on a second day on some topics: * Anatomy as structure; physiology as function (and process); * Process ontology, and thing ontology; * Qi ju as qi-in-concentrating mode, and qi san as qi-in-dissipsating mode; and […]
    • 2021/06/16 Keekok Lee | Philosophy of Chinese Medicine 1
      The philosophy of science underlying Classical Chinese Medicine, in this lecture by Keekok Lee, provides insights into ways in which systems change may be approached, in a process ontology in contrast to the thing ontology underlying Western BioMedicine. Read more ›
    • 2021/02/02 To Understand This Era, You Need to Think in Systems | Zeynep Tufekci with Ezra Klein | New York Times
      In conversation, @zeynep with @ezraklein reveal authentic #SystemsThinking in (i) appreciating that “science” is constructed by human collectives, (ii) the west orients towards individual outcomes rather than population levels; and (iii) there’s an over-emphasis on problems of the moment, and…Read more ›
    • 2019/04/09 Art as a discipline of inquiry | Tim Ingold (web video)
      In the question-answer period after the lecture, #TimIngold proposes art as a discipline of inquiry, rather than ethnography. This refers to his thinking On Human Correspondence. — begin paste — [75m26s question] I am curious to know what art, or…Read more ›
    • 2019/10/16 | “Bubbles, Golden Ages, and Tech Revolutions” | Carlota Perez
      How might our society show value for the long term, over the short term? Could we think about taxation over time, asks @carlotaprzperez in an interview: 92% for 1 day; 80% within 1 month; 50%-60% tax for 1 year; zero tax for 10 years.Read more ›

  • Meta

    • Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
    Theme modified from DevDmBootstrap4 by Danny Machal