Related link: http://www.wwforum.com/cgi-bin/forum_main/ptools2.cgi

If it’s past midnight on February 28, 2003, the link above won’t work. Its keeper has retired, leaving a community of people with fond memories of a place where they learned and shared information about woodworking.

I spend a lot of my web surfing time on woodworking sites, and it’s a nice contrast to the technical communities in which I participate. Everyone has their own opinions, of course, but the style of conversation and the kinds of decisions people make based on these boards are very different.

Badger Pond’s been one of my favorite sites for about three years now, at the top of my bookmarks list in all of my browsers. It’s been a closely-moderated site, and the “Head Badger”, Wayne Miller, has put in endless hours working on the site. The Power Tool Forum and the Neanderthal Forum (Hand Tools) have both generated strong communities. “Ponder Picnics” and meetings at woodworking shows are common, and I first learned how to work with a lathe at one of those picnics.

The last day has been mostly farewells. People have been discussing where they’ll go after the Pond closes, making plans for a few more gatherings, and celebrating what they’ve learned. The archives will be available on CD, and some features - notably the shop tours and articles, have already found new homes.

While the Pond is closing, there are lots of other woodworking forums out there. I haven’t yet figured out where I’ll hang out, but I read all of these from time to time:

• Wood Central
• Sawmill Creek
• Knots (sponsored by Fine Woodworking magazine)
• Woodworking.com forums
• Women in Woodworking Forum
• rec.woodworking
• The Oak Factory
• Ryobi Power Tool Forum
• BT3Central.com

Even with all these to explore, it’s pretty strange when the one you consider home closes its doors. Thanks to Wayne for a lot of good years!

Have any of your favorite electronic communities closed?

Related link: http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/members/200302/msg00013.html

Tell us what you think about WS-Reliability.

Related link: http://www.w3.org/2003/02/xml-at-5.html

The W3C is celebrating five years of XML. I’m not so sure that it’s a good time to throw a party - and fortunately, the W3C article recognizes that.

XML has had some major accomplishments in the last five years. XML has demonstrated that it’s possible to share labeled structured information without requiring everyone to share a common API. XML has made it clear that it’s possible for programs to manage large quantities of information in forms that don’t neatly fit in relational database tables. XML has also evangelized Unicode quite substantially, making it far easier to exchange information across language barriers without corruption.

At the same time, however, it’s extremely clear that what was once a simplification process - “SGML for the Web” - has metastasized into an ever-growing collection of intricately connected (and disconnected) specifications. As the article puts it:

“You now have XML + XLINK + XSL + Namespaces + Infoset + XML Linking + XPointer Framework + XPointer namespaces + XPointer xptr() + XSLT + XPath + XSL FO + DOM + Sax + stylesheet linking PI + XML Schema + XQuery + XML Encryption + XML Canonicalization + XML Signature + DOM Level 2 + DOM Level 3. And as it grew, It became more complex and confusing. What started as a trim 25-page spec, SGML slimmed down for the Web, now has become a complex set of specs totaling hundreds of pages. While these specs describe powerful technologies, taken as a whole, who would describe them now as slim or trimmed down? Five years ago, XML tools could be developed by a good programmer in a week; now it may take full-time teams of the best programmers to keep up. Usability has suffered a bit.”

That list doesn’t even get into the stack of “Web Services” specifications, which are growing even more rapidly at the moment. Fortunately, the authors also ask:

“what remains to be answered is whether we, the community who are defining XML and building the tools to use it, can use what we learned over the last five years as a guide, and re-ask with passion and enthusiasm the question asked so often years ago — ‘is this necessary for success?’”

If not, perhaps it’s time for something much simpler - a break. While the volume of specifications has increased, it’s hardly clear that the quality of specifications has improved. XML 1.0 and XSLT 1.0 have flaws, certainly, but reading, implementing, or merely using the many hundreds of pages that attempt to add what they lack is a Sisyphean task. The continuous pile-up of XML specifications seems to be driven by a concern that vendors will go their own ways and that standardization is crucial.

At some point, we have to ask how much standardization is really needed. It may be time to let developers and vendors play for a while, learning what works without further burdening everyone with new common standards. XML 1.0 may not provide enough interop for every application, but using the interoperability it provides is pretty easy. Developers who need different kinds of interop might even want to look beyond XML to alternate approaches that do what they need without the overhead of markup.

If we’re lucky, XML will have a much calmer five years ahead than the past five years have been, making it easier for XML to permeate into new applications and become a common part of everyone’s shared toolkit. If we’re unlucky, the current pile-up will continue, and there will be enough momentum for a new round of simplification in five years. Then we can hope for stability in around ten years - maybe.

Can less be more effective?

Clay Shirky has published Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality discussing the development of a power law distribution in weblogging and garnering extensive discussion and debate in blogging circles.

Shirky concludes:

At the head will be webloggers who join the mainstream media (a phrase which seems to mean media we’ve gotten used to.) The transformation here is simple - as a blogger’s audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can’t link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can’t answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site. The result of these pressures is that she becomes a broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it.

Meanwhile, the long tail of weblogs with few readers will become conversational. In a world where most bloggers get below average traffic, audience size can’t be the only metric for success. LiveJournal had this figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their friends, rather than some impersonal audience. Publishing an essay and having 3 random people read it is a recipe for disappointment, but publishing an account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it feels like a conversation, especially if they follow up with their own accounts. LiveJournal has an edge on most other blogging platforms because it can keep far better track of friend and group relationships, but the rise of general blog tools like Trackback may enable this conversational mode for most blogs.

In between blogs-as-mainstream-media and blogs-as-dinner-conversation will be Blogging Classic, blogs published by one or a few people, for a moderately-sized audience, with whom the authors have a relatively engaged relationship. Because of the continuing growth of the weblog world, more blogs in the future will follow this pattern than today. However, these blogs will be in the minority for both traffic (dwarfed by the mainstream media blogs) and overall number of blogs (outnumbered by the conversational blogs.)

Not all are in agreement with Clay’s assertions. Dave Winer writes The scaling equation for weblogs is, emphatically, not like BBSes, mail lists, not like the Well. (I certainly agree to Dave’s call for Clay to setup a weblog.)

Shelley Powers has written an extensive rebuttal to Clay’s points noting he has one failing in regards to his viewpoints as to social gatherings: he’s an elitist. He believes there will always be an ‘elite’ grouping within any society, something I don’t necessarily discount; however, from his writing and actions, he also tends to facilitate the mistaken belief that social groupings must follow fixed statistical patterns that support a static elite, and that we must all behave as the statistics dictate. And I say, what a load of hooie. An active conversation follows in the comments to the Shelley’s post. Clay joins the discussion and says shame on me for using… old data, but his assertions on the power law curve still stands. Clay notes that was just published with similar views and more updated and statically relevant data. The numbers taken from the Blogging Ecosystem support Clay’s assertions. (Clay has since updated his essay to use the same data.)

Despite the evidence of a weblogging following a power curve, Sam Ruby makes one of the most interesting observations thus far when he writes:

I’m listed in the Technorati top 100. By looking at the statistics there, 98.93% of the weblogs it tracks do NOT link to mine. 99.90% of the weblogs tracked have less inbound links than me.

I see no mountains here, only molehills.

The conversation continues.

Related link: http://www.dddmag.com/

The “Informatics Update” section of Drug Discovery and Development Magazine for January 2003 has a set of news briefs, dicussing the future of grid computing, SNP tools and in silico biology techniques.