OK. A day late. It's the though that counts. But just what is that thought?
7/05/2003
The Stack
So Lileks writes this thing about a new paradigm- stacks- for online newspapers/blogs that he read about in a Weekly Standard article by David Gelernter, who in turn is involved with this company which is selling a Windows Explorer-type application based on the stacks paradigm.Lileks isn't impressed by the file access part of the application (see the company- Scopeware- screenshot of the product and judge for yourself- they are offering a free trial) but could see a lot of value in the news presentation aspects of it.
Hence this new design. Of course, I'm on Blogger, so the search capabilities here are almost nil, but I think this design makes the possibilities of the format apparent, if you use a little imagination.
A newspaper home page could have a stack like this for the different sections- news, metro, sports, lifestyle or whatever they call the women's/gay men's section, and each "card" in the stack could list the title of the articles within that section. You could click on the card and go to another stack of the articles in the section, or click on the article to go directly to it. Or you might just go to the "all articles" stack where each article is posted to the top of the stack and marches down as newer articles are placed on top, as discussed in detail in Gelernter's piece.
But it's the multi-site aspects of the paradigm which are more interesting. The newspaper deal is just a site-redesign. Plug RSS feeds into the format, or Google news searches, and information will start to flow from front to back in that never-ending flow of stuff that David Gelernter discusses.
A problem with my implemenation of the idea is that I rely on Microsoft code to get these effects, so that it probably only works with IE5 and IE6. I know for a fact this page is unreadable with Navigator/Mozilla. It probably doesn't work with Opera and Konquerer either. Achieving cross-browser compliance is so tedious though that I may never get around to it, assuming it's possible at all that is. In any case, the logs show that over 85% of visitors use either IE5 or 6, and that's good enough for my very limited (and non-commercial) purposes. The other 15% will just have to do without my revealed wisdom, until I trash the format anyway.
7/03/2003
BBC Crap
From a July 4 BBC article: "The United States has imposed sanctions on five Chinese firms and a North Korean company for selling weapons technology to Iran."Quite noticably, nowhere does this article mention the recent IAEA scolding of Iran and its nuclear program. Where is the even-handed background info that's supposed to clue us in on the story so far?
"America has accused Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, a charge the Islamic republic denies."
But a charge that the IAEA hasn't dismissed. In fact they'd like Iran to answer a few important questions. Apparently, however, the BBC feels that the IAEA position has no relevance to the American position, else they'd have mentioned it in this story. To read this article, you'd think it was the US vs. Iran, a he said, she said affair, and who can you trust anyway?
