Category: Four pillars

I had some unusual habits when I was young. [Didn’t we all?] No, really.

I ate cockroaches. Apparently. This was when I was crawling around on all fours in Calcutta. Every now and then, my parents would hear a tell-tale crunching sound, come running to wherever I was, only to see the last vestiges of cockroach disappear down my gullet. A one-man roach exterminator. Or so I’m told.

Old habits die hard.

Which may be one of the reasons I found Catherine Chalmers’ work extraordinarily compelling. I was blown away by Safari as shown in the latest issue of Wholphin, and have ordered both her books. Amazing stuff.

Incidentally, when I was a few years older, my father taught me these lines:

Algy met a bear; the bear met Algy; the bear was bulgy; the bulge was Algy.

A whole ecosystem encapsulated in four sentences? Strange how memory works. Because that’s what came to mind when I saw this photo on Catherine’s site, and the two that followed.

Go take a look at the site, it has some wonderful stuff.

Can’t afford to go to Burning Man? Don’t have a ticket? Not your cup of tea? Worry not, help is at hand.

[Thanks to Mary Harrington, the Chief Community Officer at School of Everything, who brought this to my attention via Twitter].

It’s not every day you come across a Chaucerian blog; I’d seen it some years ago, but my bookmark stopped working and I’d assumed it was defunct.

But it’s back with a bang. Blazinge Fellow. Read all about it.

And I couldn’t help but think: Maybe we have another opportunity to “shift time”, but this time via the Web. Maybe we could translate texts from time X to time Y, backwards or forwards in time, but in the same language. I can see a few places where such a facility would be useful. Any views?

Having watched him and tracked him for quite a while now, and with the form he’s shown in the last two majors, I cannot help but believe that Camilo Villegas will win a major soon. You heard it here first.

He has this crazy insouciance when he plays, as if it is perfectly reasonable and normal to try and birdie every hole, and to eagle a few as well. Reminds me of a young Calcavecchia, a young Gamez. A cavalier attitude that brings to mind Viv Richards and Seve Ballesteros. An attitude that yells “I’m really enjoying this”.

An attitude that says that it is perfectly normal to line up putts the way he does, shown above.

Watching the re-runs of Usain Bolt celebrating his 100m win mid-race reminded me of this one really important thing: that a sportsman must enjoy doing what he does. That every person must enjoy doing what she does. Otherwise it’s not worth doing.

When I read this evocative piece by Tim O’ Reilly on Linking To Yourself, and began to understand just how widespread the “habit” had become, I began to wonder. Doesn’t it make you go blind, or something like that? It should.

I thought Peter Kirn’s comment summarised it elegantly:

1. Link externally when appropriate; don’t create a walled garden.
2. Identify internal links as such; provide an option.
3. Link to what’s useful to people

As David Weinberger said in Cluetrain, hyperlinks subvert hierarchies. Broadcast models and walled garden approaches are fundamentally hierarchical in construct, with controlled audiences meekly fed controlled content in controlled ways. It is natural for those who believe in such models to want to prevent the subversion, since it represents a loss of control.

It is also natural for all of us to see them for what they are.

Of course there are good reasons to link “to oneself”. In the comments, Tim gives the example of Wikipedia cross-references. One of the powers of the writable web is the ability to provide rich context quickly and cheaply, wherever that context is to be found. And sometimes the best context is found in something you may have written earlier. That makes sense. But linking to oneself to the exclusion of any other form of linking is just plain silly.

Some of the comments suggest that the reason a walled-gardener does this is because of the Google ranking. Now that makes me Confused. I have always assumed that self-linking is made valueless by PageRank. Live and learn.

Last night, as we entered the dining room at the country club, we were greeted by this wonderful sign:

Gentlemen, please remove your hat. Something quintessentially Texan about that (and no, I’m not quibbling about the grammatical correctness of that notice). Not being far from a golf course at that time (and for that matter, not particularly far from a golf course as I write this), my mind wandered a bit, and I started to think about “local rules” in golf.

I’ve been fascinated by local rules ever since I played Minchinhampton Old a few decades ago. The course is on common ground; as a result, cattle are free to roam the course; flagsticks are therefore flagless and only a few feet high; and you get a free drop from cowpats.

I think it was journalist Charles Price who said that golf only needed three rules (and I paraphrase): don’t touch your ball between placing it on the tee and picking it up from the hole; no bending over in the rough; and if you must go into the woods, clap your hands.

Where is all this leading? Well, today’s Saturday and I’m on vacation, so I’m allowed to be lazy in my thinking. Bear with me. When it comes to buying/building decisions for technology, I tend to use the following mantra:

If the problem is generic use opensource

If the problem is specific to a market segment use commercial

If the problem is unique to your organisation use your own resources

I’ve begun to wonder whether a variation of that mantra is appropriate for rules in general. Generic rules, rules that matter whoever we are, wherever we are. Market segment rules, rules that relate to the specific society we associate with. And local rules, rules that are contextual.

Too often, I see people seek to impose rules out of context, moving from the spirit-of-law to letter-of-law, acting like car-park-warden-meets-jobsworth.

Just musing on a Saturday morning.