Danny Ayers is looking for a business model to fund his life of RDF and personal knowledge management research.

Danny has a range of interests very similar to mine. (He even has some software that really wants to be SdiDesk 😉 And which was written long before I got started.)

At the same time, some of his intuitions are diametrically opposite to my own. I would never have written SdiDesk in Java, and I’m pretty sceptical about the Semantic Web as a whole.

Nevertheless, good luck to Danny on this. It’s always inspiring to see people chasing their dreams, particularly of a life of independent software R&D. And I look forward to seeing what he comes up with.

LifeHacker has a story that speaks to one of my fantasies.

Now we’re getting cheap digital cameras and camera-phones, I’d like some really good software which could let me take photos of diagrams, scrawled on a piece of paper, and turn them into something useful. I want something really smart. Which can figure out the basic topology of a diagram viewed from any angle, and would then allow the user to quickly hint it into shape.

Dave Winer : Why [do] we have to design our software to the user who freaks out? … when we are basically disempowering the user who is curious? … People aren’t stupid. And people who design software for people who are stupid, get what they deserve, which is stupid users. I prefer to design software for people who are smart, because I’d much prefer to work with people who are smart.

And … sometimes people who are smart act stupid because you treat them like they’re stupid. So I prefer to treat them like they’re smart.

Yes!!!!

Great Morning Coffee ramble. 🙂

MP3 here : http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/cn05Jun23.mp3

Sigurd Rinde vs. hierarchy :


Do the test:

1. Write a letter, using a word processor, to a friend about some tax issues, some personal stuff and a great new joke you just heard.

2. Save the file to a folder. Choose the folder according to either recipient, theme or whatever you normally choose. Your choice.

3. Wait two months.

4. Find it.

Did you find it immediately? Or did you have to think hard, trying to put yourself into your own mind two months ago – was it in a folder named ‘Friends’, ‘Letters’, ‘Jokes’ or in a folder somewhere named ‘Tax issues’?

I also like this :

The sticky point about two dimensional tree-structures is that you have to assimilate the logic of somebody else. Or yourself two months ago.

Tree structures should be chopped down

Sigurde then goes on to suggest something even wilder. Why not tag people within organizations rather than put them into slots in the org.chart.

Hey! You can officially be a programmer, and accountant, and tea-maker : all at the same time, if that’s the part you play.

Seems like Thingamy are going to support this idea in their software too :


Hang on a few weeks, we’re tinkering with a slightly wacky CMS for the heck of it (and to test these ideas in practice) to produce navigation-bar-less-no-trees-in-sight websites/knowledge repositories, should be fun. Watch this space.