o'reilly Posts

Long in the works, my O'Reilly Media-published "Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators" is available. The title could sort of be boiled down to "hey this QuakerQuaker.org thing has become kind of neat" but it's more than that. I wax lyrical about the different kind of aggregator community sites and I throw a new tongue-twister into the social media arena: "folksonomic density" (Google it now kids and you'll see the only references are mine; a few years from now you can say you knew the guy who coined the phrase that set the technosphere on fire and launched Web 3.0 and ushered in the second phase of the Age of Aquarius, yada yada).

A hundred thank you's to my fine and patient editor S. (don't know if you want to be outed here). I've been an editor myself in one capacity or another for fifteen years (I've sometimes even been paid for it) so it was educational to experience the relationship from the other side. I wrote this while living an insane schedule and it's amazing I found any time at get all this down.

As luck would have it I've just gotten my design site at MartinKelley.com up and running fully again, so I hope to do some posts related to the PDF in the weeks to come. In the meantime, below is the marketing copy for Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators. It is available for $9.99 from the O'Reilly website.

Web aggregators select and present content culled from multiple sources, playing an important taste-making and promotional role. Larger aggregators are starting to compete with mainstream news sources but a new class of niche and do-it-yourself aggregators are organizing around specific interests. Niche aggregators harness the power of the internet to build communities previously separated by geography or institutional inertia. These micro-communities serve a trend-setting role. Understanding their operation is critical for those wanting to understand or predict cultural change and for those who want to harness the power of the long tail by catering to niches.

For those who love real-live conspiracies, there's the case of this week's three cut undersea cables.

On Wednesday the anchor of a ship off of Alexandria, Egypt, sliced through two important fiber optic internet cables that serve critical traffic between Western Europe and the Middle East and India. On Friday, a cable off Dubai was cut for still undetermined reasons, one proffered explanation being (yes) an errant anchor. One commentator called it "a national disaster," citing the almost complete loss of communication in Egypt; about 20-30% of Indian's traffic is affected. Here's a cool map of the undersea world from the Guardian.

Apparently some aren't calling these closely-time cuts such a coinkydink. The USS Jimmy Carter nuclear submarine (named after a US Navy submarine officer who later went into politics) is a spy sub specially designed with a kind of underwater "shuttle craft" perfect for installing taps. Can we add large-scale internet failure to the cost of war?

When I was about seven I wrote a school report on the Glomar Explorer, a hugely-expensive deep-sea drilling ship built by eccentric gazillionaire Howard Hughes to extract minerals from the ocean floor. Well, at least that was the cover story. Shortly after my report, the Los Angeles Times uncovered the real story: the Glomar Explorer was a CIA ship built to recover a sunken Soviet sub off of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean (I myself didn't learn about this until only a few years ago).

Then of course there's the true stories of the secret White House, secret Pentagon and secret Congress, three separate underground mini-cities carved inside Appalachian ridges in the 1950s to be used in case of Ruskie attack. The locations are well known now. Interesting Fact #1: if you study maps you'll see underused interstate highways leading from Washington to the secret White House and secret Pentagon, ready for quick escape. Interesting Fact #2: the secret Congress is much further away, has no mysteriously-placed highway and was unknown to most if not all members of Congress; whoops!, no legislative branch! I can't find the websites listing all this very quickly but they're there and it's all pretty much out in the open now. When looking I found Interesting Fact #3: the White House East Wing was built in WWII to hide construction of a underground bunker, the famous "War Room" fictionalized in Doctor Strangelove. Veeery interestink, mein fuhrer, I mean mein President.

For those thinking I'm just busting on the U.S., rest assured. I have one client in a Far East Asian country I won't name who can't access this website, my design site, her internet bank, or any Blogspot-hosted site because the country's leaders have put a firewall around the whole frigging country, blocking off sites they don't like!

MONDAY UPDATE: From Egypt's Ministry of Communication: "A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time." (via Jesse Robbins @ O'Reilly)

• O'Reilly Media group on Facebook
  And under-used groups in general
  (tags: tech comments)

• O'Reilly on the opening of NYTimes site and Kottke's links
  (tags: checkback)
• Nancy A wonders if we're complaining and "looking at our buttons" too much
  "Maybe what's important now is not for Quakers to be uberQuakers -- or even Quakers at all. Maybe many are each being called to be Spirit-led in a more nameless, formless way, just following those inner nudges..."
  (tags: quaker quaker.liberal)
• Johan M revisits the concept of Gospel order
  "For some in this Friends meeting, that was the moment when Gospel order stopped being an ideal, a nice Quaker cliché, and became an operational reality."
  (tags: quaker.ministry quaker checkback)
• Scratching my head over the British Quaker Week t-shirt design
  Hopefully the rest of the outreach week won't be so obscure...
  (tags: checkback)
• Qr Oats Cherice on the relation between service and outreach
  "[Early Friends] weren't just serving people in order for people to become Quakers. They were serving people because they genuinely loved them and wanted to show them the same love they'd received from God."
  (tags: quaker quaker.outreach quaker.christianity quaker.evangelical)