PCD 4/11/03 Turner: "In 1993, just as the Internet was emerging into public consciousness, journalist Howard Rheingold brought a new phrase to public discussions of computer-mediated communication: 'virtual community.' Within months, the phrase had been taken up by researchers, programmers, and corporate CEO's. For a time, virtual communities seemed poised to become one of the defining social formations - and business plans -- of the Internet age.
Yet, the notion of 'virtual communities' substantially predates the public emergence of computer networking. This presentation traces the origins of the concept in the Whole Earth network of publications and people. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews, the presentation will show how the notion of virtual community first emerged as a day-to-day 'contact language' on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL). It will then show how both the communities who used the early WELL system and the system itself represented networks and networking habits of mind first developed around the Whole Earth Catalog some twenty years earlier.

By tracing the migration of countercultural ideas and practices into the digital realm, I hope to raise questions about the role culture plays in shaping our perceptions of emerging digital technologies.

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ACM Queue - Comments Are More Important Than Code - The thorough use of internal documentation is one of the most-overlooked ways of improving software quality and speeding implementation.: "The thorough use of internal documentation is one of the most-overlooked ways of improving software quality and speeding implementation.
Reliable and Maintainable Code"

Turn on, tune in, log on / The PC and the Internet sprang from pot-smoking, acid-dropping California dreamers: "The implication throughout is that drugs were somehow one of the necessary conditions for the development of innovative PC technologies. Yet nowhere is that implication turned into a clear assertion -- the closest thing is a comment by highly inventive programmer (and occasional LSD user) Dan Ingalls: 'Well, where do you think these ideas came from?!' But Ingalls was joking, and elsewhere there is little evidence that drug use actually improved the ability of researchers to come up with ideas. Engelbart himself took LSD as part of Stolaroff's program and found its results disappointing. The only product he invented while under its influence was a 'tinkle toy,' a floating waterwheel for toilet training that spins when urinated on.

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Collin vs. Blog: "Behind": "My third answer is that part of the gap between haves and have-nots is unquestionably economic, but there is also a part of it that is simply volitional. No, I am not blaming the people who can't afford access for not having access. But I would echo John's claim that there are plenty of places with resources where there is no desire for, interest in, or curiosity about these things. The cost of a computer with an internet connection is not an insignificant one, I know, but the cost of a lot of the things I named is minimal. The sound program I used to podcast my CCCC paper? Free. Blogger? Free. Bloglines? Free. It costs nothing but a little time to learn that John Holbo is one of the bigwigs at the single most popular academic blog out there. Learning about Grokster? Please. Heck, even Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture is available at no cost in pdf format. I know not everyone out there is a Mac person, but iMovie can help you put together a slide show, set to music, with voice overs, and save the whole caboodle as a QT movie, and it's a pretty simple program (and came pre-installed).

Every single one of those 'behinds' I mentioned, and plenty that I didn't, can be managed with relative ease by someone with an internet connection and a copy of iLife (an $80 software suite from Apple) or an assortment of shareware apps. But more important is the fact that these and other technologies are shifting the way that large segments of our population are thinking about culture, about property, about politics, about journalism, and yes, about writing. It costs us nothing but a little time and attention to get access to these ideas, and to work with them when and where we can. When a whole species of public writing receives more column inches in Time and Newsweek than it does in the pages of our journals, then yes, I do think we are behind. When our incoming students are held to higher standards of technological literacy than we ourselves are, then yes, I think we're behind. When the best we can do to explain online research is to point students to the help pages at Google, we're behind. "

XSLT Tutorial: "In our XSLT tutorial you will learn what XSLT is.

You will learn how to use XSLT to transform XML documents into other XML formats, like XHTML."

Future Ivanhoe Visuals: "What follows is a selection of visualizations of a test game played by the Ivanhoe development group. I modeled the game as a topic map, used XSLT to transform the data into a 'dot' file, and then used Graphviz to generate some visualizations. Different 'variables' were used in different graphs, as indicated in the parenthetical comments. Note: If using Internet Explorer to view these graphs, be aware that your browser will automatically shrink the images to fit your browser window. If you can't read labels or the graph is just generally fuzzy, resize the image to its original dimensions."

Tim's Weblog ? Topic Maps/Semantic Web