Thursday, August 4, 2005

Ride on

DIT knowledge source husbandry

I'm in a session for H20 Playlist at OSCON. Very interesting stuff. Make "playlists" of sources for topical syllabi. Kind of a del.icio.us for academic source materials. Pretty neat.

It's a DIT thing: Do It Together, rather than Do It Yourself (DIY). DIT is a concept introduced in a keynote yesterday by Kim Polese of SpikeSource.

Tags: DIT, playlist, oscon, syllabi.

Hooked on phonics

The Prepostophone.

Courtesy of Ken Coar.

Beyond bondage

Paul Graham just put up a brilliant essay that was also his talk two nights ago, which I missed.

Lots of unexpected and deep connections between blogging, business, open source, professionalism, amateurism, and the power of loving one's work. A sample:

Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture. [2]

This turns out not to be the last word on work, however. As societies get richer, they learn something about work that's a lot like what they learn about diet. We know now that the healthiest diet is the one our peasant ancestors were forced to eat because they were poor. Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get enough of it. I think we were designed to work, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if we don't.

There's a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology, though it's staring us in the face. "Amateur" was originally rather a complimentary word. But the thing to be in the twentieth century was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.

Thanks to Jim Thompson for the pointer.

[Later...] James Robertson disagrees.