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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Keeping up appearances

Wow, I think this is the longest gap in my blogging since I started! I wish I could say I’ve been enjoying the sunshine or taking up a new hobby, but the truth is that the weather’s been horrible and I’ve just been run off my feet readjusting to life in England and at University.

One thing I haven’t been doing is reading blogs. My aggregator (currently the excellent NewsFire, although NetNewsWire 2.0 could easily steal my affections) has been lying dormant, and aside from occasionally checking a few sites (congratulations Matt on the new job!) I’ve been reading more academic papers than weblogs. My final year project is tentatively titled “Collaborative annotation of web resources” and looks set to take up a big chunk of my time over the next six months or so.

I certainly miss the information flood of blogging, but there’s something very liberating about dipping in every now and then rather than following several hundred constant streams of consciousness, Scoble style. I guess you could say I’ve been re-evaluating my priorities. I’ll certainly be scaling back some commitments in the near future, though which ones and by how much I have yet to decide.

Posted 29th October 2004 at 11:41 am

This is Keeping up appearances by Simon Willison, posted on 29th October 2004.

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8 comments

  1. Nice to have you back Simon.

    "Collaborative annotation of web resources"? That sounds like it could be a new addiction.

    Good luck.

    Blair Millen - 29th October 2004 12:51 - #

  2. How about collaborative annotation of the python standard library documentation? People have been talking about it for a long time, but I don't think anyone's tried all that hard, or found the right interface. Those docs could be a case study, at least.

    I think this article is a good argument for why a global collaborative system isn't the best goal (especially as all previous efforts at that have failed, and there have been many).

    Ian Bicking - 29th October 2004 19:08 - #

  3. Welcome back Simon! Best of luck with University. Your project sounds like something that will pop up as the Next Big Internet Thing in a year or two.

    Michael Moncur - 29th October 2004 19:59 - #

  4. Ian: the Python standard library documentation (as well as the W3C's CSS specification documents) are the two examples I used in my project proposal as ideally suited for early deployment of a prototype.

    Simon Willison - 29th October 2004 20:06 - #

  5. Hi, Simon. It is nice to see you blogging again, even if it is in a limited capacity. Your entries are always interesting and insightful.

    Simon Jessey - 29th October 2004 22:11 - #

  6. Welcome back, Simon! Glad to hear you're keeping busy. I hope the readjusting period is almost over.

    Levi - 30th October 2004 04:28 - #

  7. Huzzah!

    I'm interested in web annotation as well. I'm also quite ignorant of the "many attempts" that have been made. I can well see that a single annotation namespace would be problematic, but I don't see why tagged annotation filtering couldn't work.

    I'm sad that we'll be hearing less from you, but glad you've got interesting work to do. Take care.

    Jeremy Dunck - 30th October 2004 14:47 - #

  8. Nice project topic. Would love it if you post a running list of related references and resources that you find as work on it. Good luck.

    Chris Dent - 30th October 2004 21:33 - #

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