How Not To Feed Your Daemons

Everybody has daemons. And I’m not talking about those small, dormant, discrete programs running in the background of your computer (I know a few programmers are reading this blog so I thought to cut any ambiguities from the start). I’m talking about real, active and powerful forces which are acting in a disruptive way. Sometimes … Read more

Personal Mission Statement

I’m writing this post under quite a pressure. This is coming from my personal life, where apparently we reached a point when things must be changed. It was never a totally transparent personal life, there were always some closed windows, and I never wanted to look through those windows. I totally believed that those windows were closed for good. I assumed that everything was exactly as shown, no hidden windows, but apparently I was wrong. Whatever must come out of this, it should be for the better. It’s a crossroad I must solve.

I won’t go into further details about that. I don’t think that my personal life is worthy enough for public exposure, and even if I would, I won’t make it public out of shyness. Or decency, call it what you want.

What I would do though, it’s to continue my chosen path in regard with this blog. I established a schedule and I intend to keep it as much as I can, even under stressful events. Maybe some of you will think that this is strange, and I should focus on solving those problems first, and then work on this blog again. While I totally agree with the fact that I should solve those problems, I don’t think that I should focus only on that and let other parts of the mechanism to fall apart.

I think that we’re made of different commitments and that every commitment, being personal, social or business, must be fulfilled. If there is unbalance in one category, keeping the other categories working is a must in order to keep the machine working. Otherwise the machine will stop for good, and everything will be lost. It’s hard to do it, don’t get me wrong, the pressure I have right now is really hard to describe and I don’t wish for anybody to go through this. Anyway, to make a long story short, I might post smaller articles and not keep up with the intended pace, but I’ll do whatever it takes to keep my commitments.

It’s funny how the synchronicity in our life can manifest. Today I scheduled a blog post about “Personal Mission Statement”. I wrote earlier about the necessity of a personal mission statement, and today I’ll outline mine.

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Taxonomic Twitter

In another post about Twitter I wrote extensively about the implications of this service from a behavioral perspective. It seems that I’m quite in a “twitter mood” lately since I’m writing another post so close to the first one and I’m planning another one for the upcoming days. Right now I would like to share something more technical about this.

It’s about an attempt to make Twitter even sharper and thinner, by using some sort of taxonomy, or in plain english, a method of grouping together posts by putting “labels” on them. Twitter already has a max limit of 140 characters for each post, and chances for this to grow up are likely to be zero. At least for now. So, in order to increase the readability of the tweets, all work must be done “inside” this 140 characters limit. And the way they’re trying to this is by using some extremely scaled down mark-up language.

They’re called hashtags and they are a way of identifying zones of related content. For instance, if you’re going to tweet a lot about raw food, you can insert somewhere into the tweet something like this “#rawfood”. The “#” sign will have the role to identify the string after it as a marker. Everything with a “#” in front will actually become a label. So every time you will be tweeting about raw food, you will group your tweets into a larger category of possibly related tweets. If somebody else will tweet about the same things and they’ll use the same marker, your tweets will be grouped together.

Using Hashtags Implications

First of all, there will be less room for the actual information. Every hashtag will eat some space out of the 140 characters, leaving less space for the original content. Chances are that your content could be grouped in more than one category, or marker and you’ll be inclined to use more than one hashtag in your tweet. If a consistent API would be provided for working with those hashtags – and chances are that there will be some hooks sooner than we think – then a lot of applications would be using that. Turning Twitter into a searchable catalog is just around the corner. There is a great potential for advertisers and even for people who are trying to promote their blogs or products. It would be the easiest way to direct your tweet to the intended category of readers.

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