TITLE: Learning via the Blogosphere
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 06, 2004  8:14 AM
DESC: I stumbled across a new blog that reminded me how the blogosphere is changing  how we share ideas.
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BODY:
This is why I love the blogosphere so much.  Somehow,
I stumble across a link to
<A HREF="http://jtauber.com/leonardo">
   Leonardo</A>,
an open-source blogging and wiki engine written in
<A HREF="http://www.python.org/">
   Python</A>.
I follow the link and start reading the blog of
Leonardo's author,
<A HREF="http://jtauber.com/">
   James Tauber</A>.
It's a well-written and thoughtful set of articles
on an interesting mix of topics, including Python,
extreme programming, mathematics, linguistics, New
Testament Greek, music theory and composition, record
producing and engineering, filmmaking, and general
relativity.  For example, my reading there has taught
me some of the mathematics that underlie recent work
on proving the
<A HREF="http://jtauber.com/blog/2004/09/17/journey_to_the_poincare_conjecture">
   Poincare Conjecture</A>.

But the topic that attracted my greatest attention
is the confluence of personal information management,
digital lifestyle aggregation, wiki, blogging, comments
and trackbacks, and information hosting.  I've only
recently begun to learn more deeply about the issue
of aggregation and its role in information sharing.
This blog argues for an especially tight intellectual
connection among all of these technologies and cultures.
For example, Tauber argues that wiki entries are essentially
the same as blog trackbacks, and that trackbacks could
be used to
<A HREF="http://jtauber.com/blog/2004/09/25/pims_and_dlas">
   share information about software projects</A>
among bosses and teammates, using RSS feeds, and
to integrate requests with one's PIM.  But I'm not
limited to reading Tauber's ideas, as he links to
other blogs and web pages that present alternative
viewpoints on this topic.

Following all these threads will take time, but that
I can at all is a tribute to the blogosphere.  Certainly,
all of this could have been done in the olden days of
the web, and indeed many people were publishing there
diverse ideas about diverse topics back then.  But the
advent of RSS feeds and blogging software and wikis has
made the conversation much richer, with more power in
the hands of both readers and writers.  Furthermore,
the blogging culture encourages folks to prepare their
ideas sooner for public consumption, to link ideas in
a way that enables scientific inquiry, to begin a
<I>conversation</I> rather than just publish a tract.

The world of ideas is alive and well.
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