There is not much time left till 2005 will be gone for good. And yet it seems as it was yesterday when I was planning what I would do this year.

In the end, I can?t complain about 2005, since I managed to:

• Finally defend my master thesis
• Visit eight new countries (again, my favorite one being Romania, check it out here)
• Meet a lot of interesting people
• Buy an apartment (which is still not ready, though)
• Create this web site
• Learn Italian and start learning Russian
• Start salsa lessons; actually no. one achievement in some sense.

Thanks to everyone who inspired me or helped me along the way!

However, there are some areas where I somehow fell short:

• Haven?t helped anyone much
• Didn?t manage to leave for Asia this year
• Still no driving license
• And surely, earning too little:)

Fortunately, there is still 2006 to make that up. Stay tuned for part 2: next year resolutions.

Happy New Year everyone.

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Once I had the idea to provide more ways for the readers to influence the blog. I planned to give comments some independence from the posts and promote the best to a more prominent location.

Then I found out that most of these ideas have already been discussed and even implemented to some extent. I lost interest for a while, but today reading VC blog inspired me to do something about the topic:

And as I have said before, we need a way to elevate the best comments right up onto the front page. I realize that most of my posts generate comments that are way better than my posts. I want a simple one click button that posts the comment right onto the bottom of the post.

Bottom line - blogs are conversations. We need to start treating the comments like the important content that they are instead of an afterthought.

I made a start by allowing to view all most recent comments, as well as by providing a place for notes unrelated to a particular post. In the end I also improved the feed machinery a bit. The job took only a little of plugin-shopping and some hour for fine-tuning and testing. (read more…)

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Wikipedia received a great deal of criticism lately. The poster child of the new Internet became a favorite target for anyone having an issue with the noise generated by web2.0 prophets. Nicholas Carr fired a resounding salvo in October with his ?Amorality of Web2.0? article.

Using Wikipedia as a representative of the emerging ?cult of the amateur?, he examined some sample deliverables of this new mode of production. Compared with work of the professionals, in this particular case Encyclopedia Britannica, the results were rather unimpressive, to say the least. Clearly, the exhibits made it hard to imagine that any respectable researcher would use Wikipedia as an authoritative reference.

At that point I felt an urge to write a longer comment to this topic. It seemed ridiculous to me to even consider Wikipedia as an authoritative reference and compare it with professional work. Regardless of whatever the Wikipedians might be saying, I felt that no one serious would expect authority from Wikipedia. That said, lack of authority doesn?t negate in any way how useful Wikipedia can be. (read more…)

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I’ve been using Supermemo for close to 1o years now. Can’t think of any other program even close to that.

Supermemo is based on a scientific theory of how human memory works. Basing on that theory a method was created, which allows predicting when the once memorized item will reach the stage when it is likely to be forgotten. (read more…)

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I started using Tracksy on 4th December. It is a free traffic monitoring tool. It provides everything I was looking for, including lots of useful reports and a fast interface. On top of that, Tracksy doesn’t put any ads on my website. Yet I have a small problem with it: the number of reported visits doesn’t seem correct. (read more…)

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Thanks to Otis I read another interesting failure story.

Blink, a social bookmarking site, had the idea and the money to become what del.icio.us is now - back in 1999. Yet, they missed the opportunity.

Some observations after reading:

• Knowing what works today, it’s easy to forget that there had been hundred of ways to do it wrong
• Particular details can drag the implementation off the right course, even if the idea in general is right on target

The comments to the article give some more reasons for the final outcome, including lack of development focus and too early timing for the social bookmarking idea to gain foothold (though it seems that Blink managed to acquire more clients that del.icio.us has now).

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MMORPG, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game.

The Wired runs a story about a virtual world which was taken away from players. The topic inspired me to mention the Genesis for the first time on this blog. (read more…)

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I wrote a post on why consultants do not blog once. Among other things I noted that I failed to find any kind of blogging policy of my own company.

Nothing has changed since, however, in the meantime I found this blogging policy of IBM (pdf).

Seems I would be fine with it.

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Some time ago I was looking for some videos related to salsa steps, and I was even able to find a couple of them.

But they never came anywhere close to this dance tutorials from zefrank:

How to dance properly,
Dancing properly: advanced seminar

Can’t wait to test it:)

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Cracks are beginning to emerge on Google’s myth of unlimited processing capacity.

Some highlights including my recent experience:

• Search query containing lots of “inurls” and other modifiers returned an 403 error and suggested that my computer has been taken over (I don’t think it has)
• Blog search returned an error as well
• Sitemaps verification didn’t work due to “server is busy” issue, try again later
• Google Analytics is closed for new users due to capacity issues, as everyone knows.

I hope it’s only me. Otherwise it would be a pity - after all infrastructure strength used to be considered as one of Google’s key competitive advantages.

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I did some rebranding this weekend.

While I’m still unsure about the best name for this site, I decided that the idea of virtuous cycle is the one so broad, that it will be able to cover whatever I will write here. (read more…)

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Del.icio.us has just made public that it joined the Yahoo! family.

The first impression upon hearing the news this morning - things are moving really fast for these guys. Close second would be some kind of uneasiness about where it’s heading. (read more…)

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Social bookmarking subject provides a good opportunity to introduce concept mapping as a tool that you can use when making first steps in an uncharted territory of knowledge.

Instead of trying to describe the approach, I will take you through my concept map of social bookmarking. Should you wish to try yourself afterwards, you will find suitable links at the bottom of this post.

Below is the concept map that I drew for the social bookmarking topic: (read more…)

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