Several reports have been published in the Airblog section since 17 February.
There were a lot of interesting things going on in the world, but I was not able to blog on them, focused on my reports in the Airblog section. Most interesting I found the Napster case, and the Nice treaty. I will look for some interesting links on them to publish here.
Updated: Wikipedia on Napster
and on the Nice treaty
I tried to make the style sheet work in Netscape, but I failed. So the best way to view this pages will remain Explorer.
Yesterday I visited the Scratch days in Leiden, to give the organizers a helping hand. If you ever happen to be around in The Netherlands in February, and if you like singing or playing music, check out their website. The event always takes place in the historical Pieterskerk, where the Pilgrim Fathers were centered.
I added my airblog, with a reports section. Though it will need a lot of work before there will be the mass of content I have in mind.
These days are memorable in different ways. First there is of course the news that there are only around 30,000 genes in our DNA (see Nature, http://www.nature.com/genomics) responsible for such a complicated being as a human. That apparantly means that there are more interactions and influences needed to explain life, according to many commentaries.
I don’t believe that. I think that it reduces complexity. After all, life is so abundant that the underlying mechanisms could not be that complex. Therefore, less genes means less complexity in the process of unraveling the interactions. I don’t say the unraveling process is simple!
Another memorable event is the soft landing on Eros (http://near.jhuapl.edu/). So ‘low budget’ doesn’t mean that the results are of less value. I think it is a spectacular result. Congratulations to NASA.
I have added an archive (see at right). All texts have a definitive URL on that page.
(update: this was in the self-made version: see Achived Version of how it looked like)
The first section of this blog that becomes operational has its origins in my boyhood. I then was a fervent aircraft spotter. Don’t ask me why, but it has something to do with collecting, adventure, technical interest, romanticizing flying, freedom, travelling, competition, a bit of anti-establishment and many more I could not think up now.
When I left university and started working, back in the eighties, I more or less left the habit of visiting airports for plane spotting. That was also because my telelens broke down, my budget for photographic material was limited, and because of the lack of computer power to assist me with the huge pile of information. I once told a friend that I would resume spotting as soon as I had a database at hand.
Nevertheless I admitted myself to make notes when at an airport, while travelling. And of course I still had my notes and photographs from those earlier days.
At the end of 2000 I decided to take up the habit of plane spotting again and to start publishing my reports on the internet. Publishing should follow the model of a blog, and I called it “Airblog”, a word I herewith coin, because I think nobody used it before.
First entry will be on french squirrels and an aircraft carpenter, to be published the next couple of days in this separate blog. Enjoy, in case you like aircraft, and spotting in particular.
Back in 1996 I had my first experience with internet, in the city library. And from 1997 on I had internet at my office desk. Though I was not such an early adopter, it was at a fairly early moment, and a lot happened on the internet then. And since, of course.
At first I used internet to extract for information only. At work I loaded HTML pages onto floppies and transfered them to my computer at home. I also did print out a lot.
In those years I also did some very basic essays, using information from articles, some of which I had collected since my school days. At the same time I was trying to cope with those piles of information by archiving them in some kind of database.
In May 1998 I came across Peter Landry’s website Blupete, He is a lawyer based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. And I new at once that this was an important model, a blueprint, for the website I had in mind. For one, he was clearly interested in more or less the same subjects as I am. And further, he used linked essays as the main body for his website. In his own words:
My purpose in writing these pages is to express that which interests me in my life and to educate myself in the process.
The next year, 1999, I entered the internet work force as a content master at the Amsterdam Exchange. And from then on I had the opportunity to experience the internet to the full extent.
I learned who were the gurus, like Jakob Nielsen and Lawrence Lee. Both were using a form of communication that imme.diately struck me for its model. Nielsen posted, and still does, comments and links on his work. He also combines them with bi-monthly essays on internet usability. Lee’s Tomalak’s Realm once was THE source for the hottest stories on internet technology, internet economy and internet marketing, published every day. See 1999 interview on WebWord. In fact he had what we now call a blog. (Update: for an overview of those early “bloggers” see Julia May in Pelfusion.com May 2010)
The model I had in mind was now almost complete.
Since 2000 I have came across a growing number of so called weblogs or blogs. And from then on I knew how my model for a website should look: a weblog that had to be regularly updated with thoughts, experiences and references, either based upon on-line or printed sources. And to combine that with more in depth stories and reports. It should also have to use the minimalistic approach that is so strongly promoted by Nielsen.
On “story telling” Nielsen wrote in his Alertbox of 1 October 2000: Content Creation for Average People:
To take the Internet to the next level, users must begin posting their own material rather than simply consuming content or distributing copyrighted material. Unfortunately most people are poor writers and even worse at authoring other media. Solutions include structured creation, selection-based media, and teaching content creation in schools.
Not to mention learning English up to a very high level.