Keeping a personal diary is a useful exercise, for several
reasons – Robert Fripp

I was writing an “essay” that referenced and quoted from other entries on this same site. I decided to call this sort of entry an excursion, since it provided a guided tour through a selected part of the topography of this site.

I had been under the impression that this version of the site had a new, neat feature. When writing a post you only have to categorise it under its final child category. This, it turns out, is only true up to a (not very useful) point.

Redesigning this site has taken a lot longer than I thought it would, but then I have been a lot busier than I expected. Relaunch date is August 1 2010.

Ralf skyped me yesterday to point out that I was being blogged about.

OwenKelly.net is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Notes about the various design elements, which I will otherwise lose.

This is an explanation of the reason for the existence of this page.

There is an additional navigational need for this site. It concerns the question of how a set of linked pages can be seen to form a larger piece.

I have spent a good deal of time in the last couple of months searching for the kind of online scheduling tools that I wanted; and I think that I have finally found them. Or, more specifically, I think that I have found a set of tools that will form the basis of what I need: AirSet.

Today Google announced Google Gears, and articles have sprung up like mushrooms explaining why this is a truly historic day. If this works as claimed then the articles may all turn out to be right.

About two years ago I began to ask how the students’ home pages could be used as a pedagogical resource. I began to look at how other institutions fared, with a view to surveying the possibilities and presenting a plan of action; and it was here that this project began.

Developing the idea of the memi involves juggling several concepts at once. One of these is data mining. The usual mechanisms for searching blogs are not necessarily sufficient to retrieve something that you stored years ago, and now only vaguely remember.

In May 2007 I changed the formatting for images to fit in with what I am calling version five of the site. More accurately, I finally standardised the formatting and made it fit the new, improved design logic. I also added a couple of styles that can be added to graphics, including a style for captions.

Is ownership the same as access, and if there is a clear difference then which is more important? This is a question that has been bothering my for weeks. It is concerned with what we can mean when we say that we “have” something. When we say, for example: “I have the information you need right here.”

something goes here later

This is the thesis, published directly from Scribd. It is an example of the kind of distributed publishing that I have written about in and around the thesis.

This is the thesis, published directly from Zoho. It is an example of the kind of distributed publishing that I have written about in and around the thesis.

This is an overview essay for the thesis about developing the Memi.

This is an overview essay for the thesis about developing the Memi.

something goes here later

something here please

something goes here

something here please

something goes here.

something goes here

This is the part of the final report of an eighteen month research project.

something goes here

something here please

something here please

This is an overview essay for the thesis about developing the Memi.

something goes here

something goes here later.

My thesis – Memi: a tool for cultural democracy – was “finished” last month, which is to say that it arrived at a point where I felt I could show it to people without leaving the room. It was accepted, and last Friday I walked on stage at LUME and received my MA certificate. You can read the thesis here, courtesy of Scribd or Zoho. You can also download a copy from Box.net.

This is a trail through entries in this web site that, taken together, constitute the core elements of a thesis for an MA in epedagogy at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland.

I am looking for the tools that I need to make the next upgrade to this site.

Mozilla Labs have a simple starting point: “a virtual lab where people come together to create, experiment, and play with new Web innovations and technologies”. They have a number of active projects, designed to improve the web. One of these is Prism.

Broadly speaking there are two approaches to navigating through a large store of information. I have deliberately used both strategies on this site.

As part of my ongoing project to move everything into the cloud, I have been looking for powerful and reliable online financial organisers and password protectors.

The OpenID scheme is something that I need to consider incorporating into the mimi specification that will become my MA thesis.

Try as you might at the beginning of a project, you are bound to get some detail wrong. Often this doesn’t matter, but sometimes it does. I got the permalink structure on this site wrong at the beginning, and the longer I left it the harder it became to fix. Today I finally fixed it.

Google is free and so Google is wonderful. Camie and I have began using Writely a year or so ago, and it worked very well indeed. We could both access each other’s files, and we could both work on the same report at the same time. Oddly, the idea of the memi militates against this in a subtle manner.

I have been wondering about the limits of the memi, and the limits of my pda. So far I have been concentrating upon developing the memi as an enhanced information storage tool for housing thoughts and ideas, and found material. Logically, though, there is an argument that it should also replace the suite of personal information management tools that currently live on my Sony Clie.

The site has scarcely been updated since the end of June. I managed to upload several posts from India but none of the accompanying photographs – and indeed none of the re-edited prose. Early this morning I reloaded the amended versions of the Goa pieces, so they make at least some sense now.

My decision the other day to investigate the applicability of software as a service for the memi project has had some interesting preliminary results. Zoho, Omnidrive, and Adobe Remix are just some of them…

I have just added the structured blogging plug-in to this site. It is available from StructuredBlogging and I am in two minds about it, even before I have used it. The idea is impeccable and important, but it feels as though the crew may be preparing to abandon ship.

On Sunday evening I got my first chance to look inside the Structured Blogging plug-in, and so I started to poke around. In this kind of situation my technique is usually task-based. In this case the process was made easy because there were at least three features that I really did want to change from the moment I installed the plug-in.

Having spent some time evaluating the Structured Blogging plug-in, and discussing it at length with students, I have become less and less certain that what it offers is worth the price. At first sight the ideas behind it, and its implementation, are impressive and thought-provoking. The fact, however, is that in fifteen months the plug-in has signally failed to set the world on fire.

Over the weekend I found out about Tabblo, a service from HP. Although it is advertised as “a place to make cool stuff with your photos”, they have something much more interesting in the back room.

This page contains the full licence, detailing the terms of use that apply to everything you find here (except for those things that have been borrowed and are thus subject to the terms of use applied by whoever and wherever they have been borrowed from).

now has to explain how TAIK’s “security” systems locked him out of his own meeting
is now out of admin hell and back doing online things
is one (big) step closer to Memi 1.0 – the portable lifespace

I think that the new version of the memi theme is now complete. The look and feel of the site is now almost completely as I intended it. The layout has a consistency that is based on the concept of doubling doubles that I may have mentioned earlier, and will certainly write up in a few days. I am ahead of my self-imposed schedule.

Entries about cultural prophecies, such as the claim that by the year 2020 we will all have implanted ID chips.

This week I have added two services to this site and one to Firefox. What they have in common is an alleged ability to make my life simpler by linking things together and saving me work.

The menus on this site are currently in a state of flux. Not all of them work, and not all of the entries here are currently available through any sensible method of navigation. This is because I am currently working on the next stage of developing the memi, and I am testing ideas live here.

As of today the site is running on WP 2.3.3, using the native tagging system. The menu bar shows version 4 of what is intended as a universal topic list for a personal lifelong dataspace. The entries on the site will soon be reclassified and hooked into the new structure.

Today the students in the Managing Information course told me that this site was completely invisible to Internet Explorer 7.

I have been trying to develop the structure of this site into a robust version that is complete enough to no longer require my explanations about its purpose to begin with an apology. I am now close to ready to bring out the sparkling wine. My current deadline for a version that will need no more designing and programming is Wednesday May 21 2008.

• Linden Labs re billing fiasco (31 Mar 08 at 2:29PM, Arcada) •••
• Breadcrumb navigation for single pages (31 Mar 08 at 12:40PM, Memi) •••
• Pay Visa bill (31 Mar 08 at 12:39PM, Personal)

…

• Remake category system (3 Apr 08 at 7:14PM, Memi) •••
• Upload finalised mem menu structure (2 Apr 08 at 4:08PM, Arcada)
• update Structured Info notes (1 Apr 08 at 3:41PM,

There are philosophical reasons why a memi is a good idea, and these can be discussed either theoretically or in terms of a generalised set of envisaged users. However there are also reasons closer to home: small, personal examples that can reveal more in some ways than carefully annotated, wider arguments.

Stefan mentioned the ideas behind wikimap this afternoon, and I had to confess that I had never heard of it.

Today I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.1. I was planning to delay this for some time but I needed to try out the new features for a project we are completing.

I upgraded about fifteen minutes ago, and all seems to be well. The upgrade is primarily concerned with bugfixes, and it seems to have fixed the bugs I had noted previously.

I saw an article about turning WP into a contact manager last Friday. This is interesting and is in some ways a parallel effort to the Prologue theme in that it seeks to extend the WP engine into another area.

I spent the morning up to my knees in php, because I had realised that the navigation inside this site was nowhere near flexible enough to demonstrate what I am talking about…