Olifante's Lair

del.icio.us linkroll

I'm switching to del.icio.us for quick posts. There's a new linkroll in the right-hand column that will always hold my 15 most recent del.icio.us favorites.

Startup School Impressions

It's 6 a.m. and I've been tossing and turning for the last hour. That's what you get from drinking too much champagne while helping an uncle configure his Mac for web and mail. Actually, maybe it's all Paul Graham's fault, since most of the ideas jumping around in my mind have to do with his Startup School from two weeks ago. I decided I might as well get up and write that post I've been wanting to write ever since I got back from Boston. All in all, It was quite an experience.

I almost didn't make it to the US. It was only the night before my flight to Boston that I found out that my perfectly valid Portuguese passport was no longer good enough to get into the States. Since last April, US visa waivers only apply to holders of machine-readable passports. Next morning at 8 AM I was standing in line in front of the US embassy to try to get an entry visa. When I finally got in, I found out that the computer system was down, and that the list of requirements for getting a visa was so long that there was no way I was going to get one that morning. I switched to plan B and tried to get a new passport issued in 2 hours instead of the usual minimum 24 hours. Things didn't look good when I got to the "Governo Civil de Lisboa": Their computer system was also down, and they told me my chances of getting a new passport in time for my flight were very slim. Fortunately, at 11:45 it finally started working, and I got a brand new passport just in time to catch my 2 PM flight. I left wondering what kind of shared distributed system that was causing problems both at the US embassy and the local passport issuer. Maybe some kind of Interpol felon database...

I got to the Harvard Science building next morning at around 9:15 and joined a nearly packed auditorium. I didn't catch much of the first talk by Trip Advisor's founder, although it sounded interesting. I took a good look around: Most people seemed to be in their early twenties and the audience was overwhelmingly male. I saw 10 to 20 people who might be women, and discovered later that some of them were just guys with long hair (in his talk, Paul Graham came up with an interesting explanation for why so few women start tech startups). Many in the audience were using laptops, particularly Apple laptops - mostly Powerbooks, with a few scattered iBooks. Many seemed to be engaged in collective note-taking with SubEthaEdit. I tried to join in, but for some reason it didn't work. I also tried use Bonjour iChat to see if anyone was talking about the conference, but although I could see a lot of users I couldn't chat with anyone. A few other Mac users had the same problem.

The day went by pretty quickly as I was engrossed in the presentations, a total of 13 from 9 to 5. Topics included Intellectual Property, Legal Issues, Economics, Venture Capital and Finance for Startups (I actually found this last one quite interesting). Most speakers were quite good, some were excellent. Steve Wozniak was amazing, and was the only speaker to get a well deserved standing ovation. The Yahoo guy was perhaps the least exciting of all speakers, I found it hard to pay attention to what he said. Stan Reiss was in my opinion one of the best speakers, presenting a fascinating account of how Venture Capital firms work and why they can be useful. Olin Shivers also did an excellent, gripping presentation covering a lot of stuff, including a critique of VCs with the über-quotable headline "VCs: soulless agents of Satan or just clumsy rapists?". I managed to ask Paul Graham a question in his keynote's question round ("yes, you, the guy in the orange shirt"): "if you have an idea you believe is valuable, how hard should you try to protect it, and who can you share it with?". Paul answered with some good advice, but I still asked him, tongue-in-cheek, "should I tell you?", to which he promptly replied "No!!", drawing a round of laughter.

A lot of interesting data entered into my brain, hopefully some of it stuck. Fortunately I can always recap with the online slides, the mp3 podcasts and the assorted notes. The best part of the conference, however, was the social networking that took place in and around it, and the sheer buzz and energy that people seemed to share. Although most people left at the end of the conference, a few dozen people remained clustered around some of the speakers, asking questions and exchanging ideas. I had a nice burrito at some Mexican place near Harvard Square (Felipe's something?) with a bunch of them, and we had fun discussing tools, languages and startups. One of them was a Google guy who earlier had declined to answer a couple of questions I asked, saying "I don't have clearance for answering that".

Paul Graham

I was lucky enough to be invited by Paul Graham at the end of the conference to show up next day at Y Combinator's open house - I think he was so amazed that I had come all the way from Europe (I was one of only 4 europeans at the conference) that he thought I deserved a break. Y Combinator is about half an hour on foot from Harvard Square, and is housed in a small one-floor square building. From the outside it doesn't look like much, but inside it's very pleasantly laid out and decorated - I took a few photos with my phone camera. It seems that Paul's aesthetic sense doesn't only apply to computer code, which is not altogether surprising given that he's also a painter. Around 30 people were there, about a third of them members of the Summer Founders program. I met a lot of interesting and interested people, who were discussing their projects. I don't yet have a project of my own to discuss, so we discussed practices, tools and languages, same as the day before. What emerged from the discussions at the open house and later around dinner was a kind of consensus: nobody at the Startup School seems to consider using anything other than agile programming languages. No mention was made by anyone I talked to of using Java, C# or other staticly typed languages, but also no mention of Perl or even PHP. The only credible contenders seem to be Lisp, Scheme, Ruby and Python, at least for this crowd (applications for Startup School were selected by Paul, who has a generic dynamic language bias and is a Lisp evangelizer). Oh, and EVERYBODY's heard about Ruby on Rails, most are interested, many are already using it. I've been learning Rails too, and I have to agree: it's a wonderful tool.

So, apart from meeting celebrities, learning stuff, having fun, meeting people, discovering Boston and spending a lot of money on air flights and hotels, what did I get from this conference? Well, most of all a sense that the time is pregnant with opportunities, and the sooner you have something you can show other people the better. The fact that so many clever and dynamic people believe this and are doing something about it really excited me and gave me the confidence and the energy to do something of my own. One of the guys I met at Y Combinator repeatedly said "We're crazy! This is all crazy". In a way he's right: most of us will fail. Nevertheless, I still left Boston feeling that it was sheer insanity not to try to act on my ideas.

Many thanks to Paul Graham for conceiving and organizing this new kind of event. I hope it will inspire other events of the same kind, particularly in Europe where people as not as interested in entrepreneurship (probably someone other than Paul will have to do it - his plans are to eventually do another Startup School on the West Coast, and perhaps later in China). I'm confident many a doubter will be more eager to dive into the water after such an experience.

R.I.P. Covil do Olifante

"O Covil do Olifante" is dead - long live "Olifante's Lair", this blog's new title. It didn't make sense to hang on to a Portuguese title for a blog that has mostly shifted to English.

Linkies

From now on, when I read something interesting that I want to share but don't have anything useful to say about it or the time do it, I'll stop censoring myself and just post the links, using the prefix "Linkies" in the subject.

Interview Meme

Tobias Sargeant is trying to jumpstart a new meme. The idea is that people can leave a message in for instance my blog asking to be interviewed by me, the catch being that I then get to choose the five questions that are to be answered.

He picked up my comment in his LiveJournal and gave me five questions. Here they are, along with my answers:

1) I'm curious: how did you find this post, and why did you decide you wanted to be interviewed by a complete stranger?

Your blog has been in my bloglines blogroll for some time. I guess I imported it because it was listed along with a bunch of other Python blogs. I wanted to be interviewed by someone else because frankly writing monologues and rants only takes you so far. When I started my blog, I hoped it would become a catalyst for conversations, interesting conversations with interesting strangers. So far I must admit I haven't done terribly well in that regard.

2) You say (I think) that you never want to learn objective-c, and yet you use a mac, and program in Python. What turns you off objective-c?

I don't remember if I ever said anything about Objective-C, but the reason I wasn't thrilled by it is that it is still C, i.e. it forces you to do manual memory management. I never really became fluent in either C or C++, so I try to avoid the paths that involve mastery of even a subset of those two languages. However, I have recently learned Smalltalk (the Squeak version), and I was flabbergasted. What an amazing language! Maybe I'll revise my opinion and learn Objective-C anyway, but my money for MacOSX tinkering is on the Python bridge, Bob Ippolito's extraordinary PyObjC, which I hope Apple will eventually officially bless.

3) Do you have any opinion on Australia's current and Portugal's historical relationship with East Timor?

I was badly impressed by the Australian government's selfish attitudes towards Timor before the independence, kow-towing to Indonesia across the board. Admittedly, Australia has atoned for this attitude quite a lot since E. Timor became independent, but the recent strong-arm tactics in the Timor gap negotiations show that playing nice still isn't a major element in Australia's foreign policy. I have also been terribly disappointed by Australia's support for the war on Iraq, but my country also jumped on that bandwagon, so I can't really point the finger.

4) What do you think is Portugal's best aspect? Its worst?

Best aspects: we're tolerant, flexible, open-minded and resourceful. Worst aspects: we're too undemanding of ourselves and others, worry too much about what others think, and we are too ennamored of caustic, destructive criticism. Did I mention Portugal is a wonderful country? And Lisbon a beautiful city? You should come visit some time.

5) What's your favourite Greg Egan novel, and what similar writers would you recommend?

I think I only read Greg Egan's Permutation City, which I loved. It falls short of being a great novel - I think the story loses steam and consistency halfway through. It is however filled to the brim with amazing ideas taken to astonishing extremes, and I thoroughly enjoyed this book for that reason. Egan is a brilliant and imaginative man, an intellectual dreamer's dreamer, and I certainly hope to read more of his books. As for similar writers, I think Neal Stephenson is exploring some of the same ideascape in his books Diamond Age and Snow Crash, with an additional nanotech angle. Although not one my favorite writers, in his Gateway series Frederik Pohl also explores some of the same ideas regarding Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Human Intelligence, mind-uploading, etc. By the way, I always mix up the two Gregs, and Greg Bear is also a great writer. His novel "Eon" is probably the most mind-expanding hard sci-fi I've read in the last few years. Stephen Baxter's "Flux" is also a great novel (set in a neutron star), although I've been disappointed by some of his other books.

That's it for now. This was fun, but I've gotta go pack my bags for my wedding trip to China.

Mais 10.000 hits em 3 meses

Em 2005-02-03 comemorei a passagem da fasquia dos 20.000 hits acumulados por este blog desde a sua inauguração em 2003-12-09. Hoje por acaso lembrei-me de consultar as estatísticas de acesso ao "Covil do Olifante", e fiquei surpreendido por constatar que três meses mais tarde já cheguei aos 30.280 hits acumulados. Fazendo as contas, o meu blog teve ao longo da sua vida uma média de cerca de 57 hits por dia. No entanto, se fizermos a média dos últimos três meses tenho cerca de 106 hits por dia. Parece que apesar de não ter escrito muito nos últimos meses, as visitas continuam a aparecer. Bendito Google, abençoado sejas entre os motores de busca, já que quase todas as visitas chegam por teu intermédio.

Bloglines

Betterdays has a nice illustrated guide to Bloglines called Using Bloglines (or How to keep up with dozens of blogs everyday).

Reading more than a dozen blogs on a periodical basis by manually visiting their sites with a browser is a great way to lose your mental sanity. That's what News Aggregators are for. Enter Bloglines, the king of news aggregators. When I discovered it, I immediately abandoned NetNewsWire, which was and remains one of the best news aggregators for MacOSX. Why did I do it? Because Bloglines is a web application, meaning I can access it from any machine. I regularly move between Macs, PCs and Solaris machines, and Bloglines allows me to keep track of all the stuff I've already read, showing me only the new and unread items. I also use Bloglines for managing my blogroll, i.e. the list of blogs shown on the right-hand side of this blog. Bloglines also lets me publish my blogroll on their site: here's olifante's feeds.

Bloglines actually isn't the first web-based news aggregator: the first one I used was Geekboys, a Swedish site that didn't last long. I later moved to Fyuze, then to NewsIsFree, then back to Fyuze, and later to locally installed news aggregators. What sets Bloglines apart from those is its ease of use and good graphical design. I can manage my subscriptions in an explorer-like tree panel, allowing me to keep track of many more blogs than before (over a hundred now). Bloglines gives a much more efficient way of wasting even more time. Procrastinators of world, you know you want it!

Which language is home?

In That's why I blog in English too, André talks about the reasons he blogs in English: International Recognition, Networking and Conversation. I would put my reasons in a single expression: Community of Interest.

When I started a blog, nearly two years ago, I thought long and hard about the language I was going to use. Logic told me I probably should be blogging in English, but I felt that would be a betrayal, a desertion from my language and my local community. So I followed my heart and wrote almost exclusively in Portuguese, hoping to discover fellow Portuguese bloggers with a shared interest.

Unfortunately, I eventually came to the conclusion that most people in the Portuguese blogosphere were not interested in what I had to say. That could very well be entirely my fault, of course, and possibly that won't change by moving to English. What's more difficult to ignore is that most of the blogs I read and would like to correspond with are written in English, and most of the stuff I quote is in English. It's not much use writing in Portuguese if you limit your potential audience to people who are at ease in both English and Portuguese.

I slowly came to the conclusion that virtual communities on the web are often more defined by common intellectual interest than by shared cultural background or language. Most blogs gravitate around a few chosen topics. Globally, these topics may be of potential interest to tens or hundreds of thousands of passionate people. When you confine yourself to the boundaries of a small or medium-size language, however, your potential community shrinks dramatically, possibly to a few hundreds who most likely are not even aware your blog exists, and likely never will be.

Of course Portuguese isn't such a small language, but if you restrict yourself to European Portuguese (pt-PT) it shrinks from 200 million to 10 million speakers. Usually Portuguese people don't enjoy reading Brazillian Portuguese (pt-BR). It's actually a bit weird, since written pt-BR is actually closer to written pt-PT than spoken pt-BR to spoken pt-PT, but most people in Portugal are at ease with spoken pt-BR due to frequent exposure to Brazillian television programs. Written pt-BR is close enough to written pt-PT to be emminently understandable, but different enough to jam the mental parser and seem like slightly incorrect pt-PT. When we move to technical matters, the communication barrier is worsened by the fact that a lot of English loan words are used, and Portuguese-speaking communities on both sides on the Atlantic often settle on a different set of words that are retained in the original English and another set of words that are translated, often in different ways. Thus "delete" becomes "deletar" in pt-BR and "apagar" in pt-PT, "file" translates to "arquivo" in pt-BR and "ficheiro" in pt-PT, etc...

Furthermore, it seems like the best and brightest tech bloggers naturally gravitate towards the English-speaking blogosphere, and for good reason too: it's very difficult to replicate the critical mass of the anglo-saxon blogosphere. The network effect means that the more people blog in English, the more attractive it becomes to blog in English.

Although I haven't written about it before, I decided a few months ago I would use the language that is most adequate for each topic. When I write about local politics and events in my geographical community, I use Portuguese. When I write about specialized or arcane stuff, I use the language with the widest reach, the language of my intellectual community. Right now that means English, but who knows, in a few decades maybe it'll be Mandarin (which I started learning around 6 months ago, but that's a subject for another post).

Dar a Cara

A partir de hoje, o Covil do Olifante passa a ter um rosto. Na sequência de algumas questões que mencionei nesta posta, todas as páginas do meu blog passam a ostentar a minha tromba no canto superior direito:

Entre as 95 teses do Cluetrain Manifesto, destaco duas:

3. [...] A voz humana soa aberta, natural e livre de constrangimentos.
5. As pessoas reconhecem-se como tal por esta voz.

Espero que este passo sirva para consolidar o carácter humano da minha voz. Acaba assim com alguma pena minha o reinado algo críptico do meu anterior ex-líbris:

Requiescat In Pacem.

Vou no entanto continuar a usar neste blog a identidade Olifante para assinar todo o conteúdo por mim introduzido. O meu objectivo não é manter o anonimato, muito pelo contrário. Embora o anonimato permaneça uma opção importante em situações limite, em sociedades modernas o seu uso poucas vezes se justifica.

Apesar de teoricamente o anonimato constituir uma arma importante em relações de poder fortemente assimétricas, em muitos casos serve simplesmente de capote à cobardia. Por outro lado, o anonimato tem a grande desvantagem de impedir a construção de uma identidade, que é precisamente o que estou a tentar fazer com este blog. O anonimato dificulta o diálogo, já que elimina a possibilidade de criar reputações que sirvam de contexto a novas conversas com novos interlocutores. Parafraseando o cartoon anterior, o problema fundamental é este: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're *NOT* a dog".

Por outro lado, a adopção transparente de uma identidade física significa que doravante todas as interações passam a ser desequilibradas: a maioria dos meus interlocutores saberá muito mais sobre mim do que eu sobre eles, sem que eu possa fazer grande coisa para alterar esta situação sem recusar o diálogo. O aparecimento dos motores de buscas veio amplificar estrondosamente este efeito. Como profissional liberal, é garantido que qualquer potencial empregador introduzirá o meu nome no Google antes de sequer pensar em contratar-me.

Não estou disposto neste momento a abandonar o pouco controlo que tenho sobre a minha identidade, e vou por isso continuar a optar por uma terceira via: a do pseudonimato. O pseudonimato permite-me manter um apontador para a minha identidade física que me deixa construir uma identidade online que posso revelar selectivamente.

Como é óbvio, a publicação da minha fotografia significa que a minha identidade física passa a ser um segredo de polichinelo, facilmente acessível a qualquer pessoa suficientemente motivada, mas a camada de indirecção introduzida pelo pseudonimato permite-me preservar algum controlo e manter o equilíbrio entre o "tudo" da identidade nua e o "nada" do anonimato.

Cute Quotes

James Tauber has a blog named James Tauber : journeyman of some. The expression is a twist on the familiar "Jack of All Trades, Master of None":

I'm not a jack of all trades.

I'm not a master of none.

I'm a journeyman of some.

I still prefer Bolt Cranks' twist:

I am not a jack-of-all-trades. I am an explorer.

as well as my own twists:

Jack-of-all-trades, choices in spades.

or:

Jack of no trade, master of one;

Choose the wrong one, you're fucked.

23? ROTFL!!!

The 100 Funniest Jokes of All Times

74, 84, 86 and 88: LOL!!

8, 26 and 52: :-)

94 and 99: WTF?!

My absolute favorite is number 23, a one liner by Henny Youngman:

I was so ugly when I was born, the doctor slapped my mother.

Everytime I start to visualize this scene, I burst into loony laughter. Here's a couple of other notable shorties from the GQ list:

I went to the psychiatrist, and he says "You're crazy". I tell him I want a second opinion. He says, "Okay, you're ugly too!"

After 12 years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes... He said, "No hablo ingles."

20.000 Hits Submarinos!

Hoje o "Covil do Olifante" ultrapassou a fasquia dos 20.000 mil hits acumulados, de acordo com as estatísticas do TypePad.

Desde a sua inauguração em 2003-12-09 que o tráfego deste blog vem crescendo paulatinamente, e ultimamente tem sido normal ter mais de 150 visitas por dia. É claro que isto é uma ninharia quando comparado com os dois gigantes da pequena blogosfera portuguesa: O Barnabé e o Abrupto recebem rotineiramente para cima de 10.000 visitas diárias cada. No entanto, 150 leitores não deixa de ser uma audiência electrónica superior a qualquer audiência física que alguma vez tenha tido, e aqui reside o milagre do blog como micro-publicação digital: Com recursos muito modestos, qualquer um pode hoje em dia rotineiramente ter audiências que estavam antigamente reservadas a personalidades públicas ou a determinadas actividades profissionais (jornalismo, ensino, etc.).

Embora no cômputo global o meu blog tenha tido sucesso, há algumas coisas que não funcionaram como desejava. Esperava que o meu blog permitisse construir diálogos e não solilóquios, e neste aspecto falhei rotundamente, salvo honrosas excepções (olá Aristarco e António!).

A esmagadora maioria das visitas ao meu blog chega por intermédio de motores de busca, e embora escrever para o Google seja uma actividade louvável, sinto a falta de interlocutores com voz humana, e não de simples visitantes que chegam, lêem o post indexado pelo Google e partem para não mais voltar.

No entanto pode ser que esteja enganado e existam frequentadores habituais. A ausência de feedback dá por vezes uma percepção distorcida - os estudos nestas áreas costumam indicar que por cada 100 leitores, há geralmente apenas 1 a 5 que interagem com o autor. Por isso, se vocês andam por aí, dêem um ar de vossa graça, só para saber se existem!

Além das visitas silenciosas, existe ainda a questão das visitas não-visitantes: Graças à magia da Sindicância há quem leia o "Covil do Olifante" usando um agregador de feeds, como o fantástico Bloglines (talvez a web-application mais importante de 2004). Como os meus posts estão disponíveis na íntegra em RSS e em Atom, há leitores que nunca cá põem os pés e portanto não são contabilizados pelos meus contadores. No entanto não deverão ser muitos, a julgar pelos 3 macacos que assinam o meu blog no Bloglines (eu sou um deles, e o António é outro!).

Talvez por ter andado a meditar nestas questões, a frequência com que escrevo no meu blog abrandou bastante no final de 2004. Cheguei à conclusão que há várias razões para a coisa não ter resultado inteiramente:

• O facto de escrever em Português enquanto que o meu Peer-group é esmagadoramente de expressão inglesa, como se pode constatar no meu Blogroll;
• O facto de o blog não ter um enfoque claro provavelmente não ajuda a fidelizar os frequentadores, embora não tenha a certeza se quero ter um blog especializado;
• O facto de o próprio blog ser anónimo não ajuda. Quem quer interlocutores humanos deve antes de mais apresentar-se como humano. (Seria mais correcto chamar-lhe pseudónimo em lugar de anónimo. Costumo responder aos emails com a minha verdadeira identidade, e utilizo um pseudónimo para me esconder não das pessoas mas sim dos motores de busca.)

Felizmente há ideias que começam a estar mais bem formadas e já tenho algumas decisões alinhavadas. Falta agora o tempo para as implementar.

Bloglines meme

For what it's worth, here's my take on the Bloglines meme for my blog. These are the top related feeds mentioned by Bloglines:

1. Magonia
2. Dave Shea's mezzoblue
3. Asterisk -- Summaries
4. Nick Bradbury
5. kottke.org remaindered links
6. sken | externals
7. Neil's World
8. Veerle
9. CSS Vault Gallery
10. SimpleBits
11. Daring Fireball
12. Gizmodo
13. Boing Boing
14. Tales from the crib
15. little things of life (sken.be)
16. 7 seconden
17. reddeyez
18. Het Pakket
19. Sepi
20. Rigoureus
21. Percept
22. kapingamarangi mainblog
23. Branchleft

Unfortunately, the only ones I usually read are nos. 2, 5, 11 and 13, and for some reason several Dutch blogs are mentioned - go figure.

Incidentally, I recently removed BoingBoing from my Bloglines subscriptions - too much fluff and fun stuff for me, I guess.

The Python snippet was very handy, but please remember to save the source code for the "related links" html frame, instead of simply copy-pasting the text into a Python prompt. Python newbies should perhaps try this recipe:

1. Save the "related links" page into a file as "/some/directory/a.html" or "C:\some\directory\a.html"
2. (Install Python from http://python.org)
3. Type "python" at the command prompt
4. Type "s = open('/some/directory/a.html').read()" or equivalent
5. Type "import re"
6. Type the following:
   print '<ol><li>'+'</li>\n<li>'.join(re.findall(r'<h2.*>(<a href=".*?">.*</a>)</h2>',s))+'</li></ol>'
7. Copy-paste the resulting output into your new post
8. Millions rejoice!
9. ?
10. Profit!

blogs.sun.com

I used to like 'em | Metafilter

Pouco depois de ter contratado o Tim Bray, guru de XML e uma das estrelas da blogosfera, a Sun seguiu o exemplo da Microsoft e lançou o blogs.sun.com, um serviço destinado a incentivar a utilização de blogs públicos entre os seus empregados. Um dos leitores do Metafilter faz um comentário perspicaz:

Monitoring employees web habits must be prohibitively difficult and futile. If employees are *voluntarily* posting their web habits, then they are not at their desks surfing for porn.

Qualquer dia as empresas vão achar estranho que alguns dos seus empregados não estejam em auto-aprendizagem constante. Coisas como a limitação da utilização da internet vão parecer bizarrias dignas da idade média.

Desde que deixei a Sun em Dezembro de 2002, a companhia tomou várias decisões dolorosas mas vitais:

• Sun, AMD announce plans for line of low-cost servers - a aliança com a AMD e a viragem para x86
• Sun Java Desktop System - a viragem para o Linux
• Sun confirms plans to open source Solaris - a "libertação" do Solaris

Falta ainda tomar a decisão mais difícil: libertar o Java, a jóia da coroa da Sun. Parece no entanto que a tão desejada "libertação" do Java já não está longe.

Arredondamento do Quadrado

Devo confessar que só recentemente comecei a explorar a blogosfera nacional. Hoje em dia tendo a ler quase exclusivamente livros em Inglês, e a esmagadora maioria da informação electrónica que consumo vem da Web de expressão inglesa, que continua a constituir a maior, mais antiga e mais rica fatia do ciber-espaço. Embora escreva bem em Inglês, optei deliberadamente por escrever o meu blog em Português, porque apesar de todos os cosmopolitanismos, continuo a encarar este país, este povo, esta cultura e esta língua como a minha pátria afectiva e física, mesmo se a minha pátria intelectual é o trans-culturalismo.

Com tantos e tão nobres sentimentos patrióticos, pode parecer bizarro conhecer tão mal e escrever tão pouco sobre a blogosfera portuguesa. Decidi começar a explorar a comunidade electrónica portuguesa e investigar o que os nossos bloguistas escrevem.

Um dos blogs mais conhecidos e lidos em Portugal é o Abrupto, da autoria do conhecido euro-deputado do PSD José Pacheco Pereira. (Talvez devesse ter usado o título de "Vice-Presidente do Parlamento Europeu" com que gosta de assinar as suas habituais crónicas de Quinta-Feira para o jornal Público). Devo confessar que o Abrupto me desiludiu: ao contrário das crónicas do Público, que leio com um misto de interesse e de exasperação, o blog de Pacheco Pereira parece privilegiar neste momento a poesia e a pintura em detrimento da discussão política. O que não tem nada de mal, mas confesso que actualmente não são esses os temas que mais me interessam.

Estranhamente, para alguém com tão grande interesse pela pintura, o Abrupto não é exactamente o supra-sumo da estética. As imagens e o texto aparecem um pouco ao molhe, e o layout e o esquema de cores usado não são francamente muito inspiradores. A versão do Blogger usada está já um pouco vetusta, havendo melhores alternativas para quem quer criar um blog não só com conteúdo mas também com forma apelativa, incluindo o novo serviço gratuito do Blogger ou o serviço básico do TypePad (€4 por mês): ambos disponibilizam uma série de elegantes designs, criados por alguns conhecidos profissionais de Web Design.

O programa A Quadratura do Círculo produziu mais um bloguista para além do Pacheco Pereira: O ciber-deputado do PS José Magalhães parece ter dois blogs, um pessoal, o veterano Ciberscópio, e outro profissional, o fresquíssimo República Digital, que foi aparentemente criado este mês. Não tentei avaliar a qualidade do conteúdo do Ciberscópio, pois a maioria dos artigos tem caracteres espúrios em lugar dos caracteres acentuados habituais na nosssa língua. Infelizmente este problema é bastante comum nos blogs lusófonos que usam o Blogger, que pelo menos até há pouco não lidava muito bem com caracteres fora das 26 letras do alfabeto romano usado na língua inglesa. Quanto ao design, é literalmente um pouco cinzento: sub-títulos cinzento escuro sobre fundo cinzento claro não são do mais legível que há. O resto não ofende mas também não entusiasma.

Quanto ao República Digital, é demasiado cedo para me pronunciar sobre o conteúdo, mas o design também deixa algo a desejar: os artigos têm tamanhos de letra inconsistentes, a letra normal é demasiado pequena e os parágrafos não são espaçados entre si, o que torna a leitura pouco agradável.

Talvez o Abrupto e o Ciberscópio pudessem pedir uns conselhos ao Barnabé, um blog dinamizado entre outros por Daniel Oliveira do Bloco de Esquerda. O software usado é o excelente Movable Type e o design é elegante e criativo em todos os aspectos, desde o layout até à cuidada tipografia. Pelo que me disse o Daniel, foi criado por um amigo dele que é profissional de Web Design. Nota-se.

Para lá da forma, o conteúdo do Barnabé é delicioso, especializando-se na sátira mordaz com alguns requintes de malvadez. Abundam os bons-mots e as frases assassinas, mas há também alguma crítica mais séria de alguns dos nossos paladinos da guerra preventiva. A ler.

Software para Blogs

A página Blog Software Breakdown oferece uma análise comparativa dos diferentes programas e serviços disponíveis para quem quer criar e gerir um blog. O autor da comparação acabou por escolher o WordPress, que tem dado muito que falar desde a confusão com a alteração da licença do MovableType (no qual se baseia o TypePad que uso para manter este blog).

Todo o mundo é feito de mudança

e este blog não é excepção. Acrescentei algumas coisas à coluna da direita, incluindo um campo que permite efectuar buscas no Covil do Olifante usando o Google, um contador de visitas e alguns botões do Bloglines, o meu newsreader favorito.

Quem são os leitores de blogs?

A página Blogads: reader survey for blog advertising contém os resultados de um inquérito feito pela Blogads aos leitores de uma selecção de blogs (maioritariamente americanos e virados para a política). Aqui vão alguns factóides extraídos do inquérito:

• A esmagadora maioria (79%) dos leitores de blogs é do sexo masculino
• Os trintões constituem a faixa etária mais representativa (29%)
• Os profissionais de informática são a ocupação mais representada (11%), seguida dos estudantes (10%)
• Cerca de 21% dos respondentes afirma ter o seu próprio blog, um número surpreendentemente alto que pode ser o resultado do viés do inquérito (ver abaixo) ou simplesmente reflectir a natureza mais participativa da blogosfera relativamente a outros média
• Entre os blogs seleccionados, os que têm maior audiência são o DrudgeReport (81%), o Instapundit (79%), o Talkingpointsmemo (77%), o DailyKos (77%) e o Atrios (75%). O Atrios lidera ainda entre os que são lidos duas vezes ou mais por dia, com 38% dos inquiridos a confessarem este grau de dependência
• Os leitores de blogs são viciados nas compras online: 86% já comprou livros online, 64% já comprou música, 63% já comprou bilhetes de avião e 63% já contribuiu para uma causa ou campanha

Embora interessantes, estes resultados devem ser encarados com alguma cautela, por várias razões:

• Como companhia de publicidade, o negócio da Blogads consiste em "vender" audiências a anunciantes, o que indica um potencial conflito de interesses que pode reduzir a credibilidade dos resultados.
• Os leitores são todos provenientes de um pequeno conjunto de blogs que não constitui uma amostra representativa do universo de blogs. A amostra de blogs seleccionada é predominantemente americana e virada para a discussão de temas políticos, o que provoca uma representação provavelmente desproporcionada nos resultados do inquérito de leitores também americanos e interessados por política.
• A amostra de leitores não é representativa, pois é auto-seleccionada e não aleatória. Como o inquérito se baseia nas respostas dos leitores que por alguma razão se sentiram suficientemente motivados para responder ao mesmo, os resultados são válidos apenas para esse segmento da população total de leitores, não podendo ser estendidos a todo o universo de leitores de blogs.

Apesar de todas as advertências, eu próprio li os resultados do inquérito com interesse e atenção. Os resultados dizem coisas interessantes sobre um sector muito específico dos visitantes da blogosfera: aqueles que viram o anúncio ao inquérito e se sentiram suficientemente motivados para responder.

Atenção!

Na era da informação, a informação é um recurso tendencialmente gratuito e infinito, enquanto que a atenção é um recurso finito que constitui a verdadeira moeda de troca dos novos tempos. A página A Economia da Atenção contém apontadores para uma série de artigos que exploram este tema e propõem uma teoria do valor baseada na atenção.

Rule Number One is to pay attention. Rule Number Two might be: Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.

Howard Rheingold

If the Web and the Net can be viewed as spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or what rubrics such as "the information age" suggest. What counts most is what is most scarce now, namely attention. The attention economy brings with it its own kind of wealth, its own class divisions - stars vs. fans - and its own forms of property, all of which make it incompatible with the industrial-money-market based economy it bids fair to replace. Success will come to those who best accommodate to this new reality.

Michael H. Goldhaber in The Attention Economy and the Net

It lives!!!

Após quase três semanas de silêncio, o Covil do Olifante regressa hoje à vida. O facto de ter atingindo o plafond do meu único cartão de crédito significou que a minha conta do TypePad ficou bloqueada pouco depois do meu regresso dos EUA, e só ontem é que consegui resolver a situação.