They announced the 2011 Code for America Fellows in November. I was delighted to see a friend of a friend among them.  I think this is a great idea and am looking forward to see what they come up with for their cities, over the year.

Since it’s still January of 2011, I hope it’s not too late to point this out!  :-)

Right now I’m listening to my Classical Gas station on Pandora on my Pre, checking my calendar (without having to pause/close Pandora), and charging off my OLPC  XO laptop (where I’m composing this entry — the Pre keyboard works fine for me to compose short replies, up to a paragraph, maybe, but it’s not great for long compositions).  In a pinch, it works ok as a primary computer (there’s even a way to hack it to run a terminal window for command line/ssh joy, though I haven’t done that yet). I had pretty minimal wifi access on a recent beach vacation with my family, but I was able to keep up with my usual Web hangouts via the Sprint network my Pre  sees.  I’ve been able to read my email on my Pre inside a concrete auditorium.  Web rendering is fast and the landscape rotate and pinch/zoom and double-tap snap zoom (scrolling stays in the column selected) make it pretty easy even to read busy websites with 3 or more columns.

This is my first smartphone, but it’s hardly my first Palm — I started with a Palm IIIx pda, then moved up to a Zire after I dropped the IIIx on its corner.  I might still be on the Zire, but it started flaking out in March and pretty much went into a coma in April.  I was able to migrate my data each time.  The Classic emulator lets me run my favorite tools from my old Palm.  The Pre also syncs with my contact info from GMail and Facebook (after I enabled that), “stacking” the info from the different accounts so I can see it all together (automatically in most cases, but easy to link if it misses a connection between friends’ accounts). Most contact info is in the cloud, but there’s also an automatic backup of data I add to the Pre (though I haven’t had to restore from it yet, and it *doesn’t* save customizations such as settings tweaks to apps).

The Pre costs about $200 with a 2-year contract (Sprint, $70/mo for 450 minutes + unlimited data/texting/gps navigation).  With taxes and the insurance I signed up for, it’s running about $87/mo.  It’s not a must-have, but I’m having fun with mine.

Next, I’ll review the apps, and then the accessories.  In the meantime you can check out very detailed reviews and videos on PreCentral.net.  I’ve saved the most interesting articles from there and elsewhere in my links library with the Palm tag.

Since we started using the Confluence enterprise wiki platform at my current job, I’ve come to a better appreciation for the use of fields in wikis, particularly as I’ve worked more with wiki templates.  With hundreds of projects deployed on multiple tiers, it’s very important to have the information about the servers, infrastructure tools, and applications organized in a standard way, so we can find and share information more easily (especially when getting a 3 am page and troubleshooting a system).   Templates and field structures can certainly help with that.  For example, one could have a drop-down list of approved operating system versions to pick from on a server information page template.

I still think fields should be used judiciously (if at all) when trying to encourage wiki use.  When just trying to add some data, it can be very frustating to encounter a field mechanism that seems poorly designed, such as incomplete dropdowns or incorrect-seeming unalterable items (though sometimes these may be due to fundamental disagreements about the intended use of pages/information).   Some people will not have the time or patience to try to contact wiki admininistrators or other users to work out a fix to the field or a common understanding of the page; they may just give up and not make the contribution they were planning. I was happy to notice recently that LibraryThing had fixed the dropdown that had so annoyed me before.  There was a long stretch of time before that where I just wasn’t as enthusiastic about them.

Where there are wikis with multiple users and audiences, sometimes compromises will have to be made, or one path or another chosen in structuring input mechanisms.  Sometimes this just doesn’t happen fast enough to keep up with changes going on in the world.  Where possible, I recommend having some kind of an open notes section in addition to fields, so that there’s at least a hope of keeping the contributions flowing and finding the (up-to-date) info one needs.  Also, anyone with ownership of the page (or at least some feeling of responsibility towards its contents) should probably set up a notification so they’ll know if the contents change, and perhaps be able to address problems/disagreements in good time.

However, when I got to my local Costco, I was seduced by another Magellan — the Roadmate 1212 was selling there for a mere $89.00!  Seriously!  I’ve been driving around with it for a few weeks now, and thought I’d share my impressions.

Pros: Good battery life, fast address entry, highly readable screen/display, clear voice, reasonably good directions for the most part.  The UI is pretty much the same as my old Magellan, as far as I can tell.  This Magellan seems to have more POIs pre-programmed in than the last one.

Best improvement:  The address entry is screamingly fast compared to the other three GPS units I’ve used before.  Type-ahead, looks locally first, and simply fast fast fast.  In the parking lot at the store, it fired up before I put it on the charger (the on button is on top, not on the side like the old one, oops) and figured out where it was very quickly.  I programmed in the first two names of my home’s town (one over from the town we were in at the moment) and it filled in the rest of the town name/state, bam!  and paused for me to confirm before going on to the street name.  As soon as I’d put in the first two letters of the street, it gave me a choice of the four streets that started that way; no waiting required.

Cons: power plug design, still doesn’t know where my job or the library are.  The latter is disappointing, but easy to get around by just setting map points and programming those in to my address book instead of the street addresses.  The power plug, however, makes the cable coming out of the GPS point straight back, stiffly, in a way that I can’t just fit it on the tiny shelf in front of a dashboard dial I don’t care about.  I don’t like fooling with the mounting gear, and the dial solution had worked fine with my old Magellan (it leaned back and never fell out).

On the whole, I would say the Magellan Roadmate 1212 is great value for money.

I started using LibraryThing because I liked its tagging power (for browsing and searching). I also liked its less-commercial book pages, fondness for and willingness to work with libraries, and above-average books reviews from LT members, and book-based discussions (easy to find and see updates on discussions of one’s favorite books/authors). But mainly, I liked their approach to tagging. View one’s own tag cloud, author cloud, tag mirror, and community tags for books! Play with tag combinations to find very specific books! This last feature I especially like, because it combines the metadata from individual taggers to allow searches they might never have thought of trying to foster. One person might tag a book by what interests them about the author, another by something about the characters, another by the locale; the sky’s the limit. If enough people are tagging, useful and interesting information will bubble up, and the noise won’t matter — and what’s noise to one person might still be useful to another, and it’s all there.

Now, however, LibraryThing is rolling out its new Common Knowledge feature which uses fielded wiki technology. I don’t know how much effort this will take away from tagging by LT members; I intend to ignore this as much as possible (not easy, considering it’s on the book and author pages). Other people have written about issues with specific fields (e.g., binary thinking above does not work for some authors/collaborations). I know some people like it, and I know some of the issues may be smoothed out. However, the idea of one person at LibraryThing getting to decide what are valid values to allow people to put in for some of these fields seems like a step back to me. I’m afraid it will combine the worst of both worlds: rigid (“expert” knowledge determining categories/values, not necessarily so expert/authoritative in all cases, and prone to being outdated/inflexible) and error-prone (at least Wikipedia facilitates footnotes/cites/references for factual claims, and makes it easy to discuss potential changes with a discussion page per article … and offers RSS for both articles and discussion pages).

[Edit: removed scare quotes (see comments) and an unconstructive aside]

[Update!  I was happy to notice in 2009 that LibraryThing had fixed the dropdown depicted above.]