Features to look for that distinguish the different systems:

• collaborative filtering: voting, top10
• designer look, graphics design
• hierarchical categories, multiple belongings
• modules: blogs, forum, polls, ...
• submission approval: ease of member publishing

Mambo is meant for a small group, where each article requires human approval before publishing.

Drupal offers a balance, good for typical groups, where everyone's submission will be automatically published, but only the approved ones make it to the top page. Its drawback is the lack of multimedia content upload.

phpBB2 has the virtue of an intuitive interface, the same layout, predictable organization of content. It may be the easiest to learn and use.

phpNuke, PostNuke, and Geeklog has lots of modules, such as top10 or most recent in various categories. They lack the designer look, but good for large user community interested mainly in content.

Finally, I have registered with BGFweb to host my website.

Controls:

• tech-spirits.com:2082 - Control Panel
• tech-spirits.com:2086 - WebHost Manager
• tech-spirits.com:2095 - Web Mail : login using full email address: wj@tech-spirits.com

Sub-Domains:

• tech-spirits.com
• wjzhu.tech-spirits.com
• jz.tech-spirits.com/blog
• mrz.tech-spirits.com

April 20, 2004:
Designful-Living

• registered designful-living.com at 1and1.com for $6.
• create account at tech-spirits WHM (detail info emailed to admin)
• admin.1and1.com to setup DNS setting: name server changed to what tech-spirits says.
• wait for DNS to take effect, then I can play with being a regular client of tech-spirits

May 4, 2004:

• care-and-share.net to start faith-related communities in action.
• Hua-Lian.Net for Chinese communities.
  • 80-20 drupal
  • casb drupal
  • ibmwcc phpbb2
  • hlt drupal

May 29, 2004:

• Chinese-Christians.com, where .com is for community.
• ministry-technologies.com

In 2003, before my encounters to all the CMS systems, I thought about how to organize my ideas.

Organization:

• all thoughts will be in the form of html pages.
• with category, keywords, ...
• evolving home page serves as a hierarchical tree for navigation

Modify TheBrain to realize this structure.

Tone and style:

• never a "manual" of "what to do and how to do it" (people can decide for themselves.)
• but a sharing of my own life, thoughts, and decisions

Website:

• follow examples of good websites
• about this site: meta-data about the structure of the site itself
• start with text, evolve to multimedia.
• use graphics and sound as needed.
• Web publishing to establish my online identity, market the "WJZ Inc".
• More than a resume, but the essence of my e-self.

Categories:

• self-discipline: tempted to divide into "me" and "God + me", but I should demonstrate that faith and life are integrated.
• so instead, how about: "intelligence", "moral character", "practical psychology and learning theories"
• How about opening paragraphs on the 2 central subjects: "self" and " living in society"
• use of dewey system? No.

Topics: Physicist's version.
ego-centric view: 1-body, 2-body, many-body

• 1-body: Self. - intellectual development; technological gadgetry; learning and teaching; personality; relationship between any two person
• 2-body: 1+1 interactions: me + God, me + others;
  emotional development
• many-body: 1+N: society: making a living; influencing society; creative ideas of interacting with societ - build companies, communities, ...

Upon reflection, many of these ideas are now implemented in my CMS systems and the categories that I created in them.

Slashdot is still the best example of community-built personalized content. Too bad they lack:

• recommended list of urls and people
• personalized notebook that can save the links to stories in slashdot
• simple bookmarklet
• categorize your journal.

All the lacking are picked up by Furl. So reading Slashdot with a Furl account is the most powerful way to digest my daily digital content.

Furl, TinyURL, google, A9, ...

While people are focusing on search engines, etc, the two articles I furled yesterday on what really makes Google powerful both point out the fact that Google is a giant GooOS farming user behavior and other valuable information.

I see clearly the trend after SoftBank's 4 categories: after "created digital content", it is "interpreted digital behavior information". Google acts as a module that sits between the user and the vast sea of URL. Google delivers the search results, and profit from extracting (like a T-joint in plumbing) user behavior information. Similarly, Furl acts as a T-joint between the user and personal information database, and extracts user behavior that can turn into highly valuable information.

The future of the Info World are modules that deliver values to users, but extracts valuable information in the process. Hence, NLU and even understanding of lower level events (clicks, mouse positions) are the essential playing fields.

Given the idea to enhance a browser (such as Opera) with blogging abilities, I looked into Baidu to search for Chinese-made browsers, and encountered several interfaces that sits on top of IE5.

Google ads led me to ICEbrowser and Pluck, which has a nice layout of RSSfeeds, Blogs, and Web in one. However, Pluck sits on top of IE, and only serves RSS. It has the right layout for a blogging browser though.

A9 search into Pluck led me to Furl.net, which provides instant filing cabinet to any web page. They then allow search over personal histories. I am setting an account with them now.

WOW! Furl is a major replacement of my blogging from now on !!! It has everything that I planned for my new blogging/browser idea.

Other news communities:

• SciScoop || SciScoop - Exploring Tomorrow
• kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches

an entry on web annotation: Nu Cardboard: Annotation Blogging which links to channel c | the new hotness: Web Annotation: Reloaded, and Roger Eaton's AntWeb, and Blogger Parliament.

They have ideas on how to annotate the web, particularly by utilizing blogs. This idea is potentially revolutionary:

• rather that to rely on a central or distributed server with logins and security models (lot of reinventing the wheel), people are already blogging like crazy, with their favorite blog hosts and tools.
• the information is the same: when I write some comment, post to a forum, ... I am essentially blogging.
• browsers like Opera should integrate the functionality of a blogger tool, so that rather than relying on a third party bookmarklet, Opera would have a button to get to the BlogPad, another button to get the URL reference of a page, and other convenient buttons for frequent blogging needs.
• Opera can simply have a check box for "public" vs "private", so that a public post would send the blog info to a community (central server) that would know you have blogged (commented/annotated) on a certain page. This would allow anyone who wants to read comments on a certain page to read yours too.
• If there are too many comments for a page, there could be some ranking or filtering, whether by time, by focus - whether your blog links to one or many sites, by collaborative filtering, by access level, ...
• The above would have solved: system, hosting, community vs private blog, security, and blog tools. Search on one's history is also possible, since we'd be searching on our own blogs.
• Opera would have the option to have blog tool on the sidebar, just as the current notes would.
• It can add more features later, such as list of (possibly hierarchical) categories. Each post could be in any combination of the categories.

Experimented with a9.com:

• a9.com allows you to keep a history of the search queries only,
• and what websites you click from the a9 list.
• It does not keep your surfing history.
• The diary function, available only on IE and hence not useful to the real surfers,
• does not even work if I surf behind a firewall.
• That may be the only possible "history of websites surfed".
• A successful personalized surf-tool must allow you to search only on your entire surf history.
• Given that no web tool is able to access your history (built-in security in web access), a proper surf-tool would need to be like a spy-ware that communicates with the server and access your personal data.

A perfect surfing/searching tool needs

• annotation of web pages
• security controlled access to my history and notes
• ability to instantly share parts of my history/notes as webpages
• clustering technique for my history, to classify the sites I am interested in
• database-like access to my search history, so that I can search, e.g., only within the intersection of two categories.
• whether centrally stores on servers or distributed storage, it needs to be on the web, so that I can access my info on any machine.

Viewing our interaction with the web as a database transaction, such a system could be built from PHP an d javascript readily.

• The different fields of a database transaction for viewing and annotating a website:
• URL, content,
• our comments, the different assigned categories,
• date of access, dates of comments,
• brief navigational context (history of how I get to the site),
• whether I am logged in, what login name, access levels, ...
• Such info will be editable, of course, so that we have the option to keep or delete such info.

Then our interaction with the web is stored in database as a potential report of some sort of knowledge that we may want to document for future use.

Amazon's a9.com search engine offers annotation, but only on your search query. A more general web annotation is Gibeo Network - Community Web Annotation & Power Tools. Got an account setup there. Looked at one of the top sites: jeremie.com, and find the home-made php blog layout simple and appealing.
Drawbacks: any annotation is automatically public.

My ideal blog layout: list of topics on left frame, with detailed blog content on right frame. Top frame would offer categories. There should be tools available for database access to only certain topic combinations.