Tuesday, May 14, 2002

Much ado about blogging [functions of blogs--historic] "Some weblogs were personal diaries; others were free- form catalogs of personal obsessions; others were focused on one or another arm of the technology industry or Internet culture." " . . . Blogs express opinion. They're one-person pundit shows . . . " "Then there are those . . . [that] compile news and links on some specific subject -- and that, yes, sometimes break stories of interest to devotees of that subject. . . . There are those . . . that provide links with no opinion at all." 3:03:55 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Use the blog, Luke " . . . becoming a force that can make sense of the Web's infinity of links." " . . . weblogging has finally hit the mainstream. . . . more need for experienced guides." "The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is . . . about information management. . . . help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs." " . . . helping Google transform the Web from a disorganized mess into a more coherent universe of useful data." " . . . a conceptual limitation with most individual blogs, a limitation that is hard-wired into the software used by the great majority of webloggers: They are organized around time. . . . The beautiful thing about most information captured by the bloggers is that it has an extensive shelf life. The problem is that it's being featured on a rotating shelf. If there's a time element that I do care about, it's not the just-off-the-wires time of today's news. It's my time. It's what I'm doing right now." "If we had standardized tags for just five or six additional elements . . . you'd need keywords . . . a way to distinguish between positive and negative links . . . " " . . . [subscribe] by checking a box when you visit their site . . . watch the activity on sites . . . a connection machine . . . your blog analyzer . . . [would] do away with the dependence on front doors, and let your favorite bloggers come to you."   2:57:10 PM  Google It!  comment  []

Steven Johnson on "Emergence" . . . emergent theory and its relationship with the Web. "Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It's what happens when you have a system of relatively simple- minded component parts -- often there are thousands or millions of them -- and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up." "leader is probably the wrong word for people who start trends, early adopters. . . . They just are somewhere at a key point in the overall system of fashion, wherever that is, where they're connected to the right people, and what that core group decides ripples out very quickly through the whole system. So they're leaders in the sense that their ideas emanate from them, but they emanate in a much more distributed-network kind of way." " . . . four stages of emergence: first stage was people working on the problem without realizing they were working on the problem . . . second stage is when it becomes a field in itself . . . third stage is where people actually go out understanding the laws that run through these systems and start building things in a conscious awareness of those laws . . . fourth stage [is] when computer networks get to actually start having kind of a mind of their own . . . " "What has emerged in the weblog community is that I don't have to become an average Slashdot reader, I can say, I'm kind of like Cory, and I'm kind of like Steven, and I'm kind of like Dave Winer in a certain sort of way. I'll read their things, and they'll point me to the appropriate things, including Slash articles." "A blog tribe." " . . . can you see a point where all these little things add up to a system that wasn't planned, but fixes the problems by grouping together." " . . . there needs to be some other thing that comes along that holds all of that information and turns it into some higher level structure that can actually make sense of it all." 2:23:38 PM  Google It!  comment  []