Seb's Open Research
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23 novembre, 2002
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Nancy White on group-forming and networks
"Networks, Groups, and Catalysts". Nancy White has a very relevant article from August 2002 titled "Networks, Groups and Catalysts: The Sweet Spot for Forming Online Learning Communities". In it she discusses how online communities form. She writes in her introduction,
"online community or online interaction is not the goal. It’s one means for helping groups achieve their goals. It is not necessarily about "online community" but what conditions and process are needed to enable communities to use the online environment."
[...more at group-forming: user blogs]
 10:46:09 PM
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Research on weblogs: getting funding?
Liz is thinking of applying for funding at the U.S. National Science Foundation to study blogs. Ideas on her mind include "designing new curricula, creating new professional publication models, sponsoring a conference, developing a new online resource center for microcontent publishing, etc, etc." Alex might be interested in such a thing...
This might be the first time that plans for a research grant application are unraveled in such an overt manner. I must say Ilike the approach.
10:43:17 PM
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The truth about RDF. "I am a disbeliever of anything that requires as much documentation, head-scratching, hand-waving, and eyes-glazing-over as RDF does in 2002. Forget the problems with the formats, that can be dealt with later, after you figure out how to explain it to someone who knows a lot about computers, networks, users, XML, HTTP, etc. If you can't explain it to me so that I understand what you're doing -- you've got a big problem.
It's a cute, and all-too-common tactic to say that people who don't get it are dumb. I'm not dumb, but RDF makes me feel that way. After all these years, I've concluded that if I can't understand it, it doesn't have much of a chance in the market. All the powerfully successful technologies of the past have had simple explanations anyone could understand. If RDF is one of those, I strongly believe it must too. Therefore I conclude that it isn't. [Scripting News]
10:29:47 PM
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22 novembre, 2002
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Designing Empowerment Epidemics
Virtue Viruses and Uplift Pattern Languages.
to quote Freeman Dyson :
"To help the poor from "the top down" is least likely to succeed. But science and technology are concentrated at the top, making top down the method of choice for those in power. The challenge, he said, is to find ways to help people by providing science and technology from "the bottom up." …Three successful "bottom up" approaches described by Dyson share an important trait: As they succeeded, they spread quickly. Dyson calls this "autocatalysis" -- a chemistry term meaning that as a chemical reaction proceeds, it automatically accelerates. When, for example, British farmers in the 1950s began using drying sheds to keep their harvests dry, the technology spread rapidly. "As soon as the sheds were shown to be effective, every farmer had to have one,"
Autocatalysis is a "key virtue to look for in any technology that claims to improve human welfare on a large scale," he added."
He introduces two profound questions:
1. How do we improve human welfare on a global scale?
2. What energy could “automatically accelerate” to fuel this improvement?
It seems to me that we can address #1 above by applying our knowledge of scale free networks to create a cascade of uplift. To do so, however, we need to figure out how to talk about uplift. One way to do this is to create an Uplift Pattern Language (UPL) which allows us to talk about patterns of uplift. This is modelled after Christopher Alexander's work on architectural patterns which has been adopted in the software community for software Pattern Languages. The Jini Community Pattern Language is an example of this applied to a community.
The Uplift Pattern Language would define patterns of uplift and their contexts, within a benegnostic framework.
One application of the UPL would be to create Virtue Viruses, which would be self-propagating, self-organizing activities/messages/events which would exploit the most powerful uplift patterns. Seligman's work on Values in Action provides some fuel for thinking about this. This also relates to Hirshmann's "Finding where Virtue is afoot" quoted by David Ellerman. [Tom Munnecke]
Not only do I find these thoughts from Tom exciting, but I think they also make a lot of sense. I for one would be willing to work on developing the Uplift Pattern Language. (Patterns are a lot of fun.) Who else is game?
10:57:03 PM
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21 novembre, 2002
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Microsoft: Peer-to-Peer beats Digital Rights Management any day
MS Researchers say P2P will always beat DRM. According to The Register (File swap nets will win, DRM and lawyers lose, say MS researchers), a paper from a group of Microsoft researchers says that "darknet" file swapping will always be able to share pirated files, no matter what DRM technology copyright holders use. The paper goes through the various options like watermarking and explains why they all will fail. This true even for DRM built into the hardware. The paper concludes that the only way for corporations to compete is to make their services more convenient and full-featured. We have known this all along, but it is pretty amazing to hear some Microsoft people say it. This paper is just the thing to refer to when the next congressional bill comes up to make DRM manditory, just explain to them that even MS says it won't work. [infoAnarchy]
Which reminds me of that great Gene Kan quote, "The only way to make music that cannot be copied is to make music that cannot be heard. The only way to make movies that cannot be copied is to make movies that cannot be viewed."
10:08:58 PM
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Where's the fertile soil for group-forming?
I've been thinking about the following question: Presumably, the different communities that already exist in society differ in their potential to spawn new groups. What are the already existing communities where a group-forming system would be likely to get a good amount of traction? Here are my thoughts on that. I hope to elicit yours.
I'll start off with a few observations. First, it seems fairly clear from our previous discussions that some sort of label or description is needed for a group to come together. In the case of meetup.com, for instance, labels are pretty simple, having two facets: geographic location and a label referring to an interest (which can be pretty much anything - examples: "Radiohead", "homeschooling", "philosophy" ...) [group-forming: user blogs]
10:05:29 PM
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A practical guide to finding like minds (or minds you like)
Wall Street Journal: ...Find a Blog.
"Where's Melvil Dewey when we need him? The 19th-century creator of the Dewey decimal system has helped generations navigate libraries. If only he could do the same for one of the 21st century's burgeoning media: Web logs, the diary-like Web sites also known as blogs.
Blogs mostly catalog their creators' musings, with links to related sites, and as such they can be as hard to categorize as the people behind them. They're occasionally ferocious or funny, brilliant or banal -- and they all want your attention. But with more than half a million of these sites out there and new bloggers appearing all the time, how can you find the ones worth the commitment of a daily click?"
This journalist has done a terrific job. Great tips and great links in there - and YULBlog (a site for Montreal bloggers) gets a mention. But he forgot one of the most powerful ways to find weblogs you'll like. Here goes, a Seb's Open Research exclusive. Visit Google and type one or two words describing something or someone specific that really interests you; append the word "blog" or "weblog"; click " Search ".
11:57:51 AM
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20 novembre, 2002
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Is Academia the A in 'Magic'?
Education Leaders Sacrificing Integrity. "How can we carry forward an honest debate on public policy if our universities have decided a priori to side with the military and the banks?" This is a serious question posed by a Montana State English professor as he bemoans such things as tied research, exclusive deals with coke, and the general abandonment of research for the sake of knowledge. The column is important in the sense that it explicity recognizes and endorses more than just an economic role for universities; it endorses the important social function of the institution. Unfortunately he ties this into the university's adoption of technology, a classic case of confusing the means and the motive. I so applaud his sentiment, but I wish he could understand that a tool like the internet can be used for social good as well as economic gain. By John Snider, The Missoulian , November 17, 2002 [OLDaily]
On Brainstorms I've seen people refer to a monstrous entity they call the Military Academic Government Industrial Complex. I think it makes for a nice, thought-provoking acronym.
3:15:01 PM
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Ten Reasons why People Stop Playing. Here, from Dragon (actual legal name of the principal of the below-extolled Academy of Play), are ten reasons why people don't play even though we could if we were grown up enough. [DeepFUN Weblog]
3:12:16 PM
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Footbridge is "a lightweight tool to mirror Radio categories to Advogato, LiveJournal, and Blogger API sites." [Scripting News]
Sounds interesting, but how about giving a motivating scenario?
3:07:43 PM
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Hoarding is for the weak. Xerox has apparently proven what all knowledge workers intrinsically knew anyway; that knowledge hoarding is detrimental. Via Column Two
A recent Xerox research report has found that high-performing employees don't tend to hoard information. According to the news summary: The idea that knowledge is power has been knocked on the head by researchers who claim that high-performing employees are more likely to be ones who proactively share information with their colleagues.
My own experience agrees 100%. I am personally more powerful in what I do when I collaborate and openly share with others. They provide essential critique, support and grounding for my thoughts. [thought?horizon]
I think there are exceptions to this "hoarding is for the weak" rule. When an organization is in decline you might see good people who for some reason can't or won't leave for greener pastures trying to save their butt by hoarding knowledge, in an attempt to make themselves irreplaceable.
3:05:49 PM
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Sir Winston Churchill. "The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning." [Quotes of the Day]
2:58:26 PM
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My popular pieces
Blogdex conveniently ranks your posts or stories by the number of links to them that it has found, so I figured that adding a continually updated list of reader favorites in my sidebar would be helpful for new visitors who want to find old stuff of mine that others found interesting.
The whole top block of the sidebar is actually designed as a welcome package intended for people who've just come to this blog and who want to size me up. I think the list of communities that follows also goes a long way towards defining what interests me. The overall goal is to help people quickly get a sense for what they can expect in these quarters, and make a better informed decision to come back (or not) in a short amount of time.
I've noted that while a week's worth of posts can tell a lot about the author, it is not always representative of the typical content of the blog, depending on the day you drop there.
2:41:39 PM
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BlogChannels for loosely joining webloggers?
Here's a little something I wrote in reply to High Context editor David Gammel's introduction to the group-forming community.
"I'd like to mention one of David's initiatives that he hasn't mentioned in his intro but is in my opinion highly relevant as a practical illustration of blog-based group-forming. David has set up the KMPings service.
What KMPings does is enable webloggers with an interest in knowledge management to combine teasers for selected blog posts from their personal blog. The result is another, collective blog that points to various posts by participants. (If this sounds abstract, just click the link and you'll understand right away.) KMPings has enabled the formation of a loosely coupled community of KM bloggers. I'm subscribed to this blog and it has helped me discover a few new webloggers who share my interest in knowledge management.
One way to describe what KMPings does is to say that it provides a shared channel for a particular area of interest. It was a direct inspiration for my proposal of ridiculously easy (blog-enabled) group forming. My idea is to automate what David has done and extend it to any topic anyone can dream up.
Given such a system, if I felt like it, I could almost instantly set up a "MontrealPings" blog channel, or a "OrigamicArchitecturePings" blog channel, or what have you, and start putting relevant posts at those channels. Other interested webloggers could subscribe (via RSS) to such channels and could ping them whenever they write something that relates to the topic at hand that they wish to share with the community of subscribers.
Perhaps a better name for that idea would be just that, BlogChannels - what do you think?"
There's a dual way to look at blog channels. They provide a sociality-driven incentive for bloggers to apply metadata tags to their posts. By tagging X on a post you're in effect hanging out a bit with the X crowd. "Metadata has never been more fun!"
Well, that's perhaps an exaggeration, but I'm personally much more interested in metadata that means something for people other than me. This is what I find most interesting in this scheme: metadata is shared - that's built into the design. The meaning of the shared term takes shape through the efforts of several people. Contrast this to what currently happens with individual blog categories, where we often have a hard time making sense of each other's categories.
10:42:07 AM
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19 novembre, 2002
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Emergent intelligence in the Net?
Phil Wainewright: Spontaneous intelligence and the Semantic Web. "the only way intelligence gets into a computer is as a result of humans putting it there."
My first reaction was to endorse that statement wholeheartedly. Upon thinking a bit more about it, I think I'd be more comfortable with a more restrictive statement such as "the Semantic Web will not by itself generate intelligence beyond what humans put into it".
I think spontaneous intelligence might pop up in other computer-related areas. For instance, as the Internet grows into a more and more biological-like system, we might begin to notice large-scale patterns of behavior emerge that were not planned by the designers. (Actually I'm not sure that this hasn't already happened, e.g. in router networks.) If some of these patterns turn out to have a recognizable function, they might be construed as evidence of intelligence.
9:15:52 PM
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18 novembre, 2002
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Copyleft
2005
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
2005-07-18; 16:13:51.
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