Seb's Open Research
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Tuesday, January 07, 2003
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Don't throw away the past
Tom Coates has a post called The excesses of "Social Software". I can't seem to be able to properly cut-and paste to quote it, but essentially he warns against neglecting many things that have been already been learned and evolved in online communities in developing ideas about social software.
Indeed there is a danger that in typical hacker fashion we try and build things from the ground up and unnecessarily duplicate mistakes. There's a lot to learn from the last 30 years of computer-mediated communication. I'm reading Howard Rheingold's pre-WWW book "The Virtual Community" right now and there's so much to pick up in there. We have to keep in mind that while on the surface the technology has evolved, the core - humans - has not.
Here's a previous post on the past of online communities, pointing to a nice piece by Chuq.
 4:20:46 PM
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The Semantic Web
Joshua Allen (via Burningbird via Stephen Dulaney) has an illuminating, if a little complicated, post on the Semantic Web and the main languages that currently provide support for it: English, RDF, and XML. A few quotes:
The Semantic Web is about people, and specifically about making people's voices clearly audible and indelible
I'd rather say findable than audible. If every voice were audible we'd be stuck with white noise.
The key point here is that the web, and especially the semantic web is about capturing and communicating human knowledge. For people who have trouble understanding that "knowledge" is a truth-neutral word, it is fine to say that the semantic web is about capturing and communicating human voices. [...]
You don't see such refreshing descriptions in academic material about the semantic web.
I would argue that people like Dave Winer (who overtly disparages certain semantic web technologies while producing code that gives people voice) have done more to advance the semantic web (the web of renmin voice) than many of the semantic web advocates. [...]
RDF is simply a syntax for exchanging knowledge representations, and not even a particularly ambitious or cutting-edge syntax. [...]
Most of the examples that qualify as "semantic web" today rely on plain old English recognition, and the rest rely on extracting predefined semantics from markup, meta tags, and so on.
What I get from this overall is that the semantic web is here already. It's in a process of bootstrapping, progressing towards more structured forms of communication. Perhaps in a couple generations we'll all speak in an RDF dialect. (Don't laugh just yet. What I mean by that is that we'll all be making more precise, less ambiguous, statements, in such a way as to be found and heard by the people who care about the things we're talking about.)
4:03:53 PM
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Monday, January 06, 2003
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Community straddling and innovation
Lilia quotes from Senge et al.'s Dance of Change:
The most effective local leaders seem to be those who learn to "live in two worlds" -- the world of their innovative subculture and the world of the mainstream culture of the larger organisation. They realise that innovative practices need "incubators" to develop and that, to some degree, these new practices must be protected. But they also value the knowledge developed through experience that resides in the mainstream culture. They seek to cultivate both, and they do so by developing their own abilities to be effective in both environments.
In a sense they become "bicultural", just like someone who lives in two countries with very different cultures. They become adept at crossing the numerous, often subtle, cultural divides between the two worlds. [...] Perhaps most important, they continually develop their awareness of the boundaries between these different worlds, knowing when they are in which domain and what it requires of them.
Lyn called this kind of people community straddlers, and I picked up the term in my short Kuro5hin piece Online Communities and the Future of Culture. Thanks to the Net it's becoming easier every day to cross boundaries, and I believe this will accelerate change.
By the way, Lilia did terrific blogging about learning and blog evangelization throughout December.
3:07:20 AM
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Blogmapping
Ross has three good posts about a social network mapping project he's doing jointly with Valdis Krebs. By now surely my readers have all heard about it - he got blogged to death. Two more thoughts: some people link more consistently to others, which indicates closer relationships. The strength of ties could be reflected in the visualization, perhaps using node proximity or thickness of lines. And a better blog map might be built out of the blogging ecosystem dataset, which I believe is available for download.
2:51:10 AM
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NGO Knowledge Map blog
This blog collects knowledge on the world of non-government organizations (NGOs). Specific themes: to improve the world by mapping the NGO world. This is a knowledge mapping and sharing endeavour. By Olaf Brugman.
Mapping. What a great idea. Though I'm still unsure I get exactly what a NGO is. This page says that "NGOs = Citizens' action groups for mutual interests and objectives." Action seems to be the key word here. It's getting easier and easier to get people to speak out. Getting them out of their chair is another thing. (But words are also deeds, aren't they?)
2:40:16 AM
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Who you gonna trust?
It's hard,
Hard when you're here all alone
And everyone else has gone home;
Harder to know right from wrong
When all objectivity is gone
And it's gone
But you still carry on
'Cause you,
You are the only one left
And you've got to clean up this mess,
You know you'll end up like the rest,
Bitter, twisted unless
You stay strong
And you carry on.
(Excerpted from Yann Tiersen's song Les Jours Tristes)
2:20:53 AM
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Tree is tree
Mike Axelrod:
The thing I’m going to tell you can’t be said with words (doh!) It’s that Lao Tzu thing happening. But I’ll try anyway. Go look for yourself. See that tree over there. Now look at that other one. Ok, now look at that little scrubby one. So what’s the same about any of these trees? Not one thing, there all completely different. Different atoms, different bark, different textures, different species maybe. Yet they are both tree. Tree is Tree! But what makes tree equal tree?
2:19:44 AM
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Web communities from link patterns
Trawling the Web for emerging cyber-communities. A research paper from 1999, predating Flake et al. (who cited them) by three years.
The Web has several thousand well-known, explicitly defined communities –– groups of individuals who share a common interest, together with the Web pages most popular amongst them. [...] implicitly defined communities often focus on a level of detail that is typically far too fine to attract the current interest (and resources) of large portals to develop long lists of resource pages for them. Viewed another way, the methods developed below identify Web communities at a far more nascent stage than do systematic and institutionalized ontological efforts.
[...] such communities sometimes emerge in the Web even before the individual participants become aware of their existence. The question is the following: can we automatically recognize and identify communities that will clearly pass under the radar screen of any human ontological effort?
Interesting goal - people with common interests need to be more aware of one another. The algorithm seems a little complicated, though. But sometimes in order to publish it is better to avoid doing things too simply. I wonder if the algorithm has been turned into a resource somewhere on the web... seems not... I'd love to know what implicit communities I belong to.
2:06:31 AM
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Prof. Winer?
Userland chairman Dave Winer wants to move away from business and become an academic. What a great idea! I'm pretty sure he for one wouldn't disconnect too much from the real world once inside the Ivory Tower. And I'm sure he'd be a great teacher. So good luck to you Dave!
1:24:57 AM
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Trustrolling
Trust is a central ingredient in community building. Steve Gillmor explains its role in blogspace in a few well-chosen words:
blogs have nurtured a growing circle of trust, the mulch for building directories of digital identity based on expertise, communication skills, and critical intangibles -- sense of humor, ethical infrastructure, shared values, and contributed resources.
I've written about trust in blogspace, here and there. Continuous relationships of the kind we see in blogs sometimes make it feel like a village and this seems to help build (generalized) trust. One thing I'm wondering about is whether we'll see our circles of empathy grow along with our circles of trust. That could have long-ranging effects.
1:09:39 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:12:24 PM.
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