Seb's Open Research
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Saturday, January 18, 2003
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Introducing: Seb's matchmaking service!
If you're a newcomer to the world of weblogs, one of the first things you will want to do is to find people with similar interests to yours. Unfortunately, it's so difficult right now that some human assistance can come in handy.
I've been blogging for a while now, and I've seen a lot of high-quality blogs, more than I can read actually, about a variety of topics such as science, philosophy, literature, knowledge management, e-learning, information architecture, communication, design, social software, etc. Most of those I can remember are written by articulate, investigative folks. I've already helped a few people connect in the past, for example Alex Halavais and Liz Lawley, or Alf and Richard Gayle.
So here's my offer to new bloggers. (Veterans are welcome too, but there are more chances that I'll point you to people you already know). Post an explanation of what your core interests are on your weblog, and send me a link to that post. I'll do my best to find a few good blogs that match those interests. I won't spend a day on this though; your mileage may vary. You can also post to the new webloggers blogchannel to improve the visibility of your post.
One thing to keep in mind: the more precise the description, the better the results.
Oh, and it's a free service.
Update, 21/01: I've already received a few requests. You can look at the matchmaking archive if you're curious.
 12:53:45 PM
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Blogs and support of inquiry
Nurul Asyikin:
[...] It was horrible - the night before my proposal presentation I was desperately trying to find a way to convey the potential I saw in blogs as a new tool for community building to a roomful of disbelievers. For some reason, none of my web searches last year returned any academic papers on blogging, so you can imagine how completely alone I felt.
A couple months later, things have changed. I've found a multitude of papers (I'm listed there, even), blogs and websites, all devoted to the various possibilities presented by weblogs. I've no idea why I couldn't find them last year, when I felt so alone.
It could very well be because of this blog. Since I set this page up, I've received a bunch of emails offering help and support in writing this thesis. It's heartwarming, and somehow knowing that other bloggers care really does a lot for my confidence in doing this research. It's nice to know that blogs mean as much to other people.
12:41:23 PM
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"Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website"
One of the first serious articles on wikis that isn't on a wiki (a previous one was The Reengineering Wiki (pdf)). , by susning.nu founder Lars Aronsson. Abstract:
A Wiki website is a hypertext on steroids. Any user can create or edit any page on the site using a simple web browser, and all information processing is done on the server side. Wiki sites are powerful tools for collaboration in closed work groups, but can also be used for the general public on the open Internet. This paper summarizes the experience from the first nine months of operation of Sweden's biggest Wiki website susning.nu, including its usefulness in non-profit and commercial applications, in hobby and professional, projects, its social and legal aspects, its relation to geographic information systems, subject information gateways, the establishment of a controlled vocabulary, and its implications on learning, free speech, the price of information, licensing, and copyright. Relevant comparisons to similar projects in other countries are also presented.
(via Peter Suber)
12:32:57 PM
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The LiveJournal boom
Did you know that LiveJournal is probably the largest weblog service around? Their users seldom read weblogs outside LiveJournal, which is what makes them less visible to outsiders. Here's a company profile from late 2002 which states that
LiveJournal boasts a total of 782,000+ users. Of these users, 64% are female, 93% are free accounts, and a large majority of the users are between 15 and 21 years of age. The 729,000 free accounts are made possible because of the 37,000 users that pay. When a user pays, they are contributing a little over $2 a month to pay for LiveJournal and the extra features they have access to.
In case you want to see the impressive growth curve, here's a little zipped Excel file for you: LiveJournalStats.zip, based on the data here. (Scroll down to line 625.) I've estimated that if their membership continues to double every year, their user base will surpass in number the population of Canada around 2008.
And here's another post on LiveJournal demographics at Unbounded Spiral, a blog that you'll surely enjoy if you like reading (or writing!) Ross Mayfield's weblog.
11:50:25 AM
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Disconnects
Political Patterns on the WWW. Valdis Krebs always has interesting things to discover using social networks and databases. The fact that people who read political books tend to fall into 2 camps is not too unusual but the abolute separation is pretty surprising. It would appear that the 'right' side has fewer books in the cluster than the 'left' side. Wonder what that means, if anything? [A Man with a Ph.D]
Political clans are often quite disconnected from one another, but so are many other kinds of communities, whether they be scientific, religious or otherwise. One of my hopes for weblogs is that they might let community straddlers have a beneficial "bridging" effect, improving communication between people who really ought to listen more to one another.
10:46:41 AM
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Tuesday, January 14, 2003
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Introducing the Internet Topic Exchange
Phillip Pearson is in the process of creating the Internet Topic Exchange (http://topicexchange.com). This is a service that enables anyone to easily create blog channels like Lazyweb.org, Blogpopuli, and KMPings. Once a channel is set up, people can send links to their weblog posts to it using TrackBack or using a simple form. The resulting feeds can be read on the web and they are also available as RSS. To see what it looks like, have a look at the new "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" channel.
Matt Mower: "What Phil has done is to implement a very simple, elegant, solution along the path of the BlogPlex idea I've been working towards. With the Topic Exchange, it will be simple for users to cluster around topics simply by using them."
This is indeed, I believe, a good way to facilitate group-forming among bloggers. Hopefully, people will set up channels corresponding to interests close to their heart and will subscribe to them. As I have pointed out earlier, this is a sociality-driven way of building what has been called "shared categories", "shared topics", or "distributed metadata".
One way to see it is that this extends the notion of RSS feeds. An ordinary RSS feed is easy to listen to, but "hard" to speak into. Blogchannels correct the asymmetry by making it easy both ways. Phillip has also put up what he calls a vague history of the concept.
6:22:48 AM
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Monday, January 13, 2003
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Weblog & Wiki Survey: Last Call
I will pick up and start analyzing the data for my knowledge sharing survey a few days from now. I figured it would be a good idea to mention it for a last time while I'm enjoying the incoming flow from Scripting News. So here's the text of the original post:
As part of my research into knowledge sharing practices, I'm conducting an online survey on two Web tools that can be used for sharing knowledge, namely, weblogs and wikis.
You would do me an immense favour if you could go and fill in the short multiple-choice questionnaires that I have prepared. Here's the weblog survey, and here's the wiki survey. Answer them in either order. If you know nothing about one of the tools, go ahead anyway - you'll be done quite early on in the corresponding questionnaire.
Note that I'm not going to hoard that data - I will publish it online when I'm done collecting.
A heartfelt thanks to VeerChand Bothra for setting up and hosting this survey on the BlogStreet weblog neighborhood analyzer and search engine site.
And if you're even more in the spirit of giving, you could help spread the word, for instance by posting the following line to your own weblog:
Sébastien Paquet is doing a survey on the usefulness of weblogs and wikis for sharing knowledge.
2:03:39 AM
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The End of 'The End of Free'. You may have read that "the end of free is near" for content on the web. There is even a high profile blog devoted to it. But I beg to differ. Consider this: The number of amateur sites and blogs far outweighs the number of heavyweights and big media content providers. In fact the amount of quality content since the wide-spread emergence of blogs is so great and continues to grow, that the actual content provided by the big players is negligible by comparison. But the story goes, that these higher quality writers still need to make a living. Sure, I'm not arguing that, but there are just as many high quality writers who have their own blogs who make money doing something else for their primary income.
And when you take the advent of smart news aggretators like Amphetadesk, it only makes the task of getting the news you need that much easier. When a site starts charging for content, the Net effect will treat such charged content as censorship and route around it. So what is my prediction? I'm predicting the opposite of other more prominent techno-pundits: 2003 will be the year of the end of "the end of free". Instead we are going to see a massive proliferation of amateur writing permeate the net in unprecendented ways. And with increasingly sophisticated filtering and search tools, we will be able to keep up with the best of the best based on our own web-of-trust and customized reputation systems. I also expect that the best writers will be able to get payed for their work through pay-pal and other voluntary tipping mechanisms. I know of several writers who have managed to get some money from the very kind and loyal readers. [infoAnarchy]
The comments to the piece are also interesting. 2003 is pretty early for this though.
1:52:18 AM
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Research and money
An Academic Resource for Microcontent. Met with Liz Lawley last week in Rochester to talk about the possibility of putting together an NSF grant... [Blog de Halavais]
Alex is thinking of
[...] an organ of communication between the traditional academic world and the blogging frontier. By this, I mean that there is a lot of excitement and experimentation already going on in the blogosphere, but the mainstream of even Internet researchers seems relatively oblivious to its niceties. The hope would be to provide tools and explanations to social scientists, but to scientists and academics who might be able to leverage these technologies to better create and disseminate knowledge.
I want to do this regardless of funding. The truth is, it can be done--as have many great projects--without funding. [...]
For some reason I really savour that last observation, though it is not completely accurate.
1:38:24 AM
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The role of weblogs in online community building
Lessons in Community Building: An Inquiry into the role of weblogs in online community building is the title of a very interesting thesis proposal by Nurul Asyikin bte Mohamed Razali from the National University of Singapore. And guess what, if you edit a blog, this is another researcher who needs your help. Nurul writes,
I am mainly in need of webloggers to interview. If you maintain a weblog and are interested in contributing to the ongoing dialog concerning the issues of online human behaviour in general, and virtual communities specifically, please contact me. I can be reached via ICQ (UIN: 115135696) and email.
Unfortunately, I will be unable to provide neither material nor monetary compensation in exchange for your time. I am relying solely on the goodwill of webloggers for the completion of this thesis, and I hope you can help!
1:20:47 AM
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"Down and Out" going Up and Up
Author Cory Doctorow posted his new SF novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" for free download. The results: "24 hours after launching the site from which you can download my novel for free, the book has been downloaded over 20,000 times. It's been Slashdotted, blogged to hell and back, and I've done a number of press interviews about it. What's more, the title is currently sitting at #304 in the Amazon Sales Rank. Let's call this one a success. I could not be more stoked. Damn." I can confirm his experience. I posted the entitre content of my textbook, "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited" online in April 1997. The Web sites has had more than 2 million page views hitherto. My publisher is selling c. 3000 print copies and 400 e-books a year. The book is ranked 1000-2000 at the Barnesandnoble.com. Not bad. [FOS News]
Well, here's one more link for you, Cory.
12:51:02 AM
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Sunday, January 12, 2003
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Are government services anti-competitive?
Dismay as BBC Gets E-learning Go-ahead. No bias in this headline! The BBC has won the right to provide free digital educational resources to schools, as it should. The thought of making it illegal for a government to provide resources to its own schools is ridiculous. Sure, industry calls it "anti-competitive," but by this logic any government service (into which industry decided it would like to offer its services) is anti-competitive. Sorry, it doesn't wash. Industry doesn't have the right to prevent a people, acting through their government, to provide for themselves. By Richard Agnew, NetImperative, January 9, 2003 [OLDaily]
Not all government services are this lucky. For instance, PubScience was killed because members of the Software & Information Industry Association lobby didn't like competing against it.
11:31:45 PM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:12:25 PM.
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