Seb's Open Research
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Thursday, February 20, 2003
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Facilitating disruptive technology development
Hugh Blackmer, a Science Librarian at Washington & Lee University with a very wide array of interests, has written a very nice piece called "Making room for disruptive and emergent technologies". I found the following paragraph especially evocative of the problems facing boat-rockers:
Each campus seems to have a few people whom others identify as visionaries and pioneers, but their niches are not predictable: sometimes they are professors, sometimes librarians, sometimes IT or computing people. Their penchant for experiment and innovation is often applied at the outer fringes of their nominal position or assignment. Some are lone wolves, but many pursue collaborations, often across administrative boundaries. They share a common problem: where can they turn for support for their efforts? As rogue operatives and boundary-traducers, innovators are often ineligible for resources within their administrative units, so they must either attract extraordinary support internally (from contingency funds or generous programs), or divert time into applications for external funding.
 7:21:22 AM
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Wednesday, February 19, 2003
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Weinberger keynote at Blogtalk
David Weinberger is one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming Blogtalk conference on "Weblogs: Web-based publishing, communication and collaboration tools for professional and private use" (Vienna, May 23-24). Hurry up if you want to submit a paper - deadline's February 28th.
12:59:06 AM
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Emergent democracy follow-up
We had another "happening", with three times as many participants. It was very interesting -thoughts flying everywhere. Joi got his paper to version 1.0, and you can read what Liz, Jon Lebkowsky, Ming, Ross, and Peter Kaminski thought of the event on this channel.
12:27:36 AM
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Three degrees - warm or cold?
Ross on Microsoft's new Three Degrees product for ad-hoc community formation, a topic close to my heart:
Microsoft's first relationship product should be taken seriously. By initially targeting the younger IM set, they don't have to hold back on multi-modal features. Their proprietary FOAF functionality enables community building similar to that of Live Journal. It could also host a trust/reputation system. And as a platform for other applications and gateway for P2P file sharing it is comparable to Groove. That and it bypasses blogging. The question is if we want our kids growing up hooked on monopoly.
All good points. Don't miss the Newsweek article, which unfortunately misses the innovation / knowledge socialization implications of technology like this. It ends thus:
“This is something we did for ourselves,” says engineer Eugene Zarakhovsky, 24. [...] In any case, Tammy Savage’s project has won at least one crucial, though overaged, convert. “Bill Gates,” she says, “totally gets this now.”
12:06:17 AM
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Tuesday, February 18, 2003
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Tomoye Simplify demo
If you're developing community-ish, person-centered knowledge management environments and haven't looked at Tomoye's guided tour by now, you probably should. Looks pretty well-thought-out. And it sells, apparently.
10:35:27 PM
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An introduction to wikis
From Open Magazine, a (not especially well-written) article introducing Wikis, with a pro and a con view appended. Wikis are still getting 0.01% of the press that weblogs do, so it's refreshing to see pieces like this.
For the hordes of people all over the world who use Wiki, they are apt to argue that Wiki is the best ‘shared space’ going. Wiki is an Open Source tool for collaboration. With Wiki, everyone has edit access to everything. Wiki allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.
“Open editing" means that everyday users create and edit any page in a web site. Anyone can go into a document, make additions, amendments, deletions, edits, and reformats….Scary! Doesn’t that lead to chaos—or, even worse, garbage? There is a counter-response for those who think Wiki might be an information disaster waiting to happen. Wiki users say, What disaster?
10:29:00 PM
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Another step towards semantic blogging
HubLink looks like a mutant nephew of the TopicExchange.
HubLink is a prototype of a Blosxom-powered RSS feed and CSS-based semantic weblog that uses TrackBack, autodiscovery and XML web services to form ridiculously easy groups.
I'm a little confused as to what this is exactly, but Alf really impresses me with his productivity.
Update: Alf comments:
It is basically the same as TopicExchange, only with a more focussed range. I also wanted to aim towards the semantic web thing by including metadata in the page. Though I'm not sure if I succeeded at all.
9:47:17 PM
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Inaccessible conversations
"I find myself, from time to time, in discussion regarding topics on which I have a lack of depth, of experience; economics, business, law and the like; this is one of the most effective ways to learn that I've found. Recently, though, I've started noticing that some communities don't accept this as a valid method of learning.
One of my social communities refuses to hold discussion on some topics with me, until I've formally educated myself via other means; we clash over and over again on the core issue of "terminology". There's a rigid set of terminology definitions that I'm expected to know, without which discussion is refused. It's very strange; where normally I'd learn out of the discussions the context and usage of the terminology, the chance never appears. Without access to ongoing discussions, I haven't been able to internalize the terminology required to "gain access", as it were, to the discussions."
Read on over at Floating Atoll.
8:25:32 PM
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Conversational Terrorism
via Puzzlepieces. A quite comprehensive lexicon of underhanded ways to win arguments. An example:
"Think vs. Feel"
A person will likely be off-center of the ANALYTICAL/EMOTIVE SPECTRUM (an alternate name for this technique) in any heated exchange. By pointing out which side the other person is on, (either side will do) he/she is obliged to defend his/her temperament instead of the case at hand.
- "Your cold, analytical approach to this issue doesn't take into account the human element."
- "Your emotional involvement with this issue obscures your ability to see things objectively."
7:50:25 PM
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Recommender systems and the microblogosphere
Michael elaborates on Ming's call for personalized collaborative ranking. (Did you ping the LazyWeb, Ming?) I think the idea has been around in various forms for a while, under the general rubric "recommender systems". I know Epinions features a (probably nowhere documented) personalized web of trust that influences the results you get when searching for product reviews.
We want to get recommendations from people we trust, how do we implement that? The obvious way is to just read these people's blogs, but they don't cover everything we might be interested in.
Perhaps a good, simple start for ranking Web content would be a customized Technorati that restricts the blogosphere to only take into account blogs that are at most N degrees of separation away from you (link-wise), for small values of N (say, 2 or 3). Call that the microblogosphere that has you as center. I'd love to see what "interesting newcomers" would show up there for me.
7:22:20 PM
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Smart kids and the real world
I seldom link to Blogdex Top 10 pieces, but this one is just too good to miss. Paul Graham presents an insightful description of the social structure of high school, offering an explanation for why nerds have such a hard time between ages 11 and 17.
Basically, "schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day". Meaninglessness ensures that life in school becomes a popularity contest, a zero-sum game where people who don't play full-time (i.e. "nerds" and "retards") finish last. Makes a lot of sense to me.
That severe disconnect between school and the real world is what I hope will ultimately kill school-as-we-know-it. In a connected world, I'm sure kids will find better ways of getting prepared for the world. With luck they'll get some help from teachers. Let them network with grownups for a change! (I know, not everyone wants to network with teenagers, but taken one at a time, in the presence of shared interests, I'm sure it can be pretty fulfilling on both ends. Look here for an inspiring start :-) )
I would take issue with how Graham depicts the "real" world, though. He seems to assume that the world that adults live in is actually pretty meaningful and not artificial. I don't know enough to be sure about this.
7:04:13 PM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
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4/22/2006; 12:12:30 PM.
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