Seb's Open Research
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Saturday, March 15, 2003
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Constellation W3
I'm headed for the Constellation W3 event at the Université du Québec à Montréal. If you're in Montreal today, I hope to see you there - looks like there are some places left. I think we're going to have a good time.
Je passe la journée à Constellation W3 qui se déroule à l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Il semble rester de la place, alors si vous êtes à Montréal et en mesure de venir, je crois qu'on va bien s'amuser.
 6:21:17 AM
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Thursday, March 13, 2003
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Who Loves Ya, Baby?
Great article on social network mapping by Steven Johnson. The main spotlight is on Valdis' work in visualization. Uncovering implicit social patterns is where it's at.
11:42:10 PM
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Towards Structured Blogging
 Lately I've been thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily.
Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on. Now, say I've written a review of the latest Radiohead album into my blog. I'd like others who are interested in Radiohead, or in music reviews in general, and who may not know me, to be able to pick out my review from the common pool in a simple way. Interesting people may come my way because of this.
What we're talking about is getting people to put more metadata on their content. Now allowing it is one thing, and fostering it is another. And I'd say the latter is the bigger challenge. Here are some ideas.
...continued in Towards Structured Blogging
1:42:49 PM
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SXSW 2003 Wrapup
Heath Row's coverage of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival beats the crap out of all instances of event/conference/symposiumBlogging I have seen so far. Kudos! Here are the reports that connect the most into my interests:
- Richard Florida: the rise of the Creative Class, pointing out the correlation between the Bohemian Index, the Gay Index, and the health of local technology industries. Diversity is good, baby.
- Beyond the Blog with a bunch of Movable Type folks. Says Anil Dash on contributing content in many different places: "I almost resent that someone else controls what I've written. The tools need to evolve so I post to this one place, and it's posted somewhere else." Mark these words.
- Digital Aboriginal, on the shift back to an oral-like culture. "If we're approaching the characteristics and number of words of an oral tradition, what does that mean? In an oral tradition, reputation is extremely important. Relationships are extremely important. Intimacy is extremely important."
- Jon Lebkowsky, Adina Levin, and Nancy White: Effective Social Networks.
- Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal.com), Scott Heiferman (MEETUP.com), and James Hong (HotOrNot.com): Trends in How the Internet Connects People. "I showed up at this Howard Dean Meetup and there were 400 people in a New York bar. It was fully acknowledged that no one would be there if the idea hadn't spread through the viral nature of the Web."
11:28:49 AM
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The case for generalists
Azeem digs up an essay by Paul Saffo on information overload and new organisationional structures, written 14 years ago, to make a case for generalists.
We are in a pickle today because we are trying to manage 21st century information overload with 19th century intellectual skills. For example, we still prize the ability to recall specific information over the skill of making connections among seemingly unrelated information. We have become a society of specialists, each knowing more and more about less and less.
[more at Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
In (yet another) strange synchronicity, just yesterday I stumbled upon this post about creative generalists.
9:21:02 AM
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The challenge of converting leaders
Tom Munnecke comments on Dee Hock's letter to Joi, recalling his earlier work with Hock. He raises what I think is a very sensible idea: it is very difficult to turn people who have worked their way to leadership positions within the context of command-and-control systems into leader-followers. I presume the reason for this is that it amounts to effecting a huge personality/identity shift. Quoting Tom (emphasis mine):
About 200 folks were there, representing a wide range of stakeholders. I soon realized that these were the very people we needed to disintermediate. Asking them to "streamline" themselves and jumping off the gravy train was not going to happen.
And Hock himself hints that he recognizes this in his letter when he writes this optimistic (but inspiring) passage about routing around gravy trains:
I wonder if you realize that a dozen or two people like yourself with the right combination of communication, technological and organizational skills could design and implement a global government without the consent of any present form of organization and provide it with the neural network to insure its success.
Reading this helped me pin down precisely what makes me uneasy about David and Doc's World of Ends piece. They're trying to do exactly that, make current executives and the ilk streamline themselves, instead of targeting, giving hope to, and helping organize those who have little to lose. I suspect that the attitude shift that David and Doc are hoping for is only going to materialize once this groundwork alternative organization effort is well underway and pretty much everybody has woken up and smelled the coffee.
Look at the inertia of the music industry for an illustration.
8:50:55 AM
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Combining Mo-blogging and Mob-logging
The paper I wrote about back in November is out. The author and his team participated in (and won) a photo-scavenger hunt. They used a combination of group chat, Instant Messaging, and communal moblogging. Must have been a lot of fun. And the guy managed to get a conference paper out of it! Via Robert Paterson:
John Lester, Harvard Medical School: EVOLVING A MOB: WIRELESS COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Crete, Greece, June 22-27, 2003
"Based on experiences with Hiptop Nation, it appears that by having ubiquitous mobile data communication devices and a successful communal blog, it is possible to create an ideal environment within which a smart mob can grow into a goal-oriented mobile community of practice. Communal blogs play a critical role in the creation of three essential elements of community: the establishment of social capital, the creation of weak ties that foster creativity, and the formation of a sense of "place" within which everything can happen. The final crucial ingredient is a complex goal."
http://neuro-www.mgh.harvard.edu/lester_hci_2003.pdf [PDF, 5 pages, 170Kb]
7:47:04 AM
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Open source courseware
Liz is trying out the proprietary courseware framework that her university has invested in, and she doesn't like it at all. She thinks it'd be a good idea to develop a more flexible, open-source package. I agree.
6:36:23 AM
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Trusted Blog Search
Micah has simplified his microblogosphere search tool, which he calls "Trusted Blog Search". It's really simple. You feed it the URLs for your blog and for your subscriptions file, and it gives you a piece of Javascript that you can copy into your home page template. Afterwards you can search spheres centered around your blog with radius 0 (my blog), 1 (blogs I read), and infinity (the Web).
I'm trying it out right now (find it below the calendar). While there are still a few things to iron out in the "blogs I read" search, I find it quite handy. If you try it, be sure to put in the slash following your blog's URL in the customization box.
6:32:01 AM
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Tuesday, March 11, 2003
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Blogs and academics. A heterogeneous collection of links to pages relating to blogs in academia. Many links I've never seen previously, along with a few old-time favorites of mine.
10:07:53 PM
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Sunday, March 09, 2003
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Learning by doing and sharing... at age nine
I have reflected a couple times on building communities of inventive kids. This post by Mark Szpakowski describes the kind of thing I believe could get kids hooked on learning and sharing:
I've been watching how my 9-year-old son is making use of the Lego Mindstorms community and associated sites: he's self-educating himself, making use of both books and online resources. The lego robotics forums let him see what builders all over the world are constructing, complete with digital photos of construction details. He refers to these in his own building projects, always with variations due to different parts, etc.
In the Mindstorms forums you can find dozens of kids exchanging tips and undertaking all kinds of cool projects. Makes me wish I'd had something like that when I was their age.
12:25:07 PM
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Blogging in Mexico
On the Tijuana Bible of poetics, a description of how blogs are changing the literary landscape in Mexico.
From my side of the bed, I can tell you this: in Mexico, blogs have helped balance who is published, who is considered a writer, what can be said, reviewed or what new agents appear.
That used to be a decision taken by a man in a Mexico City office. Now anybody can publish (even several times a day whatever she-he wants). And people get readers. An then readers turn into new writers. Some good ones have appeared—the left out by the State presses for “Young Literature”.
11:54:26 AM
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What we all have in common
Matt Webb points to A list of the universals of human nature. Quite a few things, it seems. Here are some. (I'm not convinced that they all are 100% universal, though.)
Value placed on articulateness. Gossip. Lying. Misleading. Verbal humour. Humorous insults. Poetic and rhetorical speech forms. Narrative and storytelling. Metaphor.
Binary distinctions, including male and female, black and white, natural and cultural, good and bad. Measures. Logical relations including "not", "and", "same", "equivalent", "opposite", general versus particular, part versus whole.
Status and prestige, both assigned (by kinship, age, sex) and achieved. Some degree of economic inequality.
Exchange of labor, goods and services,. Reciprocity, including retaliation. Gifts. Social Reasoning. Coalitions. Government, in the sense of binding collective decisions about public affairs. Leaders, almost always non-dictatorial, perhaps ephemeral. Laws, rights, and obligations, including laws against violence, rape and murder. Punishment. Conflict, which is deplored. Rape. Seeking of redress for wrongs. Mediation. In-group/out-group conflicts. Property. Inheritance of property. Sense of right and wrong. Envy.
Obviously, this is not a list of instincts or innate psychological propensities; it is a list of complex interactions between a universal human nature and the conditions of living in a human body on this planet.
By the way, Matt's blog, Interconnected, is excellent. Consistently delivering delightful food for thought to inquisitive minds. Pay a visit if you've never been there.
11:46:38 AM
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Architecting online communities
Joel Spolsky's very well-written piece titled "Building Communities with Software" provides insightful perspectives on what makes online communities work. Spolsky makes a good case for simplicity in design; he has paid attention to the tradeoffs inherent in many implementation details. The key idea:
In software, as in architecture, design decisions are just as important to the type of community that develops or fails to develop. When you make something easy, people do it more often. When you make something hard, people do it less often. In this way you can gently encourage people to behave in certain ways which determine the character and quality of the community.
More on building communities here, and in chromatic's piece here.
11:00:11 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:12:33 PM.
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If you have bandwidth to spare and have a pixellation fetish, I recommend you have a look at the White Stripes'