Seb's Open Research
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Friday, April 11, 2003
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Results of Seb's "weblogs and knowledge sharing" survey
Long-time readers of this blog will recall that I have been conducting a survey of weblog use for knowledge sharing. 176 people have heeded my call and answered the survey that was graciously hosted by Blogstreet. As promised, here's the data and the first pie charts to come out of the oven: Seb's "weblogs and knowledge sharing" survey results.
Unfortunately I don't have time to provide an analysis right now, but the result I personally find the most interesting is in the answers to question #16 and #17 - they suggest that weblogs provide a unique opportunity to create meaningful links between people in different fields. This correlates with my personal experience as well. I believe that deep insights often come out of such occasions for "creative friction".
The wiki pies aren't ready yet, but it shouldn't take too long.
 2:39:55 PM
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Hire me
I will be available for work starting this summer.
I have a strong preference for jobs that involve interacting with people outside the organization - partners or users, for instance. I wish to use a personal voice, rather than official, dry, or overly corporate lingo.
Online community building, online learning facilitation, evangelism, bridge-building, and product documentation are among the things I would consider doing. I'd also be very happy to help out in the design and implementation of social software / knowledge management / e-learning / multiplayer gaming / online community systems. And if you need someone to perform and publish research on such, I'm your guy.
Some examples of relevant work that I've done in the above cloud of interest are:
You may also be interested in my publications, online stories and articles, and the posts on this weblog that got the most links. And for more background here's my résumé, in English and in French (RTF format; let me know if you want something else).
My ideal job would allow me to stay in the Montreal area - and I'm even willing to be paid in Canadian dollars :-).
Please let me know of any leads or feed me suggestions. Whose doors do you think I should be knocking on? And is there anything else I should indicate here? Send me feedback.
2:39:12 PM
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Blogspotting
Michael Fagan: "On January 10, I found 2,185,759 different blogs on blogspot, using the AlltheWeb search engine. [... today] I tried a new query. I chose Blogspot blogs that are 7 kb or more. The result is 2,760,532."
11:19:31 AM
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Thursday, April 10, 2003
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Receptors and sticky bits
Ming just ran a good "Big Ideas"-type essay titled Many to Many. In it, he uses an inspiring biological metaphor to describe the ultimate information system.
[...] say I have something to say, or something to sell, or something I'm looking for. I'd like my communication to be there for EVERYBODY. Yeah, yeah, so does every spammer. My point is that we need an approach where that is actually a good thing, and where it is feasible. My communication touches everybody. But everybody has different receptors. So it will only stick in some places. Same thing the other way. I want to be informed about everything that everybody is talking about. Except for that I only want to retain the stuff that actually fits for me. I have my own receptors, which will only allow specific items to stick.
He then comes back to his idea of a powerful all-encompassing multidimensional open database, which remains vague in my mind.
9:32:10 AM
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Welcome, Dina!
 "Conversations" with Dina is a nice new blog that has been focusing on social networks and metablogging in the recent weeks. I'm sure Marc will like this quote from a recent post titled Why do I blog?:
Do I really need several profiles and identities – a company website, Ryze profile, Ecademy profile …. the list can be endless. Could a blog consolidate all these identities – a one-stop profile – where you see ALL of me – my thoughts and preoccupations – personal and business - a bit of mind and soul?
6:46:55 AM
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Blogging & LiveJournal demographics
Neel Bubba contributes a quite interesting analysis of blogging/journaling use, mainly based on the rich LiveJournal dataset. Here's a graph of the LiveJournal age distribution over time.
The average LiveJournaler's age shows an intriguing evolution over time:
There is an inflection point near the end of 2001. Neel came up with two possible explanations: 9/11 prompted older folks to jump onboard and express themselves; or the dotcom fallout resulted in more older people with time and inclination to blog.
But this does not explain why the curve initially goes downward. Here's a hypothesis. LiveJournal was originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick, who was then a sophomore at University of Washington. When he made his system available to other people, the first ones to pick it up were his friends, who must predominantly have been around his age. As the word spread virally about this cool new tool, younger brothers and sisters latched onto LiveJournal, told their friends, and usage spread furiously to teenagers, gradually drowning out the college folks and driving the average age down.
Neel speculates,
Lets say there are lots of NetGeners interested in blogging/journaling (as the graph above shows)...this could be an indicator or perhaps a key aspect of the future growth and impact of blogging/journals.
which I think makes great sense.
6:42:06 AM
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Monday, April 07, 2003
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Garbage in, garbage out
Flemming Funch boils an important piece of wisdom down to a couple sentences:
It doesn't matter if you eloquently and 'logically' can deduct yourself from one point to the next, if you didn't perceive what really is there, or you were looking at only a small part of it, or you were looking at the wrong thing. Most people have a certain innate sense of logic, but if the input is faulty, so is the result.
If you'd like to dig into this line of thought I suggest reading this conversation with complexity specialist W. Brian Arthur, beginning at part II if you're not that interested in Arthur's bio.
11:06:06 AM
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Me, too!
Blogging and Trust.
Steve Ivy follows up on my hope that Jim Fawcette would start weblogging.
Good point! I know that I trust people who weblog more than I trust non webloggers. Why? Because I get to know their philosophy. Their point of view. Day after day after day. Look at how Dan Shafer and I get along. I know more about Dan than I know about most of the people I even work with. Seriously. How many people do you work with that you have passionate discussions about things with? [The Scobleizer Weblog]
I am finding that this is true for me as well. I have formed an opinion based on months of observation about a group of bloggers that I feel comfortable with. Trust is engendered because you have access to a quite complete perspective of the other. How often at work do you know how a colleague really thinks? You may know his opinion on a project. You may know his opinion of a person but I seldom was let in deep enough at work to understand the full person. Blogging gives us that chance to see below the surface. [Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]
12:45:20 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:12:35 PM.
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