Seb's Open Research
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Friday, April 25, 2003
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The dynamics of ridiculously easy group-forming
 Very interesting exchange between David Sifry and Gary Lawrence Murphy on what happens when everyone is empowered to create open channels where any blogger can contribute content. (I believe the Internet Topic Exchange is the first implementation of that idea.)
What Gary writes is similar to the (private) reasoning that led me to decide that the ridiculously easy group-forming idea was probably worth an experiment or two.
But here again, people are driven by two competing objectives, one to be uniquely differentiated, the other to be found in a group, so as these top topics grow to unmanageable size (themselves flatten out), people will fork them, recursively repeating the top-level problem, eventually moving into a deeper hierarchy they see as still likely to attract those who got as far as that hot topic just above them. In the long run, chaos will anneal to a solution.
Ditto for the synonym problem: If two directories have lexically different topics that are similar, and both directories grow in popularity, it won't take long before people learn of the other and double-classify their blog into both taxonomies ... and by being present in both, they inadvertently create the needed bubble bridge our spider robots can use to suss out the semantic relationship.
Why didn't this happen with the Meta tags? Simple: There was no feedback. No vehicles grew up to take advantage of any of those meta tags (except description being used for bookmarks) and as a result (except for description) no one really took them seriously.
I'm really happy that Gary should put on his systems thinking had and bring up feedback again. I believe the issue of feedback is quite fundamental and deserves more attention than it generally gets right now. For instance, I doubt blogging would have taken off nearly as fast as it did had it not been for the availability of referer data, which effectively closes the loop between writing and perceiving an effect and is a great source of reinforcement.
In a recent short piece called Towards Structured Blogging I speculated that designing with feedback in mind - that is, being careful to harmoniously mesh the "publish" and "subscribe" activities - might help build community and at the same time drive people to author metadata.
Yes, open channels do get polluted. The issue is, should we filter them? If so, how? Here are my quick observations on this, which I hope to be able to expand upon sometime:
- It is always possible to keep the raw feed accessible in case anyone wants to know what they're missing by following a filtered feed.
- Filtered feeds are derived products of raw feeds. As nobody owns the raw feed, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it, an arbitrary number of filtered versions may coexist. They will compete against one another (and against the original feed) for readers.
- Filtering can be done by a single person, a group, a software entity, or a mix of those.
- The simplest filtering method is for a single person to appoint herself as an editor and select posts for inclusion in a derivative feed. The load could also be distributed across a group. This is akin to moderation in a mailing list - except that there can be as many moderator slots as there are people who are willing to moderate.
- Given that we now have tools like the blogging ecosystem and Technorati that give a rough measure of how many people "trust" sources, a potentially worthwhile and completely automated filtering method would consist in the following. First, the reader requests a certain "reputation rank" threshold (say, 10 inbound blogs). Then the system simply culls out posts whose sources fail to meet the threshold from the raw feed. The decision of where to set the threshold is up to the reader, who can check out what he's missing by selecting a different threshold.
- Different individuals will want to adopt different filtering behaviors, depending on the throughput of a given raw feed, how much time they have on their hands, and their degree of interest in the topic at hand.
- In a loosely joined group, the fragmentation resulting from the fact that no two people experience the feed in the exact same way might not be something to worry about. No two people even experience an identical feed in the same way, anyways.
 12:54:06 AM
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Thursday, April 24, 2003
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Yet another!
First time I've heard of it, but SharpReader looks like an interesting personal news aggregator. Greg at Ten Reasons Why writes:
SharpReader allows me to collect them into categories, in a Windows Explorer style set of folders. I can click on a folder and read a reverse-chronological list of all the feeds in the sub-folders (or chronological or sort by title or by weblog & category). I can even click on the top-level folder and read all of the subscribed feeds in reverse chronological order, a la Radio Userland's only option for organizing feeds, or a variety of other orders.
11:33:35 PM
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Blogging in Iran
Weblog central has a post on blogging (and getting arrested) in Iran. It quotes from Hossein Derakhshan's proposal that was accepted at BlogTalk :
“The popularity of Weblogs among young Iranians, suggests that great changes has happened in Iranian society during the past two decades, at least among the new generations of middle-class residents of big cities. It shows that they are carrying new values and promoting new lifestyles, which is very rare among older generations, who were trying to hide their personal feelings and opinions from the others. Individuality, self-expression, tolerance are new values which are quite obvious through a quick study of the content of Persian Weblogs.”
Comparison with Blogging in Mexico is left as an exercise for the reader.
6:08:30 PM
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Many-to-Many blog launches
I'm pleased to announce that Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield, Jessica Hammer, Liz Lawley, and I are starting a collective weblog focusing on social software, called "Many-to-Many". Liz has written a nice introductory post explaining what it's about.
Thanks to the involvement of a rapidly growing and densely interacting group of developers, designers, thinkers, and users, social software is getting more exciting every day. I believe that Many-to-Many will provide an interesting set of points of view on this emerging area, and hopefully help fuel illuminating conversations.
It's an honor for me to join these very talented people and to show up alongside the other great blogs already under the Corante (pronounced Core-Aunt, by the way, as I just learned) banner. Aggregator junkies breathe easy: an RSS feed should be available soon.
5:39:25 PM
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Tuesday, April 22, 2003
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Come together
A few sparks fly between two folks who ought to have discovered one another a long time ago. One, two, and three.
I hope social software will induce more of that kind of encounter, even if it means mixing pleasure and pain at times. The wheel has been reinvented often enough already - let's find the others and talk.
2:08:38 AM
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The Internet Topic Exchange now supports Easy News Topics
Phil Pearson:
A minor (but very handy) change to the Internet Topic Exchange today: it now supports ENT (spec), which means suitably equipped aggregators will be able to pull topic information straight out of the RSS feeds.
Making this actually useful is a new RSS feed: all posts on the site. If you want to keep track of everything, subscribe to that one (traffic on the Exchange is still not awfully high, so you won't find yourself overwhelmed). An aggregator which understands topics will be able to just pull down this one RSS feed instead of heaps of individual topic channel feeds.
The most interesting bit is yet to come: I've been contacted by Scott Johnston and Greg Gershman, who both seem interested in using Topic Exchange information to do some sort of classification of search results. Sort of like the way Google uses dmoz to give you links to relevant categories when you search. This functionality is yet to come, but the hooks are there in the Topic Exchange, so any developers are welcome to start using them from now on!
For people who are interested in using this, I've written a page to explain how to handle the data. Enjoy!
Speaking of the ENT standard, David Sifry has a review up. I should get around to looking more closely at this interesting new development sometime.
1:43:48 AM
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Open Education launches
It's a big week for group-forming. Something about the spring?
Writes George Siemens:
Several weeks ago, I posted several articles relating to open source...and the need for a model that encourages sharing of educational content: Part 1 and Part 2.
Since then, a small (but committed!) group of bloggers/thinkers/educators have joined forces to create Open Education...and the Open Education Mailing list. I strongly encourage you to join both. We are still in the process of organizing...but are making rapid progress. This is an exciting project that has potential to make a real impact in how knowledge is shared at an educational level. Join in and let your voice be heard. Much, much more to come!
If you blog, we'd appreciate links/awareness to the site and the mailing list!
I'm in. These folks really look committed.
1:25:38 AM
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blaxm! improves
The blaxm! reviews exchange now lets you look up reviews by author and by item. For instance, here are reviews of "The Invisible Computer". Moreover, blaxm! uses RSS to publish headlines from blogs in the right-hand column when you look at a single blogger's reviews. blaxm! will help you post your reviews to your weblog as well as on the site itself.
1:21:45 AM
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Call for discussion: Social Software Alliance
Like that name. From Peter Kaminski's blog:
PURPOSE AND SCOPE
We propose a trade group of social software developers and other interested parties who work together to create and promote open standards for the social software community. Social software blends tools and modes for richer online social environments and experiences. Some examples of social software are weblogs, wikis, forums, chat environments, or instant messaging, and related tools and data structures for identity, integration, interchange and analysis.
Social software is a dynamic and constantly evolving environment, rich with possibilities to create better connections between people. With a growing number of active developers, we need a central nexus to help drive the process of coordination and interoperability between different developers' products.
The alliance will:
- aid discovery of developers working on synergistic projects and standards
- assist in shaping open standards that mesh well with other alliance and Internet standards
- help promote each standard to gain wider adoption
The fast-paced nature of the social software space now argues for developing light-weight, easy-to-implement standards, following the Internet tradition of rough consensus and running code, but perhaps moving faster than the larger standards bodies. It is expected that those standards promulgated by the alliance which become widely adopted will be proposed to the appropriate general standards body or bodies: W3C, IETF, ISO, etc.
PROPOSED SCHEDULE
- First CFD published: April 16, 2003
- SSA Happening (voice/online meeting): April 18, 2003 (time TBD based on participants' time zones)
- BoF at Etech conference: April 22-25, 2003
- SSA Happening (voice/online meeting): May 2, 2003 (time TBD based on participants' time zones)
- Alliance announced with founding members: May 15, 2003
DISCUSSION
There is an email list and a wiki set up for the purpose of discussing the formation of an alliance.
list subscribe: blank email to social-subscribe@lists.polycot.com
unsubscribe: see List-Unsubscribe header in any list email
help with list server: social-help@lists.polycot.com
digest: social-digest-subscribe@lists.polycot.com
archive: http://lists.polycot.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi/2/
wiki: http://www.socialtext.net/ssa/
registration for editing: http://www.socialtext.net/ssa-registration/
It is expected that similar and/or additional discussion and collaboration tools will be migrated to the alliance's web presence, once it is created.
FOUNDING MEMBERS
Danny Ayers
Ideagraph
Stewart Butterfield
President, Ludicorp Research & Development Ltd.
Marc Canter
Chairman, CEO Broadband Mechanics Inc.
Ward Cunningham
Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.
Greg Elin
Noah Glass
Listenlab, LLC
Mark Graham
VP of Technology, iVillage
Meg Hourihan
Co-founder & Director, The Lafayette Project
Peter Kaminski
CTO, Socialtext Inc.
Elizabeth Lawley
Asst. Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology
Jon Lebkowsky
CEO, Polycot Consulting
Kevin Marks
Instigator, mediAgora
Ross Mayfield
CEO, Socialtext Inc.
Matt Mower
Novissio Ltd.
Mitch Ratcliffe
President, Internet/Media Strategies Inc.
Clay Shirky
Benjamin Trott
Co-Founder & CTO, Six Apart Ltd.
Mena Trott
Co-Founder & CEO, Six Apart Ltd.
Paolo Valdemarin
Evectors Software
David Weinberger
Writer
Nancy White
Online facilitator, Full Circle Associates
Keep (at least) an eye on the SSA. I think this is an important step.
By the way, in case you missed it as I did, Nancy wrote a transcript of the April 18 Happening (thanks!).
1:14:40 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:12:37 PM.
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