Seb's Open Research
|
Saturday, May 17, 2003
|
|
| |
Wiki of all wikis
WorldWideWiki: OneBigWiki. I didn't know there were that many public wikis. (And some are missing from the list - I should try to add them when I find time.)
 8:50:06 AM
|
|
|
|
|
Friday, May 16, 2003
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, May 14, 2003
|
|
| |
Disinfopedia
A project of PRWatch.org, Disinfopedia was started in last January - almost exactly 2 years after Wikipedia, after which it is modelled. It describes itself as
"a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests. We are already working on 1015 articles.
Anyone, including you, can edit any article right now. See the Disinfopedia FAQ for more background information about the project. Read the help page and experiment in the sandbox to learn how you can use and contribute to the Disinfopedia.
The content of Disinfopedia is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that it is free and will remain so forever. See Disinfopedia:Copyrights for the details and open content and free content for background."
This could turn into a highly useful resource for making sense of much of what we read and hear, complementary to things like Who owns what. I'm kind of worried about the possibility of edit wars, though, should that wiki become very popular - is it possible to write neutrally or objectively about such a topic?
(via Collaborative Learning)
10:40:21 AM
|
|
Will social software encourage polarization?
A good post and a fascinating discussion over on Don Park's blog on the potential adverse effects of social software, starting from his observation of how the Internet affected people in his home country:
Korea is emerging as one of the most advanced Internet nation in the world. Young Koreans, in particular, live and breath Internet, each belonging to large number of online communities. One would expect them to be well informed and objective, yet they are not. Their views are warped and often radical. While all the world's information is at their fingertip, they consume information subjectively and produce misinformation biased by their views. Adding highly effective social software to this is frightening to me.
[...] In a sense, social clusters form gravity wells which has its own local physical laws and is difficult to escape from. Social softwares make it easier to create and grow such clusters.
Bill Kearney offers a counter-argument that I find cogent:
The fact that groups can form more rapidly will do more to devalue the ability of any one group or cult of personality. Yes, for those ununsed to the process it will be a terrifyingly vast expanse of rapidly changing groupings. Hang on, it's going to be a fun ride.
I guess the question could be summarized as "Does social software help people turn inwards or outwards?". (Personally, I don't think it can be answered without taking the context of use into account.) [Corante: Social Software]
3:48:30 AM
|
|
Ridiculously easy group-forming via k-collector
Communal topics and super-blogs. Matt on k-collector and shared topics: "If you click a topic name on my weblog now you don't get a local page but, instead, the dynamic k-collector page for that topic. At the moment this is an aggregation of all the posts about that topic from anyone subscribing to the cloud." [Curiouser and curiouser!]
I hope to find time soon to compare this to the Internet Topic Exchange and investigate interoperability in both directions. More than ever do I believe that there is promise in loose community formation among bloggers. Many ingredients are there that weren't around only six months ago: more developers, many more bloggers (meaning more diversity and overlap of interests at the same time), and new complementary technology, such as the shiny new Technorati API.
Now, this is nothing more than educated guesswork, but I have a feeling that, say, a year from now, many of my favorite sources will not be personal blogs, but rather topical feeds that have been duly post-processed in some way by the collective intelligence of my microblogosphere.
While it makes me kind of sad to entertain the thought of progressively abandoning per-person subscriptions, I'm afraid I won't be able to keep up with all of those tremendously interesting new voices without the help of more sophisticated personal relevance filters.
3:30:18 AM
|
|
More blogstats
Michael has just appended links to Weblogs.com: Seeing the Curve (on the blogosphere's growth rate across time) and to Hot Weblog Crawling Action (stats by tool and language) to the Weblogs by the Numbers page. Both worth a look.
12:16:01 AM
|
|
|
|
|
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
|
|
| |
PlaNetwork Conference: Networking a Sustainable Future
I just got this in my inbox and thought it might interest readers of this blog.
Join Hazel Henderson, Douglas Engelbart, Joan Blades, Jeff Gates, Leif Utne and others at this exciting gathering of innovators from the world of IT,
environmental advocates, peace and social justice activists, independent media pioneers, and many others exploring how social networks, information technologies and the Internet can play a key role in accelerating positive global change. June 6-8 at the Presidio in San Francisco, CA. Special non-profit, activist and student rate: $95 for three days. Register now online at: http://www.planetwork.net
2:57:59 PM
|
|
Is the MTTB (mean time to Blogdex) computable?
Interestingly, BlogMatcher's link cosmos shows that the word about it has been out for two weeks already, but it didn't start seriously ripping through the blogosphere until just two days ago. Assuming one knows that a particular meme is bound to explode at some point, is the "fuse length" predictable, say, from social network connectivity data?
Note that a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle is at work here: if you reference a specific test case publicly, you're certain to influence its diffusion process.
[Update] Ryo writes that he set up a referer feedback loop a couple days ago, which might have triggered it all.
1:14:27 PM
|
|
Vipul Kashyap and emergent semantics
Vipul Kashyap's home page says "I am a Fellow at the National Library of Medicine in the Medical Informatics Training Program. I am currently working on issues relating the Semantic Web and Medical Ontologies."
The part I found most interesting is at the end:
Some other areas which I am working on are Emergent Semantics which is based on the hypothesis, that semantics on the Semantic Web are more likely to "emerge" from various types of information available and interactions between participants as opposed to top down formal specifications. Towards this end I am taking a close look at statistical clustering and NLP techniques. Also of interest are techniques from cultural anthropology, such as consensus analysis and social networks.
Vipul is presenting a poster at WWW2003, so I might be able to meet him soon.
9:33:39 AM
|
|
Survey: blogging and social relations
I am a Brazilian student of Master in Communication of Bahia Federal University, in the area of Cyberculture. I have been researching the formation of social relations within the practice of blogging. I'd like you to help me by answering my questions going to the following address: http://www.dinamidia.com.br/weblog. Please, spread this research among bloggers, please. Your help is very important to its extension.
Thanks a lot.
I enjoyed filling in the questionnaire and it didn't take long. (However I had to take away the text I had put in the box under question #29 to get the database to accept my answers.)
9:30:14 AM
|
|
The sincerest form of flattery - Marek Kowalkiewicz
Alex Tarkowski sent me an email that reads:
Just wanted to leave you a note that a Polish online newspaper has published under http://www.gazeta-it.pl/internet/glob_blogow.html an abridged translation of your text on personal knowledge publishing without any reference to your original text etc. I doubt this is a case that you have been informed about this, if so sorry for the problem. Otherwise you might want to do something about this.
To make this clear, I am writing this because plagiarism is driving me mad, in Poland we have no respect for other's people work whatsoever, I teach students who sometimes give me papers which are two texts from the Net glued together, and my mom recently found a PhD paper which had large chunks taken straight from her book from 10 years ago.
Thanks Alex. I don't read Polish so I can't verify the claim, but it does look a bit like my text. Perhaps Maria can confirm?
In any case, I'm kinda flattered that someone found my article good enough to want to translate it and put their name on it...
9:27:15 AM
|
|
|
|
|
Monday, May 12, 2003
|
|
| |
Strong essay on the significance of weblogs
by Andrew Grumet: Deep Thinking about Weblogs.
David Carter-Tod writes: "Not much that you haven't heard before, but presented cogently and in enough depth to, perhaps, convince a decision maker." I agree.
In case you're new to this weblog, my earlier article on personal knowledge publishing was in a similar style and made similar points, though it was longer and deeper in some respects.
Here's an interesting tidbit I learned in Grumet's piece: the SharpReader personal news aggregator can automatically show you what posts link to a post that it has retrieved. (See the screenshot). This lets you more easily follow the scattered thread of commentary that follows a post.
2:50:18 PM
|
|
The quest for beauty (and interesting problems)
Is computer science really closer to an art than a science? Paul Graham, in Hackers and Painters, argues that it is the case. An insightful piece, as usual with Graham, that draws many interesting parallels between hacking and painting.
A part that caught my attention was that about the mismatch that exists between the urge to hack and the requirement to fit within existing institutions, as this quote illustrates for the case of academia.
"In the best case, the papers are just a formality. Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software. But often this mismatch causes problems. It's easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers.
Unfortunately, beautiful things don't always make the best subjects for papers. Number one, research must be original-- and as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure that you're exploring virgin territory is to to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants. Number two, research must be substantial-- and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome in order to get things done. Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions."
Which reminds me of a recent post by theoretical computer scientist Lance Fortnow about finding problems to work on:
A good problem for a graduate student must fulfill each of three characteristics.
- Open.
- Doable.
- Interesting.
Finding problems that fit any two of these three is not hard, but if a problem is doable and interesting, someone likely would have solved it by now. Too often interesting is the property that is given the least emphasis.
2:33:50 PM
|
|
Oblique strategies
I like to keep this neat JavaScript implementation of Eno and Schmidt's Oblique Strategies at hand on my links bar. Though I've found that, by itself, the very act of recognizing that you're at a point where you need a shot of obliqueness tends to get you unstuck.
Oblique Strategies - creative guidance while under pressure.
 I ran across Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies today. Very interesting. This printed set of cards had words of guidance that were to provide clarity during moments of pressure.
"Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking - to jog the mind."
Gregory Taylor has provided quite a write up on the history of the Oblique Strategies. Take time to peruse his wonderful resource.
The originally printed cards are very hard to come by. But there are many versions available electronically:
[nick gaydos > thynk via Marc's Voice]
2:12:48 PM
|
|
|
|
Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:12:39 PM.
This theme is based on the SoundWaves
(blue) Manila theme. |
|
|
