Seb's Open Research

Saturday, December 27, 2003

"Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." - Leonard Cohen (via whiskey river) What do you think? []  links to this post    3:29:40 PM   Leader as place The latest Wired article on Howard Dean's internetworked campaign features a wisdom quote from emergent democrat Joi Ito: I contact him to ask if he thinks there's a difference between an emergent leader and an old-fashioned political opportunist. What does it take to lead a smart mob? Ito emails back an odd metaphor: "You're not a leader, you're a place. You're like a park or a garden. If it's comfortable and cool, people are attracted. Deanspace is not really about Dean. It's about us." It ends with a killer reading list: Out Of Control by Kevin Kelly KEY POINT: The most powerful information systems of the future will be grown, not made. DEAN TAKEAWAY: Turn every supporter into a potential organizer. "Grow" the grass roots. The Cluetrain Manifesto by Chris Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger KEY POINT: The Net undermines respect for authority. DEAN TAKEAWAY: Participate: Blog daily, link to indie blogs, and allow open comments; reflect the tone of the community. Emergence by Steven Johnson KEY POINT: Our media and political movements will be shaped by bottom-up forces, not top-down ones. DEAN TAKEAWAY: Let the ants do the work, not the queen; allow local groups to function independently. Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger KEY POINT: The loose structure of the Web encourages social experimentation and is a balm for alienation. DEAN TAKEAWAY: Encourage face-to-face contact. Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold KEY POINT: Mobile mobs linked by electronic devices could change history by intervening in politics spontaneously. DEAN TAKEAWAY: Hold events, such as Dean Visibility Days, where the mass of supporters suddenly come together. Linked by Albert-László Barabási KEY POINT: Essential aspects of networks - e.g., the advantage gained by pioneers - are the product of general laws. DEAN TAKEAWAY: Be first to adopt and invent community tools. The risk is worth the chance of grabbing an early lead. What do you think? []  links to this post    11:31:42 AM   Encourage linking Jill Walker gave a talk at Brown University on blogging and network literacy. There's a lot packed in that post; you may want to start somewhere else if you're relatively new to the landscape. My favorite sentence: "Encouraging linking is key." Well, I suppose you just did it for me, Jill! What do you think? []  links to this post    11:03:28 AM   Windows-Linux equivalence table As the post below deals with alternatives to closed systems, I figured I'd throw in a link to an earlier post of mine that is relevant. What do you think? []  links to this post    10:24:50 AM   How users can help open standards evolve Robin Good reflects on the issues surrounding standards and offers practical suggestions for end users who want to support open standards for the common good: So, what you can do today to help open standards evolve and be adopted by a larger number of users is to: a) start asking yourself some questions about the benefits of going one way or the other while b) gradually favour and adopt those tools that actually do support such open standards. Here are some great examples which you can start to consider for adoption now: Open Office in place of Microsoft Office PHP - in place of ASP for development XML - RSS - for information distribution Linux - MacOS X in place of closed systems Jabber - in place of YM, AIM, MSN, ICQ SIP - in place of Skype and other proprietary VoIP solutions Mozilla - in place of Microsoft Internet Explorer Media Player Classic - in place of Windows Media Player or Real Media Player (it plays all formats and more) JAlbum - in place of proprietary digital image management solutions Wikis - for group-based collaboration content editing Plone, Drupal, and other great open source CMS solutions in place of proprietary portan/content management systems http://www.masternewmedia.org/2003/06/11/effective_content_management_comes_of_age.htm Gnutella, eMule, BitTorrent - for file exchange and distribution in place of Kazaa and other mischievous P2P tools. MySQL in place of SQL, Oracle and other proprietary solutions PD (Public Domain), CC (Creative Commons), GPL (General Public License), vs Copyright I should note that in most of the above examples, you don't have to be a self-sacrificing zealot to pick the light side, as the open alternatives are cheaper and work better. (via Stephen) What do you think? []  links to this post    10:20:26 AM

Monday, December 22, 2003

Barlow takes the plunge Many thanks to Joi for giving John Perry Barlow the extra push he needed to start his own weblog! My method of communication with you has been generally about as interactive as Rush Limbaugh's. I broadcast and then take a few calls (or e-mails, as the case may be) which I have not shared. I've often thought about passing them on, because they are usually as wonderful, thoughtful, witty, and intelligent as you are. But I didn't want to burden you with even more e-mail than you're already gagging on. It felt selfish not to share such an embarrassment of riches, but I know that if you start getting too much mail from me, you filter it into another mailbox which you never get around to opening. (Maybe this message is sitting just such a black hole now.) The solution has been obvious for some time: put up a blog. Then, instead of sending your responses to me alone, you can send them to everyone who reads the blog. What do you think? []  links to this post    1:02:30 PM   "Show HTML anchors" bookmarklet Anchors are marked spots within a HTML page that you can use as link URLs for fine-grained linking. While handy, anchors are not always easy to find in a page. Now Matt Mower has put together a "Show Anchors" bookmarklet that will reveal them on any page you're visiting. Just drag the previous link into your links toolbar, and click. On my page, stars will show up before every post. Works in Mozilla, not sure about IE. What do you think? []  links to this post    12:32:53 PM   The uncapturable Gary Lawrence Murphy: in one fell stroke of a stripe of red midst the deep blues, Barnett Newman defeated the entire reprint industry. They can copy his stripe all they wish, duplicate every non-variance of his pigment tone and brushwork, even blow their copies up just as high and mighty, but they cannot usurp his work's position as the Voice of Fire. [...] Only this ephemerial state of being the uncapturable, the marker of a place in time and space, the now of being here, this is the only option in a digital rebroadcast future, an inevitable convergence path for all art in a digital age. And that future is here. What do you think? []  links to this post    9:58:18 AM

Sunday, December 21, 2003

A new blog is born every 11 seconds Technorati founder Dave Sifry writes, "Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We're also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds." 8,000 a day translates to almost 3 million new weblogs in a year. Not bad. Surely we're going to see many great new bloggers in 2004. I'm looking forward to finding them! What do you think? []  links to this post    11:14:46 PM   Does groupware imply groupthink? Geoff Cohen asks, "Could we architect social software that fought groupthink? Or does it just make the gravitational attraction of consensus, even flawed consensus, ever so much more irresistible?" I think the key to avoiding unhealthy levels of groupthink has to do with designing spaces that consistently exert pull upon outsiders (or social hackers or community straddlers), so as to keep the air fresh. As long as they feel welcomed, outsiders are able to inject an essential dose of criticism into a group's deliberations, which will help steer it out of groupthink potholes. I think the blogosphere exhibits this kind of "outsider pull" much more than topic-focused forums. This is because a blog lets you expose a complex identity while a topical forum requires you to leave out many things that would be offtopic. Even if you do participate in several forums, almost all the time your identity gets fragmented and people are not likely to see your other facets. (I must note, however, that isolation between facets can be useful in some situations, as danah boyd argues in her thesis.) But what about action? A diverse group has fewer blind spots, but on the other hand, agreement in such a group can be harder to establish, so there is a real possibility that the group will go nowhere beyond conversation. Is a core of agreed-upon ideas necessary for group action to take place? I think so. Does this mean that group action requires groupthink? Not necessarily, because some people are able to act upon ideas without believing in them so strongly they can no longer challenge them. So, I figure, you could have a group that effectively acts as if it were "of one mind", yet will challenge itself when the time is ripe to do so. The scientific community likes to think of itself as such a group, though challenges to established ideas propagate socially, one individual at a time, and sometimes require a generation of scientists to die out. I heartily recommend Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to anyone who's interested in these dynamics. If you don't have time to read it all, here are an outline and a synopsis by Prof. Frank Pajares. What do you think? []  links to this post    10:10:20 PM   Audio technology wiki Just stumbled upon a great wiki about audio tech on the hydrogenaudio site. Contains guides to audio formats, ripping, etc. If you're more of a hardcore techie, check out the Audio Coding Wiki. (Speaking of audio technology, Alf recently blogged on how easy it is to remove vocals from songs. Invert one channel and subtract it from the other one. Voice is left/right symmetric and so cancels out, while the other layers are usually asymmetric and won't disappear.) What do you think? []  links to this post    8:25:20 PM

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