Seb's Open Research
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Friday, January 09, 2004
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Microblogosphere Top 100
In the item below
I suggest picking subsets out of the subscriptions sharing dataset that
Dave has assembled. One subset that is of special interest to me is the
set of people who read my blog. What does the top 100 look like for
this particular crowd? (In other words, what feeds are popular among
those who read my weblog?) Of course I'll show up at #1 (how
ego-flattering ;) but it would be quite interesting to see the rest of
the list. Not hard to do.
 4:03:15 PM
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Exploring subscription networks
Dave Winer has started an initiative for sharing RSS subscription lists. Subscriptions define a social network in a manner similar to blogrolls, so you get an explorable dataset similar to Phil's blogging ecosystem (of which I just found out there's a spiffy new version; here's my record) and Dave Sifry's Technorati.
A look at the most subscribed-to feeds reveals the self-selection bias:
participants (so far) are mostly techies -- syndication cognoscenti. Say
Dave, wouldn't it be cool to define several pools that people could
choose to put their list in? That way we could see, for instance who
the "librarians" or "software developers" read. I'd really like to see
"learning" and "knowledge management" networks.
Want to add your voice? Don't have an OPML file of your own? Fear not, as from Stephen Downes comes this handy tool:
I created a super-easy OPML generator that
you can use to create your own reading list and send it to
Feeds.Scripting.Com, even if you don't use a headline reader and even if you
don't have a website. Moreover, I am releasing the source code as open source
(GPL) software, free to anyone who wants it. So now anybody who wants to share
their reading lists can do it quickly and efficiently.
3:51:17 PM
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Should you split your blog?
Last month Lisa Williams answered no, and proceeded to eloquently articulate a key part of the philosophy that motivated the design of the Internet Topic Exchange (which incidentally turns one year old next week!).
Basically, unless there are good reasons to do otherwise, all of an individual's public writing ought to be coherently tied together (that includes comments too, by the way). Some of it could additionally go to other spaces, if the author feels like sharing it with a community. To reuse Don Park's metaphor, bloggers are mountains, topics are lakes, and posts flow like water from one to the other. Topics help generate new connections and they provide good starting points for new bloggers.
Here's part of Lisa's post:
As
syndication becomes more robust, I think we will see more and more
site/feeds that contain vast quantities of news and commentary on a
specific subject as people map their own categories to a kind of
"pidgin taxonomy." The categories in that taxonomy could then be
themselves a feed displayed in an aggregator or on a webpage or both.
(While I was hanging out on IRC someone -- I wish I remembered so that
I could attribute this idea -- made the comment that we could use the
categories of the Wikipedia as this kind of lingua-franca. Just think
how it would enrich an online reference work to be able to get a
definition of a term and then hit a button and see a live, continually
changing feed of related news stories and blog posts on that idea!! I
need to fan myself...is it warm in here?).
It so happens that Michael Fagan took it upon himself to create directories of topics in the Exchange early on. One of them uses the Open Directory's category scheme.
(link via Kaye)
11:21:22 AM
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Shift happens
Clay
points out how the meaning of the term "weblogging" has changed over
the last few years as people have repurposed weblog tools in
multidinous ways:
Weblogging used to mean, roughly, “daily personal publishing, with an
emphasis on conversational annotation of links”, and the software was
originally designed to match that pattern. Now weblogging means “stuff people do with weblog software”, and those
uses are far more various than the pattern Jorn Barger named and
Rebecca Blood described.
So do we need a new term for the activity formerly known as "weblogging"?
10:16:48 AM
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What YASNSes bring
Jeremy Zawodny:
"Get yourself out of the mind set of social network software for the
sake of social network software and start thinking about how adding a
social networking component to existing systems could improve
them."
Follow the links from JZ's post to find a lot of discussion surrounding this debate.
And see the argument that my colleague Stephen offers to the view that there is a disincentive to sharing one's connections:
"If the value you create is based on 'knowing', then your livelihood will be
undercut by someone who has the same knowledge - in this case, the same (or
similar) network of contacts - and who shares it freely."
(By the way, my primary point of presence in social networking systems is here, on Ryze.
Ryze is one of the oldest systems alive today - it was launched in
2002. Worth a login if you have yet to try one of those systems...)
9:01:11 AM
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Thursday, January 08, 2004
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"There are 2 great secrets to success in life. The first is not to tell everything you know."
Anonymous
10:36:34 PM
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Memetics meets Granovetter
Jim Moore: A theoretical note on why blogs matter.
I loved this explanation of how weblogs can prove to be influential on
society at large, in spite of a low overall blogger density; this connects
with some of my own thinking on information routing in knowledge networks. Let me quote extensively (emphasis mine):
We can best connect to other social worlds through the social shortcuts of weak ties, by which we engage folks that
are not necessarily that close to us initially--e.g. Uncle Albert, or an old high school friend, or
someone we know at work, at the dry cleaners, or where we have our car repaired. These bridge persons may not be that
emotionally close to the people we hope to reach on the other end of the
connection, either--but the value of bridging is that the relationship may be just strong
enough, as a social tie, to spread an idea or enable a new connection
for action.
Blogs have a special social relevance because they allow their bloggers
to
create and maintain a network of weak social ties. The network of
weak ties that a blogger can sustain is open to all comers, and is
potentially vast and highly diverse (as diverse as the web
itself--which of couse is not diverse enough, but is more diverse than,
say, academic journals). Blogs are weak tie machines!
Anyone (you!) can read my
blog.
If my ideas seem relevant to you, you can take them and
plant them within your local, strong-bonded social network. Of
course, if you are a blogger, you can also spread them across your own
blog-based weak ties--and thus diffuse the ideas even farther.
Blogging helps us expand and maintain a large number of loose
ties. And loose ties, to go back to Granovetter's point,
are the vital links for social progress. Social progress may be
(oversimply, of course) defined as the spread of good ideas across
society, and the combination and recombination of people into new
groups that can take collective action.
Finally, a good thing about weak social ties is that it appears to be
difficult to exert conventional social pressure across such ties.
It is hard to "pressure" someone into agreeing with an idea or an
action. Loose ties are voluntary. Thus ideas and actions
that grow across networks of weak ties can perhaps be presumed to be
better vetted by each person--based on merit rather than
coercion. Perhaps this process of individual discernment helps
filter out bad ideas seeking to spread across the network of loose
ties. Perhaps this filtering in turn contributes to collective wisdom
being developed across the loose-tie long distance network as a whole,
and thus also within the strong-tie local communities at the edges.
From what I've seen of the blogosphere so far, I think it must however be noted that while blogs support the creation and maintenance of weak ties, they do not compel it.
I think a fair proportion of bloggers quickly end up with mostly strong
ties to a core cluster and thus spend most of their time in a mostly
self-absorbed collective or (in the worst case) an echo chamber,
contributing little to the spread of ideas across communities. But that
doesn't do anything to diminish the ability of the weak-tie bloggers to
spread ideas.
Those people who wish to cultivate weak ties can do it more easily and
cheaply than before weblogs were around, and I think that's a
significant development in the evolution of knowledge sharing (read my thesis if you really want the full-blown exposé!).
This post also appears on channel social software
10:30:52 PM
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Dialog is a resource
Denham Grey:
Shared tacit knowledge formed in a community through conversation and dialog
is a very valuable corporate resource, well-protected from competitors,
impossible to copy and requires special conditions to replicate elsewhere.
Very well said. I'd never thought about dialog (dialogue?) in this way, but it makes plenty of sense.
Actually, I'd argue that dialog can also be seen as a personal
resource. The individual has a monopoly over all those pieces of shared
context he has with the people he has dialogued with, inside and
outside his organization.
8:40:12 PM
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Blogs and pogo sticks
The 2002-vintage Caslon Analytics profile on weblogs is still being updated. Thorough, crunchy, sarcastic in places - I like it. Here's a prediction I quoted from that report back then. It (still?) hasn't come true but the author(s) left it in:
we suspect that
the blog phenomenon is about to peak and that most will soon be stored
in the part of cyberspace dedicated to hula hoops, pogo sticks and
other fashions that reached their use-by date.
7:31:21 PM
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Wednesday, January 07, 2004
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Metadata overload
Jason Kottke: "The actual writing may be in there somewhere as well."
(Actually Jason, you forgot to throw in the Waypath related links:)
8:51:52 AM
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Tuesday, January 06, 2004
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P. G. Wodehouse. "The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun." [Quotes of the Day]
8:56:55 PM
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Published, hyperlinked events lead to awareness
Jon Udell reflects on a subtle chain of events leading to his becoming
aware of issues FOAF developers had with some of his writing:
What struck me later about this interaction was its miraculous
subtlety. I wrote something that made Edd sigh, I overheard his sigh,
and we had a discussion about what provoked it. Now let's look at how
this happened. My original comments were posted on this weblog. Edd and
Dan may or may not subscribe to my blog, but given their central
involvement in FOAF it was virtually certain that the item would come
to their attention. Their reaction to it, on the FOAF chat channel, was
logged on a public page. I became aware of it when somebody followed
the link to my item from that page, which created an entry in my
referrer log. A truly remarkable chain of events. This kind of thing
happens every day, but I continue to find it astonishing.
Weblog to chat channel (via Feedster, perhaps?), to referrer log, to
email. With human intervention in between each step, mind you. If you
got the dynamics of it all you should get a passing grade in social
software 101.
2:15:19 PM
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Why people blog
The good folks over at the Community Wiki (a fork out of Meatball wiki, with less restrictive copyright and NearLinks into Meatball - brilliant idea) have had a stab at figuring out why people blog. A few drivers from their list which I think are spot-on:
But what drives people to publish personal information in the first place?
- Group Building.
People don't always have good friends in real life with whom they can
discuss what is on their mind; the web facilitates finding like-minded
people
- Reputation. In online communities, it
is sometimes important to offer more personal information in order to
build trust (ie. link to your blog from your signature when posting to Usenet or a MailingList)
- Plain Talk, Personal Freedom. You are held to your own standards. Your friends are your friends. You can talk naturally. You can be yourself.
- Off-Topic. People need
off-topic so that they can build the human interest needed to work
together in trust. But off-topic is off-topic, and doesn't belong in
work mailing lists, and on some wiki. So what you do is you put your
off-topic thoughts into your blog. Problem solved.
- Half-Baked Thoughts.
Nobody's going to pounce on you for putting your half-baked thoughts on
your blog. People may disagree, or help you see some flaws, but almost
always with the understanding that they are in your house as a guest.
Lilia has been thinking about this too, but I can't seem to find exactly where. Lilia, are you around? Google has ideas, too.
(link via Xtof)
1:25:36 PM
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ZOMBIE collective blog
Serendipity stroke again this morning. While browsing self-introductions by Jean Leloup fans on this board, I came across ZOMBIE, a quite thoughtful French language collective blog that features contributions from a number of young physicists from my alma mater - string theorist Vincent Bouchard and particle physicists David Côté and Sylvie Brunet, among others.
No, that blog is not about physics - ZOMBIE stands for "Zone Ouverte de
Mobilisation pour Briser les Injustices et Exclusions" and is a project
of the Priorité à Gauche collective. I found a few interesting items penned by Vincent Bouchard - for instance, this essay questioning the meaningfulness of the concept of "human nature" (en français) and an emergent democracy-flavoured quote from Guy Debord:
Revolution
is not showing life to people, but bringing them to life. A
revolutionary organization must always remember that its aim is not
getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders,
but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at
least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.
The RSS feed is here but the site doesn't seem to offer author-specific feeds.
10:27:34 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:17:39 PM.
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