Elwyn Jenkins: Blogopedia of Technacy

Wed, 05 Mar 2003 22:58:22 GMT

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Some additional terms used in the study of technacy

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 21:03:17 GMT

Some terms as listed in Google for the Technate person to adopt and use:

Blogopedia (listed 267 times in Google Search)
A list and explanation of new terms that arise in electronic language -- especially those that are used in weblogs as people create new knowledge.

Blogmapping (listed 41 times in Google Search)
Mapping the social network that exists between people when they link to each other's sites.

Technacy (listed 173 times in Google Search)
The new set of skills required by human beings to be able to communicate in an era when electronic language dominates communication activities. (As opposed to literacy which are skills that were required in the age of print.)

K-logs (listed 7,970 times in Google Search)
"Some people are taking the concept of weblogs and applying it to the wider concept of knowledge management. The result is k-logging ("knowledge-logging"). But will it catch on - will your employer dump Lotus Notes databases in favour of browsers and blog-style brain-dumps?"

K-logs (John Robb's Discussion)
It promotes a personal brand (as a domain expert in an organization or a smart person with a valuable POV). It solves personal organization problems. It makes it possible to be heard in the online environment despite noise generated by more vocal contributors. It documents what you do in a way that is visible to a wider corporate audience. As a result of the above, it provides people with motive to contribute (a feature lacking in the solutions provided by Lotus and others).

Social Software (listed 3,050 times in Google Search)
Social software improves in functionality with more users because either the more people that use it, the better the environment that the software creates is (Ebay, Sims, etc) or because the more people that use it the better the actual software itself becomes (open source software dev and, as J C Herz points out, the Sims again).

The Google Words

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 15:20:47 GMT

Arising across the net are a range of words that are beginning to be used more frequently -- all connected to Google. There are Googling (20,000 uses), Googler (3,250 uses), and even Googled (12,500) [as in I have been Googled -- meaning that the GoogleBot has come onto my site.]

What is more interesting to me, however, are words to do with studies of things Google. Such as Googlology and Googlosophy each used about six times only online so far. No one has really attempted an explanation of each; rather each has used the term in a rather intuitive fashion. So here goes a definition for each:

GOOGLOLOGY
The art and science of Googlology refers to the technical knowledge identifying the workings of Google. This study is akin to Geology, where Googlology is setting down a description of exactly the interactions between Google and websites, seachers and websites and everything in between. As with other sciences there is a lot of guess work, as well as a lot of experimentation to prove a point or to demonstrate a result.

GOOGLOSOPHY
The Theories of Googlosophy include primarily a description of the belief system underlying the organization of the text of Google, the uses of the text and the ways in which people are represented and ordered in that text. The Google Coporation is in the business of constructing a very public text which many millions of people read. That text is one of the keys to understanding and interacting with the web. The theories of decision making in composing that text, the equity of the system in representing peoples equally, explanations that provide a gloss of way of uderstanding the world constructed by Google, all have to do with Googlosophy.

Microcontent Defined

Sat, 28 Dec 2002 13:38:38 GMT

Organized means of publishing small texts online by individuals. Such publishing is accomplished using organized means of disseminating links or the text itself. Publishing may include one or a combination of: email, weblogs, ezines, automated instant messaging (robot initiation or responses), and/or eDocs.

Sites that discuss Microcontent include:

Some ideas about Micrcontent that others have voiced:

Microcontent is meme-sized pieces of the Internet. We've discovered in the last few years that navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of the Internet. So it's time to create a tool that's designed for the job of viewing, managing, and publishing microcontent. This tool is the microcontent client. [Magazine]

Today, microcontent is being used as a more general term indicating content that conveys one primary idea or concept, is accessible through a single definitive URL or permalink, and is appropriately written and formatted for presentation in email clients, web browsers, or on handheld devices as needed. A day's weather forcast, the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, an abstract from a long publication, or a single instant message can all be examples of microcontent. [Magazine]

‘Microcontent’ is Jakob Nielsen’s word to describe the short bits of text which carry disproportionate weight on a website. Their specific role in relation to a site’s information architecture means that titles and headings, in particular, require special attention. [Website]

Rapid Text Construction Defined . . .

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 12:59:29 GMT

This is a concept of electronic composing, devised by Dr Elwyn Jenkins, where a composer (a writer in the era of electronic text needs to be consider a composer rather than writer) using a computer and a suite of two or more computer programs devises a way to build text from larger chunks of language than letters and words. Essentially, a composer databases all her/his writing in text chunks. As a writer often uses previous concepts to build the next text, there is no need to re-write the concept, but rather borrow text chunks from previously written text.

The problem solved by Dr Jenkins in working towards this goal was to locate a program that provided not only a way to database text chunks, but also a way to logically connect these chunks to speed-up the process of text chunk selection so that text chunk selection occurs quicker than re-writing a group of 200 to 400 words. This was solved by using the program PersonalBrain 2.1 where text chunks are stored as either .doc files or .rtf files and can be sorted by the meta-storage device called a 'thought', in PersonalBrain terminaology, or text searching through the files stored in a 'Brain', the storage concept of The Brain Technologies Inc.

Rapid Text Construction can build a text at the rate of 25,000 words per day instead of the normal 6,000 to 7,000 words that an author can normally write using traditional word processing methods. Dr Jenkins now frequently practises writing in this manner completing the text "Build eTexts Faster and Better using Rapid Text Construction Techniques" in less than a day. [Download a copy using the link provided.]

The book provides a wider background to the issues of Rapid Text Construction and provides a hands-on approach to actually practising this form of text production.

You should also go to TEXT CHUNK INFORMATION. You may also register to download the PersonalBrain Navigation Brain for the TEXT CHUNK LIBRARY on this page.

Thu, 05 Dec 2002 15:15:39 GMT

Synthesis

Just as there is grammar in written language, there is 'Synthesis' in Electronic Language. One would say that text is composed gramatically, in this case of Electronic Language one would say that something is composed synthetically.

A comparison between Grammer and Synthesis can be seen in the diagram below:

The basic unit of Grammar is the 'clause' which is very much related to the more colloquial term 'sentence'. In Synthesis the basic unit is 'System'. A system is a combination of instructions that form or make a program, that in turn when a series of programs are linked form a system.

An example of a system I have composed is a document called "Electronic Composing". This document is constructed through in combination using PersonalBrain 2.1, MSWordPad, MSExcel, MSWord, Radio Userland and Internet Explorer. The 'system' means only in combination and is a structure of text that can now be pointed to and studied just like one may see this text and identify the particular grammatical construction.

A system has a utility value as well as a meaning value -- using a sentence can get something done, and a sentence also has particular embedded meanings. Similarly the system I have composed called "Electronic Composing" is a structure of 45 meg of files that combined form the Brain (a text built in PersonalBrain 2.1) that show the realtionships between thoughts, ideas, texts and graphics, that when the Brain is updated it automatically generates changes to the base files of a MS Word document, that when Word is opened and the Word Document is opened, all updates are automatically included in the document which can then be published by way of Radio Userland to go onto a website, into Adobe Acrobat to make a pseudo-print documents, can be printed on a computer printer to obtain hardcopy and can be zipped up for sharing with other people electronically.

The utility value of this particular system is that I can prepare a text and have automatically updates made to that text and produce the text in various versions according to the need. The meaning of the 'system' can best be understood if we focus on the meaning of a grammatical cosntructions for a moment. Let us ask a question about the meaning of a clause. We can say, "What does that sentence mean?" for example. The sentence may be "Tom rode his bike to school today." The answer may be something like, "The meaning of this sentence is that Tom, my cousin, rode to school perhaps inferring that I am lazy and get driven to school each day, or something like that.

IN the case of the text "Electronic Composing" the meaning is that the text is a highly efficient text being able to provide a utility action with few activities on the part of a human, and that it is a text that is truly electronic in that it is genuinely modifiable, active, interactive, databased and collagic (the tests of electronicity). "Electronic Composing" also messages to us that it can only be truly read and interacted with on a computer and that anything that may look like a complete text is just a shadow of the real text on a computer.

Further work on Synthesis will be done to explain it more fully in the next weeks.

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 17:49:05 GMT

Deep Linking

The practice of listing a URL in an online document, either overtly as in this link http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0709-deeplink.html or covertly as in this link to refer a reader to another location on the Internet which may be useful to the reader in this context. It is labelled as deep linking as the reader is not linked to the home page of the referred site, but is linked to a deeper page within the other site.

This is fundamental to the way people have accepted electronic language operates. However, there are court cases in some countries endeavouring to restrict deep linking.

Deep linking is a key composing and decoding strategy of technate people. Without deep linking a main meaning system is crippled. Opposition to deep linking is perpetrated by people who have a conception of documents derived from the age of literacy where references to such a document cannot be made unless to the whole document.

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 10:01:07 GMT

Composing

The challenge of composing is to knowing how to obtain resources from which a starting-point can be set, and secondly, how to move on from there to modify that starting text into what is required. For example, a composer may adopt the layout of another document on file , or even cut and paste large portions of text from another document; the next steps of modifying those borrowed selections to mould them into an expression that is consistent with the balance of the composition is the challenging step.

Composing is an activity of orchestrating a large number of variables quite unlike “writing ”. Composing also involves borrowing, and knowing how and when to borrow “text ” at a much higher rank than “writing”. Writing is usually a feat of “wording”; composing is an activity of “objectifying” or working at the rank of “object ” within a particular program or set of programmes. Depending on the selection in place, an object can be as small as a “word” or it can be as large as a complete photograph , or an entire document .

Composing, then, has an element of politics that may not be at first apparent to the composer. How much of each text , and how many of the texts on-line within an organisation are available for “borrowing”? Some businesses prefer that “standard” letters and forms are used. For example, one organisation required from the writer that every document raised for any client be a standard document available on the network and modified only in those places so marked ¾ outside of this no document was to be forwarded to a client. Other organisations allow borrowing from any other person’s documents, except the Managing Director’s documents. In some settings, every document is copyrighted, marked with the composer’s name and warnings of rights and uses marked in small text on every page . In spite of the capacity for substantial savings in computer based communications being available in that business , the sensitivities of the organisation set as they were precluded people from using the most valuable resources they had in composing further computer documents.

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 09:58:00 GMT

Operating

Operating involves using a keyboard, mouse, and other peripheral devices to provide the computer with input that forms the human part of the human-computer dialogue. When using a keyboard or other peripheral device, the human must select from the range of options defined on the computer screen using active units as a resource with which to reply to the questioning of the computer.

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 08:00:13 GMT

Technacy

Technacy primarily is about a new consciousness, an extended consciousness beyond oracy and literacy that encompasses the problems posed by a new language order ¾ electronic language. Consciousness of language (spoken and written) is taken here to be a description of the relations people believe to exist between language, the mind and the world. Most people go through the day without exercising their consciousness of language . To be aware of every word and its ramifications might be either sublime or petrifying. Yet consciousness of language is innately human. It shows itself most in the way we play with language ¾ puns, slang, rhyme and a host of other verbal tricks. Similarly, consciousness of electronic language is taken to be a description of the relations people believe to exist between electronic language, the mind and the world.