Friday, March 14, 2003

Source: Ming the Mechanic; 3/14/2003; 10:56:14 AM. Towards Structured Blogging. Sbastien Paquet has a great article with thoughts about how we can move towards structured blogging. You know, where the meaning of what we post is captured more systematically than just being a bunch of words one can link to. "Lately I've been thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily.Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on. Now, say I've written a review of the latest Radiohead album into my blog. I'd like others who are interested in Radiohead, or in music reviews in general, and who may not know me, to be able to pick out my review from the common pool in a simple way. Interesting people may come my way because of this.What we're talking about is getting people to put more metadata on their content. Now allowing it is one thing, and fostering it is another. And I'd say the latter is the bigger challenge. Here are some ideas....continued in Towards Structured Blogging" Good stuff. Seb suggests some ways of choosing what types of thing you're posting in your weblog entry. Like, is it a 'Music Review' for example. That would allow services a step beyond Internet Topic Exchange aggregating postings more intelligently. I think we need something a couple of steps beyond that, but I can't quite articulate what exactly that is, so this would be an easy place to start. [Ming the Mechanic] 2:17:09 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Haystack is a graphical information manager being developed at MIT.  It looks extremely interesting - news, email, IM, document management, and a calendar, all in a nice-looking GUI.  No downloads yet, or information on the licensing. [Abe Fettig's Web Workshop] 2:13:10 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Source: Neurotechnology and Society; 3/14/2003; 9:28:12 AM. Social Software Convergence. Steve Johnson's piece this month in Discover is fabulous.  Valdis' latest social network mapping can be found in an analysis he and Ross Mayfield are doing with the Ryze Business Network.  From: "In his classic novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done— as Vonnegut describes it, "a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing." A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a "false karass," a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is "meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done." No doubt you've experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it's an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID. " [Neurotechnology and Society] 9:38:12 AM    trackback []     Articulate []