Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Matt pointed me to a great piece he wrote about Village Shops in BlogSpace, where he echoes a lot of my thoughts and feelings as a newbie blogger:

"I guess that like most people who have just come to weblogging I am not part of the weblogging establishment. More importantly to me, I am also not part of an established community. Although I have found lots of people talking about lots of interesting things, I do not perceive them as the coherent community that I am looking to participate in."

Basically this is the feeling I get - and perhaps it ties into other things. Most bloggers seem to spend a lot of their time talking about... blogging!

This is fine, but annoys me sometimes because:

  1. it's hard to get your own voice heard on other topics - for instance I've emailed Dave Winer a few times about various issues, and been summarily ignored. I'm supposing that it's because the emails weren't necessarily blog entries about blogging or Radio. (Or perhaps he's just too busy - always a possibility)
  2. it's very hard to find other bloggers with common interests to me when everyone just talks about blogging. This is the idea behind my list of Java and J2EE Weblogs. If I try to make some effort to collate the community, more people will link to the list, and it will grow - thus I myself find more blogs of interest to me.

I'm not sure a software solution to all this will be very effective though - it's very complex to pull the key topics out of a blog by scanning the text of it. [rebelutionary]

I started a longer piece on this but ran out of time.  Some thoughts on automatically creating online communities:

  1. Voting systems don't work.  everything and slashdot use this, and I simply find the side effects overwhelming.  The idea of "karma whoring" is a good example.  Essentially, the politics tend to overwhelm the content.  Furthermore, certain members of the community get a disproportianate say in the formation of the community; the community centers around a few individuals rather than forming more loose groupings, as we see "in the wild".
  2. Static recommendations aren't much good.  Amazon's recommendations system uses this and comes up with some bizarre choices.  The problem is that there's no reputation attached to the individual rankings (in particular, anonymous rankings should get 0 reputation), so the fact that I liked a book and someone else likes the same book is useless, because I might consider that other person not trustworthy, or not authoritative.
  3. Static membership in a webring or similar construct is useless.  The webring construct proposed needs to be dynamic.  The fact that 2 people belong to the webring says nothing about their relationship, nothing except that they both agreed to join a "club".  If someone joins who I'm not interested in or disagree with, my option is to leave.  Too much of this destroys the community.  We saw this on usenet when it became overwhelmed with garbage.
  4. The original author disregards links too much.  Links mixed with content demonstrate approval or rejection, or shades of these, and links without comment probably indicate approval.  This is why publishing your subscription list is important.  This is a list of your tacit approvals for membership in the community.  Furthermore, your subscription list can change as your interests and opinions change.
  5. Traffic analysis is important.  Intelligence agencies know this and can tell things about communications simply by analyzing traffic patterns.  We currently get traffic analysis via referrers, imperfect but useful.

Sam Ruby and Paul Snively have made some suggestions on automating this process as well.  I'll try to bash my thoughts into something more coherent later.

8:25:39 AM  permalink Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog. 

Parties and depression are perfectly good writing subjects. The Great Gatsby, for instance, has plenty of both.  A List Apart: How to Write a Better Weblog [rebelutionary]

A good article on writing in general.  I've looked at what I've written over the past couple days and wanted to rewrite it all.  So much of it is poorly constructed and poorly argued.  So I'm going to break this article's rules and just post a random link without much comment!

6:31:47 AM  permalink Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog. 


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