FF tackles categories

Categories and Group Forming. I have often tried to come up with lists of perfect categories in one context or another. Right now one that works fairly well is the one you might see for example in New Civilization News in the right sidebar. There are more than 50 total, and usually I can find one that fits whatever I'm posting. But the categories I chose for my own weblog here no longer work. Most of the time none of the categories fit, so it is pretty haphazard what I choose.Part of the trouble with categories is that most of us don't really organize our lives around clinically neat categories. We don't really get passionately excited about sections of the yellow pages. We usually get passionate about more complex memes or about complex feelings we have inside or about specific activities we do with specific other people. I'm passionate about 'Emergent Social Systems', but even if a number of other people were willing to stand under that same banner, we probably wouldn't all agree on what it meant, or what fit under it, or what was really important about it. My own passion is a compass I steer by, which I can't even adequately describe in writing. If I could write it down, it would be pages long, rather than just a couple of words.At first I thought that categories naturally and automatically would lead to group forming and collaboration and community. They don't. If several people choose the same category, chances are they'd be more likely to form a group than if they were put together randomly, but none of it is automatic. In NCN one of the first things I did was to announce a number of groups based on certain subjects. Alternative Energy Sources, Alternative Money Systems, Social Rules and Ethics, Spirituality, etc. A number of people joined each one, and there was some initial excitement. Then there were interested discussions for a couple of months. And gradually each of the groups died out. More people joined once in a while and sometimes revived them, but nothing much happened. Why? Because all they had in common was a category. They didn't have a shared outcome in mind, they hadn't agreed or committed to anything, and they didn't share any model for how to think about it, or how to go about it. And because nobody took the lead in making it happen, no matter what.Categories are still very useful, and might help people find what they're looking for, and I'll probably still look for better and better categories to put on things. But when it comes to forming groups, I think we need to find ways of codifying outcomes, world views, and preferences, so that we might help match up people who actually fit together. And we need to turn on the spotlights, blow the trumpets, and roll out the red carpet the moment we notice that somebody actually is passionately driven to do something great. Because that is what the world is really organized around, whatever label we put on anything. [Ming the Mechanic]

Flemming Funck gives us a person-centered notion of the mechanics of power.

Bubble Blog Emergence. Ross Mayfield did an excellent post on Distribution of Choice and another one on Ecosystem of Networks. I was sitting looking at his neat chart, wondering why I didn't really like it very much. Well, it is a good chart, and it shows what kind of audience weblogs might have in their different roles. I guess [his analysis ] indicates that what emerges from blogs is in the bigger picture the winner-take-it-all phenomenon of power-law distributions. The people who are first or who are popular will just get more popular [. . .] but it doesn't really sound like what I think emerges from blogs. So, I decided to make my own chart, coming from a totally different place [in which] the point is that it starts with ME and the choices I make and what happens to them. So, if we're talking about blogs, there is first whatever I have [chosen to] write about.

Let's say we consider each of [our blogged thoughts ] a little bubble, and that those little bubbles naturally rise up in the information ocean. [---] My blogging bubbles float up and get spread wider. People I don't know read my blog, and read various people's blogs, and we get attracted to each other. Connections form. It might just be that we read each other's stuff, or we link to each other, or we start talking in other ways. That becomes a good basis for forming new groups that can act together. All of our bubbles, mine and those from other blogs, with the added value of our collective linking choices, will float up and into the cloud of the web. Specifically they will end up in an assortment of directories and search engines, most notably in Google. And that is [ ] where there are interesting and new things going on.

Not just that few people get most of the attention, but also that the choices of many relatively ordinary folks become more visible than ever before. And they form emergent patterns that become very visible. For myself and my weblog of relatively modest popularity, I notice that many of the bubbles I set up rise to considerable size and power, because they're supported by others who choose to link to them. What interests me [is that in the] emerging democracy in blogs [we] together leverage our choices in a way that [without weblogging] isn't possible unless you run a big corporation or you're run by one. We're a swarm of thought bubbles. [Ming the Mechanic]

I feel that we're onto something here. My follow-up thoughts relate to mechanism (the swarm of bubbles sequence of ideas) and to the consequences of a more complex distribution of knowledge and power. Here's what I've got so far.

-Webloggers send out ideas

-Each repeats numerous times

-Others link to weblogger based on contact, understanding and some significant overlap of concern

-Communities of weblog conversants (those that link to and read each other) form

-Communities (see above) provide viewpoints which don't derive from corporate pursuit of maximized bottom line or governmental pursuit of complaisance and obedience.

-Resolution of National (community, state, region etc) Choices Becomes More Complex (because of multiple perspectives that are now on table).

-Resolutions, if produced, are, however, more likely to represent the "will of the people" than ever before.

This can be a good thing, but, naturally, we will have to work for it.