I had been looking for a concise way to express the interpersonal role of a weblog. This description hits the nail on the head. If you've ever been to a gathering full of people you didn't know and tried to find someone with whom to have an interesting conversation, you know how hard it can be. The bottleneck there is that you can typically only listen to one conversation, where one person at a time speaks. What matters to participants is hardly accessible. The bulk of it remains hidden.
Now imagine a party where, for each person, you could instantly know about ten things that were meaningful in their recent life, in a perfectly non-intrusive way. Imagine how easy it would then be to find common ground and start a meaningful conversation. In effect, each person's "contact surface" would increase tremendously.
This is exactly what happens with weblogs. By visiting one person's weblog you can "sample" them much more efficiently. And if you don't have anything to say to them you can just move on: no more polite, mindless chatter; no more finding excuses to go talk to someone else. (Of course, the weblog is not strictly superior to physical presence: you're missing a lot of things that you have in face-to-face meetings, such as body language and the opportunity for quick exchanges.)
Usage of Geometric Algebra as a representational tool. In this essay we shall explore an alternative to the use of vector algebra for representation of physical objects in the sciences. It is not the purpose of this essay to make converts of the readers. It is enough to demonstrate how geometric algebras can be used to do many of the same tasks as the vector algebras along with a few additional ones usually reserved for other mathematical tools. [kuro5hin.org]
Another example of fine, meaty science work that is appearing increasingly often in the kuro5hin community. (For other examples see the science section at the end of the K5 Directory.)
fake user "posts" on public forums and newsgroups. Yesterday I met a couple of guys from a local web-marketing company that showed me their proposal for our website. Among other interesting suggestions (user forum, mailing lists, and so on) they "suggested" some form of Internet marketing. And one of those really made me sad and thinking: the possibility to posts "user comments" on public forums and newsgroups about our product. Here I would like to discuss what will be my decisions, and what are my thoughts about such an ethical dilemma. [kuro5hin.org]
As several people have commented, this is known as Astroturfing (as in "fake grass"). Reminds me of the Salon story about suspicious-looking Blair Witch fan sites.
What are you to do to know whether you can trust someone's opinion on the web to be independent of what they recommend? I think you can really only trust people who have a credible history, e.g. a trail of contributions in communities or a weblog that's been running for a while. Does that person exist elsewhere? Does someone you trust know him/her? That's one of the ways visible webs of trust (such as provided in weblog margins) can come in handy.
Weblog Kitchen. There's a lot of interesting work ongoing at the Weblog Kitchen, at the intersection of hypertext theory, knowledge management, and information architecture. A lot of the foundation-laying seems to be a matter of defining terms and finding leads to core technologies -- including some I should know well, and don't. [Mark Bernstein]
Weblog Kitchen is an interesting resource. There is common ground and probably should be more interaction (think interlinking, TourBussing, perhaps consolidation?) between WK, Meatball Wiki (online communities) and IAWiki (information architecture).
"We can see how weblogging has expanded the influence of the individual and envision the transformational effect it can have on the employees of a company and the company itself. Put those three dynamics together--the empowered consumer, the connected professional, and the collaborative business--and it's easy to see why there's so much buzz about weblogging. What professional wouldn't benefit from being part of a loose-knit virtual community that helps people share ideas and experiences? Already, the software-development community provides a model. "
