"blogs accomplish public discussion through a far different architectural design pattern. In the Well's terminology, taken to its extreme, you own your own words. If someone on a blog "posts a topic", others can respond, but generally do so in their own blogs, hyperlinked back to the topic's permalink. This goes on and on, back and forth. In essence, it's the same hyperlinking mechanism as the traditional discussion design pattern, except that the topics and responses are spread out all over the Web. And the reason that it "solves" the signal:noise problem is that nobody bothers to link to the "flamers" or "spammers", and thus they remain out of the loop, or form their own loops away from the mainstream discussion. A pure architectural solution to a nagging social issue that crops up online."
And to think that this could have been implemented much earlier! Think of all the flames that would have been spared!
I believe the title conveys a lot of what weblogs are all about, and makes their potential usefulness very apparent. I believe a lot becomes possible when groups no longer have to erect fences.
Tonight lounge-radio.ch started playing Buddha Bar, and I thought, "neat sound, what's that band?". So I googled it; one of the links was to the intriguing What do people who like Buddha Bar listen to? I click, and, lo and behold, comes an interesting implementation of the Music Artists Map I had been longing for! Which again confirms the lazyweb rule: "if you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about"..."or already has".
This is actually pretty neat. It uses statistics about what people like to listen to (i.e. which bands tend to come together often in people's preferences) and, given an artist, spreads out the "closest" artists in a two-dimensional map. I guess the same thing could be done using blogrolls. This could provide an alternate (and, I believe, more informative) visualization of the blogstreet data.
