Philip (of ecosystem and Radio comment monitor fame) has got some thinking going on over in New Zealand. He's started a page on the Community Server Wiki to work out yesterday's idea for instant weblog-driven group-forming. Much to my merriment, he makes it sound like it could actually be feasible (indeed, his use of the word "will" would seem to imply that it's going to happen).
This is very similar to TrackBack. Most of it isTrackBack. The cool thing is that is will be easy to use. [...]
[on John Robb's multi-Radio-author proposal] As he says, this approach is a good bootstrap, but IMHO there are still too many steps required for this to be 'ridiculously easy'. It requires everybody involved to create a new category, and the category 'owner' has to poll all their RSS feeds regularly to pick up the info.
Philip goes on to describe a possible implementation in more concrete terms than the vague stuff I'd come up with yesterday. I'm excited.
Of course, one way to see it is that we're just reinventing unmoderated USENET newsgroups - with the critical difference that we're doing away with the politics that cause the group creation bottleneck over there.
This is an inspiring chapter proposal from Barbara Ganley, Catharine Wright, Sarah Lohnes, and Hector J. Vila. Of course the vision can extend way beyond the classroom. Or, put another way, how about a billion-strong classroom?
[...] weblogs have evolved into mirrors of who we are that have, because of their pliability, enabled users to become "immigrants of subjectivity"--individuals who no longer travel from "point to point on the surface of the world, but crossing universes of problems, lived worlds, landscapes of meaning. These wanderings among the textures of humanity may intersect the well-delineated paths of the circuits of communication and transport, but the oblique and heterogeneous navigations of the new nomads will investigate a different space" (Lévy, Pierre, Collective Intelligence, 1997. xxii-xxiii).
Our article examines how Weblogs offer a way to initially cloister, organize, assess and criticize, and then re-distribute knowledge and information for the purpose of convening a community that will then function to amass knowledge, each member sharing, collaborating, redistributing and redefining themselves in the act of knowledge production. Members of weblog communities enter into apprenticeships with one another that constantly enhance intelligence in knowledge spaces because the guiding principle is that we dont know everything so we are looking to "the other" to complete us, and therefore complete the community.
