I just got this in my inbox and thought it might interest readers of this blog.
Join Hazel Henderson, Douglas Engelbart, Joan Blades, Jeff Gates, Leif Utne and others at this exciting gathering of innovators from the world of IT, environmental advocates, peace and social justice activists, independent media pioneers, and many others exploring how social networks, information technologies and the Internet can play a key role in accelerating positive global change. June 6-8 at the Presidio in San Francisco, CA. Special non-profit, activist and student rate: $95 for three days. Register now online at: http://www.planetwork.net
Interestingly, BlogMatcher's link cosmos shows that the word about it has been out for two weeks already, but it didn't start seriously ripping through the blogosphere until just two days ago. Assuming one knows that a particular meme is bound to explode at some point, is the "fuse length" predictable, say, from social network connectivity data?
Note that a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle is at work here: if you reference a specific test case publicly, you're certain to influence its diffusion process.
[Update] Ryo writes that he set up a referer feedback loop a couple days ago, which might have triggered it all.
The FAQ is quite informative, as well. Similar earlier "related blogs" services include the BlogStreet neighborhood (which offers a cool visualization app as well), and Mark Pilgrim's New Door application, which no longer seems to work.
Some other areas which I am working on are Emergent Semantics which is based on the hypothesis, that semantics on the Semantic Web are more likely to "emerge" from various types of information available and interactions between participants as opposed to top down formal specifications. Towards this end I am taking a close look at statistical clustering and NLP techniques. Also of interest are techniques from cultural anthropology, such as consensus analysis and social networks.
Vipul is presenting a poster at WWW2003, so I might be able to meet him soon.
I am a Brazilian student of Master in Communication of Bahia Federal University, in the area of Cyberculture. I have been researching the formation of social relations within the practice of blogging. I'd like you to help me by answering my questions going to the following address: http://www.dinamidia.com.br/weblog. Please, spread this research among bloggers, please. Your help is very important to its extension.
Thanks a lot.
I enjoyed filling in the questionnaire and it didn't take long. (However I had to take away the text I had put in the box under question #29 to get the database to accept my answers.)
Just wanted to leave you a note that a Polish online newspaper has published under http://www.gazeta-it.pl/internet/glob_blogow.html an abridged translation of your text on personal knowledge publishing without any reference to your original text etc. I doubt this is a case that you have been informed about this, if so sorry for the problem. Otherwise you might want to do something about this.
To make this clear, I am writing this because plagiarism is driving me mad, in Poland we have no respect for other's people work whatsoever, I teach students who sometimes give me papers which are two texts from the Net glued together, and my mom recently found a PhD paper which had large chunks taken straight from her book from 10 years ago.
Thanks Alex. I don't read Polish so I can't verify the claim, but it does look a bit like my text. Perhaps Maria can confirm?
In any case, I'm kinda flattered that someone found my article good enough to want to translate it and put their name on it...
