In the item below
I suggest picking subsets out of the subscriptions sharing dataset that
Dave has assembled. One subset that is of special interest to me is the
set of people who read my blog. What does the top 100 look like for
this particular crowd? (In other words, what feeds are popular among
those who read my weblog?) Of course I'll show up at #1 (how
ego-flattering ;) but it would be quite interesting to see the rest of
the list. Not hard to do.
A look at the most subscribed-to feeds reveals the self-selection bias:
participants (so far) are mostly techies -- syndication cognoscenti. Say
Dave, wouldn't it be cool to define several pools that people could
choose to put their list in? That way we could see, for instance who
the "librarians" or "software developers" read. I'd really like to see
"learning" and "knowledge management" networks.
Want to add your voice? Don't have an OPML file of your own? Fear not, as from Stephen Downes comes this handy tool:
I created a super-easy OPML generator that
you can use to create your own reading list and send it to
Feeds.Scripting.Com, even if you don't use a headline reader and even if you
don't have a website. Moreover, I am releasing the source code as open source
(GPL) software, free to anyone who wants it. So now anybody who wants to share
their reading lists can do it quickly and efficiently.
As
syndication becomes more robust, I think we will see more and more
site/feeds that contain vast quantities of news and commentary on a
specific subject as people map their own categories to a kind of
"pidgin taxonomy." The categories in that taxonomy could then be
themselves a feed displayed in an aggregator or on a webpage or both.
(While I was hanging out on IRC someone -- I wish I remembered so that
I could attribute this idea -- made the comment that we could use the
categories of the Wikipedia as this kind of lingua-franca. Just think
how it would enrich an online reference work to be able to get a
definition of a term and then hit a button and see a live, continually
changing feed of related news stories and blog posts on that idea!! I
need to fan myself...is it warm in here?).
Clay
points out how the meaning of the term "weblogging" has changed over
the last few years as people have repurposed weblog tools in
multidinous ways:
Weblogging used to mean, roughly, “daily personal publishing, with an
emphasis on conversational annotation of links”, and the software was
originally designed to match that pattern. Now weblogging means “stuff people do with weblog software”, and those
uses are far more various than the pattern Jorn Barger named and
Rebecca Blood described.
So do we need a new term for the activity formerly known as "weblogging"?
"Get yourself out of the mind set of social network software for the
sake of social network software and start thinking about how adding a
social networking component to existing systems could improve
them."
Follow the links from JZ's post to find a lot of discussion surrounding this debate.
"If the value you create is based on 'knowing', then your livelihood will be
undercut by someone who has the same knowledge - in this case, the same (or
similar) network of contacts - and who shares it freely."
(By the way, my primary point of presence in social networking systems is here, on Ryze.
Ryze is one of the oldest systems alive today - it was launched in
2002. Worth a login if you have yet to try one of those systems...)
