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Tuesday, March 11, 2003
![[Item Permalink]](http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/images/ur_bullet.gif){kind=small} -- Comment()
The Scobleizer Weblog writes: "Dan Gillmor helps out an independent software developer. [...] I know who the anonymous guy is that Dan is writing with and his stuff is killer. Too bad the platform vendors are all asleep. Oh. Wait. At least one guy at Apple isn't asleep. [...] Why don't all software companies have evangelists who write weblogs? I'd love to see the excuses that small guys like this get for not even getting the time of day."
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More on open access to scientific data: "Let's go beyond open access for computers to open access for cell phones. That was the inspiration that seized Björn Ursing, a genomics researcher at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute. He has now created WiGID (Wireless Genome Information Database), a database providing open --and wireless-- access to the genome sequences of all 117 sequenced organisms. As new organisms are sequenced, WiGID will incorporate their data as well. Mauno Vihinen of the University of Tampere, Finland, has taken the idea a step further with BioWAP, a wireless gateway to more traditional open-access databases." [FOS News]
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Kottke.org writes about Sampling networks accurately: Here are some lists of the top weblogs (as determined by counting inbound links):
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Cognitive Correlations: 'Sometimes the obvious just knocks you on the head and you think, "Why didn't I do this earlier?" Douglas Hafstadter is one of my favorite writers. Until I read his work, I thought the way I strap thoughts together and converse was rare.' [Private Ink]
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Joi Ito writes: "Very early on, Howard warned me not to blog about the news that people will see in other places. I think this is very good advice generally. I've gotten some feedback about some of the stuff I've posted which seems to be heavily blogged already (showing up on Daypop and Blogdex). It appears many people haven't seen it yet and appreciate pointers to important stuff, even if it is a bit late. So, I'm going to write short "roundups" of links to things that bloggers seem to think are important. Heavy bloggers can ignore these."
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Weblogs on the borderline of control and chaos -- Comment()
I collected some of the recent discussions into a story titled Weblogs on the borderline of control and chaos. The story text is draft version 0.1, so all comments are welcome. Update: I edited the text slightly for clarity (version 0.11), and added some ideas taken from the search functionality of Amazon.com (version 0.12). I received a long comment from Michelle Legare at Private Ink (thanks!), but haven't yet had time to think about it.
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Towards a centralized weblogging community -- Comment()
I thought some more on The dynamics of weblogs vs. the island model and Who is in control: the technology or the users?. Currently there are three class of bloggers: A, B and C class. The 'A-class' gathers most of the page-reads and referrals. There are perhaps 10-50 bloggers in this class. The 'B-class' consist of bloggers who once in a while get wider notice, perhaps thanks to the attention of an 'A-class' blogger. There may be 100-1000 bloggers in this category. And the 'C-class' contains therefore about 999000 bloggers (if the estimate of a million bloggers is correct). This seems to be a distribution similar to the current page-reads of web sites. On most countries MSN and related sites get most of the traffic, Yahoo getting also some attention. But rest of the sites receive a small fraction of the total traffic. This means that currently the web is an extremely centralized medium, even though the original design was aimed at a decentralized system. Will the weblogging community evolve towards a similar destiny? I think that it will not take too long until the commercial interests raise their head. When MSN or a similar site decides that weblogs are an interesting medium, they can hire a dozen skilled writers to gather traffic to their weblog channels. After this it will not take long for the weblogs to be just a part of the existing dominions of the corporations.
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Who is in control: the technology or the users? -- Comment()
Project Paul commented the posting on the dynamics of weblogs vs. the island model: "I think that there are already devices that may serve the very cross-pollination function you describe. People actively seek new material using recently updated indexes like those available at weblogs.com, blogger.com, and movabletype.org. The 'A-List' bloggers might also help drive this inter-island movement: for example, Jason Kottke probably has people reading his site with whome he shares little ideological common ground. Therefore, when he links to something, people might find themselves reading something 'other'. Lastly, the meta tools and network analyzers continue to provide churn, at least in terms of memes and breaking information. [...] So, despite the fact that blogrolls often fill with links of a similar type, they often include links to some indexes, some tools, and a few big hitters, and these few links tend to span ideologies and genres." I think this is true. However, I hope these tools allow for the discovery of new voices also, as I discussed in the posting on How to be familiar and different: the key to inventions which create diversity. I'm not sure which is the driving force here: the technology or the people using the technology. I think the technology should be such that it would support the people using it, not force them into a built-in pattern of the technology.
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Chunking and scanning RSS feeds: "I've been somewhat surprised to find myself preferring the Radio UserLand aggregator to the others I also use: NetNewsWire and NewsGator. Last night I realized why: it's a matter of chunking and scanning. In RU, I scan and dismiss batches of 100 items. On a typical day, when I receive a few hundred items, that's just a couple of clicks -- modulo any additional effort to save or respond to an item. In NetNewsWire and NewsGator, it's more of an item-by-item thing. There are consolidated views available, but they display headlines (or truncated previews) only. Processing a lot of feeds feels like more work." [Jon's Radio]
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