Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

-- Comment()
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]

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.

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.

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.