Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, March 17, 2003

Books about networks -- Comment()
After receiving a pointer to the book Tipping Point, I browsed Amazon for books on network-related topics as reading for my essay on weblogs.

Amazon listed many book with fine reviews, so it is difficult to choose the ones to read. Here is a list of some interesting ones:

Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-László Barabási
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts
Small Worlds by Duncan J. Watts
Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks by Mark Buchanan
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin

I'm not interested in marketing, so the book on Idea Virus is perhaps ruled out. Have you suggestions or comments about the rest of the books?

-- Comment()
Who's Winning Privacy Tug of War? "Businesses want customers to give it up. The government can't make up its mind. And consumers just want e-mail inboxes free of junk. The battle over electronic privacy is as hot as ever. Michelle Delio reports from Washington." [Wired News]

Island-mapping for weblogs -- Comment()
The Trusted Blog Search by Micah Alpern is a nice example of an island-mapping tool for weblogs. I congratulated Micah on Friday, and received a pointer to the discussion of power law distributions and their applicability to weblogs. As suggested by Micah, this framework may offer an elegant description of the A, B, C classes of bloggers.

Micah also suggested the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell as a useful source of ideas. Have to look this up: "[...] a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does."

The power law distributions have connections to the concept of self-organized criticality, where Per Bak was one of the central investigators. I studied this area a bit in my master's thesis on cellular automata. One problem in power laws is that the distributions are difficult to verify. Sometimes the data gathering method affects the results. A phenomenon shows a power law distribution in the hands of one researcher, and lacks that kind of distribution in the hands of another researcher.

In any case, weblogs are an interesting area for both research and development. There is a lot of potential in weblogs. I hope this technology will offer a new kind of collaborative media for ordinary citicens, for knowledge workers, and for decision-makers. We have to see if these different communities can coexist in the same medium.

Web and NCSA Mosaic 10 years ago -- Comment()
On Wednesday, 21st April, 1993 the NCSA Mosaic 1.0 browser was released, and the web really got wings. I had been keeping a mathematics-related Gopher service since 1992, and during the summer of 1993 I converted the service to the web format. I wrote an essay of this in 1997: "I started in 1992 by offering a list of interesting and useful Gopher links. This service was used about 200 times each day in the end of 1993. In fact, the usage was more frequent than I anticipated. There seemed to be a real need for a mathematics information service, and moving to the Web system made sense already in 1993."

In the same essay I discussed a possible standard for mathematical documents: "Currently there isn't any universally accepted standard for publishing mathematical documents on the Web. This is one of the biggest problems of using Internet for scientific communication. Some possible solutions are PostScript, Adobe Acrobat (PDF files), HTML with GIF images for equations, or TeX/LaTeX." I went on to discuss the MathML standard. Today the situation of web-based mathematics standards is, unfortunately, not much different.

-- Comment()
Open source courseware: "I have spent most of this weekend wrestling my course materials into the proprietary courseware framework that our university has [...] Why isn't there an open-source courseware package that's as easy to use and customizable as something like Movable Type?" [mamamusings]

-- Comment()
Versioning CC licenses: "We are in the process of versioning the CreativeCommons licenses, so check out the discussion and please participate." [Lessig Blog]

Weblog analysis by communities -- Comment()
Seblogging: Weblogs as knowledge management tools: 'If you want to apply Weblogging and personal Webpublishing as a tool for "organizational change" you might want to choose "groups" or "communities" as your unit of analysis.' [Serious Instructional Technology]

So, perhaps there is something to the idea of weblogs as islands: 'The diversity (or the lack of it) in weblog communities will be an essential factor in the success of weblogs. Too much winnowing caused by, e.g., dominance by a few weblogs will kill the community. Thus measuring the referrals and making it easy to find out the "popular" weblogs may ultimately cause the whole system to collapse. It would be more useful to have tools for finding original thoughts and viewpoints on the interesting current subjects.'