Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, March 10, 2003

-- Comment()
Social Software's Emerging Norms: "The last time there was this much foment around the idea of software to be used by groups was in the late 70s, when usenet, irc and MUDs were all invented in the space of 18 months. Now we've got blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, Trackback, XML-over-IM and all sorts of IM- and mail-bots. We've also got a network population that's large, heterogeneous, and still growing rapidly. The conversations we can have about social software can be advanced by asking ourselves the right questions about both the software and the political bargains between users and the group that software will encode or enforce." [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

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BioSpace: "I was exploring for good examples of industry wide portals and found Biospace which focuses on the Biotechnology industry. It is a good example of providing a very useful aggregation of content relevant to this community of users. It includes news, databases that follow companies and drug developments, and it provides clinical competitive intelligence." [Ralph Poole's Weblog]

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Marston Bates: "Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind." [Quotes of the Day]

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IBM Unveils Technology For Handling Surges In Computing Demand: "IBM unveiled technologies on Friday to help IT organizations handle sudden surges in computing demand that can often take down systems." [Google Technology News]

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Dinosaur-Killer" Asteroid Crater Imaged for First Time: "A high-resolution map from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), released yesterday, has provided the most telling visible evidence to date of a 112-mile (180-kilometer) wide, 3000-foot (900-meter) deep impact crater..." [Google Technology News]

Weblog communities as islands: improving diversity -- Comment()
I wrote earlier about the similarity of weblogs: "When the outside world [...] changes there is not enough diversity in an island of weblogs to generate new solutions which meet the requirements of a changed world." Perhaps this kind of argumentation is not needed.

However, the diversity (or the lack of it) in weblog communities will be an essential factor in the success of weblogs. Too much similarity 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.

The weblog toolmakers should develop new search tools, which don't put too much emphasis on the popularity of a site. This would help the weblog ecosystem to survive: most of the weblog views and referrals would not be concentrated only on a few dozen weblogs, and new original thinking could have a chance to emerge.

Weblogs as worldview tuners -- Comment()
One more point about the dynamics of weblogs vs. the island model: I didn't specify in what space the evolution of the weblogs takes space. In fact, my point falls apart if there is no such space. However, here is a first try: the space of worldview memes. (I suggest a name for an element of this space: "wovi". Or perhaps introducing the term wovi is unnecessary, could "value set" be a good enough name?)

A wovi works as follows: input from the external world -> processing by a wovi in a human brain -> a response to the input. Of course, a wovi is never expressed explicitely, and thus never transferred in whole from a person to another. Rather, a weblog functions as a wovi-tuner, where you can observe the input-output behaviour of a wovi, and adjust your wovi accordingly.

How to choose links -- Comment()
Private Ink comments my speculation about the dynamics of weblogs vs. the island model? "The main similarity between my links was my person taste in subject matter. Case in point, I am interested in literature, poetry and the arts but when looking through the links, the thrust of the subject or topic is usually not to my taste, however the way they say it is. Nothing wrong with opposing philosophies, as long as you are willing to listen and try to understand." Good point. Perhaps the excessive similarity only applies to us who are focused on technology. Perhaps culture-oriented weblogs can bridge the gulf between the islands?