The Weblog Wishlist Manifesto :

"Dave Winer posed a question: “Question: What’s next in writing tools for weblogs?”. Shimon Rura and I volunteered to read through the dozens of responses and shape them into a readable whole. What follows is a series of excerpts of representative comments, with links to their authors where available. Even more exciting: Shimon and possibly Jay McCarthy may come out with their own “takes” on what happened in comments. – – Lisa Williams"

"..... over a hundred responses came in. After printing out and reading through the 40+ pages of responses, a few major themes began to emerge. Bloggers wanted to create more easily, connect with others fluidly, create and manage communities around their weblog and throughout the blogosphere, and conserve their content"

The suggestions there are so so cool !

What fascinates me along with the content of this article is how powerful the weblog can be as a tool to brainstorm and generate ideas.  And how well it can lend itself to analyses - there is live content there, consumer speak in real time, jazz play with thoughts bouncing off more thoughts, stories and analogies and some really neat suggestions and wishlists. 

This is something i have been talking to a client in India (no name for confidentiality purposes) about for a while now. They've got an active website with several hundred thousands (this is not an exaggeration) of online journals from their target audience which is the youth.  It is a real goldmine of consumer speak, voices, lingo, relationships, perceptions, preoccupations, lifestyle and attitudes. 

We've been thinking of ways to mine the 'data' in order to analyse content.  The other thoughts is to convert these journals into blogs that may lend themselves to greater data analyses.  And then carry on continuous 'netnography' on this online community ! 

I've had an interesting round of meetings in the last two weeks with them and slowly but surely, we're getting there.

Some links, comments and articles that i've read with interest recently : 

• It's Not Just Usability - Joel Spolsky: Over the next decade, I expect that software companies will hire people trained as anthropologists and ethnographers to work on social interface design. Instead of building usability labs, they’ll go out into the field and write ethnographies. And hopefully, we’ll figure out the new principles of social interface design. It’s going to be fascinating… as fun as user interface design was in the 1980s… so stay tuned.

• User Experience Resource Collection. Just bookmark it! [elearningpost]

• Blogging for Books : "The format of the book review is 30 years out of date," he says, where blogging offers the opportunity to discuss not only the book, but the context and process of its creation. It also puts the book's creator out in front of his or her work, a notion that may not sit well with authors who value their privacy.

• Chicago Tribune, via textually.org : IMing Revolution Suggests Broader Social Implications : This generation is one of multitaskers who believe they can and are getting more things done simultaneously. It's hard to believe that multitaskers can do all those tasks well, as anybody who has driven behind someone on a cell phone will tell you. But that issue aside, maybe we are slowly wiring future generations in a new way. Maybe 40 years from now, we'll drive and yak as easily as we walk and chew gum today. Maybe we're turning ourselves into what our newest cell phones are: portable units capable of communicating in multiple formats. .... [The Shifted Librarian]

• Jeremy Zawodny asks: "People ask about Yahoo offering web services, but I'm not sure what services a user or developer would want. In other words, if I was going to make a big stink about it, I'm not sure what I'd choose to target first. Search? Bookmarks? Finance? Messenger? Sports? There's a lot of potential and a lot to choose from. So that's the point of this post. For the sake of my curiosity, what web services would you like to see Yahoo offer? Not things that'd be cool but you'd never use, but the ones that'd actually be useful. What web services would you like to see Yahoo offer? Not things that'd be cool but you'd never use, but the ones that'd actually be useful." Lots of goodies in the comments.

• Flemming writes about Marxism, Open Source and New Economy : A free market is good. For people to participate in a free market, they need to be free to choose, and they need some kind of tools that allow them to have something valuable to give to others. The internet and open source have opened up a bunch of areas, creating new free markets. Now we need better communication tools, to allow larger numbers of people to coordinate their actions. We initially need ways of capitalizing such networks of people. And then we need more technologies virtualized and made free. And eventually the centralized capitalist bureaucracies will go the way of their communist cousins, and crumple under their own weight, because they can't compete with well-organized free people. Will take some work, but it is probably inevitable.

• Getting the blogroll links out of Technorati. Something that bugs me every time I use Technorati is the way the listings get clogged up with blogroll links. I wouldn't mind so much but they're usually the same links over and over again. What i'd like is for those links to be displayed separately. I have in mind some kind of reverse blogroll box down the right hand side with the remaining entries listed pretty much as they are now. [Curiouser and curiouser!]

• Tom Peters takes on corporate cluelessness. Tom Peters: Idiots!  Ahh, it's nice to see that Tom has put up an RSS feed. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

• Richard Macmanus On Collaboration.: Today I had a meeting with a large multinational content and document management vendor (who shall remain nameless). I was struck by how many times they used the word "collaboration" to describe their current software. Collaboration is also a trendy word in the world of social software. But the difference is that social software folks use collaboration in the bottom-up sense - using weblogs, wikis and other new web technologies to empower the users.

• Rob Paterson on Why Change is so difficult - The Story of the Fosbury Flop : Imagine we are back in the late 1960's and you are a high jump coach trying to convince an elite jumper to switch to the Flop. "You must be joking - I go over backwards! I will break my neck!"  It took 10 years for the Flop to be adopted and then it was only the kids coming up who had nothing to lose who adopted it. Why if the Flop could deliver another foot of height was it so long in being adopted? This surely is the same issue that we face today as some of us talk about inserting conversation into organizations.

• Julian points to a neat series by Amy Gahran who has started documenting patterns of blog posts. 3 of 7 posted so far. 

• Lilia shares her experience at AOIR 0.5 : Workshop on Qualitative Research : The discussion was floating around several themes: field boundaries, ethics, researcher role and methods and tools for data collection, analysis and representation, so I'll try to put my bits and pieces that way as well.