IT Conversations hosts the complete audio archive of the Bloggercon III held November 2004. My fourth stop was the Academia Session, hosted by Jay Rosen.

quick notes:

• killer question: why should (or should not) academics blog?

• in part the academic publishing model was based on limited publishing resources (peer review, printed publication = expensive,..). Blogs provide a new way for this that exceeds digitizing journals as PDFs.

• dissemination of ideas that have been closed within the academy vs. academia as system based upon keeping information closed

• various use cases (professor student interaction; research collaboration; collaborate workspaces; self-promation;…)

• possible changes: broader audience; history of thoughts; interactivity; possibility for a less civilized discourse, noise; attacks on the reputation system; uncontrolled utterances (no prefilter); publication of unfinished texts;…

• blogging is symbiotic to other knowledge generating machines, not a replacement

• unprecedented confrontation with legitimacy (what are you guys doing all day?)

• loss of prestige which relies in part on the exclusiveness of the discourse, on incomprehensible and intimitating language.

• institutions are founded on the control (how to generate, disseminate, monetize) of the knowledge; blogging attacks the very DNA of this principle

Previous stops were the Newbie Session, the Overload Session, and the Journalism Session.

The Observer – Britain’s oldest Sunday newspaper and part of the Guardian Media Group – adopts blogging and tagging as techniques of their online strategy. Tagging takes the form of a Folksonomic Zeitgeist, which lets the user browse the blog entries of the past seven days via a graphical representation of the frequency of the applied tags. Tagophiles will know how cool that can be. Regex-junkies can even use Regular Expressions for searching the blog, and RSS feeds are provided (via del.icio.us/ObserverBlog).

Via Susan Mernit – who also gives background on the people involved – and definitively gets my vote for Best Looking Blog of the Year.

current snapshots of my next action balls basket (first outdoor / snow experience)

Note to self: new koan – somehow hypertrophic attachement to NABs

IT Conversations hosts the complete audio archive of the Bloggercon III held November 2004. My third stop was the Journalism Session, hosted by Scott Rosenberg.

quick notes:

• how do bloggers conceive themselves (as bloggers, as journalists, as both) vs. how are they labeled?

• new media don’t succeed if they are better at something old media are already good at, but if they are good at things where old media fail

• holy wars (bloggers: journalists don’t get it, are corrupted, betray democracy,…; journalists: bloggers don’t get it, are uninformed, betray democracy,…) vs. what can bloggers and journalists learn from each other.

• journalists can learn from bloggers: blur the personal and the professional (everyone has a position anyway so why not put it on the table); vitality; conversation with readers; being humble (they don’t know everything, bloggers correct, put in perspective,…)

• bloggers can learn from journalists: value of legwork; nature of accountability; editing is a good thing; being humble (don’t know everything either)

• feeling that media don’t represent the people anymore (are stuck in their business situation, ass kissing the sponsors,…)

• bloggers cover local news, micro-stories, establish a local expertise,.. and it’s on the record

• blogging is no zero sum game for journalism (if bloggers gain, they loose)

• traditional journalist career: cover hard facts (reporter) – analyse – finally: have a opinion; blogger denaturalize this.

• insularity of journalism (don’t pass on sources, don’t link outside,…) vs. the linking factory of the web, where more is better, because it allows to form your own opinion.

Previous stops were the Newbie Session and the Overload Session.

IT Conversations hosts the complete audio archive of the Bloggercon III held November 2004. My second stop was the Overload Session, hosted by Robert Scoble.

quick notes:

so if the average blog reader is subscribed to 50 to 100 feeds (and struggles) – how do power feedsters with 1000+ feeds and mails each day survive?

• motivation: feeling of staying on top of the world

• accessing the raw you vs. the filtered and beautyfied treasures

• it’s easy to find the good things that people cluster around, but how to find the hidden goodies

• filtering promises hope (via aggregators, via people that do the filtering for you, via attention.xml, via reputation systems, via content based classification models, via a combination of technical and social intermediaries,… but: don’t let a single source control what you read)

• missed presentation features in aggregators: sort by most linked to blog (should be interesting), by least linked blog (could be even more interesting), by frequency of posts, …

• the role of the producer (use categories vs. free flows, restrict yourself vs. do what you want; connector blogs and commentator blogs)

and: a zen acceptance of being able to sleep knowing you didn’t read everything might help

The first stop was the Newbie Session.

IT Conversations hosts the complete audio archive of the Bloggercon III held November 2004. My first stop was the Newbie Session, hosted by Rebecca MacKinnon.

quick notes:

• many use cases for blogging (keeping an open (text or rich media based) diary for oneself as an outsourced memory device, establish a way of communication between a defined set of people, establishing a sense of local community, addressing a global audience with ones expertise, increase marketability via corporate blogs, political activism, blogging as complementary practice for news organizations,…)

• when is a blog a blog and not just writing or a homepage? (sense of sharing, possibility of feedback and interaction via trackbacks and comments, broadening ones conversational networks,…)

• what is a good workflow for posting? which tools support them? (blogger.com good for starting out but lacks trackbacking, as you get into blogging and want more control over your layout you might want to look at Typepad, Movable Type, Radio UserLand, Wordpress – but these tools do require some technical skills, some are hosted, some require your own server, lot of confusion…)

• RSS, aggregators (for taming your private information overflow, for improving the overall web experience, as filtered feeds in a corporate scenario, summary vs. full article feeds,…)

• blogs are not the only tools for communication, connecting interest groups, supporting corporate collaboration out there (Wikis, various groupware products, forums,…), but they do contain a hell of a lot of potentiality

current snapshot of my next action balls basket

close-up of a few actions grouped by context (blog exclusive)

This was a checking out webapps kind of weekend. Time travelling really has become easy now. Just don’t surf on the web for two years or so, and then try to catch up.

Textpattern

Lovely. Ten minutes install (I just followed the instructions, you need a free MySQL database and (probably) a recent version of PHP) and you get a very clean webbased content management system for blogs and various other usecases. The homepage is just two pages and yet tells all for getting started. There is also a forum and a wiki.

Wordpress

Nice. Twenty minutes install, same prerequisites as above. More feature fledged as Textpattern, the learning curve should be a little higher. Supports Pages (sites living outside of the ongoing blogentry stream), modularized Themes, Textile and Markdown, and tons of more features.

Rails

Awesome. Three hours for installing and building the first database backed webapplication. Based on everybody’s darling programming language Ruby, Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups.

If you are a psychologist, start specializing on dazed and confused J2EE / ASP / … developers now.

Google not only provides us with Google Groups, Gmail, Blogger, Google Maps, Google Sets, Google Scholar, AdSense, and whatnot, but also with the Google Language Tools for crossing language barriers on the web. Copy and paste the text to be translated or a URL of a foreign language website, select the corresponding language pair, and off you go. Currently the supported languages are: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese, Japanese, Korean and a subset of Chinese.

The first japanese website I visited (suneoHairWax::ein differenztheoretischer Ansatz) threw up this:

Communication is suitable to operation regarding the social system. Communication always exceeding the intention of the individual and expectation range, forms the network which becomes complicated unlimited. It is impossible itself to identify that kind of network. Consequently, a some distinction (two minute diagrams) by introducing, the object must be identified. While the system observing itself with similar procedure, what it tries to decide the identity of oneself is " self observation ". However so doing, the object which is identified simplification (the " complex reduction decrease") has always worn in a some way, consequently it has been filled " emptiness " and " excess ". When distinction turn back the on by your, it manifests this emptiness or excess in a way, paradox which it occurs (the distinction, itself legitimacy / illegality legitimacy or illegality?, the etc System theory this paradox which self observation has concealed the distinction, system / environment (complex differential of both) of making use is disclosed, commenting.

Three clicks later (The radio will be recorded with the Non Passport personal computer!) (I like the dichotomy here):

The English conversation, you don’t try beginning from today? Piece by piece secret! English rescues Japan! It will bring the work of the foreign country in Japan! You can record also favorite radio program in the personal computer!

This weekend (and those to come) should become interesting.

Good news for all tagging junkies. The social software / (anti-)folksonomy theorists at Many-to-Many point to a few cool tag aware applications this week:

fac.etio.us – grouping and filtering of the del.icio.us link stream by various facets. See David Weinberger’s article. Highly recommended.

Co-Links – annotating text with links (a somehow inverted form of tagging. Tags are no longer applied to links, but links to tags).

Colr.org – tagging colors. Interesting thought / software / social experiment. Via Grassroots Crayolas.

CiteULike – del.icio.us for academics (tagging papers, filtering by interest groups). The (currently) commonly used tags are great:

adipocytes aerosol agents animation attention bayesnet bioinformatics blog blogging blogs children collaboration communitybuilding competition compiler compilers complexity conflict consensus correlation decisionmaking demara design diffusion docking drosophila economics electricity evolution fast-spiking finance fmri functional gap generation genetic-testing graphs health highered human immunity informationtheory internet interneurons junctions ken knowledge language-implementation lattice learning libraries lip macroeconomics management markets matchinglaw measurement microarray mle model modelling monads monkey msmdx mt multimedia-learning networks neurophysiology noise openaccess pointprocess policy populationcoding procurement reactiontime regulation reinforcementlearning renewable reputation review saccade scheme science social social-networks social_networks sp1 statistics teaching testing theory trust tularensis two-component type-theory ukgreecepolicyreview usability web wiki

Via CiteULike and Connotea: Linklogging and Tagging Go Academic.