Does anyone know when the beta of Game Neverending will start? I signed up a month ago, but I've only received one email from them and it basically said: wait till the beta starts. I can't find any timelines on the official site. Incidentally my GNE article is currently the number 2 ranked Google link for "Game Neverending" - second only to the official site (I know this from my Referers list).
I really want to start playing GNE. Anyone have any details?
S¯ren Kierkegaard, 19th century philosopher: "Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion--and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion . . . while Truth again reverts to a new minority."
Thought a) Some people post too much. Recently I subscribed to 7 Journalist Bloggers - 6 of them post too many items, so I've fallen behind already. One of them has 81 unread items sitting in my RSS Aggregator and it's only 3 or so days worth. It's too much! I don't have the motivation to catch up, so I will probably unsubscribe from most of those Journo bloggers. The 1 Journo blogger whose quantity I can keep up with is Jay Rosen, who posts 1 or 2 long essays per week. That's more my style.
Thought b) Robert Scoble has admitted he's a "Blog Addict". He's taking a 1-week holiday from blogging to clear his mind. While I'm not on the same scale as Robert, I have to admit also that my blogging is beginning to become all-consuming for me. The positives: I'm actively writing and generating ideas because of blogging, I'm watching less tv and reading newspapers less, I'm interacting on an intellectual level with people from all over the world. The negatives: family time does suffer, I'm reading less 'real' books, there are too many interesting things to keep up with and so one tends to lose focus.
Thought c) Will blogging ever be anything but an "online diary" to Normal People? I'd like to think it will hit it big sometime soon, but let's face it - we're a minority (or is it a cult?).
Thought d) Does Location matter more than than The Blogosphere would like to think it does? Is blogging too American-centric? I live in New Zealand, so I don't get to attend any of the blog conventions, blogger lunches, etc. And I do feel like I'm missing out on something. e.g. nobody sent me an invitation to Orkut (it's invitation only). I'm probably not interested in Orkut anyway, but it did make me wonder if living in New Zealand is affecting my ability to actively participate in the blogosphere.
Thought e) Somehow related to Thoughts c & d, but was Howard Dean's polling failure related to the fact that blogging isn't REAL enough? Location (of votes in this case) matters.
Thought f) I keep thinking about my Microcontent Wiki idea, which really revolves around trying to keep up with conversations and aiming for a sense of permanance to them which is missing. e.g. when is the tipping point for when blog conversations (via the comments sections on peoples blogs) peter out? Sometimes I want to go back to a conversation two months later and re-start it, but I know that no one apart from the original author will be notified and so the momentum of the original conversation is never regained. We need places where ideas can reside and continue being debated for all time. Wikis are the right tools for this, mostly. Except they aren't good at the Subscribe part of the PubSub equation. And Wikis to me don't have the same personal touch of weblogs - Wikis ain't Avatars.
(this thought is inspired by Erik's interesting post about effectiveness, which has got my brain spinning - but I don't know that I'll have anything further to contribute until a few days, when the conversation will probably be finished).
Thought g) Attention. Where do I start with this one... Pick me, pick me. It may be a democracy of ideas, but sometimes it feels like a Horserace (in the American politics sense of the word).
These are just Saturday Morning thoughts, before the real day starts. Ah, my daughter's just woken up and needs my attention :-)
One of my 12 main categories for this weblog is Corporate Weblogging. I recently wrote my category headings in the form of a manifesto, so here is how I actually phrased it: "Weblog technology can be used to enhance Corporate/Business communications and KM."
Thus far I haven't written much on this theme, but it's something that's been percolating and bubbling away in my brain over the past year or so. It's a very important subject to me, because I'm keen to marry my interest in weblogging technologies to my day job. If my life was an XML file, then my goal with blogging would be to do an XSLT transfer from Amateur to Professional. It's that old maxim about getting paid for what you love doing. I'd dearly love to get paid to develop weblogs, but realistically the only way for me to do that is to introduce weblogging and similar technologies (such as Wikis) to my company.
My day job is Web Producer in a medium-sized New Zealand company. I've come to the conclusion that there is potential for weblogging technology to be used at my workplace, on our Intranet in particular. The company I work for is very project-oriented, as opposed to being run by a bunch of middle managers. This type of culture, I believe, could take advantage of weblog technologies internally to disseminate project and other business information. There are many advantages to a project-oriented culture - e.g. it's a flat hierarchy and so it's more dynamic and responsive to change, kind of like the Web in fact. However one of the disadvantages of a project-oriented workplace is that information stays within silos. One project team often won't know what another project team is doing, even though there may be a lot of knowledge they could share that would be mutually beneficial and therefore benefit the company as a whole.
So I've taken it upon myself to try and kick-start some weblogging and wiki initiatives in my company, to get information flowing like it should. I'm an established personal blogger now, and one of only two people in my company who even knows what weblogging is, so I'm in a unique position to begin implementing weblog technologies in 'the real world'. Of course there's still the issue that 'normal people' have no interest in writing. As Nova Spivack memorably put it recently: "I like blogging. Everyone I know likes blogging. But let's face it, we are all a bunch of geeks."
Nevertheless, corporate blogging has potential. I forsee weblogging and wiki technologies will be most useful in enabling bottom-up Knowledge Management in my company - via our Intranet.
Looking around the Web, it's quite hard to find practical information on using weblog technology in a corporate setting. What I have found so far seems to be mostly related to using weblogs as an external marketing tool. For example, Dina Mehta pointed to a Microsoft Marketing manager who uses blogging to converse with his customers. That's great, but external blogging isn't suitable for the place I work for. You really need to have a significant proportion of customers/clients who are both tech-savvy and motivated to use the Web regularly, in order to achieve anything with external blogging. So the internal Intranet is where I must focus my attention.
Keith Robinson regularly writes about using weblogging technology on his company's intranet. He uses Movable Type for parts of his employer's Intranet. I've found Keith's articles to be very useful and relevant to me - check out a recent article from him that describes how he implemented MT for a Policies & Procedures website. Using weblog tools as an easy-to-use and adaptable Content Management System is one way to introduce blogging into corporations. DL Byron notes:
"I'm consulting for a large corporation and it's fascinating to watch my peers embrace blogs and blogging. They're still working out how to use them internally, but have had success externally and I expect the same. Besides the communication within teams, I'm trying to help them understand the simple content management aspect of blogging."
I agree that success in corporate blogging has been mainly with external customer-facing blogs, and mostly sales and technology-oriented ones at that. Also don't forget about people like Robert Scoble, who is pushing the boundaries between personal/corporate blogging. His opinions are his own and he doesn't speak for Microsoft, yet he is quite obviously hyping his employer for all it's worth on his blog. His readers push back too, which is a sign of Robert's success and perhaps points the way forward for Political Candidates - involve your audience, engage them in conversations.
Today Digital Web asked "Is it year of the blog for corps?" I think it may be the year that internal company blogging begins to gain traction. My own corporate blogging efforts will probably be in the Knowledge Management arena - my users will be employees rather than customers. Plus my company already has an easy-to-use Content Management system for the Intranet, so I don't need to use weblog tools as a CMS.
I see that the upcoming SXSW (South by Southwest Interactive Festival) will have a panel called "Blogging for Business", featuring Keith Robinson and DL Byron. I'd love to go along to that, however I'll be stuck on the other side of the world. Hopefully someone does a write-up of it.
Over the past few days I've been doing some work on a new XSLT-based topic navigation for my weblog. I started it over xmas, but had parked it since the new year because of a couple of bugs. My goal was to swap my Radio Userland-hosted OMPL-to-HTML transform (see Weblog Archive - by Topic in my menu) with a custom XML-to-HTML transform hosted on my own server. The reason I want to use XML over OPML is that it's more flexible - I can potentially do lots of clever things with the XML data in the future, using XPath and the like, whereas OPML would be limiting in that respect. Also I want to host it on my own server to enhance download speed. So I picked up the XML topic nav work again this week and I pretty quickly solved the issues that were bugging me at xmas. It's funny how parking troublesome code for a couple of weeks can clear the mind and make the fog disappear!
My ideal is to do the XSL transformation on the server-side, rather than the client (browser) side. The reason for this is that due to the proliferation of different browsers on the Web, it'll be a nightmare to second-guess how all of them will process the XSL transformation. Whereas with a server-side transformation, I know how my server will handle the task. Basically it comes down to this: it's one less thing for the user's browser to do when reading my site. Why get the client to process the XSL transform if I can do it on my own turf (my server)?
But having just said all that, I currently don't have the correct server configuration to do the XSLT processing. I'm used to working with IIS at work, so I was able to come up with a nifty ASP solution to transform my XML to HTML. But my weblog runs on Apache, so ASP can't be used (there may be a plug-in somewhere to get around this, but I wouldn't bet on it being an easy implementation). Far better that I do it in a language Apache understands, and the obvious one is PHP. So I've investigated using PHP to do the transformation and this will probably be my long-term solution. However it requires me to install two things on my server, which I've yet to do - Sablotron and Expat. These things will enable me to do XSLT transformations on my Apache server using PHP. There are other options too: Java/Cocoon and Perl/AxKit, to name a couple I found while searching. However I know very little about those options. If there are any XSLT experts out there who can advise me on the best method to transform XSLT server-side, I'd appreciate it.
My short-term solution is to do the XSL transformations on the client-side, using Javascript. And yes I know I just talked myself out of doing this a couple of paragraphs up. But I really want to see how my XML transforms look now and a Javascript is the quickest way. Besides it doesn't hurt to experiment with both client-side and server-side, to see for myself the differences.
Here is a test page I've done: it's an HTML page with Javascript (c/o W3Schools) that uses an XSL file to transform a selected section of my XML file into HTML. A caveat: it currently only works with Internet Explorer. I haven't been able to track down a a cross-platform version that will work in Mozilla and Firebird etc. Note that there is also a way to transform straight XML-to-XSL-to-HTML in modern browsers (eg IE6) without using Javascript. However to do that I'd need multiple xml files (or else do some tricky things to bundle multiple XSL files into 1 XSL file). As the purpose of my topic nav is to have a single XML file to update, and bearing in mind this is a short-term solution, I decided to use Javascript to do the job.
Hey, what are you trying to achieve with all this XSLT processing?
That's a good question; allow me to explain. I recently converted my taxonomy to a flatter hierarchy, with a maximum of 3 levels. In line with this, I also decided I only want to categorise each weblog post into one category. This may seem to go against the grain of the latest in weblog taxonomy trends (see Jon Udell's Dynamic Categories post), but there is a method to my madness. I hope.
I was browsing through an introductory book on Wittgenstein, as you do, and I read that his major philosophical work called the Tractatus is ordered using a decimal numbering system. He lays out his arguments like so:
1 -> 2 -> 3 (first level)
1.1 -> 1.2 -> 1.3 (subordinate to first level)
1.11 -> 1.12 -> 1.13 (subordinate to second level)
My understanding, based on my limited reading of Wittgenstein, is that he structured the Tractatus using seven main theses. For each theses, he drilled down and analysed it using the above numbering system. Not to sound pompous or anything, but this is similar to what I do with my weblog. I have a dozen or so topics that I regularly write on and it's tempting to think of these as theses. They're probably more like themes than theses, but hey it's just one letter difference :-) My recurring themes are things like Universal Canvas and Microcontent.
To make a long story short, I discovered Wittgenstein's numbering system wasn't suitable for my weblog taxonomy. However I did end up with a manifesto of 12 themes that generally revolve around the subject of the Two-Way Web (it's not restrictive though). I've categorised each of my posts into one of those 12 themes. There is one further level below that, so that I can bundle things together if need be - e.g. my collection of posts about Nanowrimo 2003 is categorised as Top > Writing > Nanowrimo 2003.
To bring this post full circle, currently I'm using Radio Userland's OPML-to-HTML service to produce the above taxonomy. As I mentioned, I've got a draft XML-to-HTML version going that uses client-side XSLT. Here is my list of 12 main categories (a plain html file for now) and here is a list of all my weblog posts categorised using this taxonomy (this one uses XSL).
In future I will add extra bits of data to the XML file (e.g. dates, maybe even the content of the posts). This is another advantage of using XML over OPML. I'll also eventually introduce some dynamic categorisation, a la Udell. All of this XML exploration may be leading me inexorably towards a tool like Syncato, which stores all its content in XML.
In summary I think my thematic taxonomy will help me keep my weblog writing on topic. And from a readers perspective, you will be able to explore any one of '12 paths to Two-Way Web enlightenment' ;-)
Well my Fractal Blogosphere concept seemed to generate some interest this week. I think it's the first article I've done that got picked up by the populace without the support of an A-Lister. By that I mean, it got linked to by many "normal" people and no A-Listers (as far as I know). However one person did steer loads of traffic my way. That was Andy Baio's waxy.org linkblog. His site is obviously very influential and having since checked it out, I can see why. Andy points to many interesting stories you won't find on the mainstream channels - e.g. the sad story of the decline of a Meat Puppet.
Meat Puppets was a band that will be forever linked to Nirvana's MTV Unplugged album - it featured 3 of their songs and they played on it. Kurt Cobain was apparently hugely influenced by the Meat Puppets music and attitude, and of course Cobain and Nirvana were hugely influencial on a mass scale in the 90's. So the rise and fall of Cris Kirkwood was a moving story for me and probably lots of other people of my generation and ilk. Come to think of it, are the Meat Puppets a metaphor for all those influential webloggers out there who write remarkable and original pieces but never seem to get Bloggies-type glory and adulation? You won't find them on the Bloggies short-list for Best Essay 2004, but you may find them on my blogroll. They are my 'Meat Puppets Bloggers', to coin a phrase. Not that I'm comparing myself to Nirvana! I'm more like The Modern Lovers ;-) My point is they are people who have influenced me a lot and continue to inspire me in my own writing and web development efforts.
And I suspect they don't want to be really popular. Because if they got famous, well maybe they'll turn into the weblog equivalent of Nirvana and begin to find the pressure of mass popularity too much to handle, thereafter spiralling down into a self-destructive whirl of "I hate myself and I want to die" articles. Or maybe they'd handle it just fine.
I think I better define what I mean by "influence". Here are the two top definitions of "Influence" in dictionary.com:
1. A power affecting a person, thing, or course of events, especially one that operates without any direct or apparent effort: relaxed under the influence of the music; the influence of television on modern life.
2. Power to sway or affect based on prestige, wealth, ability, or position: used her parent's influence to get the job.
For arguments sake, let's say the first definition is Influence by Content and the second definition is Influence by Authority. In the world we live in, the concepts of Influence and Celebrity are linked mostly because celebrities carry a lot of Influence by Authority. That theory carries over to the blogging world too. But what would happen in the blogging world if Influence by Content was the main criteria for Celebrity? If quality of ideas and originality of thought were rewarded with celebrity status. Would Influence by Authority eventually infect and poison that Celebrity? Or would the Nirvana self-destruct principle apply, because such an original and intelligent person can't handle Celebrity? In an ideal world, Influence by Content and Celebrity would link together naturally and happily ever after. But how realistic is that?
The other thing my Fractal Blogosphere article taught me this week is the value of people who make constructive and forward-thinking contributions to a meme, such as Andrew Chen. There are lots of people in the blogosphere who are positive, but they often get drowned out by the naysayers. As I commented over on Andrew's blog, it's very easy to throw stones at glasshouses. It's a lot more difficult, but ultimately far more rewarding, to build new glasshouses or extend existing ones.
I always think of my weblogging experience as an exploration. I explore ideas, analyse them, think up new concepts. I skim stones over ponds and create ripples. Those ripples fan out and intersect with ripples created by other people. Maybe some people want to throw parties at the pond, splash around and have some fun. More ripples, perhaps waves. That's fine by me. But I think we can do without the people who throw rocks in ponds just to create a noisy splash and upset the current of other peoples thoughts.
I say leave the eddies and currents of the Web to mix together of their own accord. Let ideas intertwine and flow. Kind of like when Nirvana mixed their music with Meat Puppets. Look at what resulted from that - a beautiful and hugely influential record.
Some people disagree with my use of the word "fractal" (see the comments to my last post). I've done some extensive reading on the subject this afternoon and I have to say I'm satisfied the term "fractal" is applicable both to my idea of a scaled blogosphere and to Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Fractal Society concept.
The Wikipedia defines fractal as:
A fractal is a set which is self-similar; fractals are repetitive in shape, but not in size. In other words, no matter how much you magnify a fractal, it will always look the same (or at least similar).
The word fractal derives from the Latin word "fractus". Here's a definition:
Incidentally, the term "fractal" was coined in 1975 by Benoit Mandelbrot, and comes from the Latin word fractus, the perfect participle passive of the verb frangere, meaning "to break, shatter, or break down".
On the same page, there are some great Latin quotes. This one seems especially appropriate:
Nota notae est nota rei ipsius.
A known component of a thing is known by the thing itself. (fractal self-similarity).
David G. Green's essay entitled "Fractals and scale" states this:
Mandelbrot proposed the idea of a fractal (short for "fractional dimension") as a way to cope with problems of scale in the real world. He defined a fractal to be any curve or surface that is independent of scale. This property, referred to as self-similarity, means that any portion of the curve, if blown up in scale, would appear identical to the whole curve. Thus the transition from one scale to another can be represented as iterations of a scaling process.
The phrase self-similarity is a key one. This from kosmoi.com:
A self-similar object is one whose component parts resemble the whole. Not all fractals are self-similar or at least not exactly so, but most exhibit this property.
Now back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee's use of the word fractal. He's been using the word at least since the mid-90's, since I found this in a 1995 speech of his:
People need to be part of the fractal pattern. They need to be part of organisms at each scale. We appreciate that a person needs a balance between interest in self, family, town, state and planet. A person needs connections at each scale. People who lack connections at any given scale feel frustrated.[...]Look at web "home pages". "Home pages" are representative of people, organizations, or concepts. Good ones tend to, just like people, have connections of widely varying "length". Perhaps as the web grows we will be able to see fractal structure emerge in its interconnections. Perhaps we ought to bear this in mind as we build our own webs.
TBL from a W3C mailing list entry in July 2003:
I expect the web to have different order at different scales.
A fractal system has similar amounts of organization showing up in a
similar way at different scales. I think the semantic web will -- must
in fact, to be useful -- evolve in this way.
I also want to note that there is a link between Chaos Theory and fractal. This from the Wikipedia:
Chaotic dynamical systems are often (if not always) associated with fractals.
In summary, the main point of my Fractal Blogosphere post was to try and suggest a new approach to blogging. You don't have to blog just to become popular (as is the only option if you live by the Power Law); you can derive just as much if not more pleasure from writing at the scale or level that fits your situation. Each level has different challenges and rewards. My idea says that there are gradations of motivation for blogging, which the power law in it's black/white harshness does not recognize (it can't, because it's a law not a social prescription). In the end, all blogging is pretty much the same - self-similar - but in reality there are differing levels of scale at which people can participate in the blogosphere. Why not embrace that?
In this article I draft guidelines for a Fractal Blogosphere and suggest that it be used as a measure of scale in the weblogging world. The goal is to help bloggers, particularly new ones, easily fit into a suitable blogging pattern.
Joi Ito wrote an interesting post today in response to Clay Shirky's Inequality post. It's about the ever-contentious subject of the power law as applied to weblogging. Joi suggested that we apply a Darwinian concept of "fitness" to the power law:
"If you think about the power law as themes or ideas instead of people and you think about fitness as the level in which an idea resonates with people, the power law could be viewed as an amplifier for ideas and memes that are sufficiently interesting."
This appealed to me, as it resonates with my own Web of Ideas outlook of the Web. Basically I believe that the Web should be organised around topics, not people. But I also subscribe to the 'weblog as avatar' concept that Tom Coates came up with, so it's not that I want to abstract humans out of the Web. Far from it. But I think Joi is correct to place ideas and memes at the centre of his 'power law fitness' equation. The problem with the power law as applied to blogging is that we have been placing all the emphasis on the 'who' and not the 'what' - why else is the blogosphere so obsessed about the A-List and Top 100's? A much more interesting way to measure the power law is to measure the 'A-List ideas', or the 'Top 100 memes'.
In my comment on Joi's website, I referred to my Fractal Web post from a few days ago. I'd like to expand on one part of that post: when I wrote that the Fractal Web could be viewed as an antidote to the power law. What I meant by that is that the power law is a very black and white method of measuring one's value in the blogosphere. Or to put it another way, it's a very binary method. You're either Popular, or you're Not Popular. On or off, 1 or 0, win or lose.
Now don't get me wrong, I agree that the power law is correct. I accept Clay Shirky's supposition that all "large, heterogenous and robust" network systems conform to the power law. I've read Linked by Albert-Laszlo, I'm convinced. What I'm saying is that the power law should not be used by bloggers as a way to define themselves. As Ian Bogost said in Joi's comments: "...we need to increase our sense of subtlety and scale". I believe the Fractal Web concept is a better guide to living on the blogosphere than the power law, because it gives bloggers (and new bloggers in particular) more options on where and how to focus their writing efforts.
My Fractal Web concept for the blogosphere outlines 5 levels of involvement. These 5 levels are defined by audience quantity, but you can also think of it as gradations of motivation. The aim when using this system is not to become popular, which is by definition the only way you'll succeed if you measure yourself by the power law. The aim of my proposed Fractal system, which I'll call the Fractal Blogosphere, is for bloggers to find the level of structure that they feel most comfortable in. So without further ado, here's my draft 5 Fractal levels for bloggers:
10 - Personal Blogger. Your blog is designed to communicate with a very small and highly targeted group of people. Examples: blogging to keep in touch with your family; friends blogging personal things amongst themselves; a project team. The word 'personal' isn't quite right - but I want to convey that the people at this level personally know their readers.
100 - Social Blogger. Your audience is 100 or less, you have a core group of readers who share your interests and who tend to blog about the same topics as you do. Your writing is personal and conversational and your group sometimes leave comments on your blog or trackback you. You may not know your readers in real life, but you share a an affinity of interests with them.
1000 - Community Blogger. There are a number of options at this level. Maybe you're a Citizen Blogger who is writing for a community of readers - e.g. a Howard Dean blogger. Or you could still be basically a social blogger, with an increased audience - but you don't converse with all of your readers because there are now too many of them. At this level, your writing output needs to be adjusted to take into account the less conversational nature of your relationship to your readers.
10,000 - Broadcast Blogger. I'm not sure 'broadcast' is the right term, but I'm using Clay Shirky's term for a blogger who has a large network of readers and who therefore cannot interact with them as on the 100 or 1000 levels. Typically this is what is currently known as an A-List blogger, who publishes their ideas knowing that a large audience will consume them.
100,000 - Celebrity Blogger. This is someone whose every single idea or meme will be picked up by their readers and analysed. I'm thinking here of (for want of a better word) famous people whose blog output will be subjected to a large amount of scrutiny - people such as Howard Dean, or Tim Berners-Lee, or David Bowie if he ever decided to blog (and wouldn't it be great if he did!).
I'd like to see this list of Fractal levels expand out to 10 to give it even more breadth and scale, but right now - at short notice - I can only think of 5 levels. Also the audience numbers may not match up entirely, but the point is each level is defined by quantity of readers.
So there you have it, my draft for a Fractal Blogosphere. The most important aspect of this is that each level has a different structure. For example the writing style differs at each scale - as Seb noted: "...discourse often has to become less idiosyncratic when it is intended to reach a large audience, because less common ground / shared language can be assumed."
What I hope a Fractal Blogosphere will enable is that new bloggers can immediately decide where on the scale they fit in. Currently I get the feeling that a lot of bloggers see the blogosphere as a 'dog eat dog' world - survival of the fittest, where Fittest = Popular. Maybe that is turning some potential bloggers off? But if we have a series of structural levels defined, then we broaden the scope of blogging so that people no longer compete - compare themselves - with people who are working at a different level.
For example: if I were to use the power law to rate myself as a blogger, then I'd have to mark myself as a complete failure compared to say Robert Scoble. He's obviously and deservedly way more popular than me. But if I use the Fractal Blogosphere to define myself as a blogger, then I simply don't compare myself to Robert - because he's on level 10,000 and I'm on level 100. My value system would be something like this instead: am I producing sufficient quality ideas and memes to please my small but focused group of readers?
In upcoming posts I will explore some of the technical theory behind the Fractal Web. I discovered tonight that the Wikipedia has an excellent definition of "fractal", plus Mark Pilgrim has written on a related topic in recent times: Cantor Sets (which are an example of a fractal). I'll keep thinking of improvements to the Fractal Blogosphere, but I'd also like it to be picked up by someone who has a formal background in social software. But then if it's a good idea, it'll no doubt be fit enough to be amplified!
I review Tim Berners-Lee's recent interview with Christopher Lydon and analyse how the Fractal Society impacts on the world of blogging.
Today I listened to Christopher Lydon's recent interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. In it Berners-Lee discussed the state of the Web and outlined his vision of a "fractal society". It was also very interesting to hear his views on blogging, which I'd not heard him speak on before. At the beginning of the interview, he mentioned that the general public are "seizing on the Web as a way to have a conversation". I got the impression that TBL sees blogging as one aspect of this phenomenon, but he cautions that blogging is still practised by comparatively few Web users. Blogs are a "new structure", but just one part of the Web.
When Lydon asked him why he created the Web back in the late 80's/early 90's, Berners-Lee said he felt there was "a need to write where you can read". He initially designed it to be a "collaborative medium", but it's real impact has been as a "publication medium". A word he used a few times was "annotate" and one point in particular stood out here: that we should be able to annotate the Web in order to "make people accountable". TBL used the example of US politics, which he felt needed to improve its accountability. He suggested that the Web could enable the public to annotate what public figures say and evolve discussions around that. This reminded me of the W3C's read/write web browser, Amaya, which I've blogged about in the past. Amaya is one of the great missed opportunities of the Web, IMHO. Microsoft's Internet Explorer has roughly 95% of the market, yet it can only read Web content - it can't be used to write it (at least not without using an add-on tool, such as blog authoring systems like Radio Userland and Movable Type). I am of course referring here to the Universal Canvas, which is another one of my obsessions - and possibly right up there in mythical status with the Semantic Web. But I digress.
The main part of the TBL interview focused on Berners-Lee's theory of a Fractal Society and how the Web can be used to achieve this. Fractal Web is a complicated mathematics-backed theory and I need to read up on this some more. Indeed, TBL has been using the word "fractal" a lot these past few months in order to evangelise his concept. So people are just beginning to understand it now. Essentially "fractal" in the TBL sense means structure on many levels, which is the phrase he used to describe it. Berners-Lee observed that "complicated systems seem to be fractal" - and I inferred from this that he thinks blogging is such a system.
TBL wants people to try and achieve a "balance across the different scales". But achieving success on a global scale doesn't mean you need to become famous - it simply means "think global, act local". His suggestion is that we should divide our time over 10 channels, like so:
1 - You
10 - Your family
100 - Your social group
1000 - local community (eg your church)
etc up to the 10th level, which is a global scale.
Each of those levels represents the size of your audience, or the number of people you are dealing with (nb: TBL didn't specify what exactly the labels represented, but this is my understanding of what he said). He had an analogy of dropping marbles into 10 cans and the aim is to spread one's marbles around. TBL went on to discuss the fractal theory in terms of blogging:-
Blogging is an individualistic activity, in that you're expressing yourself via the Web in your writing and other multimedia. But blogging is also a fractal activity because, even though you're doing an individualistic thing, you're also "part of something bigger". When you blog, you're participating in a group activity. The question for us bloggers then becomes: which scale am I blogging at and therefore how much time should I be devoting to it in relation to my other activities? For example I am currently working at the 3rd level with my weblog - my audience can be counted in multiples of 10. So should my ultimate goal be to hop up a couple of levels and become an A-List blogger, where my blog reaches an audience of 10,000 or more? Or do I want to become a Citizen Blogger for my local community, so I move up to level 4 with an audience of around 1000? Or should I be happy writing for a small audience of people who share my interests? Maybe I can do a combination of these things - that is, different blogging activities aimed at different fractal levels. These are all questions that perhaps bloggers should be asking themselves. My initial impression is that Tim Berners-Lee's fractal theory helps us to balance blogging with other aspects of our social lives on the Web. Perhaps it's even an antidote to inequality in the blogosphere?
My favourite part of the TBL interview was when he said that blogging *should* be two-way. One should express oneself (=WRITE), but also listen to feedback (=READ). Berners-Lee thought that blogging has done exceedingly well to provide mechanisms for gathering and listening to feedback. But he wants people on the Web in general (and I'm hereby employing this concept to blogging specifically) to make a conscious effort to not constrain themselves to a rose-coloured view of the world. That is, don't become trapped in a self-reinforcing social group, that only links to and reads content belonging to other members of your group. Listen to other bloggers, listen to *all* the blogosphere. This is where I believe topic-based ontologies on the Web can be very useful and the likes of Topic Exchange and k-collector are improving the Web, by exposing us to content from people who we don't normally read but who nevertheless share our interests.
TBL wants fractal to refer to a balance between diversity and homogeneity. By this I took it that bloggers should be diverse enough to write about the things that interest them individually (the old 'to each his own' maxim), but at the same time the Net enables us to participate in conversations with other people in the blogosphere who share our interests - and all of this is going on at different levels. Looking at this from a personal viewpoint, my blogroll reflects the people I see as having similar interests to me and therefore I see us collectively as a "group" (nb: that doesn't mean the people on my blogroll necessarily see *me* as part of *their* group). On a local community level, perhaps this is where my Citizen Blogger post comes in - maybe I will begin to use the Web to contribute to my community as a Citizen Blogger. And on a global scale, well I need to work on improving myself on this level. It may mean doing some writing for a publication with a wider audience than my humble blog. For example, the people who volunteer their services to Digital Web magazine are involving themselves on a higher fractal level than just writing on their individual websites. They are writing for a bigger community of people and for a specific public purpose, so they have to adjust their output accordingly. This is just one example, there are many more options to explore and outside the Web Development community too.
As you have seen, the Tim Berners-Lee interview has inspired me to think and write about how I can improve my 'fractibility' (if there is such a word!). I look forward to listening to more Christopher Lydon interviews too, it's quite stimulating to the mind.
I got my first PDA for Christmas, a Palm Tungsten T2 - cost about $700 in New Zealand dollars. It's already changed my reading/writing habits for the better. For a start, my information management has improved because I now have my goals and 'To Do' list on me all the time. I review, edit and add to my tasks each day, then at night I synchronise with my home PC. I haven't yet got to the stage of wirelessly connecting to the Internet in order to keep in synch constantly, but I know that when I do I will make another leap forward in my personal information management.
What's most interesting is looking at how my reading/writing system has changed now that I have a PDA. I read a lot more blog content via my PDA now and I also read longer articles more often. Remember that old axiom that lengthy articles don't get read on the Web? For example we were told in the past to "write no more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication" and to write for scannability, etc. This no longer applies in the era of mobile browsing/reading. Now that I can save long essays to my PDA for perusing at my leisure, I am able to fully absorb and appreciate a well-written lengthy weblog post. I've always believed in the principle that long articles and essays have just as much right to be on the Web than short bite-sized weblog posts. Now finally I've found the technological means to live properly by that principle.
Part of the reason that lengthy articles are traditionally considered bad form on the Web is the discomfort level of reading text on a screen. Not to mention the discomfort of being tied to a chair all day. OOS and sore eyes are the desk jockey's lot. But when I'm reading via my PDA, I'm free to move around and do other things at the same time. The discomfort level drops dramatically, simply because I'm mobile.
There's also the time factor of sitting and reading a long article - e.g. this one that Paul Ford linked to the other day. It was a fascinating article, about quantitative analysis of literature, and I was able to read it on the train and bus. I was taking the time I'd usually just spend pissing and moaning about Wellington's 3rd world transport system, and constructively reading an interesting article on my PDA.
How else has my online routine changed now that I have a PDA? Here's a summary of my read/write cycle currently:
1. Search for content: check RSS Aggregator (Bloglines) and/or do some Googling.
2. Copy/Save to PDA: For interesting articles, copy them to my PDA for reading later (or if I'm at work, email myself a list of URLs to copy to my PDA when I get home). NB: I'm not yet fully synched in a technological sense. A wireless connection is required - need a bluetooth-enabled phone? That would remove the "copy" component.
3. Read: Either on my PDA - at home, on the train, while running around after my 2-year old daughter, etc. I also read on the Web via a computer screen. At the moment, it's about 50/50 PDA and PC. But I suspect I'll be reading more from my PDA/mobile phone by end of 2004, once I get better equiped technically.
4. Write: two main options
a) Add to Linkblog: for found ideas worth preserving for posterity, but which I don't necessarily want to blog about (I may end up writing about it later though).
b) Write an original article on Read/Write Web. For ideas of my own, or found ideas I want to explore further. I usually save info and notes in my PDA for weblog article prep. My PDA has taken over my paper notebooks in this respect. I sort of miss my scrawly dog-eared notebooks.
As with the reading, I have the potential to write more content on a PDA/mobile phone. I don't think it would be Read/Write Web content though, as I typically write long posts requiring reflection and writing space. It's not feasible or desirable to write long articles on an itty-bitty mobile device. But I can forsee my linkblog entries being automatically published via a PDA/phone with a wireless hook-up. And maybe I would start to post chunks of original microcontent onto Read/Write Web in future, in addition to my longer articles, if I had the mobile means to do it. I guess the proof will be in the pudding, later on in 2004 - the year that mobile blogging takes off?
