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Monday, September 01, 2003 |
When the researchers and tool vendors hook up with the content providers and entreprenuers, new kinds of micro-content will flourish. We all need to work together to first establish standardized micro-content types, then we should make sure this stuff can be subscribed to via Echo-Atom-PIE AND RSS 2.0 (if possible.) Finally - shared public servers need to established - so multiple tools can all contribute. Remember Brewster Kahle has offered us infinite storage and bandwidth.
Reviews, resumes, conversations, media - even people - will all become interoperable micro-content. Even the term blogging or blog item will become outmoded.
So what's the right terminology?
Here's Seb's latest - reacting to Phil - pointing at Alf.....
Structured/semantic blogging: the road ahead. There's been increasing activity in the last half-year or so around the theme of structured/semantic blogging. Phil offers a very insightful post here, concisely capturing the motivation for getting this stuff up and running:
What's a structure-enhanced blog item?
Packages of structured data are becoming post components.
The virtue of blogs has been their simplicity. Each post only needs one field, and maybe a title and url.
Not everyone is served well by this lowest common denominator. Sometimes you have a burning need for more structure, at least some of the time.
When you know a subject deeply, and your observations or analysis recur, you may be best served by filling in a form. The form will have its own metadata and its own data model. Phil includes a link to the intriguing qlogger service, which I had not seen before. Qlogger already offers a number of structured blogging options ( sexlogging being one of them - "Ah sex. You've gotta love it. Keep track of it with this log". Great, now you'll be thinking about blogging all the time.). And the still mysterious Lafayette project is apparently aiming at the same honeypot of distributed, collaboratively built databases. Best of all, Phil gives a plausible scenario in which several different structured blogpost formats gradually spread across the net through autodiscovery. Future blogging tools may well allow us to manage a personalized set of formats that we can easily choose from with each new post. Ordinary, amorphous posts will remain the default for freeform content that doesn't fit a template. I think this is spot on. My own thinking efforts in that direction can be found in the piece Towards Structured Blogging; Alf Eaton's neat Blaxm! reviews exchange brings some of those ideas into concrete form. [ Seb's Open Research]
Mikel Maron has moved to England and discovered one of those quaint 'European' technologies that never made it here in the U.S. It's called teletext.
I worked at Time-Warner teletext in 1981 - doing sound effects for a Lunar Lander game. It was part of a test in Calabasas, CA and little did we realize - that the videogame would be the most popular feature of the system. Anyway just to let people know that the WWW had plenty of predecessors and $billions$ was lost on it.
But it took off in Europe. France had a system called Minitel and I remember being in Amsterdam - crusing the channels, only to find an Apple Macintosh give-away promotion (in 1988.)
The most intense thing I learned about teletext was how to program melody lines and sound EFX with 72 bytes of info - 60 times a second. I recommend this task to all nascent programmers.
So here's Mikel's post............
 Television would be the black hole of amateur sociologizing of foreign cultures. So avoiding actual content, just examine the mirror-world exterior. New sets are in cinematic ratios, jetsons against the flintstone US ratios. Some time after buying a set, and the television detector van comes round, the TV license fee shows up in the post. The vans smell of a Brazil-style-dystopian myth, but are apparently real and accurate, unless you live in a council tower block. And then there's teletext.
Lurking in the TV vertical blanking interval, is a 16 color digital netherworld. Somewhere, someone types and designs Apple IIe style screens of breaking news, weather, tv schedules, sports scores. Falling somewhere between the Internet and watching grass grow, it's a wonderful hack. Choose a pages, and wait until it's rebroadcast, in a never ending loop of thousands of 45-byte packets.
Totally amazing to see pioneering digital info, sneak into a nation's living room (and many other places worldwide). And a totally baffling relic. A feel so old, you can only imagine elderly and desperate Britons on holiday in Spain typing, and waiting. Yet, in some it inspires a bizarre nostalgia and bitterness...
we see yet another example of the decline in the BBC's teletext output as the BBC encourage an ever increasing number of hits to their BBC World website. As it slowly dies, perhaps teletext can be handed over to artists and designers. German teletext porn has already been inspirational. [ Brain Off]
Don Park has somehow gotten Richard MacManus to go OFF on a huge, incredible idea!
I don;t necessarily like the name - as Wiki has much more specific connotations in my mind - besides collaborative space - but.... it's A GREAT idea anyway!
Microcontent Wiki.
Richard MacManus responds to my Linking Blogs and Wikis with Microcontent Wiki. Is this a resurgence of microcontent?;-p
[Don Park's Daily Habit]
So here's Richard's original post - too important to NOT post here...........
Weblogs and Wikis are authoring tools that enable everyday people to write to the Web. However one part of the Writeable Web is often overlooked: weblog comments. Often some of the best nuggets of content can be found buried in a comment attached to a weblog post. I've even coined a phrase for this: Microcontent Wiki, which is defined as: Weblog Post + Comments. It's microcontent because it's usually content based around a single theme or topic (defined by the weblog post). And it's like a Wiki because anyone can write a comment on a weblog, so it has a similar collaborative feel to a Wiki. The problem is, currently we don't have an easy way to track Microcontent Wikis. We can subscribe to RSS feeds for weblogs and even topics (k-collector), but weblog comments aren't as simple to aggregate.
As Paul Everitt wrote:
"Today I was browsing around one of the sites in the world of Zope. On one page someone asked a question which, as is rarely the case, I actually had an intelligent answer. However, providing the answer required me to register and login. Meaning yet another stinking password to remember, and another URL to periodically revist for follow ups.
Needless to say, I didn't. And that's one of the big problems of today's mostly-non-writeable web. You usually have to put your words in a place where people will find them, which usually means you put your words all over the place. There is too tight a coupling between content and location.
Tight coupling of content and location is an issue that has been bothering me too. I often write comments on weblog posts, but in order to track the conversation I have to bookmark the post and check back periodically. i.e. like Paul says, I need to continually go back to the location of the comment in order to see what other people may have contributed. Tools like Trackback enable you to comment on someone's post on your own weblog (like I'm doing with Paul's post here), but you still need to visit the original location to read what other people have written. So it's often easier to write a comment on the other person's weblog. And if you're commenting on popular weblogs, like Mark Pilgrim's for example, then it's likely to be read by many more people than if you'd written it on your own weblog.
One tool that I've found helpful is Phil Pearson's Comment monitoring service, which allows you to sign up to an RSS feed of comments on your weblog. And today I discovered that Radio Userland are in the midst of implementing an email notification service for when comments are posted to your site. But great as they are, these services are geared towards tracking comments on your own site. I'd like to be able to track comments on other peoples sites, but post-by-post only. In other words I'd like to de-couple bits of content from their various locations - particularly if they're buried in a weblog comments system - and collect them together in my RSS Aggregator.
It's interesting to consider the differences of weblogs and wikis in this context. A weblog is the voice of a single person, or sometimes a group of people - e.g. the Corante Many-to-Many weblog is a collective of 5 people including Clay Shirky. The key thing is that weblogs are owned by 1 or more people and it is the publishing vehicle for them. Further, weblogs are "the unedited voice of a person" according to Dave Winer's definition. For example my own weblog, Read/Write Web, is my own publishing environment and nobody else has privileges to post here.
Wikis on the other hand are collaborative publishing environments and in most cases anyone can write on them. Like weblogs they are "unedited", but the difference is no one person or group of persons "owns" the content. But there is an interesting correlative between wikis and weblog comments. When a blogger posts something on their weblog and they have comments enabled, anyone who then reads the post is able to write a comment. i.e. essentially any reader can publish on the weblog. It's like a Wiki-on-the-fly!
This concept can be expressed as the following equation:
Weblog Post + Comments = Microcontent Wiki
Currently RSS makes it easy to subscribe to a whole weblog feed, but it isn't so easy yet to subscribe to bits of a weblog. Tools such as k-collector enable you to subscribe to topics, which is close to the ideal of subscribing to microcontent, but it doesn't aggregate comments attached to weblog posts. Some webloggers have created RSS feeds for their comments systems, e.g. Sam Ruby has comments feeds and its even possible to subscribe to individual posts. But RSS comments feeds are far from widely adopted.
Two bloggers that generate interesting comments from their readers are Don Park and Robert Scoble. But to track comments on their weblogs, I need to bookmark the post in my weblog browser (ie I have to go outside my RSS Aggregator), and periodically click "Refresh" on that webpage to see if any new comments have been written. This is a big time waster for me. Wouldn't it be great if I could simply subscribe to an RSS feed of that post's comments? For example when I click on the "Comments" URL and view the comments, I'd love to see a simple "Subscribe to these comments" button that generates an RSS file. Then I could add that to my RSS Aggregator and bob's my uncle - all the comments from that weblog post would automatically be streamed to me. Weblog authoring tools vendors - consider this a feature request ;-)
Content is always going to be tightly coupled to location. This is especially so in a weblog, where the location will be a URL - eg http://www.readwriteweb.com in my case. But even in a Wiki, or a Microcontent Wiki as I've described it (weblog post + comments), there is a central location where content on a specific topic is aggregated. The key is to make it easy to subscribe to all the "locations" that interest you. Currently it's easy to subscribe to weblogs using RSS. Now we want to make it easy to subscribe to microcontent. [Read/Write Web] |
Xeni finally files a report from Burning Man. I wonder if she even KNOWS about the death and plane accidents.
Live from Burningman.  I'm sitting inside a trailer that belongs to an incredibly generous, satellite-dish-toting friend named Wayne -- on the playa in Black Rock City, at Burning Man. It's 2:30AM. Most of the event has passed, but performance-explosions are going off all over the place, brightly illuminated art-cars are floating by in the sand, and people with el-wire woven into their hair and clothes are milling around in the middle of the night. The sky above is astonishingly clear. I can see the milky way. The Man has burned, as has the Temple of Honor, as has tons of propane, trash, wood, and just about everything else flammable you might imagine. I'm sleep-deprived, grimy, and covered in white alkaline dust. This was my first time out here, and while it's been a terrific adventure, I'm seriously looking forward to home and running water. Here's one snapshot of an art-car; at left is a snapshot of the man just before the Burn. A few more of the photos I took out here will run with a forthcoming story in Wired News within the next couple of days. Oh, Burningman Bingo? It was dead-on. I crossed off everything but the tofu pup wrapper and the deodorant rock. Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
Schools back and Rob Adams has brought us a great outline of what he's up to in one of his classes. I sure wished they taught this stuff when I was in college! All we had was Byte magazine!
Analyzing Communities.
The fall semester has begun here at CMU, and I'm taking a class in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) from Bob Kraut. This semester, the class is focusing on Designing Online Communities and Bob is co-teaching it with Paul Resnick, a recommender systems (think Amazon.com ratings) expert who is visiting from the University of Michigan.
In the first class, which was last Friday, we discussed several types of social structures that exist both in the real world and online:
- Groups are a small number of people who come together to accomplish well-defined goals and have a specific, agreed-upon purpose. Most of the teams you may have worked with for projects in a class or at a workplace fall into this category.
- Voluntary associations are generally larger collections of people who all share common goals or interests and have agreed to congregate around those interests. Unlike groups, the goals of a voluntary association may not be very well-defined. Voluntary associations tend to last longer than groups, however; many may even have indefinite lifespans. An example is your local chapter of the YMCA.
- Communities are like voluntary associations but might be more loosely organized. I don't believe we talked much about this category, so I don't recall a whole lot of distinguishing features. I'd imagine communities involve people coming together to socialize and share in each other's lives, and are potentially even longer-running than voluntary organizations (you may belong to some communities for your entire life).
- Third places are locations people go to socialize that are separate from the home and the workplace (which are the first and second places). Third places are characterized by people coming together to revel in the uniqueness of each others' personalities; the patrons of the third place go for each other and not as much because the place is enjoyable per se. An example would be a neighborhood bar. Cheers is kind of the prototypical third place.
- Social networks are collections of people who are associated with one another through social interactions such as friendships, working relationships, etc. Your social network defines who you talk to, who you can ask favors of, who you can get information out of, etc. Bob went into an interesting digression where he showed a drawing of a social network some sociologists had observed; he pointed out how the network formed certain "clusters" that were only connected to other clusters through a single link between one node in each. Bob remarked that the two people who formed that link were frequently (de facto) powerful individuals since they controlled the communication between those two social clusters. This is especially true if the groups must frequently exchange important information, since they get to play gatekeeper for that information.
- Social capital describes the sense of trustworthiness and shared identity that people feel towards one another. Your social capital is a measure of this sense that people experience towards you; if you have high social capital among a certain group of people they will tend to value what you say and listen to you; if you have a low social capital, they're more likely to ignore you. This is a different way of looking at social relationships than the more structural ones I mentioned before.
Bob also made an interesting point about how physical architectures (as in, the structures of buildings) define the environment in which a community operates and thus has a large influence on the community itself. The readings drew a metaphor between building architectures and city planning (the kinds of things Alexander discusses) that physical communities live in and the design of the software systems that virtual communities live in. The suggestion, of course, is that the software system design influences these virtual communities in a similar fashion. This was really interesting to me; I had originally thought of going to grad school to study online communities in general and specifically how the design of social software systems influenced the way their communities operated. I hope we'll talk more about this issue in later classes.
Neema is also in the class and has posted his thoughts on his weblog. Chad is taking the course as well; hopefully he'll put up a few reflections as the semester wears on. If you, dear reader, happen to be a member of the class and have a weblog of your own, please post it in a comment below or send me a trackback ping. I'd like to keep tabs on what other people think of the course. [ roBlog dot org]
bar mitzvah. Mazel Tov to Aryeh Canter. Did your dad sing? [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
Thanks Adam. And a Happy B-Day to your daughter. How's her belly button ring?
And in regards to your inquiry about me singing, as I stood at the altar, and the Hazan (Cantor) turned and sang this beautiful psalm, I harmonized with her. But quietly - so that only she, Aryeh and myself could hear it. It was a private moment.
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