Adrian has been tugging at my subconscious of late with his initial exploration of whether you write your blog or it writes you in this non-spatial (actual object?) network:

“your identity is the sum of those connections that you are a participant in, but, you have little or no say about.”

And now he really screws my head up by saying, quite simply:

“The blogosphere, all the tools we have to map this, recognise that it is only about the connections between parts. The connecting parts are of more significance than the parts themselves.”

You see, I very much wanted to have a nice little ‘centred’… ‘individuals’.. who are then able to form networks based upon their very centrality through blogs in semilattices etc. and all of that… i.e. present my bloody paper at Blogtalk… and now I’m confused.

I guess my argument is / was about personal presence, the concrete reality of an individual as a necessity for a network and how blogs do that, but in fact, perhaps it’s more about the spaces between individuals, the objects that form the nexus of the networks and really what I’m arguing is the kinda unrevolutionary ‘hypertext changes everything’. After all, there are many many successful online communities not based on blogging… as I was thinking about the other days in hard communities.

Bugger, I’m even having trouble fitting in my little organic / artificial city metaphor with this stuff… spatially… gah.

I think this is my favourite so far.

Larger version & more.

Via Steven I’d get upset about this if it wasn’t so funny.

Granted there aren’t any comments, but it is personal web publishing, there is an RSS feed, a permalink, a date and well… content one might not necessarily be surprised to find on some forum of ‘Bathetically Ludicrous Online Gibberish’.

Well worth a read and a chuckle… to tell the truth I like a Dean that ‘aint afraid to publically express their thoughts… now I wonder if he’ll be equally happy to discuss them…

“Lately, I’ve been wandering around Blogland, and I’m struck by the narcissism and banality of so many personal blogs, of which, if the statistics are to believed, there are millions. Here, private lives tumble into public view, with no respect for seemliness or established social norms. Here, as the philosopher Roger Scruton said of Reality TV, ‘[a]ll fig leaves, whether of language, thought or behavior, have now been removed.’ What desperate craving for attention is indicated by this kind of mundane, online journaling? Surely, one writes a diary for one’s personal satisfaction; journaling is, after all, a deeply private act.

One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they chose to they expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism? The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward.” [Dean’s Notes: BLOG: see also Bathetically Ludicrous Online Gibberish]

From Lindon (who posts larger versions of all images to Into the Bungelow… theme designers take note!) this is more what I wanna see in my RSS.

Well, looks like Weblogs Zinc are running with the Google Ads in RSS, just picked this up from The Social Software Weblog.

S’pose it’s not particularly surprising, am not going to throw up my arms and be all strident and unsubscribe or anything but it is a bit depressing that my once ad-free(ish) space is add free no longer…. sigh.

OK, so as my ‘debut’ in glossy print comes along with elearning magazine I have some serious things that need sorting out, and you out there in aggregator land are the perfect people to help with such serious matters.

Questions…

1.) Should I call my column ‘Inside and Between’ or ‘In and Between’ (this is, of course a reference to Earl W. Stevick’s assertion that the most important thing that happens in a classroom is what goes on ‘inside and between’ the people in the room… it’s my ‘next business’ name too :o) ?

2. Which of the following photos should I use (taken today by the wonderful Simon Fox, who is available to hire if you wanna get in touch with him!)?

a. ‘Smug’

b. ‘Shiny’

c. ‘Senile’

d. ‘Salubrious’

Thankyou!!!

Zengestrom (a bloody great blog discovery via Stephen!) has some fascinating thoughts about why social networking services just haven’t kicked off.

I wrote a few paragraphs on this in Centered Communication and still feel like there’s some validity in them in that without effective consistent and subvertable presentation (a la blogs) there’s little networking that can happen… but one thing I missed out on / brushed over was that effective networks do form around particular ‘objects’ (be they causes, hobbies or material items), such as Wikipedia & the plane stuff I was talking about the other day.

In fact, we can represent ourselves as well as we want, but without objects (edutech, beliefs, conferences etc.) there isn’t really anything to form around.

For example, being a FOAF is not an object, that’s just a relationship, it’s not a network. Sharing the same interests / job / neighbourhood / concerns / pub… that is a network though.

To quote from the article:

“The social networking services that really work are the ones that are built around objects. And, in my experience, their developers intuitively ‘get’ the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life.”

I’m having a mind expanding morning!!!

If I could produce the same quality of work as Ulises seems to do on such a regular basis then I’d be, um, Ulises probably… either his latest offering, Tag Literacy, is well worth a look.

A few select quotes:

“Decisions regarding how to classify things which used to be undertaken by humans in collectivity are now carried out by humans individually, while the code aggregates and represents those decisions.”

“Folksonomies… do not require consensus as much as they measure the consensus already established around the use of certain words. In other words, folksonomies assume consensus without involving humans in the process.”

“I merely want to call attention to this different way in which we are defining and constructing sociality —a sociality that is the result of code doing things to the resources of detached individuals.”

Of particular interest to tagaholics will probably be part II ‘Guidelines for Generating Tags’ in which Ulises outlines among other things, what makes a good tag. However, for me the most interesting point of this article is his take on the ‘why would people bother using tags when we have Google’ issue that Lindon & I have been rattling on about for a bit:

“In short, Google yields search results that represent attention allocated by computers, while DCSs yield search results that represent attention allocated by humans. The former method (computer attention) is cheap, and hence ideal for indexing large amounts of information quickly; the latter method (human attention) is not so cheap, and not so quick, but it can yield more socially valuable information because it means a human being has made the association between a resource and a particular tag.”

Which is a very good point… why, for example, do I notice a tendency to use Wikipedia instead of Google for general knowledge queries… can the same be said of tags? Having said that though, are we not tagging as we type?

I’m not sure. I think that perhaps the most important aspect that’s missing here is the consideration of the tagger (rather than the user of the tags). Granted tagging might yield better results, but why would I tag when I am already busy enough writing what I’m writing and letting Google do it’s stuff with this.

I think wikipedia works because of the significant community that has formed around it. Tagging doesn’t have that same capacity… unless, that is, you have a community of people dedicated to tagging everything else, wikipedia-style, for the results that Ulises talks about here.

But still thinking about this, an interesting article…

The WordPress plugin competition is a GREAT idea not only because there are so many great plugins coming out but also because it makes you realise what great ones are already there.

A few which I’ve been sampling and delighting in are:

Top 10: Basically allows you to count number of views for each post and display a ‘top 10 (or 20 or 30)’ of posts on your site (as well as views-per-post too)… no longer do you need a ‘best of’ section… this one writes itself! (would like to set this for ‘the last year’ or ‘the last month’ though…)

Bad Behaviour: Gets at spam before it can get to you by analysing “incoming requests to your server. If they match a profile of a known spambot, the spammer gets a nice error message instead of your blog.” Outstanding!

Subscribe to comments 2.0: Looks like it’s coming along a treat… am having some glitches with installing the ‘subscribe to comments without making one’ option (which I want… very cool option) but am sure we’ll get that flattened out soon.

Lindon: “There’s also a kind of Zen calm about these ones”