I think this is the kind of thing that Ulises was talking about in his paper Distributed Textual Discourse. It’s pretty exciting.

Basically, wikalong is a firefox extension that sits in your sidebar and allows you to effectively annotate each page you visit AND see everyone else’s annotations.. pretty cool huh.

So, if you install this and you’re using Firefox you can visit this blog and say what a jolly great read it is! Interesting stuff.

A couple of things I’d like to see would be for it to run in the status bar with optional pop-up (sidebar is too big)… maybe as a ticker… and a bit of a spam blocker would also be cool.

I’m pretty happy with myself!

Having finally managed to set up a wireless network at home (I made it as difficult as possible, honest) I’ve now got portable thunderbird and portable firefox on my USB stick… so now I can take my browser and email anywhere with xp (with all my finicky settings) and I get to have a hold of my own data and privacy rather than it being backed up to a horrid centralised storage system!

Now, um, I have to do some work…

As the WordPress Plugin Competition is underway I thought I’d submit what I think would be the best possible WP plugin for me.

What I want is the capacity to, when I’m creating a page (not a post), ‘wiki-ise’ it by clicking a box.

I’m not worried about WikiSyntax, I’m not even particularly worried about the capacity to create new pages from there (although that’d be nice), what I want is for people to be able to simply click on edit this page and then do exactly that.

(And for the site owner to then get an email / contributors to be able to sign up to email RSS notifications of changes)

It’d be lovely to combine the spaminator with this to stop stuff from getting through but I’ll settle for quick registration > page edit.

Not much to ask eh :O)

Anjo: “the task of finding an appropriate algorithm for detecting weblog communities based on linking has turned me into a deep depression”

Am not surprised at all, communication / communities between blogs is a bit like quantum physics ‘aint it… literally (I think).

He also invites readers “to submit a seed blog and a list of 10+ “community members” based on links during 2004.” as “Hopefully, the results of such an exercise give an indication of whether algorithms to detect weblog communities are feasible at all.”

Not sure exactly what you’re after there Anjo, more than happy to help though!

Here’s a new blog starting out full of stuff I like, DVNT Fragments.

With opening posts on what’s wrong with folksonomies, presentation dependencies (and dare I say anxiety!) & my hard communities thingy ’tis just my cup of tea :o) Here’s the feed.

The quality of submissions and the people who are going to be taking part in Blogtalk Downunder blows me away! Seriously!

Here are the first two presenters, Senator Andrew Bartlett and Dr Chris Chesher (you’ll love the paper too, which is, of course, published in full on the blog!)

Senator Andrew Bartlett – Blogs and politics in Australia and globally

“The real long-term value of blogs in politics is very much an open question – in many ways a living experiment in progress. We’re all finding out the answers and exploring the solutions as we go along. What I wish to explore is how things have gone to date and what can be done to increase the chances of things developing in a way which maximises the potential benefits for political processes… more“

And I can’t tell you how much I like this paper, certainly enough to not even try to describe it’s breadth and insight at 9PM so I’ll leave it to Dr Chris Chesher (who I hope I have to right picture for…):

Dr Chris Chesher – Blogs and the crisis of authorship

“The uptake of blogs proves that reports of the death of the author are greatly exaggerated. The Author is alive and well, and has a blog.

In the speculative era of cyberculture criticism in the early 1990s, many authors claimed electronic text would destabilise the institution of authorship (Poster 2001; Landow 1994; Bolter 2001). They argued changes of material form of writing would decrease the power of the author. They connected this claim with critics such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who had questioned conventional assumptions about authorship, and speculated on the possibilities of texts without authors. While the claims of these electronic writing advocates were contested theoretically (Grusin 1994), the popularity of blogs empirically demonstrates the persistence of authorship, and how progress often works backwards.

Authorship is so familiar it’s almost invisible, and so flexible it cannot be defined. Certain elements of a text attribute it to a source: an author’s name on the book cover, a newspaper by-line, or the author information in a blog. The Author emerged in the West alongside a range of economic, technological, social, political and legal changes associated with the rise of individualism, capitalism, rationalism, democracy and rule of law. Authorship functions as a boundary abstraction that connects each of these discourses. It gives authors the legal protection of copyright, economic connections with the printing and publishing industries and provides the key field to locate books on the shelves of booksellers and libraries. In silent reading, it provides a persona for the reader to imagines, completing a text’s meaning. Canons of authors provide symbolic figures whose names become shorthand for concepts and stories. The convention of reading a text with reference to its author is ingrained, even if this institution is only 500 years old. Blogs have succeeded because they are less innovative than other online forms.

Far from dissolving authorship, blogs perpetuate, coexist with, and transform it. Authorship re-emerges in proportion to the distance that a text moves from its context. Specific features of blogs allow them to invoke Foucault’s author-function more effectively than static personal home pages: the inverted narrative structure of the archive, the consistent voice, the time stamp that positions posts in a reference to a temporality shared with readers. However, the practices associated with blogs also do transform authorship. The reader’s capacity to give feedback through comments compensates for the conversational mode of writing. Many blogs’s authority comes from positions outside institutions.

Blogs gravitated towards two discourses that reflect the conventional split between public and private domains: the political polemic blog, and the confessional diary. Media events that brought certain blogs into the public sphere in 2003 and 2004 followed standard scripts for each side of this split. The role of political blogs in discrediting Dan Rather’s report on Bush’s war record was generally celebrated as evidence that blogs were legitimate players in the public domain. On the other hand, the most high profile personal diaries were those that presented narratives of transgressive sexuality: Muzimei in China, the London Callgirl in the UK, and Washingtonienne in the US. By contrast with the political bloggers, these authors who brought the private sphere to the public were subject to a moralistic collective tribunal…. more

Via Robin comes a very pretty podcasting / vodcasting (vod?) white paper, includes within some suggestions for use including the fairly daft:

“Students can record and upload their foreign language lessons to their instructor’s Web site. The instructor can then listen to the lessons on their MP3 player at their convenience.”

Maybe I was just a bad language teacher but, phew, I don’t think that’d go down to well with all concerned!

Still, nice diagrams and stuff, worth a look.

I’d like to be working at UPEI, they’re doing some interesting things there!

“Radio@UPEI is firstly a space to learn about, to post, to promote, and to celebrate rich media online and a multi-faceted service to facilitate its exchange. Our vision is to create a new type of media exchange where anyone can learn about rich media, where anyone can contribute and enjoy a diverse range of music, where anyone can contribute as well as listen to independently produced “shows”, where anyone can subscribe to and download audio clips in mp3 formats, and where several value-added methods of enjoying local media are offered. ” [BeatBlog]

Lindon, who, if anyone, should know a lot about having & not having blogs (is this one the 4th?) gets to a serious nub about blogging and communities [emphasis mine]:

“I spent some time on the week end pondering”Blogging”, ‘cause here I am again with the initial wave of posts diminishing to a trickle.

Do I not have the will? – Grief I’ve coded plug-ins for Photoshop’s (then) arcane API, so I think I’ve got will enough.

Do I not have the time? Well, no one has the time, and I’m no one so that should be fine…

Is it not satisfying? — Bingo! (but why not?) Blogging I’ve come to see has little to do with community, it’s “Stand-and-deliver; chalk-and-talk” by any other name, and that was a form of teaching I didn’t enjoy as either a student or lecturer. It’s one way traffic, it’s publishing (”duh!” I hear you all saying, well OK both of you), but I now realise I had aspirations for it as a feedback mechanism, not to start with but as soon as my interest began to flag (again).”

Which is very very interesting. I’ve been thinking about niches and smallness more and more of late and this kinda seems to link in, in a way.

Let’s say, for example, that someone was a bit of a model plane enthusiast (exchange this for interest of your own here). Now, they are pretty busy, there might be a group of enthusiasts that meet face-to-face but they have a family / stuff to do and while they go don’t necessarily get on with all of them. Besides, they’re also interested in a very particular type of model plane and while there are thousands of other people who are they’re scattered round the country and world.

So, thinking about how the web can help them out I guess there are a few options:

Email / special interest groups

It’s not hard to rock over to Yahoo groups and pretty quickly find a ton of model plane groups. Once you’re in a group you also get to email them and get their emails, as our email addys become more and more something we keep for ever people are most likely to get your message and you might be able to have some pretty good conversations.

Discussion boards

But joining a Yahoo group (or similar listserv) isn’t for everyone… they do have RSS feeds (but they’re v. limited for advertising purposes) and you can control things like digests but it is still email and that has it’s own intrusive / spam and various other issues to deal with.

For whatever reason there’s always discussion groups, for example keeping up the model plane theme these ones.

In the same way as email groups you’ve got instant (and now unobtrusive, no ’email to everyone’ going on) communication and community… should you choose to participate (as lurker or actively).

Blogs

Or of course you can set up a blog… and now here’s the rub… I can give you now an absolute cast iron guarantee that a community will not gravitate to you. Your questions will not be answered, your ideas knocked about or your posts commented upon.

Because blogging is bloody difficult.

First you have to figure out the blogosphere (if it exists) for what you’re writing about (and believe me, it is not large for model planes, this was about the best I could find) and then you have to alert them to your blog (which they may or may not like).

Then you have to ‘put in your bit’ by which I mean ‘take part in the conversation’ by commenting & linking to interesting things other people are saying, leaving comments on blogs, emailing authors… participating… it only takes two of ya!

And even then half the stuff you do write gets ignored (I didn’t mention that you probably should be writing something half interesting / useful too did I ;o)

But then, through all this work and giving and participating, you can get a pretty amazing community, you can manage conversations through RSS and you can get plenty of feedback, help, support and good things.

You’ve also got you’re own owned voice and the knowledge that you’re not foisting upon everyone through email stuff that you haven’t well edited and aren’t 100% about (after all, they all subscribe to your feed, it’s their choice) and I prefer that.

Having said that there’s plenty of room for RSS enabled discussion forums, definitely, and I think that you really can use email tied into blogs and forums very well, and Yahoo groups obviously works for a lot of people.

But for me, blogging is better… just extremely difficult and lots of hard work at the same time!

This isn’t a dig at you-know-who but don’t temporary blogs (like conference blogs) get on your nerves? Subscribe, unsubscribe and then it just sits there forever…

Am trying to do something a bit different with Blogtalk by a. doing it over a much longer time (i.e. it becomes the conference website) & b. putting all the papers on it so it becomes more than just a collection of fairly unstructured observations left to gather dust.

But temporary blogs annoy… aggregating / tagging would be a much better way to do it wouldn’t it?