Anjo has an interesting thought on weblog mapping:

“It gets more interesting, as any textbook on networks does, to draw the analogy of graphs with a system of pipes that carry liquid.

Is this analogy useful in the context of weblog communities? Perhaps it is. Imagine that weblogs are connected by a system of pipes to other weblogs where the size of a pipe is proportional to the number of links. Imagine that someone pours some water into her weblog. The weblog community is now defined to be the bloggers who get wet and wetness is an indication of participating in the community.”

Reminds me of Chris’ raindrops and pools… all this water!

Ta da!

Over the Easter break Alan was kind enough to set up a mirror of Feed2JS at IncSub, so now you can merrily aggregate, spit out and customise feeds of joy downunder :o)

Chaos Abraham quotes Doc Searls on blogging:

“just think of blogging as emailing in public. Start with short posts about anything. Like most of mine today. If you make a big deal of it, it won’t work. It should be the opposite of labor-intensive.”

So fewer 5000 word posts then :o)

Interesting ideas about blogging though, in particular:

“in public speaking, people respond less to what you say than to the way you say it. The same thing is true with blogging. For sure.”

Want more of the same? Chris is definitely a recommended feed!

Technorati Profile

Technorati one billion links

I say Wednesday 30 March 2005, 8.55pm San Francisco time.

To mark the tenth birthday of wikis (which, um might have been a few days ago but hey :0) here’s something that’s been bubbling away in me for a while…

While thinking out the centered communication paper it occurred to me that I was also writing an anti-wiki treatise of sorts.

So to check out if I with any likeminded souls I rolled over WhyWikiWorksNot and it doesn’t particularly look like it. Lots of stuff about forums and presentation and wotnot but nothing really along the lines that I’ve been thinking.

Which is that one of the biggest problems about wikis (and which is shared, by the likes of me on occasion, in relation to blogs & co) is the ‘wikis are everything we need’ approach.

The more I think about how wikis work, to be honest, the less enamoured I am of them… they are useful repositories of knowledge / project management / group things-to-do tools but that’s about it. They aren’t centered on individuals but on an abstract ‘community’ (although not in a town square way), they are horrendously difficult to track (ever subscribed to a wiki RSS feed… did you unsub fairly shortly after!) and they suffer from all the syntactical and formatting issues that are mentioned in WWWN.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a need for them, but it’s a pretty simple one which revolves around wikipedia-esque project and workplace collaboration (supported, importantly, as I argue in the paper, by other means of communication).

C’mon, prove me wrong…

I’ve posted a draft version of my blogtalk paper Centered Communication: Weblogs and aggregation in the organisation over at IncSub. I’m not about to rewrite it all… noooooo way :o)… but feedback / comments would be really cool. It’s a kind of mismash of Christopher Alexander, Ulises Mejias and a sprinkle of me complaining about discussion boards and going on about how RSS and blogs are the answer to everything ;o)

Here’s the abstract:

Centered Communication: Weblogs and aggregation in the organisation

Over the last decade business, educational and community organisations have attempted to enhance their operations through utilizing the web. A significant amount of this effort has been directed towards the development and management of internal communities, employee knowledge and organisational information. To this end, complex and powerful tools have been sourced, developed and implemented to create intranets, learning management systems, community sites, portals and virtual team spaces.

However, while many organisational communication processes have been revolutionised by direct interpersonal communication through email and Instant Messaging (IM), only limited successes have been achieved through the use of these web-based environments. It is argued that this has occurred as a result of the limitations in design of tools brought about by a tendency to embrace tree-like and centralised principles and their associated technological solutions.

In light of these arguments, this paper outlines an alternative, centred (as opposed to centralised) approach to online communication. In doing this, an organisational online communication model based around the use of weblogs and aggregation is presented and discussed in relation to its application in a large, distributed and complex setting. Key to this model are the assumptions that ownership, control, independence, choice and design for subversive use are critical in establishing conducive, motivating, authentic and effective online communication and knowledge environments.

[read the whole article and tell me what you think…]

If there’s one fashion blog you subscribe to it should definitely be this one. Here’s the RSS feed.

Making shirts like tutus… ace!

I can’t really add anything to this brilliantly succinct and to the point post by Chris Lott, who gets it in a very big way, here’s an extract… go read the rest now!

“The problem is that it takes more than one class/quarter/semester to start becoming a proficient denizen of the socially networked community. One-off uses are not enough—just when students are starting to make the connections themselves, and just when they are starting to have their own personal “AHA!” moments, the plug gets pulled and they may not encounter such an educational environment again for another term or two (or ever).

What we need to do is rethink our curriculum in terms of interaction, create a consistent, generic toolset that supports the needs of the students and instructors, and instill community practices from end-to-end in the curriculum. I have in mind something like the idea of the portfolio, which spans semesters and houses explicity artifacts, within which would be integrated discussion, blogging, and wikis tied to that student’s identity throughout their academic career. Top-down LMS like Blackboard are exactly the wrong answer because the social tools (I’m being generous with the plural here) are pathetic, locked down, and not created to go beyond the instance of a single semester or course.”

Yes, yes and thrice yes.

Lee has put together a great post on what failed and the future for online communities in business. I sometimes think there’s a parallel thought thing going on here (or perhaps I’m just copying him :o) as my next paper (which I’m hoping to publish on IncSub in the next few days – here’s the RSS feed if you’re interested) is covering pretty familiar territory (which also happened with communication dynamics!)

Lee asks the following questions of blogs and co:

# Where do we start?
# What are the capabilities, limitations and appropriate uses of the tools?
# What concepts and designs will work for our customers?
# What are the best practices for using these new tools?
# What is the ROI? How does it impact the bottom line?
# What does success look like?

And I reckon I’m honing in on at least 3 of them as I draft…

There’s a lot of interesting buzz around Personal Learning by Denham Grey. It’s a cluetrain-esque post which, if I get it basically outlines D’s understanding that:

“it is the breaktime conversation, the secondhand explanation from a colleague that situates the new concept, validates its importance and sanctions its legitimacy.”

and that this is not going to happen on your own with a CBT course:

“We own a social brain and apprenticeship is the natural way to learn. We need cohorts and community to build a shared repertoire of key concepts, evolve tools, craft language, gather stories and highlight sensitivities.”

(I’m aware there’s a lot more in the post but these stood out for me)

Of particular interest in the commentaries is George Siemen’s observation that:

“Learning is more than simply dialogue with others. I’ve learned significantly over the last few years from simply reading blogs – often without dialogue. Dialogue is a catalyst to learning, but not an exclusive conduit. Different learning styles and different learning situations require different approaches. While I’m very fond of the notion of learning communities, I’m afraid that we’ll ignore the values of personal reflective/contemplative learning in our rush to embrace this concept.”

Which swills around in me, again, the importance of aggregation in regard to weblogs and vica verca (does anyone still read this by just browsing the web, now be honest :o). In particular I’m not sure about Denham’s statement that:

“The key to learning is not the medium nor the message, it is the quality of the dialog with your peers that really matters”

Because, lets be frank, the medium shapes how we communicate. Our learning and knowledge world would be a whole lot different if it wasn’t for weblogs and aggregation (imagine you’re still subscribing to that listserv and sending out lots of group emails ;o) Aggregation enables the kind of communication that George refers to and facilitates the dialogue (through comments, email, IM, VOIP or moreoftenthan not blogs) that Denham values. One without the other though is stuffed. Surely the medium makes the message?