Wed - April 20, 2005

Starting a new blog, on szpace



I'm starting a new blog on my own server, on szpace, the software behind coachingplatform's collaboration system. I'll also use that to document how I'm integrating blogs, using the Blojsom engine, with szpace. This includes giving szpace users each a public blog, as well as the ability to have a private blog for each of their topics. Weblogs should help add more flow to szpace.

Posted at 05:38 PM    

Wed - April 6, 2005

Stocks, Flows, and LifeCycles



The jarche.com blog pointed me to last year's three-part CommonCraft series on Stocks and Flows in Online Communities.

In brief:

People engage in a flow, like a conversation.

People access a stock, they don’t engage in it. Stocks are generally static and presented when requested, like search results.

Flows come to you, and are timely. This speaks directly to what makes a community or collaboration site successful: people come back to what engages them, which is connection with a flow (weblogs, email, web forums with email notification). However, you want to sediment the flows into stocks, so that stuff may be easily found when needed (web pages, libraries, searchable archives). Both aspects are needed: in fact, most weblog entries (quintessentially flow oriented) include links to web pages (stock), and themselves have persistent URLs (permalinks, purple numbers) so they can be stocked and referred to.

Communities and collaborations have life cycles: they live in the flow, but then need to wrap up and pass their stuff on to their descendants. RSS is perhaps the major flow-enabler of the web nowadays. Complementing that is the need for ongoing automated archiving, with tagging (including folksonomies) being a major player. Having suggested tags come back at you (based on your previous tagging and on that of related communities) for your tweaking might make archiving itself more interactive and symbiotic, part of your lifeflows.

Posted at 02:57 PM    

Sun - May 23, 2004

Berners-Lee on how to do the web


Tim Berners-Lee : "the difference is that just — it's a very small difference — just doing it in a Web-like way, just doing it in a way so that you're always virally, and the small tweaks that change the architecture [...] so that it's not centralized any more".


More of the quote, from Café Con Leché (here's an approximate permalink, along with TBL's keynote slides, and more on that talk at xml.com) via Elliotte Rusty-Harold's blogging of WWW2004 (the language is a bit elliptical):

[quote]Let me tell you the semantic Web is not AI. It's just databases. And when people give the same talks, it looks as though they're giving the same talks as they did many, many years ago. I would also remind you that when Web started, the first Web conferences, a lot of the Web, some of the conferences were "Hey, you know, we've been doing hypertext for 10 years. Nobody's doing anything so different here" but the difference is that just — it's a very small difference — just doing it in a Web-like way, just doing it in a way so that you're always virally, and the small tweaks that change the architecture to make it virally make a lot of talks look the same on the outside but the architecture inside has been made so that it's not centralized any more and so that is the difference between semantic web and databases.[/quote]

That's it! It's a way of life which enables self-describing inf-formation and encourages emergence. You have nodes (URIs) which make assertions about themselves, in a milieu which responds to those assertions. Nodes as perceived are first-class objects in the ontologies enacted in their milieus. So the web is "not AI, just databases" - not imposed meanings, just nodal content. But the web as semantic is also not just nodes marshalled into a rows-and-columns view: it is multiple views, viewed, and viewers, emerging from self-description and reflection, the autopoiesis of decentralized but mutually responding nodes. Here virality is more than infection and spread of a vector - it is codependent origination, through RESTful structural coupling, and propagation of shared memes.

Posted at 08:30 PM    

Fri - April 23, 2004

Bubblets, node balloons, impish infs, and ints


Tim Bray implements Bubblets, which are really his node entry's thought balloons thinking of other nodes thinking of his node entry.

Anything referable-to on the web is a node: depending on the level of abstraction, a URI, an AIR (Addressable Information Resource), an inf (information item), or an int (intelligent inf). With weblogs we can have conversations between infs. Weblogs are generators of weblog items, each of which is an inf - and with purple numbers you can even make each paragraph an inf.

A weblog item's bubblet points to other infs which are pointing to it: it tracks links. Next step is to characterize such links. A celebrity node could have lots of adoring links. But your nodes probably want to choose which inbound links it pays attention to. So you also need to characterize the quality, relative to you, of those in-pointing infs. They take on colors. The celebrity might suddenly feel lonely.

Some nodes generate infs of interest to you - these could be weblogs you'll want to subscribe to. You build up your attention zones, with active, scripted infs following your intentions - these then become ints, intelligent infs. When an int is doing your bidding, it becomes part of your intelligence, helping embody your attention, both subject to it and shaping it. It's part of your reality feeds. It's thus more personable, and preferable from the point of view of providing a UI for symbiotic intelligence, to regard such customizable and adaptable agencies as ints, embodied intentions tuning perceptions and enacting a webby world of discourse.

Posted at 11:23 AM    

Fri - April 2, 2004

Chernobyl the Dead Zone


A tour in photos and terse text through the Chernobyl Dead Zone, shared by a young woman on high-speed motorcycle and Roentgen dosimeter - there's nobody on the roads or in the towns.

This is really powerful, almost on a non-thought level - just the straight dose. Large photos, brief, idiomatic (Russian English) words in simple raw mode.

Lena's voice :

The word CHERNOBYL scares holly bijesus out of people here. If I tell
someone that I am heading in "dead zone"... you know, what I hear.. In best
case - "are you nuts?" My dad used to say that people afraid of a things
which they don't know. Dad is nuclear physicist and he also says that of all
dangerous things he can only think about one, which is riding on fifth or
sixth gear on my bike.

and...

How many people died of radiation? No one knows - not even approximately.

Some say 400.000. The official organizations put the figure at 300.000 people since 1986.

...

Some tourists companies have been trying to arrange extrim tours in this town, but people- their customers scared and complaining about silence which is hard to stand in empty town. They charged 1200 hryvnas for 2 hours excursion and town guard says, they all were leaving in some 15 mins, complaining that silense is tremendous as if one got deaf and it ring them in ears and place is bad...

Bringing this kind of direct experience is the best of what the web can do - thank you, Lena (Motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled Gypsy Queen )!

Posted at 11:00 AM    

Tue - December 16, 2003

P2P File Sharing in Canada


Re downloading music in Canada from P2P networks being legal, but uploading not - there is no uploading in P2P networks!

CNet and others are reporting that "Downloading copyrighted music from peer-to-peer networks is legal in Canada, although uploading files is not." Umm, this is client-server language, and I'm not sure it really applies in most peer-to-peer networks - I download a file from a peer machine somewhere on the net, but I don't upload the file if I'm making it available to other peers: I just leave it in a folder on my machine.

Beyond this, the "downloading is legal, but uploading is not" approach has the same crazy asymmetry that Bill C-38 does, which proposed to de-criminalize marijuana possession in Canada. That bill (similar to statutes in a number of American states) would turn possession of small amounts of pot into a civil (but not criminal) offense, but leave, and even increase, criminal penalties for cultivating and distributing it.

Posted at 02:10 PM    

Fri - December 5, 2003

MeetUps


Just recently discovered Meetups : a way to yank people who want to discuss something, and their locations, up into the net, and then back down to earth to their face-to-face meeting spots.

This is being used, for example, to organize local meetings among supporters of presidential candidates in the the USA. Provide your location, and see how many other people might meet there, and then attend there. It's a deeply satisfying collaboration pattern , and one which the net, starting with Community Memory , has strived for: how to have the net have real effects on local economies, ecologies, societies. You go up a level, from the tangible body to the communication body (characterized, in a way, by unlimited locality), re-organize, and then return back down with, eventually, a new arrangement of bodies in a room.

Posted at 05:03 PM    

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