Category: Social Software

On the manufacturing of scarcity…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date December 4, 2002

I really want to write a proper response to this piece on randomchaos.com which discusses the ethics of ‘manufacturing scarcity’. But I’ve been meaning to write something thorough and intellectually satisfying for days, and nothing’s coming. So I’m just going to concentrate on a couple of key points…

Scott says: “Difficulty should never be created. All work should increase ease (in a general sense, work should be self-destructive). I say this because this is the only path toward what seems to me to be an obvious ideal of work being optional.” I think I’d have trouble arguing with the sentiment – but there are problems with relating it directly to these circumstances. Take the use of the word ‘difficulty’ – if making one thing harder really does make many hundreds of thousands of other things easier (in the case of e-mail for example), then collectively the weight of ‘difficulty’ on the community is lowered. We make it hard for people to burn down their houses by fitting smoke alarms and using flame-retardant foam in furniture. This makes it easier for people to live without burning their houses down. We make it hard for people to have their debit/credit card PINs stolen, by making a decision not to print them on each and every connected piece of paper connected with banking. All around us are products and services dripping with usability decisions based around making certain uses easy by making others harder…

Scott also says: When Tom says the lack of scarcity of avatars is a consistent problem for community spaces, he is wrong. The inability to associate avatars with real people is the problem, and Tom is wrongly assuming that scarcity is the only way to create this association. Actually that’s also a profoundly interesting question. One of the things that the internet was particularly celebrated for when it first went mainstream was this ability to shed your identity – to be more anonymous. By forcing people to directly associate identity with avatar, then privacy becomes a huge issue and people find themselves unable to talk freely or honestly. I believe the function of the online community-builder is to locate the particular and unique benefits of online communication and celebrate them – while at the same time not assuming that every aspect of online communication is of benefit. When I talk of scarcity, I’m actually talking about the labour of maintaining them – an identity should be an effort to use. That effort should be negligible for the maintenance of one identity, but substantial for the maintenance of more than one.

Example time… Take for example the simple interaction of logging-in and logging-out of a site. Let’s assume that a computer will have only one browser on it and that only one user can be logged into the site from that computer at any one time. Imagine a circumstance where the process of logging-in is extremely time-consuming, but the user that is logged on will remain logged on indefinitely afterwards. The cost of maintenance here is a one of transaction of ‘logging-in’. But if that user is trying to maintain two identities, that ‘effort’ increases dramatically. Each time he or she wishes to switch identities they have to go through the whole logging-in process. If the process took an hour then a user with one account will spend one hour logging in. Ever. A user with two will spend one initial hour logging in and then an additional hour each time they wanted to change identity. Make it so that you have to post once a week or your account expires, and you add one hour of work each and every week for each account that a user has. Immediately, it’s just much easier to maintain one…

In which I respond to a huge post about social software with a huge post about social software…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 13, 2002

Must-read interaction/community techblog of the moment is City of Sound, a site that I found initially via the Slipknot be-hoodied Matt Jones. Our two otherwise independent vectors of interest have recently collided quite heavily around MP3s, list-making and social software, with – I think – some quite interesting results. Our latest interaction is around the issue of social capital – which is a current hot topic of debate around government and online community circles, and which I’ve been working on (in a kind of weirdly indirect way) on UpMyStreet Conversations. Dan (the author) has taken me to task quite reasonably about this statement that I made recently:

“(P)eople in cities are talking less and less to one another. In fact most of us barely communicate with our neighbours at all. And the vast majority of the social spaces that we all used to share have been dismantled or evaporated. So how can we expect communities self-organise? And how are they expected to join together politically? How can they protest about problems where they live?”

In Dan’s response he suggests that technology has already started to rebuild these communities of geography and that I was being over-dramatic to talk about all communication in cities being in a process of freefall decline. He is of course, completely right – and I have gone into astonishingly dreary detail over on his site in response. In fact when I clicked ‘submit’ it occurred to me that I’d written so much that it might have made a better post on plasticbag.org – so I’m going to append it below in full. Forgive any typos or bad grammar – I’ll have a second look at it tomorrow and fix the most obviously horrific mistakes…

Actually you’re completely right, but I think if we look at these things in terms of their recent history alone we might lose some perspective. I’m going to go for a bit of a trip on a hypothesis-rocket now, so please bear with me if it seems based on completely anecdotal and speculative evidence – I’m about to read Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” about the decline in social capital in the States. Maybe that that point I’ll be in a better position to talk about this stuff…

At this thing on social capital and social software that I went to the other day with Matt Webb from Interconnected.org people were talking about this decline in interactions in cities and urban spaces. People were debating the reasons for it, the connections between take up of “virtual online communities” and “interest communities” and the like – and some were in fact debating the existence of such a decline.

I’m going to contend that there has been such a decline in interactions and the extent to which we know our neighbours, but I’m going to argue that this isn’t an effect of technology like the internet – it’s an effect instead of technologies like television, technologies like the car and having a more mobile work-force. I’m also going to argue that it has something to do with population density and the impermanence of habitation for some people. So essentially I’m pushing this decline back over the last hundred years or so, rather than the last ten years. And I wouldn’t want to argue that everyone has experienced it either – I grew up in a village in the countryside where everyone knows everyone. So it’s not universal. But I think certainly in urban spaces it is a very real fact…

From what you’ve written above, it looks like my statements have been interpreted to mean that I think such a social decline is an inevitable effect of the technologies we’ve been using and that UpMyStreet Conversations represents (finally) a solution. But actually that’s miles from what I think. What I would argue is that rather than exacerbating the social decline, the internet (unlike many one-to-one communication technology) has finally started to reform the social fabric – to bring back communication between people on the basis of interest groups (and what could be a greater interest group than people interested in the area in which they live – now available to people without the social danger and anxiety of actual and immediate physical interaction). In fact I think I’d argue that the take up of this technology – of the community stuff of the internet – reflects a gap in our lives – a need for it – that previous decay in social capital has created.

In a nutshell… Social interactions based on neighbourhood have been deteriorating for decades – particularly in highly transitory urban areas. New technologies have connected us with huger, but more distributed interest communities, and have recently begun to facilitate and enhance those limited local geographical interactions that we still have left. And there is now a tremendous human need left unfulfilled that we can now meet. And UMS Conversations is one way for us to help do that… I think..

Social Software

The Awesome Clay Shirky…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 8, 2002

So Matt Webb and I went to a talk-followed-by-panel held by the iSociety people today. The feature performance was the awesome Clay Shirky, with support from a variety of charming panelists, including weblogging’s own Matt Jones.

The panel was essentially about the next level of community software and community sites online. Interestingly, though, the word “community” was almost totally unused through the whole occasion. Perhaps for reasons I don’t as yet understand, that word has become suddenly unfashionable. Instead we were talking about “social software”.

But the nomenclature is essentially trivial. Clay’s talk was extraordinarily fun for me, because he was working over areas that I’ve been thinking about and working around for the last couple of years now – how do we take community functionality and sites to the next level, what parts of our assumptions and utopian dreamings about online community must we give up, and what should we keep in mind while designing the interactions for the next five-ten years?

I’ve got my own theories about a lot of this stuff – much of which I’m going to try and assemble into ‘publishable’ form over the weekend. In the meantime, here’s a micro-summary of Clay’s piece:

We live at the beginning of a third golden age of social software.
1. E-mail
2. IRC / MUDs / MOOs / Usenet
  (The Web erupts here, but is primarily a publishing medium rather than an interactive one)
3. Now Weblogs / Wikis / Trackback / Jabber & Groove / Slashdot-style collaborative filtering
But where will we be in 5-7 years time?
Blocks to the development of next-stage communities
1. We have the wrong historical models and exotic “extremist” ideologies:
  1. The suggestion that the web should represent a shift or collapse in “identity”
  2. The need to prove purity of ‘online culture’ by foregrounding immersive MUDs and MOOs
  3. Assumption (because of scarcity of humans online) that we would be using this technology to meet people we didn’t know offline
2. We have the wrong assumptions about real-life groups:
  1. We assume that a group is the same as a collection of individuals
  2. We assume (utopian) that membership should be totally open
  3. We assume that a group should be able to function the same with ten people or ten million people in it
We are ill-served by the current metaphor of architecture and space, instead we should consider the construction of social software as like building a ship:
1. Ships are places where people come together
2. … but they come together in order to get somewhere
Groups tend towards self-sabotage, they do so because behind every “sophisticated” workgroup ostensibly designed to accomplish a specific goal, “basic” group strategies are secretly persuing very different ones. These are
1. helping people to find mates
2. identifying and uniting against enemies
3. venerating or idolising a figure, institution or ideology.
Clay’s suggestion for improving social software:
1. Design social software that is half-space and half-tool (help people figure out when they’ve run aground or accomplished something).
2. Make the formation of a constitution a fundamental part of creating a community space.

This concept of “constitutions” is something that’s very close to my own concept of the politics of social software – something that I’m working on writing up at this very moment and the first part of which is apparent in the way Barbelith hangs together…

More: Matt Webb i) writes about the day and ii) publishes his plain-text notes.

Location Social Software

Introducing… UpMyStreet Conversations…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 6, 2002

So I can finally tell the world what I’ve been working on for the last few months – and in fact, more to the point, I can finally try and get some of you people to try it out.

UpMyStreet Conversations is a new kind of online community site for the UK. In some ways it’s almost anti-web. Where the web has “traditionally” been about uniting people on the basis of shared interests no matter where they live in the world, this site takes as its first assumption that people who live nea one another already have at least one shared interest – their local environment… But this interest is increasingly not catered for – people in cities are talking less and less to one another. In fact most of us barely communicate with our neighbours at all. And the vasy majority of the social spaces that we all used to share have been dismantled or evaporated. So how can we expect communities self-organise? And how are they expected to join together politically? How can they protest about problems where they live?

So this is the cool bit – it works on a really simple principle that scales and adapts really well to changes in posting. And while it’s geographically based, it’s not based on legislative or government boundaries. And a lack of population density doesn’t mean you’ll be sitting in an empty board with no one to talk to, either, because the posts you see reflects your local population density…

Well anyway… I’m not going to go into too much detail at the moment, because it should be pretty self-explanatory and i want to see how people engage with it… Let me know what you think…

Social Software

Who’s afraid of community participation?

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date October 23, 2002

There’s a fascinating post about the emergence of the UK Weblogging Community at notsosoft.com at the moment. One of the tools that has strengthened relationships between UK-based webloggers (of which there are several – pubs being a significant one of them) has ceased to function – the GBlogs Update Tracker has shut down so that its creator can concern herself with (considerably) more important creative work. But does the removal of a tool signal the end of a community project? And was UK Weblogging’s emergence as an active and vibrant interconnected community ever a project?

The most interesting aspect about some of the debate that has ensued in the responses to Meg’s post is how uncomfortable people seem to be with the concept of being part of a “community” at all. Also fascinating is the assumptions of what participating in a community involves. The assumption seems to be that being a member of a community is something chosen, something that involves heavy participation, and something that requires each of its participants to be friends with one another and socialise.

These aspects of participation are almost held up as spectres – huge achievements that one would have to wish to overcome in order to participate. I can’t tell whether it’s because we’re English or because we’re bedroom-bound webloggers that being part of such a community seems to terrify so many people. It could be just the reification of individuality that has brought us to this place. But I think it’s unfounded. And I think it’s unfounded because this sense of community is artificial and overblown…

Let’s look at a couple of examples – when people talk about the local community of people in a village do they mean that (1) they all go drinking with each other all the time, or (2) that they are familiar with each other’s existence, may know each other (sometimes only by several degrees of separation) and share a vague vested interest in their local environment? I would contend it’s the latter. And when people talk about the ‘gay community’ or the ‘Jewish community’, they’re not referring to individual social groups of friends, but instead to a roughly shared set of goals, aspirations, interests or cultural principles.

In web circles, community has come to mean different things. Mostly we think of specific sites or services designed to create communities, like Habbo Hotel, Metafilter or Barbelith. If we push ourselves we might extend this to Usenet groups or even Instant Messager communities or e-mail. But fundamentally these are tools for helping communities to germinate, develop and extend themselves – not the communities themselves. Just as the communities themselves are not necessarily defined by drinking with one another, or by believing exactly the same things. Do all members of Metafilter go drinking with one another? Do they all participate to the same extent?

In fact what community represents, what community is is something much looser than a definition surrounding the activities that the members undertake with one another or the tools that they use to communicate with one another. These can be sidelines in fact – at best, they strengthen the bonds – maybe they make possible communities between people who would not be able to form them otherwise. But that’s all…

I do consider myself a member of a community of UK webloggers. And I feel that way because we all have something in common – a shared experience maybe, or a desire to learn from one another, an interest in other people who validate our ‘hobbies’ or maybe it’s just because what matters to one of us is more likely to matter to other ones of us. I don’t share my politics or my sexuality with many of these people. Nor my gender, many of my interests, my ethnicity or my obsession with Buffy.

I also consider myself part of an online community of webloggers in general – an ever-growing group of people who share certain things with me, including the fact that they might be at home writing a huge post at eleven o’clock at night, or that they feel a need or a desire to express themselves.

I also consider myself part of a community of gay webloggers, and gay people on the internet in general, and in fact gay people in general. And then there are the communities surrounding the issues of design that I’m interested in. And the communities of people who are interested in Buffy.

Some are communities which manifest themselves through geographical proximity, closely shared values, friendships, sex even. With other communities there will be none of that at all – simply a shared characteristic, or chromosome, or interest.

We’re all members of hundreds – thousands even – of different overlapping communities all the time. Some are tiny, some are huge. Some are more important to us than others, but all are important to an extent. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of!

Journalism Personal Publishing Social Software

If this truly is the future of Google news, then the project I've been trying to persuade people to undertake for the last six – eight months is dead.

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date September 22, 2002

According to Google Blog there’s potentially a new front-page emerging for Google News. The current page can be viewed at news.google.com, and its apparent replacement is here.

To be honest, this news doesn’t fill me with the love and happiness that you might expect. About six months ago I thought of something that has probably been thought of many times in the past. It was a kind of news site that used things like Daypop and Blogdex to determine what was timely and interesting to people on a per-link basis, which could then be pulled together using something like Google News to a by-story list and which could then be attached to commentary from the weblog community directly on the page. It would be like having a world of columnists and op-ed writers ready not only to collectively decide between them what was newsworthy, but also to directly comment on the stories on the same page as the story was displayed. It would be an immediate vox-pop. A gauge of a huge community of divergent interests… That’s when I started to get excited, because essentially you’d be talking about a site that allowed anyone in the world to write a comment piece on breaking news stories.. And this extended right past webloggers themselves to mainstream writers. And if you could figure out a way of organising micro-payments you might be able to read the thoughts of academics, actors, writers, thinkers from all over the world – along with your friends, the people who share interests with you, the democratically expert… This would be the place where a world of webloggery demonstrated that being mainstream didn’t mean individuals writing like ‘proper professionals’, where a journalist could equally be conceived as the person who was nearest to the event when it happened. Where the sheer value of hundreds of thousands of webloggers could be condensed and purified and injected straight into the world’s new media bloodstream.

Most importantly, although I knew that other people were thinking along similar lines, no one actually seemed to be doing anything about it. I talked to friends about the idea and how useful and cool it could be. Some were intrigued, some bored – as you’d expect. I wrote the whole thing down and pitched it in the general direction of people who might be in a position to allow me to develop a system as part of my working life. And now Google News is so close to the first stages of something I really wanted to be part of, and I feel like I did when I was in the middle of my doctorate, watching the dot-com boom happen all around me, knowing that wonderful things were happening elsewhere that would fascinate me, but that I had to accept I wasn’t able to be a part of… It’s terrible to have invested so much of yourself in an idea only to see it go ahead without you. Even if you’re hardly the first person in the world to see the potential…

Journalism Personal Publishing Social Software

Proposal for a new relationship between weblog and mainstream publishers

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date August 6, 2002

The Situation:
Imagine, if you will, that a prominent web magazine had decided to start hosting Weblogs. Imagine if shortly afterwards another prominent online publisher said they were doing the same. And then imagine if rumours abounded that they weren’t going to be the only ones. And then imagine that you had been talking with a representative of a major UK newspaper who revealed to you that – if only for a short while – they too had been thinking of hosting weblogs on their site. What would you think? Would you think ‘what a wonderful thing for the medium’?

The Problem
Well of course it’s entirely possible that it would be a wonderful thing for the medium – but it almost certainly wouldn’t be a particularly wonderful thing for the publisher! Think about it for a moment – most people who become committed to weblogging eventually choose to set up a site of their own somewhere – sometimes with a domain name of their own – often with a design that’s resolutely their own. The logical consequence of this (surely) is that after a while any site that offers free weblogging with little flexibility in design or personalisation will eventually be abandoned by the dedicated. And in their wake nothing a but huge wasteland of tumbleweed blogs and – dare I say it – unreadable sites. How does that reflect well on boston.com? Or Salon?

The Reason
It doesn’t take a genius to gather what is happening in corporate world at the moment – weblogs are ‘in’ – they’ve finally stopped being fashionable, and so are suddenly now becoming acceptable to the mainstream. Your executive at BigPublisher.com suddenly thinks that weblogging is the heart of the internet – the web finally fulfilling its promise. And of course they’re right… But does understanding the importance of weblogs and weblogging correspond to understanding how an information publisher should relate to weblogs and weblogging? I would say no….

The Solution?
I’m not going to claim to have the definitive answer to how (say) the BBC should interact with the ‘revolution in personal publishing’ (which is, I might add, the longest bloody revolution ever, I think) – but I have got a couple of suggestions. And they revolve around not trying to usurp the common space that weblogs exist in, but in developing ways of cementing and building upon the interactions between those two very different beasts – mainstream and personal publishers.

Provide tools that allow webloggers to hook into your content. At the most trivial, this includes newsfeeds and RSS/RDF feeds. Let people put them on their sites, but also let them play with them – let them develop interesting idiosyncratic ways of looking at the information you create.
Look at the meta-tools that exist already for webloggers – Blogdex and Daypop for example. Adapt these tools to provide a different insight into the content you produce. For example: Create a “What the web is reading” page on The Guardian – this page being nothing more or less than Blogdex’s recent links thing, but only reflecting Guardian articles. Your visitors get a guide to the best stuff on your site as chosen by the web itself. You get traffic to those articles and demonstrate your respect for the aggregate power and intelligence of the weblogging community as a whole. If you included the ‘sources’ aspect of Blogdex as well – so that everyone who has commented on an article on the Guardian is automatically linked to from the Guardian’s site, then you get a situation where both weblogger, publisher and reader benefit – the weblogger in terms of traffic, the publisher in terms of traffic but more importantly by being able to demonstrate a public, conversational aspect to their sites without any of the cost of development or legal implications. And the reader is directed to the very best content you have to provide as well as to second level commentators who might be able to provide a different perspective…

Conclusion: So here’s my challenge to large online publishers: rather than admiring the medium and trying to reincorporate it into your traditional models, why not respect what makes it different – the sheer volume of people doing it, the sense of link-filtering, the personal comments and ideas that it generates – and work to make the relationship between mainstream and personal publishers a symbiotic one borne of mutual respect for what makes us so different (and yet complementary) to one another? [Comment on this post]

Addendum:
I don’t want people to think I’m talking about Blogspot sites here – which fill a valuable niche in providing cheap or free presences for people who wish to be creative without investing large amounts of cash (but which – fundamentally – can be stripped of advertising, corporate branding and completely personalised).

Journalism Net Culture Personal Publishing Social Software

XCOM2002 and TAKING IT OUTSIDE

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date June 9, 2002

I don’t even know where to start on today – I’ve not felt so mentally depleted and exhilarated at the same time for ages. I’ve spent the day with NTK and Haddock at Extreme Computing 2002 and the spin-off Take it Outside. I’ve been on three separate panels and talked so much that the pubs and bars around were full of beasts of burden missing rear limbs.

Where to start? Perhaps with an explanation – why haven’t I mentioned these conferences, why haven’t I mentioned these panels on plasticbag.org over the last couple of weeks? I suppose there are a couple of reasons – firstly I was scared, I didn’t want to make too much of a big deal about them because I was nervous about being able to do them – it’s been a few years since I talked in front of people. Secondly I guess I didn’t feel that there might be any reason for people to come and listen to what I had to say – why advertise what might be unbelievably boring? Why draw attention to something that might end badly? It may sound over-cautious, but there are a lot of things that could have gone wrong. Why not take things a little slowly…..?

Brief piece of scene-setting first: I met up with Cal and Jones at the Starbucks opposite the British Library, and then moved over to the Camden Centre to meet up with Denise from http://www.b3ta.com. Rob from B3ta also turned up after a while, as did James from unfortu.net.

First impressions are complex and confusing – there’s a room full of geeks and weirdos and I feel totally at home. There’s a block of hot people and whole racks and tables of strange and exotic people – running stalls with products from the obscure to the mediocre. Spectrums are everywhere. The C64 militia are in evidence. Steve LeStrange (I think) performs on stage. Very odd. After a stiff drink I retired to the pub for the first Take it Outside panel of the day…

Online Communities: The real world, only worse?
with Stefan Magdalinski (moderating), Cait Hurley, Denise Wilton and me.
First panel of the day gets off to a slightly choppy start, but for me was the most rewarding of the day. The debates centre around the relationship between virtual and real life communities. The stuff I think I found most fascinating were the debates about where online and offline communities differ, where they are similar and where they could be different.

Various parties contended that the two were more similar than normally given credit. Others (myself included) argued that differences emerged in stuff like stable identities, verbal and visual conversational cues, the inability to blot people out, the edges of workable communal space, the lack of differences in ‘volume’ of people speaking as well as in the way in which the relationship between people was solidified through relationships enshrined in software. One of the things I was very keen to emphasize was the possibility of building new political systems via the medium of community software – so in a sense I was very keen to decalre that online communities still had to potential to be radically different from the real world, and might even be better in some ways.

One of the other angles that was interested was that of moderation and how it’s undertaken. Obviously Barbelith was my point of reference here – with it’s new sense of distributed moderation being a very early stage towards my long-term objective of moderator-less, hierarchy-less governance in virtual space. But interestingly, although most of us could report experiences with trolling that meant that we felt some kind of comprehensive moderation process was necessary (whether it be top-down monarchist, feudal-moderation-lords, or distributed anarchist-style), B3ta reported a vast amount of traffic (I don’t know if I can report the number) along with a remarkable lack of trolling. Jones postulated that this was to do with strength of brand, while I retreated towards my more traditional model of interpretation – that there was something intrinsic to the model of the board and the board software that combines effectively with the subject of the board in order to make an environment that is not conducive to trolling…

In Defence of Weblogs – grassroots content management systems of the future, or just a load of self-obsessed secret diaries of Adrian Mole?
with Neil McIntosh, Ben Hammersley and me.
The largest panel of the day for me took me to the main stage of XCOM itself – but seems to have not been a total success, mainly because of problems with the acoustics in the room. From on stage there didn’t appear to be much if anything wrong with the sound, but guaging from Cory’s piece on his experience of the panel it seems that we were the only ones who could hear it. In fact often I appear to have been arguing totally the opposite to what Cory managed to hear – so I think I’ll probably clarify some of the basic positions that I wanted tried to present rather than talk through the whole experience…

The main questions presented were concerned with the relationship between weblogging and journalism, weblog content aggregation and its potential to be a competitor or complement to news sites, the function of weblogging above and beyond it’s ability to reflect boring peoples’ boring existences rendered interminably online.

Consolidating some of Cory’s transcript of the piece (concentrating on the stuff that I’m purported to have said) leaves us with this:

Dave: Aren’t blogs desined to cut down repetition? Tom: Some people blog for fun, for self-promotion to pursue a special interest or to stay in touch with a bunch of friends. Dave: Aren’t blogs desined to cut down repetition? Tom: No, my tool is designed to connect with with other bloggers with similar interests. You can get 200, 500 opinions on a given subject. Tom: {Cory couldn’t make out a word here} There’s a need for an editor — whether it’s Slashdot like automation or a human being. My fave: kottke.org.

Actually a large block of this needs further clarification. My positions are as follows:

Dave’s first piece of devil’s advocacy was concerned with the angle that there are too many weblogs producing too much banal and boring content. There’s no way to deny (of course) that there’s a certain amount of truth to the allegation that there are a lot of boring weblogs out there – my position is that it’s like the web itself – there are many hundreds of thousands of sites out there boring to almost everyone or indeed absolutely everyone. But there isn’t a shortage of space on the internet – it doesn’t matter! You don’t have to read them all.

The tool he refers to is metalinker – a Cal and I co-product. When Blogdex was first launched, I was very resistant to it – I argued then (with some justification) that Blogdex wasn’t about loving weblogs, but was instead about allowing people to get links stripped from all the weblogs without actually having to go through the horrible process of reading those weblogs. Increasingly I’ve begun to think that while that is true, there is an alternative use to Blogdex – a use which encourages linkages between posts made by different webloggers, which allows a debate to spiral over many sites and be trackable.

One of the other things that Dave suggested as a possibility was that the lowering of the bar when it came to DTP didn’t result in thousands of different magazines, but instead a colonisation of the space through cost-cutting at major magazine publishers. The suggestion that weblog ‘space’ could be taken over by corporations seems to me to be totally flawed – at the most basic level because the cost of distributing magazines remained after the development of DTP – something that wouldn’t affect weblogging.

This brought us around again to the idea of journalists and webloggers competing with one another. Which at the moment is patently ridiculous. However interestingly there does appear to be a parallel at work between the two – vox pops and columns are staples of journalistic work that have significant parallels with weblog culture. I mooted a situation whereby with a combination of the way in which things like blogdex and Google News grouped and gathered news and linkages with the a centralised weblog content aggregation process and some kind of feedback mechanism, you might be able to assemble a site that produced interesting online news commentary in almost real time in a way that might challenge conventional models of news media. Someone from the audience at this point suggested that an editor might be crucial for this process. But it’s simply not true. I even used my phrase of the moment in my reply. Algorithms will be editors. Or perhaps editors will be algorithms. Or maybe feedback will be the model that generates fake editors. And maybe it will be personalised…

Towards a Common-Place Web: online writing and social memory
[As part of TakeItOutside]
with Nick Sweeney moderating, Giles Turnbull, Karlin Lillington and a visit from Cory Doctorow.
The final talk for me again concentrated on journalism and weblogging – and I don’t know how useful it was. I’m exhausted this evening – so I think I’ll leave writing about it until tomorrow…

What else?
Weirdly it’s some of the less loud and vibrant parts of the day that stick in my head. It’s sitting on the steps opposite the conference place at the end of the day feeling slightly thin, grey and worn out. It’s the conversation with Webb and Phil in the hall while it rained outside. It’s the huge bucket of KFC and the frustration of trying to prove something that maybe didn’t need to be proven and failing nonetheless. It’s going ideas-wild about tube maps on the way home. It’s watching the last ten minutes of the Buffy musical with Cal and pizza at the end of the evening. It’s thinking about the next conference, in just over a week, at which I have to present a paper only 2/3rds written and still in the ugliest powerpoint format of all time…

Related links: Onlineblog, Ben Hammersley, XCOM gets slashdotted, Sashinka | If you want to e-mail me about anything discussed over the day (or want to pay me to help develop a weblog aggregation news resource) then e-mail me on tom [at] plasticbag.org | DO YOU HAVE A PERTINENT LINK OR COMMENTARY ON SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED ON THIS DAY, IF SO LET ME KNOW.