Citation analysis and burst algorithms are being used to create maps of scientific knowledge. Katy Borner of Indiana University, USA seems to be doing a lot of the work.

“Ultimately, I’d like to see a map of science in schools, as common as the political world map,” Borner says.

Data on ageing research form a mountain range of information
“‘Continents’ would represent the diverse areas of science, and closely related areas would reside on the same continent. Teachers might say, ‘Let’s look at the new research frontier in sector F5.’ Students could say, ‘My mom works over there.’”

- Source: BBC

Blogrolls, Technorati, Blogstreet et al give you a rough idea of (some of) the people involved or interested in an area. But wouldn’t it be good to be able to see what other things people were blogging about (and see maps of concepts in the same continent)?

p.s. Borner’s PNAS article here

p.p.s. No. Borner isn’t my mother.

Bit surprised by this - very pleasantly so, but surprised nonetheless. Wikipedia’s entry on commonplaces quotes me as a reference.

Hmmm.

I’m slightly gobsmacked. Last night, I went to a debate on the motion “The House of Windsor is falling down (and we should let it)”. And the voting seemed to ignore the arguments of the speakers.

These events are always reasonably light-hearted. Serious points jostle with jokes - and I’m definitely no critic of that. What I found so weird was the way the debaters divided in to reason vs emotion.

Speakers included: Dr Piers Brendon, Professor Roy Greenslade, Roy Hattersley, Peter Hitchens, Penny Junor and The Rt Hon The Lord St John of Fawsley, PC. (Biographies here)
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Long posts aren’t polite. They’re like bores in the pub. But they needn’t be. Conventions such as introductions, extended entries, excerpts and abstracts vastly improve their manners.

Spike Hall is writing about long weblog posts. He comments

“I think it’s a matter of the reader’s interests. If a reader wants to keep a current glossary of Radio Userland tools, for example, entries that give “name, rank and serial number” would be appropriate taste.

In the case of this reader preferences in my areas of deepest interest, however, require deep reading and, thus delve deep, multilayered, writing from authors I wish to learn from. Therefore I tend to read those who grab aholt of big topics and shake them thoroughly. The shaking of big mental objects takes more words.”

I very much agree. But whether you’re trying to get a huge audience or have nobler (and more sensible) aims in mind, I think there’s a presentation issue here.
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A few days ago I was getting my knickers in a twist about link taxonomies. I was thinking they needed to be made more intelligent. Does anyone else ever get that feeling that you’re using a teaspoon to dig a hole, when someone else has a JCB?

Claire Harrison has written a great article in which she classifies different types of links. It’s rhetoric and semantics again, and it works for me. Here is the table.

Link	Primary Function	Examples
Authorizing	Describes an organization’s legal, formal policies, contact information, etc. that authenticate the site and its content.	About Us Customer Service Policies
Commenting	Provides opinion about the site and/or its content.	Press Releases Testimonials
Enhancing	Provides more factual information about site content by offering greater detail or painting the "bigger picture."	Guidelines for Membership Site Map
Exemplifying	Provides a specific example of content within a broader category.	Future Events Today’s Horoscopes
Mode-Changing	Moves users from the reading mode to one that requires a different kind of activity.	Online Survey Shopping Cart
Referencing/Citing	Provides information that "informs" or supplements the site’s content.	Bibliography Related Links
Self-Selecting	Allows users to narrow a search by making choices based on their age, sex, geographical location, life situation, personal interests, and so on.	For Seniors Only Your Local Chapter

I’m not sure how well this works for blogs. There’s the hoary old chestnut of trackback vs comment. I’m increasingly feeling that trackback is a means to link to a person in a conversation, and standard href stuff is a means to link to content. Sort of. And in terms of further links classifications I’d probably want to add ones for Community (links that show who you listen to, e.g. blogrolls); Mechanics (links that point to e.g. Movable Type, Technorati, Blogstreet …). Maybe more. Or different? Anyone got any ideas?

The theory of signal detectability (TSD) has a broad application to tasks where people must distinguish between signal and noise. William Jones has written a long, but fascinating article on how we might use TSD to help stop keeping information that will never be used.

His argument broadly goes like this:

1. To keep or not to keep, that is the question.
   Whether you hoard information in case it’s useful later, or rigorously trash email, magazine articles and the like is fundamental to Personal Content Management. It is also fundamentally difficult.
2. Content gets fragmented across tools
   Current PCM tools (from Outlook to PDAs) all mean that information can be kept in different ways. The resulting fragmentation makes the keeping decision harder, and makes the mistakes made when making that decision more costly
3. The keeping decision can be seen as a signal detection task
   TSD allows for 2 types of error: saying “yes” to noise, and saying “no” to a signal. In PCM terms, keeping information you won’t use, and chucking information you will
4. Strategy 1: Reduce cost of noise
   In the digital world at least, it is cheap to keep. It takes an awful lot of information to fill up my hard drive. The cost of the first type of error is therefore reduced.
5. But there are basic limits to this
   People, or at least I have only a certain amount of time and attention. It may be cheap to keep, but keeping the wrong stuff means I’m likely to miss the gems I need
6. Strategy 2: Reduce likelihood of making keeping mistakes
   Jones thinks the way forward on this is what he calls PUTs (Personal Unifying Taxonomies)

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Jonas Luster has posted a great reading list for those wanting to get to grips with Social Network Analysis. Time to see what the Bodleian can do …

Ton has written an extremely clear, thoughtful and original piece on blogs, information overload and signal to noise ratios. It’s really well worth a look.

Briefly, his argument seems to be this:

• We have always had a lot of stuff coming at us.
• The problem has always been picking out signals from that noise, choosing the diamonds from the rough.
• “Information overload” suggests that this is a new problem, but in fact it is nothing new. Only the media have changed.
• A great way for companies to hone in on useful signals is to use blogs.

If this seems to simplistic, do read the full version. I am a simple soul, but that at least is how I understood it! Anyway, there are a few questions and misgivings I have, and these are to do with direction, cromagnon man, quality and trust, and to do with learning.
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