Just given a presentation on Social Software (1 meg, .ppt) to various at Templeton which seemed to go OK (i.e. no-one obviously nodded off, I didn’t get hiccups, and some people actually got quite excited). Was speaking to Ton on a separate matter earlier and he sent through some slides he’d done for a similar thing - bit jealous, I didn’t mention LinkedIn style tools, but hey ho - main thing is to get people thinking about it and how it relates to their work/can help them.

What’s always hard is naviating between over-tech and patronising “do you know what a mouse is” kind of talk. Happily I seem to be improving …

May 27th 2005 | Comments(2) | Asides, Thoughts on slides, social computing templeton

Slightly alarmingly, as part of Princeton’s 100 Years of ExcellenceH.G. Frankfurt is interviewed about his book “On Bullshit”. (There’s a video of it which is worth watching, though the interviewer seems to need the bathroom)

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.

In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. I shall not consider the rhetorical uses and misuses of bullshit. My aim is simply to give a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from what it is not–or (putting it somewhat differently) to articulate, more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept.”

I like the idea that truth, while it may be difficult or even impossible to pin down, should not just be ignored and ridden roughshod over willy-nilly.

Jonathan Dresner at Cliopatra hits the nail on the head.

I don’t think any of us can be objective about our own claimed objectivity. — Daniel Okrent, NYTimes, 4/24/05

…

There are three categories of common arguments in blogspace:

* Principles
* Facts
* Tone

I don’t mean to categorize posts, or bloggers, but disputes. Of these, I think the first two categories are pretty self-evident, but the third needs some explanation. It might look, to a casual observer, that Tone is an epiphenomenon, coloration rather than substance, the least important and/because the most emotional. But Tone includes subtexts, implications, style and inferences; it is where the issues of audience and the active agency of readership become central. Tone matters.> [My emphasis]”

May 25th 2005 | Comments(1) | Notes on blogs, category, Rhetoric style

Autoblogger made me snicker. (Thanks to Eszter over at Crooked Timber). The byline is: “You have a life. AutoBlogger helps you live it”.

From the site’s FAQ

1. What is AutoBlogger?

AutoBlogger is a powerful content-authoring software tool designed for online columnists and bloggers. Upon installation, AutoBlogger uses a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence algorithm to ‘read’ the public entries of your journal/blog to triangulate a sense of your writing style. From that point forward, any time you hit a writer’s block, want to take a vacation, or simply wish to step away from your computer for a few days, AutoBlogger can be set to take over, using what it has learned about your posting and writing patterns to author original content in a voice consistent with your existing prose.
AutoBlogger frees the busy blogger to a life outside computers, by giving your readers the impression you are constantly online.

Anyway, it’s firmly in the “just because you blog doesn’t mean you’re interesting camp”, and all the healthier for it.

[Update: not sure about the personal attacks page in the stories, though. At all]

May 20th 2005 | Comments(1) | Asides on blogs satire

Interesting interview with Richard Rogers in in today’s Guardian. The conversation turned to high-rise living, and this snippet caught my eye

RR: We are beginning to learn that management is one of the key elements with tall buildings. Now, of course, people want to go back to tall buildings because it’s very easy to control security. You can have your CCTV cameras and the guardian at the bottom, and if you do it carefully that guardian will know everyone. Actually, it can become a community if you really work it properly. If you leave it empty and threatening and everyone pees in the lift, then you have a problem.

RP: Are you saying that the combination of management, the people inside and the design turn a building into a proper community?

RR: It’s a failing in British housing. On the continent, you have a concierge, and the concierge knows everybody. He knows if the woman on the top floor needs whatever it is with five kids or someone needs help and so on. Ideally, the concierge’s family is there and we get a form of community. We’ve been very slow on that here.

If, for a moment, you assume that life behind the firewall is analogous to high-rise living (secure, individuals are traceable and accountable etc.), then that would suggest that for the high-rise to work as a whole, there needs to be a concierge. Clubs need club secretaries, that sort of thing.

Stretching the point as ever … ho hum.

Heston Blumenthal is an award-winning chef who is pioneering a more scientific approach to food. Egg and bacon ice-cream, liquorice pasta all sound disgusting, but he seems to be able to trick the brain into thinking they’re nice. Certainly his Fat Duck restaurant at Bray is rolling in Michelin Stars.

Recently, he wrote a piece in the Guardian about saturation points.

The more I learn about the world of flavour - how we perceive it, register it, react to it - the more factors come into play, and the more complicated and fascinating it becomes.

One thing I discovered recently was that our taste receptors can become saturated if exposed to a flavour for too long. I already knew that the brain can become tired of registering one particular flavour. That’s why chewing gum seems to stop tasting of anything after a while. It hasn’t, in reality; it’s just that your brain has got tired of it and wants to go on to something else. (You can test this by taking the gum out of your mouth, saving it, then chewing it again after an hour or so, or after chewing something else.)

It’s fascinating stuff. Certainly, it struck me as an all too familiar dynamic, and a sweet metaphor for various things.
read on »

• The Heresy of Hypertext
  exploring some fears and anxieties generated by the interaction of the print-based world and its emerging digital counterpart.

May 13th 2005 | Comments(2) | Notes on heresy, media, offline online

Open Source, it seems, is not just quantatively better than other modes of production, but qualitatively better. And Yochai Benkler, a Yale Professor of Law, has written a fascinating paper trying to prove just that. It is called Coase’s Penguin (or Linux and the Nature of the Firm).

Benkler has taken Coase’s theorem and used to it look at Open Source and its value as a means of productivity.

Ronald Coase

Coase’s Theorem

“What Coase originally proposed in 1959 in the context of the regulation of radio frequencies was that as long as property rights in these frequencies were well defined, it ultimately did not matter if adjacent radio stations would initially interfere with each other by broadcasting in the same frequency band. The station able to reap the higher economic gain of the two from broadcasting would in this case have an incentive to pay the other station not to interfere. In the absence of transaction costs, both stations would strike a mutually advantageous deal. Put differently, it would not matter whether one or the other station had the initial right to broadcast; eventually, the right to broadcast would end up with the party that was able to put it to the most profitable use.”

- Source: Wikipedia

read on »

Author and authority have the same root word. It’s a small point but thought the etymology was interesting.

• 1230, “Authority” — autorite “book or quotation that settles an argument,” from O.Fr. auctorite, from L. auctoritatem (nom. auctoritas) “invention, advice, opinion, influence, command,” from auctor “author” (see author).
• c.1300, “Author” — autor “father,” from O.Fr. auctor, from L. auctorem (nom. auctor) “enlarger, founder,” lit. “one who causes to grow,” agent noun from augere “to increase” (see augment).
• c.1380. “Author” — “one who sets forth written statements”
• 1393 Authority — “power to enforce obedience”
• 1596. “Author” — as verb
• 1611: “Authority” —”people in authority”
• Authoritative first recorded 1609.
• Authoritarian is recorded from 1879.
• 2005: “Author” — “man or woman who adds to opinions or knowledge to the web” from O.Fr. auctor, from L. auctorem (nom. auctor) “enlarger, founder,” lit. “one who causes to grow,” agent noun from augere “to increase” (see augment).
• 2010: “Authority” — as collective noun for authors in the same fields or contributing to the same project cf. “the authority of Wikipedia”

OK. I added a couple.

Interesting stuff from Anjo on some problems he’s having with an algorithm to discern weblog communities. It seems his current algorithm works fine until it hits a power node (or what he calls a “core blog”).

The core blogs … act as black holes: once the algorithm hits on one of them it is very difficult to escape.

Intuitively (I think) the problem makes a lot of sense. What struck me was that it was based on access to full feeds - I wonder whether the same problem would hold trying to cluster based on subscription lists/OPML?

Can’t remember where I heard this, but it’s always struck me as sensible. There are two ways to make your millions, get your dream home, and achieve your goals.

One is to work hard, climb the greasy pole, do the politicking, do whatever you think gets you ahead of the rest, do whatever you think will get you more money … and then trust to luck.

The other is to work hard, at something you’re passionate about … and then trust to luck.

Or as Walter O’Rourke, an American millionaire who now works as a train conductor, said:

“I don’t need the money, I need the job”

This post is the first in a series of notes on Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. The book, so far, is a corker, and looks to have significant implications for any discussion of “markets as conversations” and the like.

Chapter 1: The Orality of Language

1. The Oral Character of Language
• We’ve only recently woken up to the oral character of language and the differences between oral/written modes of thought and expression
• Linguistics has been sounding a faint alarm. Ferdinand de Saussure commented that: writing has “usefulness, shortcomings and dangers”, but he saw writing as a complement to verbal speech, not a transformer of it.
• More recently applied and socio-linguistics looking at changes in mental structures incident to writing
• The BIG awakening, though, came from Literary Studies and Milman Parry’s work on Homer and the more recent Slavic oral epic tradition
2. Why was any awakening needed?
• It seems obvious that orality and literacy are different.
• e.g. roughly 3000 languages spoken today of which only 78 have a literature
• e.g. writing extends word resources: English has more than 1.5million words (see OED), and most oral dialects have only several thousand words
• in short, writing implies some orality in a culture, orality does not imply writing.
• But: the reason our studies have focused on written texts rather than oral “texts” has to do with the relationship of study itself to writing.

“All thought, including that in primary oral cultures, is to some degree analytic: it breaks its materials into various components.. But abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of stated truths is impossible without writing and reading. Human beings in primary oral cultures, those untouched by writing in any form, learn a great deal and possess and practise great wisdom, but they do not ’study’.*” (p.8/9)
* Study meaning extended sequential analysis.

• Once writing makes study possible, one of the first things we tend to study is ‘oral’ language. e.g. Aristotle’s Rhetoric
• BUT (and here’s the catch) the oral language we study tends to be written down. And that blurs the divide and so means we needed to be reawakened to it - e.g. understand that we can’t read a speech.
3. Oral Literature
• The assumption that oral verbalization essentially the same as written verbalization has odd consequences for thinkers
• The notion of “Oral Literature” is perhaps the oddest.
• because Literature wrapped up with writing (the Latin for letter of the alphabet is litera)
• and because
  

  “Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it. We (those who read texts such as this) are for the most part so resolutely literate that we feel uncomfortable with a situation in which verbalisation is so little thing-like as it is in oral tradition.”

• If you don’t think you’re resolutely literate try thinking of a word for sixty seconds without spelling it out or visualising it in your head.
• Oral “texts” makes more sense than oral literature, in that a) Homer et al were often referred to as rhapsodein (stitching songs together), and b) text stems from the word texere meaning “to weave together”. However, texts are predominantly thought of as written. Ong suggests oral “epos” or “voicings” as alternatives
4. And the point of this book?
• To use literacy to reconstruct primary orality, untouched by writing, and so to get a better understanding of how our literacy affects our approach to current and new modes of communication.

May 04th 2005 | Comments(4) | Notes on books, Brains, classics, History, Learning WalterOng

It’s much easier to subscribe to RSS feeds than it is to unsubscribe. The mechanics are fine, but the psychology seems a little wayward. There are three reasons my aggregator is filling up with more items than I can possibly read:

1. There’s lots of interesting stuff out there (and subscription is easy).
   Which is fine. But not wanting to miss a trick, if after a quick scan a feed seems interesting I’ll just add it. And so I receive every new item (or at least get told of it) and that’s fine and dandy, it keeps me up to date. But it doesn’t help me filter things. Even though the information may well be good, I still get overloaded. Work responsibilities, and the need to spend time away from screen aggravate it. Keeping up with the Jones’ seems to be giving me a lot of stuff I can’t use, however much I like it
2. Unsubscribing is hard (No more sweeties).
   Call it taking candy away from children, or what you will, but closing off a channel of information which you have previously voted “yes, I like that” to, isn’t as easy as deleting the feed. It leads right into the life that never was type of concerns. At some level I’ve invested in the feed as being good for me. Moving on means change and change is oh so difficult.
3. Unsubscribing is hard (because it feels antisocial)
   Many feeds from blogs are feeds with a “voice”. While unsubscribing to, say, a news search on Yahoo, has little emotional pull, unsubscribing to feeds from people I’ve met is harder. Perhaps not much, but it makes you think twice. It’s a little like saying you’re not interested. And fine, they may never know, but it can feel antisocial. And that somehow feels wrong, especially if you know or have met and liked the person behind the “voice”.

So, how best to overcome this?
read on »

May 03rd 2005 | Comments(5) | Thoughts on benefit, intelligence, RSS social computing