Spurred on by Euan, Rebecca and the general idea of International Blog Day [which is basically about putting some birds less of a feather on each of our radars], here are some selected reads very different from the mine from around teh world.

1. Badlani is trying to Change the World - One Plastic Bag at a Time [India]. Is that Adam Gilchrist on the main site?!)
2. Maryam’s So I Want To Be An Astronaut [Kuwait]
3. M’lilwana Osanku’s Descendants of Sancho is a curiously gripping read

[Guyana]

4. Alphecca is “an occasional blog by an independent, libertarian, gay gun nut from Vermont.” You’ve got to love the States sometimes.
5. The Japanese “I have an ogre for a wife” blog also deserves special mention - I can’t make head or tail of it, but the title made me laugh.

I used to think the brain was the most wonderful organ in the body.

Then I realized who was telling me this.

[thanks to Johnnie, Chris but ultimately Emo Philips]

Anjo is cooking up a feast over at his blog He’s looking at ways of deriving ontologies from weblogs, with some fascinating results so far.

Another add-on might be looking at how to kickstart ontologies from del.icio.us and similar social bookmark systems?

1. You can get mindmaps from delicious
2. You can use mindmaps as a means to kickstart ontologies (e.g. Mind2Onto)
3. So presumably, if you can isolate a targeted group in a social bookmarking system, then you can use the social stuff to kickstart the ontology?

Looks like we might be starting to experiment with some more un-conference-y approaches here at Templeton. Wey hey! Was chatting with a colleague here at Templeton, and trying to explain the relationship between blogs, wikis, events etc and drew the following diagram - it seemed to help. Any improvements, corrections etc?

[Update: Forgot to add the timeline … and, erm, by improvements I didn’t really mean for making the diagram prettier/more legible ;)]

August 30th 2005 | Comments(3) | Thoughts on blogs, diagram, events, social computing wikis

RSS may well be the glue that keeps much of social computing from coming unstuck, but open, personal gumpf might well be the glue for communities.

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle has a humble theory that makes a lot of sense. [via Life With Alacrity]

As for why people get hostile when they hear a differing opinion, I go back to Spinoza’s definition of love and hatred. He says that people love that which they think reinforces their survival and hate that which they think threatens their survival. I believe — this is just my humble theory, now — that when people hear an opinion that counters theirs, their minds extrapolate from that one opinion to imagine a whole philosophical system. And then they imagine how they would fare in a world run according to that imagined system. So they go from disagreeing to feeling threatened in a matter of seconds, and they lash out. Often they write letters that begin, “You are obviously,” and that’s where they identify, not you, but the phantom they feel threatened by.

Rings a lot of bells. And it made me think how important all the personal gumpf that people put on their blogs, that they wear, joke about, decorate their homes with is.

So I did a little exercise: what’s the difference between the following two comments (apart from verbosity)?

1. I love guinea pigs so much that if someone was hurting them I would disinter their mother from her grave and scatter her bones to the four winds.

2. I get really cheesed off when people jump the queue; ooh - I love cheese - could eat stacks of it; Granny was such a wonderful, kind human being, I’ll miss her so much; and God the cricket was tense!! Does anyone else ever get that feeling that you’re just not as good as everyone else at something, that you’re a bit of a fraud? This made me laugh!! Here are some pics of Victoria, our first-born - I feel unbelievable proud, both of her and my wife. I love guineau pigs so much that if someone was hurting them I would disinter their mother from her grave and scatter her bones to the four winds.

For me, if I was just to hear the first (as I did on the news the other day), I’d feel sick. And I suppose I did go through the whole Spinoza phantom hate thing.

If I was to hear the second, I think I’d , if nothing else, be much slower to start the Spinoza cycle. I think my first reaction would be shock - an “eh? beg your pardon? your joking right?”.

And the reason for that would be in the openness of the previous comments. In many respects they’re just guff, but they allow me to draw a broader picture. Not necessarily of anyone I’d want to spend a lot of time with, but someone I can at least begin to empathise with.

And while streams of consciousness may fill up aggregators with unwanted details, they do allow you to build some sort of relationship.

It’s probably an extreme example, but it did make me think how much more ready I am to engage with what someone is saying if I know a bit of gumpf about them, however silly or trivial, and (importantly) that they have chosen to be open about.

“Oh, Lazyweb, I am curious to know: Has anyone come up with a tagging tool for personal use?”

- asks Jack

And he gets the “use a Mac” response, which is fine, but kind of a costly solution. Anyway, there’s a more general issue here I think. Currently, services like del.icio.us seem very much tied to, well, del.icio.us. And it’s a little like the first generation, punch-card based, everyone-jostle-round-the-big-IBM-mainframe machine era.

It’s a curiously un-networked approach, in many ways - one big library of everybody’s dog-ears and annotations and you.

Doesn’t, at least intuitively, a microcomputer metaphor make more sense? Your own personal set of tags, a facility for integrating those tags with whichever group you’re engaging with, and then perhaps the del.icio.us public service?

Hmm.

Hope everyone (in the UK) has a good bank holiday - off to Sennen for crab, wine, reading, walks, and absolutely no surfing.

<

I love this! A recent article from Wired called Roads Gone Wild talks about a Dutch gent called Monderman. Worth reading the article in full but some selected quotes:

“The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,” Monderman says. “To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.”

Monderman was let loose on a junction at Drachten. Two busy two-lane roads (20,000 cars a day), plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians, and he replaced it with a roundabout. In the process he ripped out the traffic lights, the road markings and the pedestrian crossings but it apparently works well.

read on »

August 25th 2005 | Comments(1) | Notes on emergence, roads rules

Ross Mayfield makes a simple, but blindingly good point

It’s becoming cheaper to host your own event than attend one…

Think about this for a minute, even if you are not in the conference business, and expect an explosion in events and venues. Easy group forming is creating the same disruption for the event market as personal publishing has for media.

Just wow! Especially in the light of the now costly KMEurope 2005.

With genius timing: I install natty little button via Jyve/Skype on my blog; I read that Google is gunning for Skype, and I sit on my skype headset thingy and break it.

Catching up with various feeds, I came across Tom Coates’ interesting comments about what he sees to be two tagging cultures: those who tag and think of it as a keyword, and those who tag and think of it as a folder. And according to Tom, Flickr users “annotate” and del.icio.us users “file”. He goes on to ask:

So two radically different forms of tagging that really share very little in common with one another - which leads to the question, is there room for two different paradigms here (at least) or will there be some refactoring and adaptation that moves us towards one or other model?

He goes on to llook at his Cloudalicious graph and muse about how the tag blog has become more popular than the tag “blogs”:

So here is that hypothesis - that the shift from people using blogs to blog represents the increasing dominance of a Flickr-style paradigm of tagging. Imagine the process of annotating a weblog - if you tag it with ‘blogs’ it seems clear that you are adding it to a collection of some kind. ‘Blogs’ is clearly the name of a folder which houses links to weblogs rather than an attempt to describe the weblog itself. But tagging something with the term “blog” suggests quite the opposite - to tag a link ‘blog’ suggests that I’m attempting to describe the link not as belonging to a bin labelled ‘blogs’ but simply as a ‘blog’ in and of itself. It is my conjecture, therefore, that the folder metaphor is losing ground and the keyword one is currently assuming dominance.

Made me think - and I’m not sure I’ve got my brain round it. What I found hard was the idea that these were radically different forms of tagging - though this is almost me certainly misunderstanding things.

The idea that it’s indicated by number is fascinating. Person is an annotation, people is a folder etc. But how about terms such as “British” or “social software”? All, as far as I can see could be both annotative and folder-based. (He is British vs stuff about the British or Movable Type is social software vs stuff about social software”).

The politics of what’s being suggested - that people are becoming more interested in describing things “in and of themselves” rather than lump categorising - is tempting, and I can’t begin to explain the shift from blogs to blog, but I’m very confused as to how this is anything other than wordplay. Any pointers?

August 23rd 2005 | Comments(1) | Thoughts on folders, social computing, tags TomCoates

Lordy lordy. Crap goes stylish.

[thanks to Robin for the laugh]

Here’s an idea: pick a startup. An unfunded one. Get to know them. And blog about that. Google doesn’t need your speculation. And there are far more interesting things that small teams are doing.

Otherwise, as Peter Caputa over at PC4media suggests, aren’t we in danger of just being page 6 gossip columnists? Think he might be right. Certainly there’s a balance that needs to be struck.

Last October, I wrote a short plea for the Pragmatic Web and ended it with a slightly sulky “I want never gets”. I thought it was a little far fetched, given how much (and how unproven) there is yet to do research-wise on the Semantic Web. But user-driven context, tailoring web services to an individual or a groups’ view of the world and what needs to be done, is a big, important, difficult problem.

Anyway, I just saw this and felt all warm about the world:

Seems that Aldo (as well as being able to put together natty diagrams) has been doing some fascinating work along similar lines. This is from his recent exploratory paper [pdf]

“Moving the research focus from semantics to pragmatics, from representing to using meaning, is the next step on the way to network applications that help communities of people realize their full collaborative potential.”

Couldn’t agree more!

On Friday, at a surprise birthday for an old friend John Foster-Hill, I met Dan Dixon again. What a nice bloke! Anyway, had met him a couple of times before but never made the link that he was into social software/online communities etc. (He works on the Beeb’s communities). Had an interesting chat about various things (healthily, not all social software related) and having looked him up just now, found his blog at http://www.digitaldust.org. More stylish than mine but hey … envy won’t stop me reading it

August 22nd 2005 | Comments(2) | Life on People

Had it pointed out to me recently that “self help” books are a little disingenuous. The self bit is redundant - there is an author after all. Perhaps “help” books would be better. Perhaps it’s a tiny nit-picking point.

Looks like Martin Visser is doing some interesting work on grid thinking over at http://www.gridthinking.org - and there’s a blog about it here.

(Following on a little tardily from May’s notes)

Chapter 2: Modern discovery of Primary Oral Cultures

Early Awareness of Oral Tradition

• Tradition of writing down sayings longlived:
  • Ecclesiastes 12:9-10
    

    “Besides being wise, Qoheleth taught the people knowledge, and weighed, scrutinized and arranged many proverbs. Qoheleth sought to find pleasing sayings, and write down true sayings with precision.”

  • By the Middle Ages, many (e.g Erasmus), got their sayings not from spoken utterance but snipped them from other writings.
  • Then there was the Romantic Movement’s concern for folk culture and their working over of parts of oral/quasi-oral tradition (e.g. Thos. Percy, Brothers Grimm, James McPherson, Francis James Child
• And by the early 20th Century, writing was predominantly seen to represent spoken language in visible form (e.g. Saussure) (though Prague Circle did note some distinctions.)

The Homeric Question

• Homeric question highlights what’s new in our current understanding of orality
• Since classical times, Iliad/Odyssey have been seen as the most exemplary poems in western heritage.
• And since classical times, each age has tried to show how these poems did what their own poems were aiming for, but better.
• An awareness slowly grew that Homeric epics might actually have been a bit of a hodge-podge:
• Vico (1668-1744)thought that Homeric epics creations of whole people not just one man
• Robert Wood (1717-71) suggested that Homer not literate, and that memory played a key role. Homer populist rather than learned.
• The Analysts of the 19thc saw epics as combinations of other poems/fragments (and tried to analyse what came from where). But strikingly they still assumed that poems/fragments all written texts.
• The Unitarians, echoed the whole Paley and the God as watchmaker idea, by suggesting that big old Homer’s works were so well structured and uniform that could not be a succession of disorganised contributions but had to be the work of one single creator.

Milman Parry’s Discovery

• Parry (apparently unknowingly) fused a lot of extant work (e.g. Ellendt’s, Duntzer’s, van Gennep’s, Murko’s, and Jousse’s) to create his own vision
• And his groundbreaking discovery was this:
  

  virtually every distinctive feature of Homeric Poetry is a result of the economy enforced on it by oral methods of composition.

• In other words, oral poets have an abundant repertoire of epithets. These are used to fit cope with any metrical exigency that arises as the poet stitches the story together. And the poems are different at each telling, since oral poets tend to memorise verbatim, but use these epithetic building blocks.
• It doesn’t sound much but it’s got some BIG ramifications. For instance, the role of the poet was itself called into question. Poets were not “meant” to use prefabricated materials, but to be original and inspired. e.g. for the Romantics, “the perfect poet should be like God himself, creating ex nihilo”. That Greek word rhapsodein (to stitch together) became more and more ominous.
  

  “Instead of a creator you had an assembly-line worker”

  .

  
• Cliches became things of value:
  

  “Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later [literate] readers had been trained in principle to disvalue, namely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier - to put it more bluntly, the cliche.

• Eric Havelock showed how fundamental the cliche was, not just to poets, but to the entire oral thought process.
  

  “In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration.”

  [My note: as per proverbs, too many cooks, what’s good for the goose, etc…]. Writing, and stored knowledge, and especially interiorised alphabetic literacy freed the mind allowing it more original, abstract thought. Hence Plato forbade poets in his Republic - their reverence for thought meccano ran agin everything the philosopher was trying to build.

• Oral thought habits continued in literate ages till at least the Tudor ages in the West through the teaching of classical rhetoric, only really being obliterated by the Romantic movement in the 1800s.
• Many literate societies still rely heavily on formulaic thought/have never fully internalised alphabetic literacy: e.g. Arabic culture,
  

  “Kahlil Gibran has made a career of providing oral formulary products in print to literate Americans who find novel the proverb-like utterances that, according to a Lebanese friend of mine, citizens of Beirut regard as commonplace.”

Consequent and Related Work

• Parry’s work has affected a range of fields from literary history to anthropology.
• Literary studies: e.g. Havelock (above); e.g. study of Serbo-Croatian oral performers (Lord); e.g. looking at African Epics (Isidore Okpewho) in this new light.
• Anthropology: e.g. shifts from “magic” to “science”/prelogical to logical/Levi-Strauss’s “savage mind” to domesticated thought can be more economically explained as shifts from orality to various stages of literacy [Jack Goody(quicktime)]
• McLuhan and ear-eye contrasts: the medium is the message.

Amazing really how much one takes for granted, in terms of how one thinks, and how others think. And how prevalent that “cliche” idea is in oral media like music (mixing, refrains, what have you). Anyway, the next chapter is about the different psychodynamics of oral and literate cultures, and is great. Will post some notes when I get a chance.