weaving

I like Anne Galloway's approach here! : )

At a technical level, weaving is to form by interlacing: warp elements are held stable while weft elements are moved through the framework. At the metaphorical level, we can also weave the fabric of society, although this implies that the collective body serves as the stable warp element and the individual body as the mobile weft. A related metaphor would be weaving our way through a crowd, in which the practice of weaving can be twisted to involve moving a stable element through a mobile element: the person navigates the chaotic crowd to emerge (on the other side) intact.

OhMyNews and political bias

"TV reporter-turned-blogger" Rebecca MacKinnon writes some thought-provoking thoughts about Wikinews:

Can a wikinews really be neutral? In the discussion, the most prominently-cited models of citizen journalism are South Korea's OhMyNews and Indymedia. Neither of these is neutral. English-readers are more familiar with Indymedia's strong political activism. What non-Korean readers may not be aware of is that OhMyNews is also very political. It's reader/contributor community are strong supporters of South Korea's current president, Roh Moo-hyun and his Uri party. Ohmynews played a key role in getting Roh elected, and in making it politically impossible for his impeachment earlier this year to stick. Opposition party leaders talk about the "Ohmynews" people as a major obstacle to their political success.

Interesting that I naively assumed that OhMyNews was representative of the country as a whole. So what is it that stops it from being so? Is it, perhaps, is the lack of multi-dimensionality of community in the OhMyNews model? Rather than each individual participating in many overlapping and discrete communities of interest—as is facilitated by the Blogosphere, for instance—with OhMyNews, individual's contributions become simple subsets of the whole. And that unitary quality of OhMyNews, notwithstanding the variety of individual voices that feed into it, seems to make it a powerful amplifier for a particular political point of view.

Also interesting is how the Korean-English language barrier and the concommitant relative thin-ness of contact between English-speaking and Korean culture allowed for a radically simplistic view of OhMyNews to bounce its meme-ish way unchecked through the Blogosphere to my news reader. I'm familiar with this issue in terms of Japanese culture: I now know Japan through the conduit of years of study of the language and time spent in the country, but for non Japanese-speakers only a tiny proportion of Japan's cultural diversity is readily visible, and so sterotypes naturally abound. But that's a whole other post...

Mosh

Eminem's video of his anti-Bush song "Mosh". Powerful.

embodied identity

Judith Meskill writes about i-names, a scheme for the secure and user-controlled federation of "digital identity".

So what is ‘it’? According to 2idi, the first i-broker, i-names are “a way to authenticate your identity and share personal  data with the assurance that it will remain private and up-to-date.” The 2idi website goes on to explain that “your identity cannot be “harvested” by spammers or other  marketers without your express permission.”

My rejoinder:

I completely agree that securely federated, user-controlled digital identity is a most valuable goal for social software to pursue. However, one of the problems I have with the various current digital identity schemes such as this one is the cerebral "disembodiment" of their definition of digital identity as a set of "facts" about oneself. It seems to me that my digital identity extends way beyond my declarative definitions of myself: surely both the content (including meta-content such as del.icio.us tags etc.) I originate and my online interactions with others and their content exist within an organic spectrum of "me-ness"?

The other issue with a unified and global system is the centralised management of namespaces. First come, first serve, and at a price, of course, trivial for us Westerners, but perhaps not so affordable to people from the developing world. So woe-betide you if your name is John Smith or you are a working-class African. It just isn't "small pieces, loosely joined", however alluring the promise of one system fitting all...

flower power?

This talk from Pop!Tech 2004 sounds intriguing (it's downloading onto my desktop right now!):

"We're screwed," Alex begins. We need 4.5 planet Earths just to meet the current consumption of resources, and it's only getting worse. But there's hope, and Alex gives his favorite examples of cool ideas of innovation, particularly in the developing world. It's amazing what necessity can breed. (How about a flower that turns from white to red in the proximity of a landmine?!)

...from Shakespeare's Sonnet 65:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

The Observer | International | Genghis Khan's hordes conquer the phone book

Now call me old-fashioned, but I just can't help feeling this is taking ontology-sharing a step too far. ; )

Quoted from The Observer | International | Genghis Khan's hordes conquer the phone book:

Better late than never. Mongolia, jewel of the freezing steppes, is joining the 21st century - by giving its citizens second names. In a nation where everyone is known simply as Ganaa or Serjee, the move is considered by the government to be a vital step to progress. Phone books, newspaper bylines, credit cards and other modern wonders will now follow in the wake of this decree, say officials.

Sadly, reality has proved to be more problematic. Charged with picking a historic name or an ancestor's moniker for their surname, more than half the population plumped for the one Mongolian that they believe put their country on the map: Ghengis Khan, the 12th century warrior who did for the civilised world what Alastair Campbell did for government integrity.

UPDATE: I was thinking that the root cause of the symptom of the ontology over-sharing (i.e. 50% of the population choosing the same surname) is the centralised imposition of ontology-sharing according to a specific taxonomy (by the government) that rides roughshod over the existing, organically-formed social "ecosystem" that Mongolians exist within: presumably there are some good ethnographical reasons why they only use one name, or else they would have adopted a second one for convenience long ago.

the lesser-spotted empty inbox

Wallop

Wallop sounds like they're onto something good with its interactions-tracking features. Although I don't have a trial account, so can't comment directly (humph!)...

Quoted from reoriginalize: Mein Wallop:

the most important, feature in Wallop is implicit relationships. This is what we have all been talking about for a long time now. People grow into your network based on your interactions with them through Wallop. Take the photo example, if two people are in the same photo together it is pretty likely that they have interacted, so give their connection a point. If one comments on the other's blog post, give their connection another point. If they link to each other in their respective blogs, give them a few more points. This is the only way to build a meaningful network of relationships."

Wikipedia becoming Established?

Simon Waldman of the Guardian on Wikipedia's success. This is an interesting overview of the Wikipedia project, but what caught my eye was this paragraph:

[Jimmy Wales' (the founder of Wikipedia)] current plan is to create a 'stable version' of some entries: in other words, one that has been fact-checked by one of a number of approved editors (although they are still working on the details of this). It is a radical change, but Wales is willing to do whatever it takes to give his project the authority it needs.

It's a curious issue: when is it useful, in terms of Wikipedia's mission to become an authoritative source, to impose centralised editorial control on (aspects of) the emergent Wikipedia process and say "this is it"? Perhaps there is an inevitability about the transition of an organisation from radical to establishment, and the real issue is how portable they make their data, enabling or not others to "remix" in other contexts what has been distilled in the transition?

Another way of looking at this issue of emergent leadership or focus, though, is to posit it as a potentially healthy phenomenen of the dialectic process of organic community. Imagine the following notional "healthy" community organism, many elements of which can already be divined in communities such as Wikipedia's:

Free and effectively-facilitated debate around topics leads to the emergence of fuzzy, albeit multifaceted consensus, and opinion leaders in the debate also emerge as natural editorial and policy decision makers. This creates a provisional, hierachical power structure, which enables a focus and consistency of approach. At the same time, the ongoing community process (focused primarily on the communal creation and revision of articles in Wikipedia's case) ensures that such hierachical power structures only endure as long as they serve the will of the community, naturally dissolving to make way for new ones as the community process dictates. What interests me is pondering what additional qualities social software needs to embody in order to more and more effectively facilitate that kind of community process.

Biojack

You may notice (or may not) that I've added a link to my Biojack Profile under my Blogger Profile in the sidebar. Biojack is a wiki for biographies. I wonder if it will take off?

semantic and respectful adverts

It seems to me that the rich-semantic tagging system i-together is developing could be gold dust for advertisers. I envisage the development of relationships of mutual respect between advertiser and user, so ads become just another kind of content, but with a "push" dynamic of being sponsored. Ads would be "magnetised" to the appropriate hosting user a la Ad Sense (but better cos it would be a richer semantic match) and with each party having choice, of (type of) hosting user and of (type of) advert respectively.

I also love the idea of users being able to use their CMS to contextualise ads as they choose, rather than the ads appearing exclusively in a separate area of the site.

What powerful tools these would be for users to influence the brands they engage with, through relationships of mutual respect and creativity! And its the brands that were most open and built most trust with users that would benefit the most—can you imagine a company like MacDonalds opening up their brand to such a system where the hosting user could surround the burger image with ones of felled rainforest and fat, ill people?

What Marc Canter is proposing is not far from this vision, but has the crucial difference that bloggers are obliged to write about the brand whose adverts they host, however freely—this is coercion, not mutual respect. A brand with faith in itself doesn't need to do that, right?

: )

the state of i-together play

I write a lot about i-together on this blog in a tangential kind of way, and there is a mission and vision statement over at the i-together homepage, but I guess I haven't been over-forthcoming of late about what we're actually up to. Here, then, is a quick outline of our three main areas of current focus:

1) Develop blog network with Global Generation and the youth groups they work with (integrating moblog and tagging features using Flickr & del.icio.us etc.): this is our online-offline integration angle.

2) Propose set of open standards for secure, social and semantic data exchange, comprising API, security model and structured query language definitions: this is provisionally called ICCMAP (Information, Content and Community Application Platform), but we welcome ideas for better names! Proposal document imminent!!

3) Develop i-together social, semantic bookmarking application: This is under wraps until we have something half-way workable (the mysterious angle). ; )

And the "we" in the first sentence depends on which part of i-together it refers to: for (1) it's me, Global Generation, Peter Ford and a whole bunch of wonderful people with physical-world focused jobs like Drama Therapist and Youth Group Leader; for (2) it's myself and a developer named Andre Sihera for now, but hopefully soon as many people as possible contributing democratically to ICCMAP's evolution; for (3) it's Andre and I, beavering away furtively to bring you an open-source resource when it's v.1 ripe and ready for picking!

Hope that helps to fill in some gaps.

peterme.com: I Have Seen The Future of Annotating Space, and My, Is It Del.icio.us!

Peter Merholz writes cogently about the self-centred motivation people have for using tagging services such as Del.icio.us, and yet how this actually simultaneously facilitates the emergence of shared ontologies. Yes folks, it's "i-together" behaviour. : )

One of the key emerging trends we're seeing with things like del.icio.us and Flickr is the merging of personal information architecture and public/shared/group/emergent information architecture. And one of the things we're seeing in the *use* of these systems is self-centeredness -- how else do you explain the prevalence of "me" on Flickr?

The Higher WE

Andrew Cohen writes about "The Higher WE":

I believe that for most of us, the only solution to this evolutionary cul-de-sac [of our extreme and largely invisible (to ourselves) identification with ego],the only way to our own higher development, lies in the context of human relationship, relationship based upon a breakthrough to a shared experience and recognition of consciousness beyond ego. Of course, consciousness beyond ego always means the state of enlightenment itself. So what I'm referring to is the shared experience and recognition of enlightened consciousness, where the shadow of ego or separate self-sense is entirely absent. In this experience of intersubjective consciousness beyond ego, a momentous leap occurs. It is a leap from I to We, from extreme individuation to a living context of intersubjective nonduality—a higher We consciousness in which all parties experience simultaneously their own individual and collective transparency while remaining fully and completely themselves.

This is brilliant stuff, wonderfully insightful and compellingly expressed, and I heartily recommend clicking through to the full essay. The only bit that jangled a bit was the "screaming" of "absolute love" he posited at the end. Does absolute love scream? Know where you're coming from though, Andrew, in these crazy times. : )

True transparency and sponsorship in the blogosphere

Marc Canter announces a new blog-sponsoring program: bloggers get paid to host ads and to blog about that brand for a three-month period. I'm sure this could prove popular, and the aspiration to transparency in and integration of the commercial branding realm of companies and the personal "branding" space of blogs is commendable. What I'm not sold on is the implicit notion of soliciting bloggers to bend their message to a favourable slant on the sponsoring brand.

Surely a true relationship of mutual respect and trust between blogger and advertiser would be a situation where not only could the advertiser target an appropriate blog for their ad, but also the blogger could freely choose:

(1) which ad to adopt, through a keyword-based discovery system. Marc has told me he is proposing this functionality for his initiative. But also

(2) how to contextualise that ad in terms of page layout and surrounding content, without coercion to blog about the brand. If bloggers like the brand and want to communicate that, they'll blog about it! If they don't, why would you want to make them? A company with real faith in their brand doesn't need to manipulate people, just to tell them their message.

With (2), adverts become just another kind of content in the network, resonating with but not tangled up with the blogosphere locales they are magnetised to.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: World on Fire

Makes you realise just how distorted our "global economy" is right now:

Musician Sarah McLachlan chose to spend the $150,000 allocated for the video for her song "World on Fire" on services for the world's needy. The full list of what the money bought is here. And she went ahead and made a video, for $15, showing what was done with the rest of the money, putting faces on the faceless.

It's kind of staggering what such a small amount of money can buy to make the world a bit more humane.

Via Jamais Cascio

Massive Change - The Future of Global Design

An inspiring and thought-provoking site: Massive Change - The Future of Global Design.

Design has emerged as one of the world's most powerful forces. It has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility...

Via William Gibson.

How to Save the World

Dave Pollard writes:

What's also really intriguing about Google Desktop is the possibility of being able (with appropriate permissioning) to do searches of other people's computers. In business, I can appreciate that people might not want others accessing documents directly from their machines. But this tool provides the promise of being able to find out just that what you're looking on is on someone else's machine, so that you know who to call. That, to me, has enormous potential. Imagine Google Desktop being able to search for something on the computers of everyone in the company, or even everyone in the industry! This could be the start of an awesome, and amazingly simple, Expertise Finder tool.

So we need a pervasive and fully network-integrated permissions system...

OhmyNews International

The Korean website OhmyNews International is facilitating a kind of community-focused aggregation of user-generated content. Interesting how it is a Far Eastern country, not the West, that is pioneering in this area. I am interested to see what will come out of Japan, too...

OhmyNews is in fact little more than a Web site, edited by Oh [Yeon Ho] and his fellow editors, and filled by ordinary members of the public--what the left-leaning Oh calls 'citizen reporters'--who submit stories, comments, pictures and sometimes video by e-mail and from their cellphones. More than 30,000 of them regularly post pieces, and many more add their comments. A team of editors sift through the material, weeding out potential legal problems and rewriting for readability, while a handful of full-time reporters add their own stories on the top events of the day. Many of those full-time reporters come from the ranks of contributors, usually after their talents have been spotted by Oh and his team.

[...]

By allowing ordinary people to submit news and commentary, OhmyNews offers an interactive, democratic style of reporting that complements and challenges the traditional media. It has more news-gathering muscle than many newspapers could afford, with thousands of citizens sniffing out stories. For sure, it has been known to be fast and loose with the facts, but it has influence, and, with widespread tech infrastructure, it's a medium that is here to stay.

Blog taxonomies/ontologies

Dave Pollard highlights a problem area of global taxonomies and blogs in THE DREADED T-WORD, OR, WHY DOESN'T GOOGLE KNOW HOW TO CLASSIFY BLOGS?.

My comment on his post:

"Dave, it seems to me that we need a whole new way of facilitating the creation of emergent ontologies through socially-focused mechanisms. We need to allow each user and each community of users to describe their identity and content in their own way, yet to share common terms of reference with whom they wish and to the extent of their choice. The evolution of meta-languages with multidimensional commonalities thus becomes part of the organic process of community building. Just as a person subscribes to RSS updates of content from, say, your blog, they could subscribe to update notifications of your personal ontology, and either manually or automatically merge all or selected parts of that update into their personal ontology. People would be free to be as different or similar to one another in their ontology as they wish, but individual freedom on one hand would be balanced against community integration and interoperability of data on the other. Of course, this ontology sharing process doesn't have to be limited to one-to-one interactions. Specialist community sites could create topic-focused uber-ontologies with contributions from the community's various members. These community ontologies would then become a resource for everyone. It's a granular thing. This is one of the things we're working on at i-together and Kendra Initiative."

William Gibson is blogging (again)

I didn't know he'd started, but apparently, William Gibson was blogging last year and has now started to once more. Get this little piece for presidential satire.

Via Jamais Cascio

Google Desktop Search Launches

John Battelle on "Google Drops The Other Shoe - Google Desktop Search Launches". So the ocean of Googled content is lapping at our hard drives. But where's the social granularity in that?

Delicious Library

"Import, browse, and share all your books, movies, music and video games with Delicious Library"

Mac-only, but check out the iSight webcam barcode scanning feature!

SID.VICIO.US/del.ici.ous combo

The SID.VICIO.US interface allows for the creation of ontologies of tag categories in the popular social bookmarking service del.icio.us. The combination of del.icio.us with sid.vicio.us (!) is moving towards the kind of toolkit I envisage ICCMAP-based apps providing users with to construct and share semantic meta-data about themselves and their content. The ability to be able to share one's own ontologies and to subscribe to and combine others' ontologies for one's own descriptions (not all of which SID.VICIO.US yet allows for) is surely a crucial factor in the organic emergence of shared yet multiplicitous ontologies across a network...

apophenia: a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture

Danah Boyd is on an interesting and, for i-together, highly pertinent tack in this discussion of a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture. A quote from the conclusion:

"The future of syndication that folks at Web2.0 are professing is really structured around information organization and access. It's about people who are addicted to content, people who want to be peripherally aware of some discussions that are happening. It is not about people who use these tools to maintain an always-on intimate community. There is a huge cultural divide occurring between generations, even as they use the same tools. Yet, i fear that many of the toolmakers aren't aware of this usage divide and they're only accounting for one segment of the population."

Marc's Voice: Web 2.0 results

Marc Canter summarizes what he picked up from the talks and discussions at the Web 2.0 conference. It's all highly interesting, but what stuck out particularly for me was the idea of "software as a service", delivered via RSS or web services. Google, Amazon and eBay, along with Technorati, Movable Type etc. are in this sense becoming part of an ever expanding "web platform". Mark also notes the developments around RIAs.

Joi Ito's Web: Will the tail wag?

Quoted from Joi Ito's Web: Will the tail wag?. Note the last sentence, and consider how Kendra/ICCMAP/i-together could help:

"So the big question for me after reading Chris Anderson's excellent article, The Long Tail is... Will there always be producers and consumers of music and other content, or does the amateur revolution really take off and completely blur the consumer and the producer of content? Will amateur and nearly free Creative Commons style content become the primary content that people consume? Will most consumers create content as well? In other words, will the long tail wag? I've heard many theories about this and it is probably different for text, audio, photos and video, but I think this is an important question.

And in case you haven't noticed, it's clearly now a discovery problem, not a delivery problem."

Here come Microsoft

Ready to Wallop all competitors in the social content management space..?

Engineering Rich Internet Applications: Opinions: Flex and Laszlo

My friend Steven Webster from the RIA development agency iteration::two is fascinating (for the techie-minded) in this piece about the relative merits of Flex and the newly-open-sourced Laszlo Presentation Server. He concludes:

"As for the emergence of a dominant standard ... will it be the budget RIA presentation server [Laszlo] that is developed by the open-source community, or will it be the commercial RIA presentation server [Flex] that matures through its product lifecycle to become accessible to more and more end-user developers?

I reserve the right to change my mind at any time."

Aerial Photo map overlay at Multimap.com

This Aerial Photo map overlay is so cool! Roll around the aerial photo and a streetmap overlay tracks your pointer.

Via Christopher Allen.

ICCMAP project

During my meeting with Daniel Harris and Andre Sihera yesterday, I came up with a diagram for the potential relationship of Kendra-structured databases, an ICCMAP (Information, Content & Community Management Application Platform) software platform and the various applications we are talking about building (Open's PlaNet, i-together, Kendra demos etc.). Andre suggested a modification which has resulted in Kendra-structured databases being represented as a layer underlying ICCMAP, rather than as a circle subsuming ICCMAP and the various apps within "kendraspace", as I imagined it. Andre's version is technically clearer, so I'll go with that:




It's important to remember, of course, that each app would have its own data store, so the bottom layer of the diagram represents the sum total of all the various databases. What you actually end up with, then, is closer to:




It's easy to see from this second diagram how we could create diverse apps on deployments of a common platform (of core functionalities) which themselves are built on top of databases built according to a common meta-data standard (Kendra). Cross-querying at the database level thus becomes possible, extending the reach of each individual app.

Now, how would we go about creating all this? Daniel suggested that, rather than partner organisations (i-together, Kendra, Open etc.) directly collaborating within an ICCMAP organisation to build the ICCMAP platform, we could rather share ideas within ICCMAP, and—going further now—perhaps the platform itself and maybe the apps that run on top of it could be built on a modular basis, with each organisation taking responsibility for and funding/carrying out code-module development (and retaining copyright, presumably?) within their specialist area(s). At the same time, we would need to develop an overarching ICCMAP plan, including detailed tech specs, to ensure that each module works properly with the others to create the platform and compatible apps.

Of course, to complete the picture with regards to Kendra, it's important to note that ICCMAP is one of any number of platforms or apps that could be built on top of Kendra-formatted data:




But I feel I can see in the core requirements of i-together, Kendra and Open at least, enough common ground to warrant considering building a shared platform. Thoughts?

Wikipedia-linking "BBC News Online" proxy site

Read about this amazing Wikipedia-linking "BBC News Online" proxy site. Put simply, you can view the BBC News Online content and layout as normal, except for some extra links to Wikipedia articles on acronyms or capitalised phrases in the content!:


"My first project for 8 years aims to demonstrate a tiny fraction of what a more open [BBC] News Online could be.


It's a proxy for the site, that does the following things:

—retrieves a page from News Online, and regexes out 'Capitalised Phrases' and acronyms. It then tests these against a database of wikipedia topic titles. If the phrase is a topic in wikipedia, then it's turned into a hyperlink

—uses the technorati API to add a sidebar of links to blogs referencing the story. Now you can see who's talking about the story from the story itself

—as a bonus, my code breaks that bloody awful ticker. I'm not fixing it.

—because that's how links should be, my links are underlined.

—reduces page bloat by about 10% by stripping acres of whitespace."

green maps

John Emerson writes about green maps, which sound like a great resource for environment-focused projects like the Open Co-op and Gunpowder Park:

"Green Maps chart the natural and cultural environment of cities around the world. The maps are locally designed and published, but share a common visual language of icons to highlight green living resources. Green maps provide an in-depth, alternative reading of cities and spaces from a green point of view, promoting environmental awareness, citizen participation, and community sustainability."