Category: Uncategorized

via David Weinberger, Zephoria has an insightful post about why profile-based conversation is wierd:

Reacting to a profile is just 10x more socially odd than small talk. And unfortunately, the profile itself takes away one’s ability to engage with the standard “what do we have in common” questions. Thus, the lurker gets that far and then they have to find something meaningful to say without the ice breaker. Given this, it’s such a miracle that profile-based dating ever works.

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More than that, even Friendster degree-of-separation introductions lack the artfulness of a good party introduction, where the host can meet two people, spark a conversation about a topic they have in common, and slide away.
Blog-browsing and commenting feels like a more natural way of making an introduction. Not only do you know that someone is interested “politics”, you have an idea of how.

Mena Trott: Interop is essential for blogging tools; we say yes to everything our users ask for; also things they want but haven’t asked for. We provide import to and export from Movable Type. Our customers are webloggers; they don’t want lock-in, so we gave them import/export. That kept us on our toes for the last two years. It hasn’t hurt us.
The death of HTML
Cory: “can Macromedia overcome the web’s limits without destroying what makes the web the web”
Kevin Lynch, Macromedia: HTML for documents, Flash for applications. URI not good for data; conflict between application model and page model.
RJ Pittman also describes the death of HTML. Applications will be inherently connected… breaking the page barrier. Self-adusting user interfaces (what does this simplify to?)
Mena: Moving away from the web browser, moving toward the device.
(HTML has been dying every year since it started.)
Merrill Brown at Real; mass consumer media, small professional media, large professional media. “Premium content” = major league baseball. Very undecentralized. (for example, I want to comment on a baseball game with my friends, but the licensing scheme doesn’t allow it; the images are copyrighted)
A lawyer in the audience disagrees with the appliance theory; likes MT because it is modular. Mena says that they’re building TypePad which is easier but less flexible.
Cory on DRM: of course there’s demand for something that lets you do less with your music.

* paid for where there’s high demand; lots and meters downtown
* subsidized as a business attraction; parking at a mall

http://www.duhblog.com/supernova/

The trouble with online social network systems: When someone introduces people to each other, they get social capital from the interaction. The value is in the process of linking. When you publish your rolodex, you don’t get that social credit.
We’re monkey’s with keyboards; the important thing is the social fabric.

Our minitel is twisted pair — the pairs of copper wires that go into your home or business. Circuit-switched, metered, voice optimized networks are obsolete.
We’ve laid enough fiber to get to neptune and back but none of it has gotten to my basement.
We have a dumbell internet – high-band at the center and in the home, and narrow in the middle — with the telco.
IP is voice revenue eroding; you can’t protect the incumbents and get more bandwidth to the home. Protecting the incumbents /is/ what dampens innovation.
If phone companies started to account for their network at replacement value on Monday, they would be bankrupt by Friday.
The phone company is like the family farm. We let shoestores fail, but not phone companies.
QOTD: You can call french fries “freedom fries”, but the freedom fries are still sold in a restaurant, and listed on a “menu”

Reed Hunt calls for universal service guarantee for fiber-based broadband. This will go out in China and other places in the developing world.

Artima Technology has set up a nifty experiment using RSS to create aggregate blogs for techology topics like Perl, Python, C#, agile development, patterns, and more.
Bloggers submit their blog and choose which of 26 topics their blog resembles most closely. The problem is, most bloggers — even bloggers who write a lot about a single topic — tend to write about more than one thing.
So, the Java blog page contains an entry each on geocoding for weblogs, HTML encoding, Movable Type, XML proliferation, and Echo, along with nine posts that actually mention Java!
I prefer the Trackback method of making topic blogs. The author categorizes the post s/he wants to contribute instead of having to stereotype the entire blog with a single topic.
This makes the blog much more relevant and focused. The Austin and Seattle community blogs use this method, and I’ve seen good conference blogs use this method, too.

Paul English on trust, and how not to be a snob.

“While dot-coms and blogs have hogged the spotlight, an intriguing bit of software called Wiki actually deserves the gold medal for best trust-building tool,” writes Peter Morville.

In a Wiki, anyone can edit (or delete) any page or create a new page. This is the ultimate in decentralized content management.
I first encountered the wacky-world-of-wiki several years ago when EricScheid launched the IAwiki. I checked it out and wrote it off as too messy, too bottom-up, and too vulnerable to virtual vandalism.
However, the IAwiki has evolved into an amazing resource for the community and a living experiment in emergence and socially constructed navigation. Eric’s trust led to creation of a public good.
My second Wiki encounter came during the formative stages of AIfIA. While some of us met briefly at the lovely refuge by the sea known as Asilomar, most of the collaboration leading to creation of this new organization happened via email and the AsilomarWiki.
In fact, we used the AsilomarWiki as a private fund-raising tool, creating an IndividualCommitments page, where each of us could pledge to donate money to cover the legal and accounting costs associated with incorporation of a nonprofit organization.
It felt scary to manage money in such a fluid medium, and yet this mutual openness and vulnerability led to a strong sense of shared trust. We raised several thousand dollars in less than 24 hours, and a few months later, AIfIA was born.
So, now that I’ve transformed from cranky skeptic to true believer, I’d love to see more people discover the wisdom of the wiki. That’s why I was excited when Ed Vielmetti and some other smart people formed a startup called Socialtext to help organizations take advantage of wikis, weblogs, and other social software solutions.
I’m glad to see so much innovation in the realms of web credibility research, social network analysis, and social software design. There’s lots to learn and lots to share. I hope to be traveling on trust for many years to come.