Category: Blogging

The Howard Dean campaign has a weblog, and it looks like they’re doing a good job of using the web to build a network of support.
They’re using Meetup to organize a local network.
The blog and Meetup are both soliciting money for the campaign.
The blog is written by supporters, not by Dean himself, but they seem to have access to the candidate. They’re doing a Slashdot-like interview, gathering questions from readers to report to Dean.
A recent post shows that the blog-campaigners get the point. They’re using the web to help organize a national grass roots network and national funding.

A big reason why McCain lost in 2000, besides SC, was that he lacked a nationwide campaign structure that might have benefited from his NH win. The combination of the very crowded early primary schedule and the massive nationwide influx of volunteers (see Meetup.com) supporting Dean have made it possible for the Dean campaign to build a national campaign much earlier.

Seb’s been thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily.”
As I said in comments to his post, I think this is a great idea bottom-up, closely tied with communities who define the categories. A group of Austin Bloggers or Emergent Eemocrats or movie lovers finds that they have a topic or set of topics in common, and creates a set of categories that can be used to aggregate posts. The categories come out of the community.
I’m more skeptical about implementing this top-down. An information architect friend was telling me that even professional categorizers categorize things differently over 50% of the time. I don’t think there’s any scheme that’s going to work to auto-create categories, outside of the context of human communities to define those categories.

Blog popularity indexes like Daypop and Blogdex showed that The Raging Cow story was one of the top-linked items last week.
If you haven’t been paying attention, the Raging Cow campaign was created by a marketing company attempting to influence bloggers to blog their endorsements for a new soft drink.
At first glance, the marketing company was probably ecstatic about the amount of publicity generated by the campaign. With a closer look, many of the blog posts derided and mocked this attempt to generate “astroturf” support in a grassroots medium.
The problem is that the indexes rank stories according to the number of links they attract. They can’t tell whether the links mean that bloggers LIKE the story or HATE the story.
There’s a lively discussion about adding a hyperlink attribute that would express an opinion about the linked content — love it or hate it, thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
Links here, here, and here.

There’s a new Blog Tribe Metablog which aggregates posts about blogging.
We built the metablog using Version 2 of the Austinbloggers infrastructure. Bloggers add a trackback ping to their posts, and those posts are aggregated into a central blog on the topic.
Version 1 used TopicExchange from Phil Pearson. TopicExchange uses trackback to aggregates posts to a URL at the TopicExchange site. This is very handy, if you simply want a list of posts on a topic. If you want to create a site that has richer formatting, you can aggregate the posts into your favorite blog tool using RSS. Unfortunately, that introduces a time delay.
So we developed Version 2, which uses a Python script developed by Chip Rosenthal, to instantly aggregate an abstract of the posts that issue the trackback pings, and to post them to a MovableType blog. Version 2 also has a right-column sidebar of announcements. The template contains a second MTEntries section running down the sidebar which displays posts having the category “announcements.”
The AustinBloggers site has moved on to Metablog Version 3, which uses Chip’s custom-written CMS and server-side includes to display the page.
But the Blog-network site uses Version 2, so it can be easily maintained by people who know Movable Type.
If you have any more questions about how this works, feel free to ask me.

One of the promising conversational threads at the Emergent Democracy Happening was the discussion of tools.
There are various types of tools that would help political action emerge from decentralized online communities.
Tools that make it easy to form self-organizing groups. Groups need to be visible to the public, enable people to join easily, and be managed by the participants. Discussion groups are great, but can be rather intraverted and hard to join. Trackback is a great way to build a community from decentralized bloggers, but there’s no easy way to contribute identies to form a self-managed group.
Tools that make it easy to increase the intensity of interaction.
Online conversation is great, but higher-bandwidth modes, like phone and face-to-face meetings often help build relationships and commitment levels.
The Happening” infrastructure — a conference call supplemented by online chat and wiki, made it possible scale interactive conference call in size, by making it easier to call on speakers, and to scale the discussion in time, by creating a persistent project space that lives on after the event.
Meetup.com has a handy centralized service that uses a website and email updates to enable people to sign up for groups, and meet in person once a month. But the contact information is managed centrally by Meetup, and the venues and dates are selected by Meetup. This doesn’t give groups enough control to manage themselves
Tools that help communicate with governments. By making it easy to send citizen letters and campaign contributions to politicians.
MoveOn.org has a fantastic centralized service that uses a website and email updates to notify citizens, and enable them to speak up or donate. It would be great to have decentralized versions of those tools, available for groups to manage themselves.
Tools that amplify memes. Daypop and Blogdex identify and amplify the ideas that are kicking around the blogosphere. It would be great to have less centralized versions of these tools, with the ability to illuminate the zeitgeist in Austin, or with regard to say, environmental issues.
I’m brainstorming here: this is just a start. Would love to continue the conversation. What do you thinK?

Steven Johnson has an interesting and insightful take on the ant analogy in the “emergent democracy” conversation.

To me, when you’re talking about emergent democracy in the online world, the equivalent of the ant is not the individual human, it’s the software. The atoms of human action are indeed incredibly sophisticated ones, but the atoms of software that enables those actions to connect in new ways are much simpler. It’s more like: “follow this link, connect this page to other pages that share links, look for patterns in the links.”

The software ants follow simple rules to find and gather the patterns created by human decisions and human actions.
I like this. It’s an example of the “Google principle”. The Google algorithm is great, not because the computer determines which web pages are important, but because the computer gathers and adds up millions of pieces of information about which pages humans think are important.

Seb questions the purity of group-forming from weblogs, since in the cases of successful groups, there were already interested, committed potential leaders.

Groups with a sense of identity do form visibly chiefly through blog interaction. Witness for instance the recent formation of such entities as the group-forming community, Austin bloggers, EdBloggers, the Emergent Knowledge Management Research group, protest blogs in Venezuela, and the copyright term action reform group. However, I’m not sure that these could qualify as pure examples of emergence, because in each case, there are individuals who have crystallized a vision, assumed a leadership role, and made it happen through purposeful design. But it could be argued that something had already emerged before those visions occured to them.

1) Catalysis. A catalyst doesn’t create the reagents itself. It simply lowers the energy required for the reaction, and makes the reaction happen faster and more often.
2) Humans, not ants. This isn’t a pure “emergent system” where the pattern is created by giving a simple rule to a simple bot.
Sure, all of the groups Seb mentioned bring together people who already had plans and skills. The question is, how likely would they have been to find each other; how quickly would they have been to organize without these tools.
If weblogs can catalyze group-forming among people who were well-intentioned but disconnected, that’s a big and welcome change.

Kellan, Snowdeal, deus_x, and raster write about digital insecurity — the anxiety you feel about asking a colleague to be your “friend” or “contact” on Ryze and similar systems.
The reason is that there is no context for asking. The question doesn’t correspond to a social form in real life.
In real life, you don’t ask someone if they’ll be your friend (not if you’re older than 5 or 6).
1. You start a conversation, and the conversation continues.
2. You join an established group (work, social, hobby), you participate together in shared activities, and enjoy the company of other participants.
3. You invite someone to something, or you accept an invitation.
Online friend lists, like Ryze and its conceptual ancestor Six-Degrees, really are socially weird. You ask someone to be your friend without any of the social context of a shared activity or conversation.
There are good online analogs to the first two friendship-starters. We’re still working on good online analogs to the third.
On the public internet, you don’t need permission to join a conversation. You send someone e-mail, or reply to an email. You leave a comment on someone’s weblog. If either person isn’t interested in continuing the conversation, they don’t reply.
Discussion groups and mailing lists are are online analogs (and often online add-ons) to joining a real-world group. You join EFF-Austin, and sign up for our mailing list. You can set up a mailing list or discussion group pretty easily — but those are pretty heavy persistent structures.
We still need easier and and more natural ways to create ad hoc groups.
You can send an Evite, but that’s more of a formal invitation to an offline event. Meet-up is ok — hundreds of groups meeting monthly in cities around the world. You sign up to a group, and then get reminders of the meetings. But it’s backwards and kind of totalitarian. Only Meet-up has the contact information — the group members don’t have each other’s contact information. Meet-up chooses the places to meet.
We need a range of easier and more natural ways to create ad hoc groups, invite people to the groups, let people join groups. The digital equivalent to hey, let’s go to a movie, or let’s go out hiking.
TopicExchange is a lovely example of this. Create a topic, and anyone can contribute blog posts to the discussion.

DJ Adams distributed book club looks like a good start at ad hoc book clubs.
I don’t think we need better FOAF metadata descriptions of the nuances of relationship. “I have now moved Bob from the category of FriendlyAquaintance to ModeratelyGoodFriend”. Instead, we need better groupforming mechanisms, so people can become friends naturally.

Folks are worried about creating a mess of useless and undifferentiated information with GeoURLs. To solve the problem, people are proposing controlled vocabularies, or auto-categorization approaches (I’ll talk about auto-categorization in a future post).
Prentiss Riddle articulately expresses the concern here:

I think GeoURLs are delightful but I don’t understand how people can proceed down this path without addressing questions of scale and of additional metadata (e.g., a taxonomy with an associated controlled vocabulary) to permit useful lookups.)
What happens if every business, blog, or blog entry — in the standard metaphor, every lightbulb — has a GeoURL? Aside from the question of whether a central GeoURL server can handle the load, won’t the concept soon cease to be useful if every GeoURL report consists of a jumble of 500 “things” in the immediate neighborhood?

Josh Schachter, who created the GeoURL service, writes (in comments conversation with Prentiss on the GeoURL site):

obviously, geourl is just a first pass at the idea. the problem with, as you mention, letting people choose where into the “controlled vocabulary” they fit is that it will be abused. you’ll note that the meta keywords tags are basically unused due to spamming abuse. so basically you’d need google-like powers to sort through it all. perhaps we need some sort of zen of what should be geourl’d and what shouldn’t? some sort of policing mechanism? obviously this becomes complicated very quickly indeed.

Maybe it’s not necessary to worry so much.
With classic transactional applications, it’s imperative to have distinct categories. In a hospital database, it is important to clearly distinguish which user has the role of “Doctor” and which has the role of “Patient.”
But GeoURL and metablog applications are just content. A little bit of ambiguity won’t cause the wrong person’s appendix to be removed.
At the Austin Metablog, we’re starting with no categories. Human editors will categorize posts. We’ll see which categories emerge,and then maybe decide how to automate them. The categorization emerges from the application as it matures.
The meta tag system for web sites failed miserably, since people learned to game and spam the system. But web site meta tags were intended to be a general-purpose system. There was no domain or community to confine the use of meta tags. So the system got out of control.
But GeoURL and metablog applications are build around specific communities with specific applications.
On another community metablog project we’re working on (that we’ll talk about soon!), we’re planning to use a defined set of categories. We think this will work because it’s a specific application, with a particular relevant set of categories.
Communities can add policing mechanisms when they are necessary. If people start to spam Austin Metablog, we can start thinking about human moderation, or automated moderation. There’s no need to develop strict security policies in advance for every possible misbehavior.
For people who’ve done content repositories for many years in other domains, please talk to me about which wheels we are reinventing!
via conversations with Greg Elin

Marc Canter picks up on Ben and Mena’s plans to include “friend of a friend” ID and relationship logic in Movable Type.
Marc connects this to an ongoing conversation about Digital ID. “Persistent digital ID’s is a foundation building block needed for social networking and what I call ‘the mesh’. (I got the link from Euan Semple)
The problem with proposals for top-down digital ID is that they don’t do anything good for individuals — they give governments and businesses more power for intrusive marketing and surveillance.
The problems with all the proposals for bottom-up digital ID is that they don’t give any immediate return to individuals. You fill out a form on your desktop computer, and the data is encrypted, and then what? Bottom up movements have gotten no traction; there’s no incentive to the individual to play.
Blogspace is different. People are already using weblogs to connect to their friends and build new connections with people with common interests.
A FOAF-based blogroll gizmo would automatically build a blogroll with data about the friends and aquaintances in your blogroll. Somebody could provide hosted services for bloggers using simpler tools.
This semantically rich information could be crawled, parsed, and mapped to reveal beautiful and useful patterns about the relationships between people and ideas.
The application will spread across the network, because it meets a need that people already have — to keep track of each other’s blogs.
Thereby creating the critical mass for other decentralized, user-driven id services.
Watch blogspace.