In response to Mary Hodder’s concern about “rankism”… I wonder whether rank is the wrong presentation, and clouds are right.
A cloud presentation would primarily show the communities that a blogger is in. It may show secondarily the influence strength within that community, but that should be secondary in the presentation.
A cloud presentation might enable navigation along topic axis. For my blog, you’d be able to traverse to social software and austin clouds.
Influence would be calculated within the cloud. So, Jon Lebkowsky would have separately-calculated influence level within Austin and environmental blog communities.
Perhaps the presentation would allow the browser to traverse communities. One could find “blogher”, and traverse to the “sepia mutiny” south asia community.
Time would be an interesting factor. Perhaps one could view the cloud by week, month, or year. See how participation ebbs and flows over time. A longer time frame would be interesting — I wonder whether other bloggers are “bursty” in their topics of interest. A long time frame would catch people who come and go.
In sum, a cloud presentation would avoid the worst of rankism, because it would focus on the community more than the individual, and allow a browser to traverse communities.
Mary Hodder on Blog Community Discovering
In a thoughtful essay, Mary Hodder explores what it will take for blog search to go beyond the “top 100 syndrome” to discover the interesting patterns of influence and community.
…this is about going beyond lists and links, to understand that the social relationships of expression between and across blogs is really about searching for a “metric for identity” or “metric for affiliation”, “metric for community”, or “metric for influence”.
Mary is ambivalent about creating new forms of “rankism”.
I have to say, I’ve resisted this for the past year, even though many people have asked me to work on something like this, because I hate rankism. I think scoring, even a more sophisticated version of it, akin to page-rank, is problematic and takes what is delightful about the blogosphere away, namely the fun of discovering a new writer or media creator on their terms, not others.
The algorithm would weight links in posts higher than blogroll links, and new blogroll links higher than old ones. It might include new terms like time read, comments, and topic score.
Hopefully, the tradeoff for more rank-ism is better discovery. This weekend, I spent some time exploring Sepia Mutiny – a group blog for South Asian writers – and its cousins, after meeting one of the authors at BlogHer. This form of indirect discovery is delightful. A tool that helps with such serendipity would hopefully be more like the joys of a used book search database, and less like “sororitization”, the turning of social groups into popularity contests.
I wonder whether rank is the wrong presentation, and clouds are right. Clouds would primarily show the communities that a blogger is in — and may show secondarily the influence strength of that community?
Blog search: Tell me something I don’t know
I got an email about a new blog search engine called Blogniscient, so I clicked through to try it.
On the home page, it tells me that the top 10 political bloggers are:
#1 Michelle Malkin
#2 Captains Quarter Blog
#3 Eschaton
#4 Powerline
#5 Crooks and Liars
#6 Austin Bay
#7 Think Progress
#8 TPM Caf�
#9 The Anchoress
#10 Daily Kos
You can drill down and find the top liberal and conservative blogs. Two clicks later, I find that the top liberal bloggers are (the list goes to 20):
Liberal Politics
#1 Crooks and Liars
#2 The Left Coaster
#3 Eschaton
#4 Think Progress
#5 Daily Kos
#6 TPM Caf�
#7 Talking Points Memo
#8 Political Animal
#9 The Huffington Post
#10 America Blog
So please, Mr. Search Engine. Tell me something I don’t know. I knew that Daily Kos and Atrios/Exchaton were very popular. I had no idea that Atrios was two places ahead of Kos, and… I don’t care. It’s not like baseball heading up to the playoffs, where there’s going to be a single winner.
Where are the good centrist blogs, like The Moderate Voice and Ambivablog? They don’t fit into the impoverished taxonomy, let alone sites like Booker Rising, a site focused on moderate-to-conservative African-Americans.
Here’s the problem. The top 40 blog list is boring. It’s stable. We know who they are. The job of a search engine is to tell the user something they don’t already know.
Splitting up the top 100 into big themes is somewhat more interesting than the general-purpose Technorati 100. It’s more meaningful to look at top political blogs, sci/tech blogs, entertainment blogs. But it’s still stable, and doesn’t convey much new information.
The top news stories is a bit more interesting, since that churns daily. That’s an interesting zeitgeist check, and may be worth checking back.
The bulk of the site misses the glory of the web. With a vast amount of human knowledge there for the mining, please tell me something I didn’t know already
The Success of Open Source
Steven Weber’s excellent book, The Success of Open Source is a superb complement to Yochai Benkler’s classic essay, Coase’s Penguin. Benkler looks at peer production as an economic system and concludes that it has become a third major form of organizing production, alongside the market and the firm. Weber takes a closer look inside the open source production process, and provides a fascinating analysis of how and why it works:
- the origin of open source software
- why people participate
- how projects are organized
- how open source fits into surrounding organizational and economic structures.
By doing this, Weber reaches a variety of interesting observations and conclusions:
- Counter to the myth, the open source development process is not a teeming bazaar, with “bottom-up” self-organization composed of local signals. The largest and most successful open source projects have identifiable, hierarchical organizational structures, with a leader and/or inner circle, up to a few hundred active contributors, and a much larger group of occasional participants.
- While Open source licenses protect the right to “fork”, to take the codebase off in a different direction than the original project, projects stay together more than a skeptic might think. Weber observes that project leaders depend on developers and developers depend on the community. The ability to get more done together than separately.
- Developers contribute to open source projects even though most users are “free riders” who benefit from the software, and contribute little or no code. This is less of a paradox than it might seem, since software is a “network good” that gains value the more people who use it. The more people who use a program, the tbugs that are reported and fixed, and the more robust the system becomes.
- Since the origins of the phenomenon, there have been different approaches to licenses. The West Coast, Berkeley-style licenses are easy-going about the ability to include open source software in other, non-open source code, so long as credit is preserved. The East Coast, Free Software Foundation GPL (Gnu Public License) is strict about requiring that redistributed code must always be free software, and any software including free software must be distributed by GPL
Perhaps the most insightful conclusion Weber draws is the relation between open source and intellectual property. Weber observes that open source redefines property around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude.
Weber is able to make this observation because he avoids polemic. Weber doesn’t try argue that open source software is good because intellectual property is bad. And he doesn’t argue that that open source software is bad because intellectual property is good. Instead, he is able to observe how open source redefines property itself.
Weber’s pragmatic analysis leads him to focus on the vibrant intersection between open source production and traditional business, with a look at a variety of hybrid business models, from IBM’s focus on hardware and service, to Red Hat’s packaging and branding, to MySQL’s service and customization, to Apple’s addition of proprietary chrome and polish. Weber predicts continued evolution and innovation and this boundary.
The book was published in 2004, and so it misses one of the most interesting trends in the last couple of years — the rise of open source software that’s not just for hackers. Netscape/Mozilla is included in the book as an example of failure. Weber looks around at Linux, Gnome, KDE, etc, and concludes that open source software may never be able to make software that works for non-hackers. This was before before the breakout success of Firefox, and the popularity of GAIM, an instant messaging client with a consumer-quality interface.
Weber examines the brash and blunt hacker culture, with its focus on technical decision making through vehement debates on project mailing lists that hash out solutions to technical problems and decisions about technnical direction. I wonder about how the culture will evolve as interactions grow with non-geek users, and hybrid companies face decisions that have external constraints driven by customers.
Towards the end of the book, Weber speculates about how the organizing methods of open source software might affect the production of other kinds of goods — writing, music, biotech, business ideas. I thought it was interesting, but less substantial than the parts of the book focused on open source itself, with analysis based on observation.
The end of innocence for Mozilla?
Dave Coursey laments the End of Innocence for Mozilla with the founding of a taxable subsidiary.
The danger of the Mozilla Foundation forming a for-profit business, Mozilla Corp., is that the result may be as nasty and political as your average nonprofit and as money-grubbing as your typical software company. Nothing wrong with that, except that it’s a wide departure from the egalitarian notion of “free” software that has carried Mozilla this far. And with that departure, I am feeling a touch of loss.
Richard Stallman, the prophet of free software idealism, says that free software is intended to be “free as in speech, not free as in beer”. Open source software never was intended to be free of commerce. You can make money with open source software. IBM makes oodles of money with Linux and Apache. MySQL makes money with its database. You just can’t sell the source code.
I think Mozilla lost its innocence a long time ago, and in a different way. Much of open source software is by geeks, for geeks. Open source developers have focused on creating tools for developers, and avoided the burden of developing for people who aren’t programmers. An open source developer is “scratching his own itch”, not developing code to please other people.
For whatever reason, Mozilla isn’t like this. Mozilla is designed to be usable and attractive for ordinary people, and extensible for geeks. The Mozilla team designs with empathy for users. They have already lost the innocence of solipsism — they are serving others than themselves.
I can’t help feeling that the foundation is crossing a line from which it can never retreat, taking with it a bit of the romance of software by the people, for the people.
Coursey writes these sentimental lines for a salary earned from a magazine publisher that makes money from advertising.
Mozilla is maintaining its license terms. That means that people will continue to be able to look at the code, modify the code, and fork the project to create their own products, following the terms of the license. That’s the freedom that counts — not freedom from being able to make a living.
Thanks, Joi for some clarification about the business structure.
Peak oil and air flight
Descending to Newark airport a few weeks ago, ribbons of street lights and twinkling cars make a glowing carpet. Is this future nostalgia? In the near future, will we be able to afford highways? Will we be able to afford airplanes?
Since Ezra Klein went on vacation and turned his blog over to Prof Goose of the Oil Drum, I’ve been reading some of the peak oil bloggers, and it seems like there’s something to worry about.
* there is one major variable in the world’s oil equation, the Saudi supply. Information about Saudi capacity is closely held, and the Saudis have every reason to lie.
* new extraction techniques get more oil out of the ground sooner, and the depletion curve is steeper after a field’s production peaks
Worldchanging covers the opportunities for new technology and increased efficiency with some practical optimism. Things might get very different in the non-distant future.
Update: Just read this Washington Post discussion with an analyst who concludes from research that Saudi production has peaked already. Yikes!
Blogher and identity politics
Jay Rosen writes that one of the themes he recognized at the BlogHer conference was fear. Women bloggers were more likely to admit that they felt afraid, about job risk, stalking, and other risks of blogging. When I read through the Blogroll in prep for the show, I noticed people talking about pre-conference jitters. I suspect there are fewer posts admitting to butterflies about, say Always On.
My pre-Blogher jitters were about the potential level of identity politics. I blog about women in technology and business occasionally, but most often about other things — social software, tech policy, books. If there was a conversation about what it’s like to be a woman blogger, I don’t think that I’d get that far.
When you assemble a group focused on “identity x”, there’s the risk of rathole discussions about whether people and things are “x enough”.
Overall, Blogher avoided the perils of identity focus, and got good things done because of the focus:
* Mary Hodder started a speaker list to identify female conference speakers. There is no good excuse for conference program organizers who just can’t think of women panelists.
* Blogs and the mainstream media have even fewer excuses for stupid stories about the scarcity of women bloggers.
* Ideas about alternative blog metrics beyond the mass-market A-list were catalyzed, as a result of conversations among people who care more about their “long tail” subcommunities than overall fame.
* In the panel on investment, audience members asked basic questions (“what is the difference between angel and venture investors”), and got answers that were friendly and informative. The questioners might not have spoken up at the investment panel at a general (mostly male) event.
* Reports say the Mommy blogger panel rocked.
* Interesting insights from the globalization session about the challenges of blogging in multiple languages — what to say to whom, in what tone.
Citizen journalism is more fun to do than to talk about
At Blogher, I was at a birds-of-a feather session on citizen journalism. It was moderated by Amy Gahran. Jay Rosen was there, along with several others who are doing citizen journalism of various flavors.
The discussion focused on the tired old wordgames — what is a journalist, what is a citizen journalist. Are bloggers journalists or not? How can citizen journalists be ethical? Is citizen journalism a good term, or is it intimidating for citizens, and exclusive of people who are non-citizens.
The discussion implies a zero-sum game of prestige and reputation between “old” and “new” journalism. I say it’s boring, and I say the heck with it.
Citizen journalism is more fun to do than to discuss. In the battle to save municipal wireless projects in Texas, Chip Rosenthal and I set up a weblog and a mailing list. And we covered the ins and outs of the issue through the legislative process. Someone attended the hearing, or watched it on video. We tracked the latest version of the bills.
We were doing “advocacy journalism” — we have an opinion — we’re not neutral on the question about whether cities and towns should be able to support broadband access. But we were covering the story. We often “broke” the story, simply because we following an issue closely, and the mainstream media has a broad beat and can’t cover everything. When we had news, we sent email to the reporters who were covering the issue for the mainstream media. And we became a source for the reporters.
We assembled a community. We found the people who were doing community broadband projects, and we wrote about them. We used the mailing list as a primary means of staying in touch with the community. And the blog did a great job of helping us link with others who were participating and covering the story, through comments and Technorati-discovered cross-links.
We didn’t complain that we were a few citizens fighting the phone company. We didn’t complain that the issue was undercovered by the mainstream media. We took the resources we had, and we used them. We didn’t spend time trying to define what we were doing. We just did it.
By committing acts of citizen journalism, whatever you call it, the new definitions will emerge.
The algorithm of network power
danah boyd just made a striking point at Blogher.
The link algorithms that drive “Top 100” lists at Technorati and other services are based on a broad and shallow pattern of linking. This is characteristic of male patterns of networking. By contrast, characteristically female patterns of networking are smaller and denser.
The “Top 100” pattern recaps the hit-based attention and financial economics of the mass media. It just doesn’t measure the sub-communities that should be visible out of the “Long Tail.”
Mary Hodder says that she is assembling an algorithm that will highlight the subnetworks and the long tails, using critera like comments and interlinks.
This is needed. Today’s algorithms are missing communities of interest. And frankly, it’s missing opportunities for power and money.
Does Technorati Top 100 count
The conversation at BlogHer is about how and whether to break into the Technorati 100. This misses the point of the Long tail— what makes the Blogosphere different from the mainstream media. You can aim to be a top celebrity. Or you can be an authoritative voice on an important topic, and be the media for an important issue. The blogosphere isn’t just about celebrity, it’s about subcommunities.