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April 25, 2003
From the margins of the writable web
Before anything. Meg rocks. Hard. I totally agree with her direction. Rah!
From the margins of the writable web
Meg Hourihan
www.megnut.com/speak/etcon
are webloggers self-absorbed and navel gazing? no, we pull things into the centre and analyse.
the weblog equation - the writing side: tools that make things easier to write, and things have progressed (2nd gen tools), but the reading side is difficult: 100,000s of weblogs - how do you find good stuff, how do you find new stuff, how do you find stuff you like, how do you know you cna trust stuff.
Geographic activity
regional - gawker, beastblog
groups such as NYC bloggers
conferences as temporary geographic center [this is really hard to quantify - even here no-one is really connecting blogs together]
navigation by location
geourl
NYCbloggers - turning to a metablog
Mikel Maron's World as a blog - www.brainoff.com/geoblog/
one-way world
loads of blogs picking info from the English language blogs, and republishing (and commenting) in other languages. This doesn't tend to come back into the English language blogosphere.
e.g. a russian kind-of boingboing
social relationships
trusted blog search tool - opml file of friends, uses google api to run search on your friend's sites
FOAF
Conversational relationships
Trackback - creating threads
More Like This From Others
Topics metadata
Easy News Topics - metadata for posts
Everyone is reading the same people - power law causes top 5-10% to be the ones mainly linked. We've begun to build some tools to cope with this.
RSS readers
anti-social software - it's individualistic, greedy, inconsistent, loss of personality (loss of design and presentation - things that make them different). RSS reader by definition is about the technology, not about a user need [amen]. There's a lot of bad headlines [The Register perchance], and syndication is inconsistent - sometimes full post, except, headline, and the seven or eight flavours of RSS.
This wasn't designed for weblogs, but for news headlines - it comes from a different place.
BUT
it's good enough for now...
more social software
Daypop - word bursts as view, working like Google and Amazon, slicing and dicing large volumes of data in new ways
Technorati - highlights newcomers
Lafayette project - expanding existing ideas
The goal is to make weblogs more accessible to general public.
Others:
personal KM
Public KM
non-human conversations (server logs as RSS)
multimedia blogs - vlogs, audblogs, photoblogs, moblogs, mophoblogs [yes!] - so blog means - easy to publish, frequently published, aiding communication
"broadcast" weblogs - mostly output
marketers - finding it an interesting space
Themes
Too much information - what's best for us as individuals.
Turning online to offline relationships
Geek overload!! (is bad) [my god i think i love her!!]
The future?
More ways to enable local information sharing and connecting - ludicorp demo, geourl, indyjunior, GPS - phones with geo-encoded pictures [yes!!!!]
post-rss readers
centralization - probably not the answer (bloggers don't tend to like it)
P2P - connected solutions
post-geek
writing hard, now easy
how can we make reading easier?
[yes, but it's still a small minority that "get" weblogs - we need new terms, new stories, new ways of packaging this up. Also, small group publishing rather than broadcast publishing]
Q: problems with location and privacy
(see Tom Coates' presentation)
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