Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
Microsoft ODF Interoperability Workshop
 
European Independence and Open-Source Development
 
Help ZoneAlarm Users Get Back on the Internet
 
Interoperability: What's the Self-Interest?
 
Interoperability: No Code Need Apply?
 
Another Lively Place for Orcmid
 
Interoperability: The Experience of It
 
Interoperability by Regulation: The Glass Half Ful...
 
Transparency Causes Performance?
 
Dreaming in Code: Going Native by the Bay?

Social Computing: My Graphs over Our Grid?

Eric Norlin applauds, "From the 'web of pages' to the 'web of flow'":

"I think Stowe’s completely right when he says that we’ll move to an entirely new platform for blogging (and RSS and email and calendars and and and) - one that embraces the “flow” versus trying to silo it. ... It is one of those “big problems” that I’m so fond of - and one that I hope Defrag can contribute to solving."

The applause is for Stowe Boyd's August 5 piece, Blogging 2.0 Doesn't Go Far Enough.  That rich piece touches on a variety of topics and envisions a new kind of blogging (i.e., participation) tool.  I'm not that enthralled with the amount of freight micro-posts have to carry (usage rights, for example), but I am enamored of a mechanism that allows a coordinated view of the current streams brokered by Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and all of the other tools that straddle contribution and comment and fumble at making digestible discussion.  This is not a new problem, but amping up the Internet has made it acutely noticeable. 

My cherry-picking of Stowe Boyd's appraisal:

• "The original ethos of the blogosphere ... was focused on supporting community, principally through the interaction on blog comments and, later on, through trackbacks. ... That has been the face of blogging until quite recently, when RSS and then flow applications -- Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. -- began to strip mine the myriad communities within the comment space."
    
• "The blog authors have no means to pull all the threads back together, and even if they did, there is no certainty that the participants would care to cross talk with other fragmented communities. Although I would welcome such tools, if they existed."

I also want tools that recover conversations from the cataracts of utterance, engaging in them at liberty and preserving a tangible trace.

• "The flow fragmentation is starting to resemble the linguistic barriers we have long had on the web ... except now it is not a segregation based on language, but based on tool selection. It reminds me of the divided world that still exists in instant messaging."
     
• "Imagine that I might sign up for a future, flow-based blogging tool. It would, yes, create static pages for blog posts for those stuck in the Web of Pages model, but those that choose to follow me a la Twitter or Tumbler would receive my posts in their own account, or, to extend the model, within any number of third party apps, perhaps as a client on the desktop. Imagine an extended version of Twhirl, for example, where I could receive Tumbler (or any other) generated posts, in between the Tweets. Note that the future Tumbler account might not even support comments, at all: it would be just a tool to generate posts, and to toss them into the flow."
    
• "In this model, everything has become disconnected, everything is principally in the flow. The absolute address of any post, or comment, or vote, is irrelevant. And posts and other atrifacts may be copied with appropriate reference back to the original author, and some means to get to a URL, but only as a way to represent an identity."

There are more specifics.  I am still pondering the generalities. 

I'm still pondering whether we might already have the bits of an infrastructure for participating in the disjointed flood of loosely-coupled utterances that is becoming the Web.  Our pages and feeds become rafts and life-lines for each of us to claim our coherent presence.

For the nuts and bolts, I wonder about open grids (where Live Mesh might be the archetypical enabler) and self-hosted presence hubs (where the customizable Windows Home Server may be an instance). 

At some point, I am going to have to dig in deeper than mere wondering.  This will doubtless arise as I am whipsawed by the transition to fully-64-bit platforms.

posted by orcmid at 8/13/2008 08:41:00 AM