The Blogosphere Map is a tool for spreading the spread of ideas throughout a blogging community.

Browsing gives a “worm’s eye view.” We need a bird’s eye view. Weblogs are a self-refererring medium. Weblogs are like the brain in terms of the density of interconnections that reflects not only events in the real world but also parses ideas and concepts that come from the blogosphere itself.

The Map supports the self-organization of the blogosphere, better than using complex ontologies. [He looks at Steve Cayzer who just spoke about the semantic web, but Steve favors the self-organizing of local ontologies, I believe.] He points to several tools, including blogwise.com and blogstreet.com, as examples of current attempts to map the blogosphere. He also mentions Daypop’s word burst.

Now they’re showing their Blosphere Map. It looks at blogs and measures similarity, including by looking at the links, and plots against time. In this example, they’ve been tracking 400 weblogs for a month. When looking for hits on “BlogTalk,” red dots on a web of links indicate hits. The map indicates links in and out; Dave Winer’s site is a central node. The red dots show up in sequence, representing the spread of the idea over time. A search on “salam” graphically shows his disappearance and subsequent reapparance. [Very cool. But how well will it scale?]

It’s in beta. It will go public in maybe two weeks.

5 Comments »

Andrius Kulikauskas, the Last Remaining Idealist, is talking about this “algebra of copyright.”

Andrius needs things in the public domain in order to enable it to be used as micro-content. (Copyleft requires the inclusion of an 8-page statement.)

But how do you define a work and where do you post the rules and exceptions, Andrius asks. He wants to find a user interface design. He asks us to google “algebraic semiotics” to find ideas about this.

He presents a model that I can’t reproduce here because it’s graphical. Here’s a link.

2 Comments »

Steve Cayzer from HP is talking about semantic blogging. He’s working on an HP Labs project on the semantic web. “Blogging is cool but it could be even cooler…using semantic web techniques.” (I enjoyed talking with Steve at last night’s dinner.)

Semantic blogging would enable us to view blogs other than reverse chronological order, to do semantic navigation (made possible by attaching meanings to links), and do semantic queries, asking who’s blogging on a particular item. To do this, we need a way to share meaning context. That means not just metadata but metadata described by an ontology, a formal way of structuring knowledge, e.g., a hierarchical classification scheme. The semantic web enables people to “create and share these ontologies in a decentralized way.” Steve’s t-shirt for the semantic web is: “Markup with meaning.”

One benefit: When doing a search, you will find stuff even if it doesn’t use any of the words you’re looking for.

We already have emergent ontology sharing. E.g., the TopicExchange that uses TrackBack for a community to arrive at a shared, decentralized ontology.

Steve touts Semantic Web Advanced Development as a resource.

Question: The AI communities have been trying to create representations of human knowledge, but it seems that there’s consensus that it’s an impossible task.

Steve: Yes. The CYC project is often criticized for trying to do this. But the Semantic Web isn’t trying to capture all knowledge in a single ontology. It allows small groups to create their own ontologies, and then enables them to be linked.

[It ought to be called “semantic webs.”]

2 Comments »

The BlogTalk conference is being live streamed here. (Vienna is 6 hours ahead of Boston time.)

For what it’s worth, I’m blogging this on the computer that’s being projected at the moment, so this is a weird case of live meta-streaming blogging. Meta-live streaming?)

5 Comments »

Here it is Friday morning in Vienna and I haven’t blogged since right before we left for Vienna on Tuesday afternoon. This is the longest gap in my blogitude so far.

The conference is about to begin and I’m the the first speaker, so this will be brief:

My wife (Ann) and I spent Wednesday getting here and napping. We ran into the peripatetic Dan Gillmor in the airport and went to a traditional Viennese restaurant with him Wednesday night. Thursday, Ann and I walked around after having coffee with the conference organizer, Thomas Burg, in a converted royal greenhouse. What a beautiful city! And so clean! It makes Toronto look like a college dorm room, it’s so tidy. Thursday night was a BlogTalk dinner in a vineyard in the Vienna Woods, looking down on the city. Too much fun, too many good conversations.

Now Blogtalk is set to begin, the first European blogging conference. It’s got a great line-up of speakers, and has drawn about 160 people, mainly not from Vienna, a testament to Thomas’ skills and the interest in blogging.

Remind me to tell you later about my how-bad-can-my-German-be moment…

3 Comments »

I’m heading off to Vienna in a few hours for the BlogTalk conference. I’m keynoting, but since my wife is coming, too, I’m also touristing. Looking forward to it. I’ve never been to Vienna before.

Since my topic is “Why Blogs Matter,” I think I’m going to talk about “multisubjectivity,” a term I thought I invented by which Google shows was actually coined by by Sugiura Kohei . Damn Google! Damn Intermenet!
Anyway, the idea is that:

Objectivity isn’t really objective. We all know that.
It still beats subjectivity for a lot of stuff because objectivity at least gets out of the individual, isolated point of view.
But now blogs give us genuine access to a global range of subjectivity – multisubjectivity – which gives subjectivity the heft it’s needed to make it a useful alternative to objectivity.

Obviously, there’s much more subtlety required about when objectivity and subjectivity are useful. But that’s the basic idea.

Comments? (Just don’t expect much of a response: I’m on the road!)

13 Comments »

Here’s an anomaly that strikes a glancing blow against the pay-per-view model of Web publishing. (See the kerfuffle Doc initiated by suggesting that newspapers open their archives.)

The New York Review of Books generously has the entire text of Josephy Lelyveld’s review of Sidney Blumenthal’s Clinton book online for free. At the bottom is a link to the Letters to the Editors about the article. So far, so good.

The only letter to the editor so far is one from Lelyveld himself, titled “‘The Clinton Wars’: A Correction.” To read it, you need to subscribe to the online version or pay $4.00.

That’s just not right.

Be the first to comment »

Here’s an excellent piece by Neil McIntosh, a tech editor at the Guardian, on why Orlowski’s article about blogs distorting Google is just hooey.

Be the first to comment »

Tim Bray on Natural Language Processing:

Even if I could talk to my computer (an idea that’s never particularly appealed to me…n), would I want to speak to it in full sentences stuffed with subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases? I think I’d want to grunt things like ?Yahoo, Berlin weather? or ?break line 238? or ?spam!?.

1 Comment »

In yesterday’s issue of JOHO, I wrote:

[Heidegger] traced this back to our desire not to die, but somehow forgot to notice the fact that we’re embodied: no one can die our death for us because no one can first take our shower for us.

In an interview published in today’s Salon, Joss Whedon, talking about why Buffy has been acting more like a male hero this year, says:

It also came from “I’ve come back from the dead!” This is no small thing, no coming out of the shower.

Omigod, am I on the same psychic wavelength as Joss Freakin’ Whedon? If only!

Meanwhile, my wife and I are upset that we’re going to be on a plane tonight, unable to watch the last Buffy with our 18-year-old daughter who is tightly bonded to the show.

Be the first to comment »