Oliver Wrede sets up weblogs for university courses. He asks students to take charge of particular topics, stimulating posts.

Courses are linear and end when they end. Oliver would like to find a way to create loop so it won’t come to a screeching halt. So, he’s making a knowledgebase, feeding into new courses what’s been learned from previous ones. In fact, it stimulates new courses. In fact, after the course ends, the weblog continues. 80% of the visitors come from Google searches.

See here and here.

He looks at the posts between Winer and Palfrey about blogging the NH primary. What isn’t said in the posts are a set of background assumptions and context. Paul Ford, he says, has categorized a variety of “speech acts” (John Austin, John Searle) routinely round in weblogging, e.g., two opposing opinions posted in proximity are an “OppoLog.” Two of his students wrote some software to map the links while indicating the type of links.

He points to a paper by Richard Seel (“Emergence in Human systems”) that give the qualities required for business organization to be emergent. Oliver points out that they are the same qualities typical of weblogs.

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