MiscLinks

Eric Norlin is convinced that now’s the time — at last — to resolve the knotty problem of digital IDs, and he’s preparing to dig into it. His interview with Microsoft at DigitalIDWorld topic gets them on the record on the important aspects of this question.

Dan Bricklin has written an excellent report on the Nantucket Conference. This type of coverage — personal, reflected through someone as knowledgeable and thoughtful as Dan — is invaluable. Of course this was done before there were weblogs, but weblogs are making the sharing of post-conference reflections an important part of the conference itself.

BTW, Dan says nice things about my presentation at the conference and presents a summary that’s more coherent than my ramblings. I have already received an email from someone totally pissed that they wasted a click going from Dan’s site to mine. I understand someone not liking what I’ve written, but I can’t figure out the pathology of someone who writes to me just to tell me that I suck. What’s he get out of it? Ah humans. Can’t live with ’em, can’t drink yourself into oblivion long enough.

Required reading from Clay Shirky on the DNS mess. You’ll also want to read Bob Frankston for an opposing view.

Jadine Ying has an article on blogs and the J word at Spike, the magazine of the Dept. of Journalism at the University of Illinois. It focuses on the High End of bloggery, citing the Glenn Fleishman, Paul Boutin and Doc Searls cut of the jib, but that makes sense given that the article is about where the Big J meets the swarm of B’s.

Peterme recommends an article called “Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool” by Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker. They write:

Bloggers have been likened to journalists, or perhaps better, editors; they might as well be compared to researchers. To blog is an activity similar in many ways to the work of the researcher. A weblogger filters a mass of information, choosing the items that interest her or that are relevant to her chosen topic, commenting upon them, demonstrating connections between them and analysing them.

Refreshingly, each of the authors actually has experience blogging:

[O]ur weblogs became tools with which to think about our research, its values, connections and links to other aspects of the world. They altered the way in we approached online communication, and have influenced the writing of both dissertations. This is the motivation for this article: a need to look at what weblogs do to our academic thinking.

They state outright that they are not objective or detached. Woohoo! As they say: “Blogs exist right on this border between what’s private and what’s public…When a blog is good, it contains a tension between the two spheres…” They then explore the changing nature of the public sphere, with Habermas as their starting point. Excellent, thought-provoking article.

Categories: Uncategorized dw