"Hypertext links having weight [via Joho the Blog]. Links as vectors complete with magnitude. Your browsing has a direction and momentum that carves out a space. So if you always follow link-then-link then the subsequent link will be in the same direction. We need a topology that fits over the screen that affects your mouse cursor, so some links (in the same direction) are easier to move towards than others. (Example: Clicking a link is like propelling yourself in a certain direction with a certain velocity. This direction/velocity is determined by the link author and your own behaviour. On the target page, you retain your browsing momentum. Links in a different direction are harder to move towards. This is attained by putting a third dimension over the page which changes how easy it is to move your cursor. Perhaps.)"
"I've put up a simple proposal on how to make links more useful by applying votes to them:
I think this fits in well with the Googlers/stir stuff you've been writing about.
The motivation is to have a per-link expression of whether it is to something you agree with or disagree with, or are indifferent to. The indifferent one is likely a good default for automatically-generated links, such as trackbacks."
Anne Galloway said a lot about how blogs interrelate: ...we're looking at constantly shifting contexts, shifting uses, shifting practices, shifting meanings, shifting understandings.
I'm talking about how each time a post is referenced somewhere away from its place of origin, it is recontextualised and takes on a more or less different meaning. During the panel discussion I was struck by the lack of consideration for any type of tool that could point to (measure) the qualitative experience of blogging - wouldn't that be valuable information if one were developing the next wave of blog-related applications? I'd like to know how social interactions differ amongst different types (genres? voices?) of blogs. I'd like to better understand how excited people (including myself) were when we actually met some of our favourite "people behind the blogs" while at SXSW. I just think blog-spaces are much bigger (less contained?) than they sometimes appear.
One of the reasons this seems so important an insight has to do with how so much of what is going on between and among bloggers falls outside what can be identified and tracked as "content." I tried to flesh this out in a comment:
''Much of the effort at tracking blogs has been made under the sign of "content" - as that unholy word is generally understood in media circles. As such, the representation of relations among various blogs, bloggers and blogged stuff is oriented toward discursive speech and often insensitive to other elements, such as the social, temporal, affective and recontextualizing elements you point to, along with qualitative elements of design, tone, timing and figure that go to matters of voice, indirection and sensibility that can elude "capture" by bots looking for "memes" or other discursive connections. Lots to mull here and to revisit.''
Anne points to the model of the rhizome as a model better suited to represent "the constantly shifting contexts, shifting uses, shifting practices, shifting meanings, shifting understandings" that obtain between and among blogs.
Through Ton's blog, we found mrG speaking thusly: The key is, we don't go looking for a guru, we go looking for consensus and while it's far from finished product, right now the combined mycellial effects of the blog ecology are the best consensus-sifting machine invented. This suggests to me yet another different way to look at the Power Law observations: Could it be that we seek those voices that agree with our alignments to a consensus, and not the other way around?
There's something to this notion of looking for "consensus," although the "con" is always a matter in question. Some days on Blogdex it seems to be largely Persian bloggers, other days, politicos. But consensus finding via blogs brings with it a host of additional values - time, voice, dialogue, familiarity with the writer(s) etc.
A scarcely pondered notion, but what the hell: News travels fast in music. Much faster than in "news." Music is aural news. Think about jazz - someone plays a new tune - that means it's out - seconds later, sidemen are all over it, taking it somewhere else. Parker takes the tune to some fucked level of speed insanity, and, like, simultaneously, everyone Parkerizes. Jeneane or George might have more to say about this. A lot of hearing and riffing is bouncing around and through blogs. Ears find the tunes, the feeling of news, faster than the news. Dan Rather, cry into the folds of your silent accordion. You have too much ass to cover, too many layers of Dullness to contend with. You are never heard, only cited. Voice is dead in there. Blogs chase tunes the way Parker chased what he heard his fingers play.
Ton Zijlstra: "Like I said before knowledgesharing is a complex thing, chaotic, pseudo-random, a composite of many different 1-to-1 interactions. The blogosphere reflects that, it's a cloud, not a hierarchy or a necessity of consensus on content, like forums, or congresses. There is no centralized push, you experience only push as far as there are pulls within you to accept it. It's not ideal, but it feels comfortable like an well worn coat." via wood s lot.
"Unless new cultures are able to consciously visualize, create and implement new forms of governance (remember, that means the codification and regulation of its new relationships and values), the old forms of corporate and political governance will assert themselves, penetrate the new culture and turn it to the same old ends. The Internet culture was too enthralled by new toys to pay attention to such mundane matters as governance. It failed to "Institutionalize its deinstitutionalization."
"Democratic or otherwise, rarely, very rarely, does any concentration of power or wealth desire to see subjects well informed, truly educated, their privacy ensured or their discourse uninhibited.
........ [In Visa] Every neuron trusts the other neurons to perform in an acceptable manner which results in the trust between cardholder and merchant that is essential to the functioning of the system. Multiply this single transaction by twenty thousand banks, 220 countries, millions of merchant locations and more than a billion card holders and you have a whole hell of a lot of excitement. Imagine what such a system would look like if its currency were ideas and concepts rather than money. Is this what you mean by blogging?"
