Wondering when (exactly) from all the aggregated clicking, tagging, writing &c. a ‘collective intelligence’ emerges, and wondering even more at what point we could speak of a community?

Look at the different, possible actions of a user — from low to high involvement:
– favoriting / bookmarking / clicking
– tagging
– commenting
– subscribing
– sharing
– networking
– writing
– refractoring (?) (criticizing, mirroring?)
– collaborating
– moderating
– leading
(copy-pasted from: http://ross.typepad.com/2006/04/power_law_of_pa.html.)

Blogging certainly comes with much less social pressures & social manners & sociality tout court, than for instance ‘hanging around’ on a forum taking part in a discussion. This is my ‘turf’. Every piece of software that facilitiates a link or a communiation comes with its own social script.

Hmm, I don’t seem to get beyond the truism tonight.

Sometimes I think advertising & marketing is so far in front of ‘us’ that we’ll never be able to catch up on what ‘they’ are doing. But a recent marketing-conference in Maastricht, http://www.marktpleindm.nl/, suggests that ‘they’ are not ahead. (Came across it through one weblog, http://ross.typepad.com/, referring to a social networking workshop for the CIA, led by a.o. David Weinberger, and checking Weinberger’s blog, http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/index.html, and finding out he’s in Maastricht at the moment). The whole conference is centered around the Cluetrain Manifesto, of 1999. Yes, that’s 7 years ago. ?!? So while the CIA is hiring ‘the big shots’ for a workshop to learn better how to use social networking tools and wiki’s, the marketeers are only now getting onto the idea that ‘markets are conversations’? Hmmm. I don’t believe it. Well, it’s a bussiness networking conference. That explains.

What strikes me more is that it takes me three clicks to go from literary theory to blogging theory, to software development, to the CIA, to marketing and back again.

Reading through about 20 papers composed for three Blogtalk conferences — some of which are very good, some of which I’m not interested in (the ones measuring & analyzing the ‘blogosphere’) — it becomes clear to me again, that my interest is in the perspective of the writer, the author. How does a writer/author use the tools of writing and publishing nowadays? I do not look at the whole blogosphere, I do not look at how we could design our tools better, or look at why certain tools are used and others are not. My question is: how does an author posit him/herself? By writer or author I do not, in this instance, refer to anybody publishing something, but to those one’s whose life depends on it — either economically or because it’s felt from ‘the soul’. This definition rules out, in a sense, those bloggers who blogs because he/she wants to join in, or start a conversation. What we see with blogging is that we get writing that is not dominantly ‘about’ something, or about itself (let’s say Jakobsons poetic function), but writing that is dominantly an invitation to chatter. (In that sense not all writing and publishing is aimed at starting or joining in a conversation). Open the channel and keep the channel open. ‘Let’s talk, it doesn’t matter about what, because I feel like talking’. Yet the boundary is very shady and will become shadier in the future. My questions concern exactly that boundary too.

Now browsing through Blogtalk-papers: http://blogtalk.net. (I’m not there, don’t ask why, earlier this year I thought about maybe going, then apparently decided not to, since I’m here, not there).

The blogtalk-presentations (happening now) are all online at Googlevideo: click from the program: http://blogtalk.net/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Program

Some links — very different btw — with somewhat web 2.0 related stuff:
http://sioc-project.org/
http://www.peopleaggregator.net/
http://structuredblogging.org/
http://www.newsvine.com/
http://www.blogdigger.com
http://itags.net/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.ourmedia.org/
http://www.digg.com/
http://www.techmeme.com/
http://wink.com/

And a very interesting small study of tagging here: http://itags.net/index.php/Study_of_tagging_with_bloggers”

I’ve been spending (losing?) time the last three days by looking at various projects that one could call ‘web 2.0’, or, more precise (?) websites & softwares that try to use (cash in?) on the power of social networking. Mostly it’s applications that provide users with some sort of wiki- blogging, FOAF-networking, and/or tagging functionality — a particular blend (melange) of it, plus a nice (?) interface designed to appeal to a certain userbase. Or hoping to find a user-base. Some of them, I’d say, are nice & will succeed to find that user-base, others come across to me as a commercial wager that can either succeed (like MySpace) or be forgotten. Some are closer to the idea of the Semantic Web, others hope that order (or usability) will emerge from the ‘multitude’.

On a personal level — speaking about this particular user: me — I haven’t seen a project that I would use regularly myself. I might sometimes use delicious, upload photos to Flickr and I have an account on Technorati (that I do not use) — but all three services are in no way necessary. I could do without. This probably posits myself as an old-skool internet-user, generation 1994. If I need wiki-functionality, I’ll use a wiki myself. (Btw my provider has set one up for every user). I can publish using ftp, html &c. Of course I enjoy the functionalities that are available now. Yet most on them strike me as ‘not designed for me’.

It’s not that I am content with whatever there is: I would really like to see a better (= more aesthetically appealing) interface for reading RSS-feeds. A better way of organizing the feeds. And I love to see better content, especially for news & background to the news.

(Not reading newspapers every day, and skipping a few days of newspaper reading last week I missed that the chess-match between Kramnik and Topalov had started! I was extremely annoyed: I like to follow that, but it’s below (or above) the radar of all the web-sources I’m bound to check. I wonder if social networking would have helped here. Chess won’t pop-up that easily in my profile.) (Just to say that — I think — there will always be a need for ‘general interest’-publications = newspapers, and for human editors next to software-channeled editors).

Software-channeled (software/computer/algorithm) newsservices like Digg and Newsvine can work. Mankind has been experimenting with these sort of concepts for ten years now (chuck a lot of stories in a database, let users vote, analyze the voting and the user-behavior & then deliver the personalized content to the user). But I’m utterly unimpressed with both Digg and Newsvine. Not enough content and no content that has my interest.

And wrt Technorati. I hardly feel tempted to explore all the different functionalities (though I’d say the search engine and the tags work quite well). I’m not interested in my ranking (don’t think I’m ranked, did I ‘claim’ my blog at all?) And what keeps me from using it, is the feeling/impression that every action I perform there is part of a huge datamining-experiment. It’s mostly a ‘feeling’ — though it is a huge datamining experiment, but Google is as well & I use Google without too many second thoughts. (We’re not going to escape datamining. The question is: who is doing it, on what grounds, what is done with the data).

I’m also not so much into social networking: I like to write & read. Let’s say — radically — : it’s the texts, the content, that weaves the web; not the functionalities of the software. I’m happy if I can give my attention to that.

Wrt to attention: I still have to order the (new) Richard Lanham book about the economy of attention. And it seems Roseanne Stone said some important things about this in her lecture at the crossmedia-week, referring that we live in a ‘partial attention’ state of mind. That’s not multitasking anymore: we’re continuously partially paying attention to lots of things. Research learns that this leads to enormous stress. We know that, but what captured my attention is the apparent difference between multitasking and partial attention. Found on http://www.uzy.nl/2006/09/28/picnic-06-dag-2/. Will check for a more elaborate reference.

Maybe the disappointed, irritated tone of this entry is to be traced back to ‘too much browsing around’ and too little concentration.

Just quickly read 2 articles that seemed interesting.

“Structure of Self-Organized Blogosphere” — (language: international english of the Chinese variety) — pdf here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/math.ST/0607361. Which is ‘one of those’ statistical analyses of linking in the blogosphere. Conclusions: ‘the blogging network has small-world property’ and the distribution of links-in and links-out follows a power-law. In other words: here’s a sort of statistical ‘proof’ of the common knowledge that a few celebrity blogs receive lots of incoming links, and most blogs hardly receive links. I’m not so interested in this kind of network-research, it seems to be more about (statistical/mathematical) network-theory, than about communication, flow of information &c. tho’ it’s possible that I miss the point.

“Copy and Paste Literacy: Literacy Practices in the Production of a MySpace Profile – An Overview” by Dan Perkel strikes me as more interesting: a simple and to the point analysis of how MySpace is used. He argues that one could see MySpace as an “informal learning environment that fosters the development of new literacies”. One could state that of a lot of similar enviroments and softwares, I’d say, yet this overview, accompanied by different theories about ‘literacy’ I found worthwhile reading. It is clear and straightforward in its approach — looking at how copy & pasting of code, links, images, music and video is used in MySpace. Although, again it does not go further than confirming what one (well, I) already believe(s). But that’s no so bad… Text is online here: http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dperkel/media/dperkel_literacymyspace.pdf.

Found these papers thanks to http://jilltxt.net.

Perkel points to the ‘problem’, for theories of literacy, that copy&paste and remixing is generally not seen as ‘writing’. (Well, he writes: “However, the importance of copying and pasting code does not easily fit in the common conventions of reading and writing, consumption and production.”) But what if we’d go back to antique rhetorics, where learning to deal with the tropes and commonplaces, is part of learning to write & construct an argument. To really make that analogy would be stretching the point — yet I’d say that ‘writing’ is also learning to use “pre-fab elements” in a good way. (And then the question is: what is that good way?)

Nice (well, useful, quotable) quotes:

“Genre is the conceptual glue that binds social activity to technical activity. In order to understand what literacy might be, one must pay attention to the particularities of social activity, to the particularities of media, and also to the generic forms and competencies that groups share in their use of a media.” (p. 3)

“Bakhtin argues that, “genres must be fully mastered in order to be manipulated freely,” implying both a mastery of both recognizing generic forms and using them, or generic competencies (80).” (p. 6)

“HTML and CSS, like other programming languages, encourage a particular way of thinking about problems. For example, learning to use them requires learning how to think modularly. The rhetoric concerning the separation of content and style, however useful, embodies a certain way of understanding communication.” (p. 8)

“The idea that same message in different form is still the same message implies that social context of use, the specifics of the activity, and the specifics of the medium have little importance in determining meaning. Regardless of how one feels about this rhetoric, learning to think this way, uncritically, may have important consequences.” (p. 8)

“[H]ow good of a learning environment is MySpace for mastering the representational form and technical competency of web programming? Certainly, it provides an introduction to the medium, and some even may learn more about HTML and CSS as a part of trying to customize their profiles. However, the way in which the MySpace designers use CSS works completely against the point of style sheets.” (p. 8) (Hear me say: “right you are!”)

Now go on to read: Henry Jenkins, “Learning by Remixing”: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/07/learning_by_remixing.html.

Finally taking a look at SPIP — a CMS of French origin, ‘logiciel libre’. Used most in Spain, Italy and France, and much less for English context: http://www.spip.net/.

I’m only now beginning to appreciate the music & musicianship of Anthony Braxton. I have listened to him in the past, I have seen him perform live a few times, but his music never “arrived”, so to say, in my heart nor head. Yes, I loved him on Dave Hollands Conference of the Birds, I have a record with Ray Anderson, John Lindbergh and Thurman Barker from I think 1979 or 1984, I pushed record on the taperecorder whenever some Braxton would come on the radio. But when I was frantically discovering all the jazz, going from Parker to Dolphy to Coltrane and Ornette, and then on to David Murray, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Henry Threadgill — I somehow skipped Braxton. I knew that he was considered a major voice and For Alto sort of a defining moment of seventies jazz/impro. I knew that I should try to get hold of his work with Barry Altschull. But his tone seemed so thin, he looked so rationally, unpassionately professorlike, that I never did.

But now look at his 1980 performance of Coltrane’s Impressions — at Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o0AYFRFX7g.

My discovery of Braxton is triggered partly by the discussion on 1970s jazz that travelled through various music-blogs last week — after Dave Douglas asked if someone could come up with a list of what is most worthwile from that era of jazz. See a.o. the wonderful http://destination-out.com/ & http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/2006/08/ethan_iversons_.html. A difficult era — if you ask me –. Jazz lost it’s place in the hierarchy of music to rock, and after freejazz there seemed to to be no way ‘onwards’. Looking back in retrospect at the legacy of seventies jazz — even if one leaves out the European free improv-scene and some spaced-out jazzrock — this seems unbelievable: so many great new sounds evolved. I tried to make my list: Henry Threadgill (hardly mentioned, strangely), Lawrence Butch Morris (his conductions are, well, awesome — they move me deeply), Anthony Braxton, David Murray, Richard Muhal Abrams, John Carter, Gerry Hemingway (also hardly ever mentioned — his early trio with Ray Anderson & Mark Helias is wonderful), Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis… And that’s just a few of the persons who came up with new conceptions, mixtures and radical sounds. See, I don’t even mention New York downtown scene (some of the best Zorn-stuff is late seventies).

Next thing to do here is listen to Steven Shaviro’s lecture at the Thinking Through Affect-conference http://affect.janvaneyck.nl. Shaviro blogs here: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/.