Mathemagenic

Peter Caputa on reading someone else's feeds:

Bloglines allows users to make 'what feeds they read' public. (ie mine, amy gahran, martsanz, mfagan)

I started reading through Amy Gahran's feeds and I felt like a bit of a voyeur. Of course, SNSs allow people to spill a lot of info about themselves, and some people have no holds barred on what they write in their weblog, eurekster lets people share what they search for. And now bloglines lets people see what you read.

I am thinking outloud here, and just wondering what the implications for this are? It isn't like I could feasibly read everything Amy Gahran reads. But, I can tell a lot about her based on 1) what she reads and 2) how she categorizes it.

[...]I think browsing someone's public bloglines subs is the quickest way for me to find out about someone and what they are into. An advanced, yet still easy to digest, business card.

[...]And last random thought/question: When will the big hosted blogging services (ie blogger, typepad, livejournal) integrate an aggregator. Imagine knowing not only what people search for (google), write(blogger) and read (bloglines). It wouldn't be too hard to guess what I was thinking if you could monitor all that. You could call it google brain monitor.

I'm a bit hesitant to make my Bloglines subscriptions public: mainly because I don't feel comfortable with people finding that some are in the "Core" category and others don't :)

Btw, you can earn 5$ linking to Peter (it's not that I need 5$, but may be you do :)

At last BlogWalk I was trying to explain my ideas about ideal wiki/weblog tool, so just writing them down.

I wrote about blogs and wikis for thinking earlier, so just in brief on what is important for me:

• process - weblogs are good to keep track of ideas unfolding; datestamp and preserving the original are important
• outcome - wikis are good for (collaborative) working on integrating, refactoring and connecting ideas
• connection between these two is essential - I'd like to see how bits of weblog posts turn into something more tangible

What my ideal wiki/weblog tool should do:

1. Weblog. Usual one. The only thing I need is something like liveTopics to add keywords to each post. Keywords should not be predefined and shouldn't behave like categories in Movable Type or Radio multiplying content: I need only an index that allows retrieving posts by a keyword (e.g. blog reading).

2. Linkblog. Something as easy as del.icio.us, with only one difference: when I add a keyword the link is added to the same keyword index as weblog posts (so, my posts about blog reading and links on blog reading are indexed on one page).

2.n Ideally I could have other types of logs - e.g. file log, e-mail log, reference log, book log, recipe log. Same: keywords and joint index (with an opportunity of switching indexing off for sensitive stuff).

3. Wiki. Here all the fun starts. When I post something to my weblog or any of other logs it's added to two places: keyword index (see above) and keyword wiki page. This is the time when I want the software to multiply my content: I'd like any new post about blog reading it is automatically copied at the end of wiki page called blogReading". Then I (and others) can do all the usual wiki stuff - editing wiki page making a whole from posts there.

If I add new wiki page, new keyword is added to my keyword index. If I rename a keyword then everything gets renamed and reindexed.

4. Keyword indexes (see above) - list of keywords that leads to keyword wiki pages and keyword indexes (and, of course, these two are linked).

5. Keyword (concept) maps. At least three of them: (1) visualising connections between wiki pages; (2) visualising connections between weblog posts based on co-occurrence of keywords in the same post; (3) integration of the two. All organised as webs (not trees :)

6. RSS feeds of every page (especially indexes, so people can subscribe to a keyword).

7. (just dreaming ;) Time-travel machine that keeps track and visualises changes in weblog posts, wiki pages, keyword maps.

That's it. Should not be that difficult given existing technologies. Even time-travel machines do exist. The only thing which is not in this picture is access rights (e.g. blogging to the world, to a group, to yourself). Have to think about it.

If you have a tool that integrates 1-6 I would switch to it.

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk

To start with - a piece from my comments to Blogs and CoPs: Can blogging replace communities of practice? (scroll to find)

For me (please forgive simplification) the essence of a community is in a sense of belonging and practices that its members share. I can understand that it's hard to believe looking at loosely-coupled weblogs "out there" that their authors belong to a community, but I can not discard my own feeling of "belonging" as well as indications of many other bloggers saying that weblogs help to build relations and shared understanding and to engage into reflective conversations.

I've been thinking on it for a while and trying to articulate my ideas about community clue in case of weblogs to a few people in Nürnberg and Lisbon... One more attempt.

Elmine Wijnia talks about weblogs as communication hub (also here) to find others and connect with them. I think weblogs do a bit more - they provide shared thinking space. I know that it's hard to believe that many individual weblogs, even linked, can provide a shared space, but it feels like that (and I tend to trust my feelings :)))

For me the closest metaphor is a city, a shared living space. Usually we don't know many others in our neighbourhood, but we walk on the same streets every day, see the same familiar strangers, get wet under the same rain, miss the same bus... We have a lot of context to share and meeting each other abroad we will connect easily. Living in a same city creates a sense of belonging and a sense of community...

Weblogs do as well. Of course, not for everyone (as in a city, you may not feel it). I was thinking what creates such shared context in case of weblogs. I guess it's weblog reading.

I'm thinking about my own weblog ecosystem. We don't read same weblogs, but they are interconnected, so at the end we get exposed to similar names, events, ideas, books. For example, once you get into KM blogging, you will quickly learn about wikis, join Orkut or find out who Dave Pollard is. Our experiences of blogging are never the same, like experiences of living on different streets, but in some cases they overlap enough to create a feeling of sharing the same space.

I think that those "some cases" of overlapping weblog experiences have to do with several things: density of a network, speed of ideas travelling around and time that one devotes to reading weblogs of others. The last one is important: getting to know your community takes time and you will never connect with a city when you jump in and out of a tourist bus.

I'm getting more and more convinced that when introducing someone to blogging the most important thing is to help newcomer to start feeling rhythms of blogging cities: getting a map for an orientation, learning basic terms to find a way around, finding good guides (blogs to start reading), taking time to explore and soak...

I'm playing with a "city" metaphor to explain blogging... I'm thinking of RSS as public transport lines - they take you faster where you have to be, but you miss little secrets on a way. And about risks of generalising in weblog research when one studies only specific communities (think of aliens making their opinions about humans based on their study of New York ;)

I guess it's time to dive a bit deeper into research on cities (thinking of Emergence on self-organisation of cities, William H. Whyte’s theory of triangulation, and may be even connecting with A city is not a tree).

So, may be at the end we can find out if and when weblogs can turn into a knowledge spaces...

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk

Last week I asked What would be a good way to find all (blog) pages linking to a specific blog post? and received some suggestions. I'm going to do an experiment and test all of them for finding links to a specific post.

For example, I'd like to find who links to my old post which is at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/11/23.html#a849. There are 9 trackbacks from external weblogs pointing to this post. Let's see what other tools give (in alphabetical order; links from my own weblog are excluded):

Blogdex - 6 (This is a complicated case: it doesn't show permalinks, only links to blogs and dates; 5 referrals come with wrong dates. Interesting that it gives one referral which is not in trackbacks.)

Blogdigger link search - 0 (Update: 1 external link - see comments to this post)

Update: Bloglines - 9 (see note at the end of this post)

Blogrunner - 0 (Goes back 3 month max.)

Feedster - 0 (I was suggested to use fields for advanced search, but coudn't figure out how.)

Google - 2 (after cleaning all links from my own weblog :)

Technorati - 0 (It shows 2 links but I wasn't able to trace referring posts. Indexes links from homepages only.)

Waypath Link References Search - 0 (This feature is beta. As far as I know Waypath database goes back 45 days.)

The obvious winner is Blogdex. It found most and even 1 link that wasn't in trackbacks, but if you think that you can use it to trace follow-ups for a post, you are wrong: you don't have links to referring posts, so you have to go to a weblog and dig out archives (and you'd better Google search them as dates are wrong :). Anyway, given that in his paper Cameron Marlow says that Blogdex is moving from opt-in to opt-out indexing system, the future gives a bit of hope...

If you have a tool that gives better results, please, let me know - you can be the winner then :)

Just a bit later: Piers Young and Matt Whyndham on "unhealthy (=no depth) fixation with now-ness" and short memories in the blogosphere. Joining them wondering why most of the tools allow only searching recent stuff...

One more update: thanks to Stephan Mosel the winner title goes to Bloglines with 9 links from outside :)

One more addition to your KM bloggers list: Jeremy Aarons with Dubbings and Diversions. 

Jeremy is a philosopher in KM land, traveller, juggler and he is likely to take you for an adventure (I met him at OKLC in Innsbruck and we shared not only fun of talking about knowledge work research, but also the thrill of paragliding from 2000m :)

You can start from Jeremy's thinking on KM research (for example, a series on task-based KM: one, two and three).

Although I don't believe that plane hopping is my favourite sport, I do enjoy travelling. I'm pretty happy that I've got chances to travel for work-related purposes and I usually try to stay a few more days after work. Like this time.

Meeting of Knowledge Board SIG leaders in Lisbon was a good learning experience. Presentation by Martin Dugage (should be posted online, will link then), talks and sometimes heated discussions about KB moved my understanding of community dynamics to a new level (and the discussion about integrating KB and weblogs is likely to turn into actions :) I'll probably come back to it later...

Of course I couldn't miss this opportunity and stayed in Lisbon for a couple of more days. These days were full of thinking about passions and work-life balance...

Some people like drawing a clear line between work and "life", but not me. I knew since long ago that my work is part of my life and I don't want to draw lines in between. These days I was thinking how I would like to work.

I'm thinking about weblog discussions while sightseeing with Marting Roell, about spending a few hours in park with Monica Andre talking about implementing blogging in organisations, making notes connecting Emergence with ideas about community dynamics today on the beach and about last week conversations walking around NØrnberg... I love working this way and I wonder why these moments are so rare. Why on a average day I sit in the office even if sun is shining outside, why my working hours break my natural rhythms (my "productive" schedule is different when I'm not bounded by work hours), why I have to manage with eating sandwiches for lunch (hope my Dutch colleagues forgive me :) instead of enjoying food I like...

Don't get me wrong, I like my work and office is a great space for meeting colleagues and serendipity of coffee talks. I'm just thinking about things what would make me more productive. A bit more flexibility, a bit more nature, a bit more fun... I know that there are organisations that make work fun and flexible to their people, but I wonder why they are so rare and what could be done to turn work into life. I guess one of the biggest obstacles is a myth about work/life balance, implying that work is not life, making us thinking that work should be that way - formal and full of discipline - and preventing thinking about other options...

Related: Personal or professional? by Jay Cross

BlogWalk 2.0 was a great company of people, beautiful city, sunshine walking and creative conversations. I was expecting some language problems as the majority of BlogWalk participants speak (or at least understand) German and I don't. Thanks to everyone for making effort of speaking English (and writing too :)

Now new blogs are added to my news aggregator, ideas are slowly sinking down and getting digested… Not sure I will be able to write much now, but just to note the emergent themes for later:

• Blogs as a community clue
• Relation between visualising traces of thinking and reflection (also: in connection with Mirror of danah boyd)
• Blog/wiki integration
• How to get out of the "train"?
• "Survival skills" for self-organised learners

I'm travelling againg (Lisbon, Knowledge Board meeting, till Sunday) and have some technical problems, so probably not blogging.

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk (check it for others!)

What would be a good way to find all (blog) pages linking to a specific blog post?

• trackbacks only show up if both weblogs are trackback enabled
• Technorati indexes only links from homepages
• Blogdex (and other blogtracking tools) indexes only subset of blogosphere
• Google only shows incoming links for pages

Note to myself - check more carefully, may be there is something in Site statistics for weblogs (2) and tracking tools

Sebastian Paquet points to a wiki discussion on why communities are usually tied to one technology. Many familiar faces. Great pictures. Interesting ideas... Must read.

Just thinking: I'm gradually getting connected with many people from my "weblog community" via wikis, e-mail, IM, phone... I would only say that IM/e-mail work best and these are not really "community" tools, more one-to-one communication...

For those thinking about communities and weblogs: Lee LeFever on Trackback across discussions and weblogs in a single online community space.

I'm looking for examples of business blogging in companies outside IT/media industry, preferably not examples of PR/marketing/customer relation blogging, but internal weblogs (~ project management, knowledge management, learning). Any pointers?