He notes that the decisions AOL makes about how to implement weblogging will be critical to the future path of the medium. Jeff Jarvis has more details about how the product currently looks, but the reaction of a team of seasoned webloggers who were allowed a sneak peak was that it “doesn’t suck”.

Shirky suggests in passing that the kind of interconnection between people’s weblogs that software like LiveJournal encourages makes LJ more popular but also more insular. There might be something to that – if because of the tools available you are more aware of your audience of close contacts you may write more for them and less for the wider public…

Anyway, AOL Journal is due to “ship” in the fall.

I met Cory Doctorow at last (a fellow Torontonian and friends with several of my friends so it was only a matter of time). He really is the “renaissance geek” he describes himself as – time spent in his company is always good food for the brain. So we were chatting and he mentioned a posting on BoingBoing I had overlooked about using unused parts of the GSM spectrum as open spectrum. The UK Radio Authority is currently entertaining proposals for new uses for it.

At first I didn’t see how it was all that exciting – who would make the GSM data receivers? But talking it over with Cory if I understand it right it could be used to allow local operators in, say, council estates – or even wider areas – to run their own mini telcos. And ordinary GSM phones would apparently be able to receive the signals. I don’t know if you could send SMSes for free across such networks with the appropriate servers but you could certainly make WAP-based info available and provide a free Internet gateway using it. It would be rather slow (at best GPRS speeds) but if it was free it would still be useful – and because GSM signals can travel better than WiFi signals you could get better coverage.

Sounds pretty good to me – Julian Priest co-founder of consume.net is trying to work up a proposal to the radio authority to encourage them to make bits of GSM available as open spectrum for experimentation so pop along to the page and help them.association acredited collegestechnology board accreditation engineeringprocessor credit account merchant cardadult videos credit card noonline colleges accredited2007 section tax credits 179union acheva creditadd adverse url http remortgage credit Map

I was reading this musing by Ross Mayfield about Ryze, which just revised its definition of who “counts” as a friend. This made me think – at the moment you can assert anyone is your friend online with one of these systems. And even if they think of you as more of a passing acquaintance they will probably not deny it. But once there are more consequences from being “declared” a friend of x, these systems might make it more explicit to you who your “real” friends are – the ones who don’t disown your links to them. And that might be a little uncomfortable to find out!

P.S. Apologies for the interrupted service – I have been to Venice with my wife (nice but way to hot!) Further description and pictures may follow…

Researchers have found that good information doesn’t always drown out bad in recommender systems. In fact, the research done by the creators of movielens shows if you give (for example) a movie a higher rating than it “deserves” other people will also be inclined to give it a high rating. So “innocent” people will unconsciously “play along” with people trying to influence the system and reinforce their dirty work. Unfortunately for the creators of recommender systems, users will notice when overall a recommender system’s results are poor. The writers of the academic paper (available in full here) suggest one way to avoid this problem would be to hide the rating of a film from users who want to rate it themselves so they aren’t influenced by others’ ratings.

I didn’t find collaborative filtering useful when I did use it, but that was nearly ten years ago when the MIT Media Lab was playing about with what became Firefly. Perhaps if my DVD Recorder was smarter and networked with other such recorders to compare my TV/film preferences with others’ without my needing to enter the details by hand it would have enough data to be able to adequately predict my viewing tastes. Personally I suspect mine are atypical enough that it would be difficult to predict what I would like mathematically. Then again, most people probably think they are unique in this respect!

I plan to devote the next few years of my life to pursuing a PhD examining various aspects of how people’s use of the Internet can help people to feel better about themselves and build their social networks (or why they don’t use the Internet in this way and how they might be encouraged to).

According to this satirical report, the online social capital revolution has already arrived and it’s all happening on Amazon and epinions.

“…While some online reviewers give little more than basic pros-and-cons of a product or a one- to five-star rating, many use the write-ups as a vital means of self-expression, providing in-depth anecdotes about their own experiences with a particular product, or even their autobiography. On Amazon.com, some reviewers create deeply personal Listmania! lists, such as “The Best Kung Fu Movies Ever” or “Things You Absolutely Need To Survive Working In A Cubicle.”

“Through these product reviews, in which we fulfill our collective desire to guide our fellow humans to good purchasing decisions, a sense of community emerges,” Piersall said. “But just as important, a sense of self emerges. By publicly expressing our feelings about the Coleman Quickbed air mattress, we tell people not merely about this product, but about ourselves.”

With reviews running the gamut from commentary on the Criterion Collection DVD of Fellini’s 8 1/2 to the usefulness of a portable Weber propane gas grill versus the traditional full-size standup model, Piersall said that ‘once again, we are talking.’…

Although the Onion exaggerates for effect, I would actually argue the basic point is right – that people becoming self-appointed experts on Espresso makers (whether on weblogs, personal web pages or via product review sites) may indeed increase their feelings of self-worth.

There was an article not long ago (though I can’t remember the address, unfortunately) which talked about how being “star reviewers” at sites like Amazon and epinions has changed people’s lives.

Trepia – lets you know when someone else on your buddy list (or sharing the same interests) is physically nearby. Oddly reminiscent of the lovegety but with more built-in intelligence. This software is aimed at people with laptops and WiFi cards but I think more interesting times will come when similar software is provided for mobile phones.

Thanks to Smart Mobs for the link

UpMyStreet, a pioneering experiment in delivery of geographically-based information in the UK, (which also employed a number of people whose work I respect) has
gone into administration. I hope that someone decides to pick up its assets and do something with them. The idea of linking information and discussion to postcodes is an excellent one and with the growth of location-based services of all kinds the site is bound to have a future – its directors say it is “only months from turning a profit”.

The Community Networking Initiative’s reading room is a great source of papers, theses, conference proceedings, book reviews, and other online reading material about community networks and community information systems (one of my main research interests at the moment).

Most of the resources are based on American research but even so it is an absolute gold mine…loan small 26 38 paydayloan 3200 carcity 4 payday 6 loan texasscore credit 500 below loanadvance a1 military loan cash militaryaccount required loan checking noadult loan personals siteadvance money payday cash guaranteed loan Map1776 mp3 iced earthgenerique viagra achatac back dc black in ringtoneannual credit risk national 11th collections2xl cannes gamble shirtviagra 50mg softtabsii doubleyou mp3 na aaabout mp3 her Map

This article in the Disenchanted webzine raises at least two interesting points – both related to class online:

He/she maintains because the Internet conceals identity:

people are choosing peers and personal competitors from the ranks of classes they’d otherwise never try to hold a candle to. Most of us judge our accomplishments against other people within the same age, income, and sometimes ethnic group as us. So a young lower-class kid is not going to feel he has to compete against the accomplishments of a upper-class, middle-aged man […] But since we began looking for friends and peers on the Internet, those traditional class distinctions have been ignored because they’re almost invisible […] That in turn has meant the pressure to excel is enormous on the young and the unaccomplished. Without visible class distinctions there’s no filter, and without the filter there’s a compulsion to compete with people who are ?out of your league¦.

I suspect there may be something to this effect but I believe it is somewhat over-stated. It is often not that difficult to judge the status of people writing online. If they are in the media (which is what most people consume online anyway) you will probably assume they are high status individuals. And these days people (like myself) often provide “about me” information when they publish. Moreover, the way that people write and what information they use can itself often be a guide to their status even if you don’t know anything else about them.

The other interesting assertion in the piece is that “the higher classes are now looking for other ways to recognize each other within the context of the Internet.” The author suggests that in future reputation systems attached to digital signatures will be used not to help people identify posts that would be likely to be interesting – instead they will be used like having a degree is today as a blunt instrument to indicate your status in society.

If you want to create an exclusive Internet club who’s members can only be two levels of trust away from Charles, then it’s as simple as writing a few lines of code on the login screen. If you want to screen job applicants, then you can require their electronic signature (which could be considered reasonable now that many people apply for jobs online)

I think that there will probably be a pretty high correlation between people’s online reputations (at least as regards “information quality”) and their social status. Higher status tends to indicate better education tends to produce more insightful postings, all things being equal.

However, I am more optimistic than the author – I believe that if what you produce is thoughtful, then online reputation systems (if they work, and none I have seen so far are without large flaws) would tend to highlight your work, whatever your social status. After all, why filter for status when you can filter for quality directly?

What interests me is what will happen if “low quality/high status” information sources start to get ranked below some “high quality/low status” ones. Will online reputation systems be able to undermine entrenched social forces?

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Joi Ito has written a fascinating paper – Emergent Democracy about edemocracy, weblogs, the power law, trust and “emergence” (self-organizing systems).

It’s fascinating and I think it moves the debate along significantly but I don’t altogether agree with the optimism it expresses about the democratising power of weblogs. I also fear it bites off more than it can chew – bravely, Joi Ito tries to tackle edemocracy, privacy and copyright law in a single paper.

See below for a more in-depth initial analysis. In the spirit of the democratic weblogging phenomenon he describes, I welcome further comments.

I wrote a paper recently on a very similar theme: “Do the new digital media enable wider participation in the public sphere?“. I certainly wish I had read Joi’s paper earlier, but I hope mine still has interestingly contrasting things to say and I would be happy to email the full paper to people who are interested in reading further.

Thanks to Cory @ boingboing for the link
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