It's a dirty job but somebody has to do it.
A memetics experiment — pass it along.
Life in the Aggregator. An Experiment: Life in the Aggregator. How far can it travel? Please play by passing it along, including all source links... [jenett.radio]
I'm willing to play [McGee's Musings]
There we go. [via Seb's Open Research]
(via both2and)
categories: memewatch
10:35:56 PM 
say what []
Don Park responds to Ray Ozzie's obituary for publishing, saying "Publishing is not dead." I would tend to agree. Publishing is definitely sick, buffeted by unfamiliar pressures, in disarray, due for some changes, racing to keep up with technology changes, slow to adopt technology. Publishing is many things.
(I feel mildly qualified to comment myself having spent most of my adult life in the publishing industry, wearing a number of different hats—editor, author, agent, book packager, e-book experimenter—and the last eight years publishing online in one format or another.)
But the Web has been promising disintermediation for a long time and Tim O'Reilly has written some good stuff about reintermediation, where aggregation services fit into the supply chain, and Amazon.com as a successful web application using the Internet as an OS.
Publishing is in trouble if it doesn't change, but I thought we'd all learned by now that these changes take time. Just because you can envision a future doesn't mean that future has arrived. Often, the devil is in the details, and whoever solves the problems of the at-first insignificant-seeming bits of grit in the workings gains the benefits of friction.
Richard Tam, a visionary and entrepreneur, started iUniverse he once told me after seeing how major publishing companies deal in false scarcity and voodoo decision-making processes. "They don't know where—or who—their customers are. They have to find them all over again every time they need to market something new."
Tam's idea was to publish freely and let the market decide. Stop doing things that don't sell and keep doing things that do. This may oversimplify things the other way. At this point iUniverse is considered a print-on-demand vanity press and its success stories are not well known.
As for predictions, while they're taking their own sweet time coming true, existing processes mutate to coopt or respond to changing pressures. Book publishing (just one form of publishing, after all) may take on aspects of electronic publishing (some publishers already produce their books in an XML format for easy expression in multiple form factors). Electronic publishing formats may integrate aspects of the book experience that are still superior to the modes of ingesting writing online.
There is always a dialectic. There are always—eventually—hybrids. I'd like to see a hybrid interface: some kind of smart paper, something tactile, something you can skim easily with your hands the way you can riffle the pages of a book, but with the augmentations of hyperlinking, deep structure, updates, interactive content, and so on.
In the meantime, we are publishing, and selling, more books today than ever before. This despite the fact of a computer-book recession, an IT recession, a tech recession, a games recession, an optimism recession.
Don Park mentions the aspect of time:
Technology will take at least 40 more years to reach the level of availability and convenience necessary to kill off publishing: 10 years to emerge and mature, another 10 years to be cheap and convenient enough, and 20 years of deathwatch (old habits die hard). Rising cost of paper will obviously become a major fudge factor.
Surprisingly revelant to this discussion is a book last revised 1960, The Truth About Publishing by Stanley Unwin.
categories: memewatch outspoken syllabus
8:58:02 PM say what []
Dylan Tweney has summarized some of the recent thinking on weblogs (overlapping with many of the recent links posted here) in an article in which he also discusses realizing the personal knowledge-management benefits of keeping a weblog:
In other words, I realized that a weblog could be a useful tool for personal knowledge management as well as for public communication. Because it's so easy to create and update a weblog — the characteristic that has made blogging boom in the past year — it's an ideal information capture device. Whenever you come across something interesting online, you can easily drop a link, a quote, and/or a comment into your weblog, and move on. You may never return to it, but it's there if you ever want to look it up again. Same with passing thoughts: Just jot them in the weblog.I agree that we need to see better forms of archival, retrieval, and organization. Either searching needs to get really smart, or some aiding for of taxonomy building has to help organize weblog entries by relationship. Just capturing knowledge or references is only half the battle.
categories: knowhow memewatch metablog
7:14:56 PM say what []
Since I'm paying (partly) for hosting, I don't like the idea of abandoning the blogs.salon.com domain entirely, impersonal as a (binary-looking, in my case; 0001111) usernum might be. I'm thinking maybe once I get started moving categories over (some to other URLs) I will at least keep salonika, my Salon Blogs channel, and radioactive, my Radio Questions and other Radio-specific entries channel here on this community server.
My question is, though, can I move the home page and thus the root address over to http://radiofreeblogistan.com and still keep some of my categories streaming here to the rcs.salon.com community server?
categories: salonika fireweaver metablog radioactive
3:45:57 PM say what []
So I promised to send him some links to philosophy blogs. Is there a good hub for such? If Wittgenstein were here today, would he be making his Tractatus notes online?
categories: metablog
11:01:44 AM say what []
Robb makes the case that weblogs will (and do) scale more effectively than discussion groups:
Too much input is exactly the reason that discussion groups can't scale. A serial thread on a topic with a million contributors swamps a discussion. As a reader, I can't find the good posts in massive discussion group or mailing list. The signal-to-noise ratio is much too low.(That's not the half of it.) Follow the link for the rest of the argument.
However, weblogs change the equation. Each contributor gets a space where they can express their ideas. Their contributions aren't buried under the weight of the community's contributions in their personal space. The central hub of a weblog community provides a way to find these personal spaces, with each personal space acting as a filter or proxy for thousands of other sources. As the community scales the number of potential connections balloons. It isn't a broadcast system with one source of content, it is decentralized system with millions of sources. It is a marketplace for ideas and insight. By subscribing to a particular weblog, I am opting to transact with their idea flow without the noise of other voices.
categories: memewatch metablog
10:52:02 AM say what []
