The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality
Grok Headline matches for The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality
Inequality
Inequality
04/05/2005 07:40 PMMaciej is (1) a friend (2) very funny and (3) in agreement with my
beliefs, so I couldn't resist linking to Dabblers and Blowhards, his
new essay. But the key issue that appealed to me about his piece is
that the fundamental problem with many people who really get our...
Inequality 'rising' under Labour
Inequality 'rising' under Labour
08/01/2004 11:17 PMAn influential think tank says inequality in the UK has increased
since Labour came to power.
Inequality and the role of "fitness" in
power laws
Inequality and the role of "fitness" in
power laws
01/17/2004 10:43 PMI've been trying to push against Clay's assertion that blogs
exhibit a power law and that power laws cause inequality. You can't
"fix" the system without breaking it. We've gone back and forth in
different places and I THINK I've boiled it down to a few key points
for me.
When Clay uses the word "inequality" he means "not the
same" and indeed, in a fair system, the outcomes will usually be
inequal. I won't argue with that. What my question was was whether the
rules were fair and whether we could counteract the current bias
towards those in positions of privilege and amplify those opinions
that are currently underrepresented.
I think the notion of trying to modify or influence the system to
push it towards a particular outcome sounds like regulation and hits a
negative chord with the free market libertarian types on the Net. I am
also against unnecessary regulation. However, I do think that we can
and should try to influence the architecture to push towards an
outcome that we believe in. I think this is the nature of
politics.
Clay talks about the power law in his paper, Power Laws,
Weblogs, and Inequality. As most of you are aware, power laws are
a type of distribution exhibited by large networks that grow where
people are allowed to link freely. Since new sites tend to link to
sites that already exist or are famous, the links aggregate to the
well known sites making the "rich richer". The power law shows that
even with fair rules, the outcome will be very inequal.
Recently,
Marko and I blogged about blogs and justice in the context of the power law.
Clay recently blogged this:
We can and should talk
about the type of inequality we want — right now, for example,
most of the high-flow webloggers are men. We can ask why that is,
whether we should do anything about it, and if so, what? We
can’t ask how we can level out the difference between the
high-flow end of the popularity curve and the rest of us, or at least
we can’t ask that unless we are advocating the destruction of
the blogosphere. The interesting and hard question is “Since
there is to be inequality, how shall it be arranged?”
I think we are going to see an explosion in work designed to alter
the construction and effects of this inevitable inequality (viz
Sifry’s experiments on moving recent blogs up the Technorati
list) and I am optimistic about this change, as I believe the
concentration of real thought and energy on what is actually possible,
as opposed to cycles wasted on utopian declations, will be
tremendously productive.
So I'm glad Clay is willing to
consider what we might do about the fact that the most influential
blogs are by people in positions of privilege.
In Linked Albert-Laszlo talks a lot about power laws and makes a few
interesting points. First of all, power laws on the web make two
assumptions, that the network is growing and that people tend to link
to sites that have the most links. Laszlo cites work by Paul Krapivsky
and Sid Redner from Boston University, working with Francois Leyvraz
from Mexico,
generalized preferential attachment to account
for the possibility that linking to a node would not be simply
proportional to the number of links the node has but would follow some
more complicated function. They found that such efforts can destroy
the power law characterizing the network.
He goes on to
talk about Google coming in as a latecomer in the search game and how
"fitness" or the likelihood that someone will link to you is not
entirely determined by your existing position on the power law curve
and that a site worthy of connecting to can quickly scale the power
law curve if it exhibits exceptional fitness. All disruptive
technologies and innovations break power law curves by exhibiting
exceptional fitness.
If you think about the power law as themes or ideas instead of
people and you think about fitness as the level in which an idea
resonates with people, the power law could be viewed as an amplifier
for ideas and memes that are sufficiently interesting. Because fitness
so influences a nodes ability to climb the power law, I think the
notion that I described in the Emergent
Democracy paper, where the tail of the curve is where the
creativity happens and the power law is how an idea whose time has
come goes main stream still makes sense. I think the key to making the
system "fair" is to make sure the tail is as inclusive as possible and
to try to encourage technology and norms to value fitness over simply
linking to those who are popular. As Ross shows in
his three layers of creative, social and political, I think the
power law is the final amplification part. In fact, the tail of the
power law, the creative layer and the social layer where the initial
deliberation occurs might be where we should be focusing our
energies.
I have a feeling that the blog power law is like a real-time
amplifier. I think it is key to note that nodes that lose the fitness
that got them there in the first place retire very quickly and that
fitness is amplified in scale-free networks. If we architect blogs to
allow the amplifier to be sensitive to positive fitness and quickly
retire irrelevant blogs, it will be a good amplifier. If the
Technorati top 100 is the Marshall amp, maybe we should be talking
about the guitar?
old.webl0gs.com
old.webl0gs.com
06/14/2004 03:50 AMold.weblogs.com
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site | 38 links
More on the webl0gs.com/rss
More on the webl0gs.com/rss
03/13/2003 10:16 AMDave Winer again:: "Second, I believe it was a mistake to spec the new
element as part of the blogChannel...
"old.webl0gs.com"
"old.webl0gs.com"
06/17/2004 11:32 AMHow many webl0gs are there in the UK?
How many webl0gs are there in the UK?
12/09/2003 10:54 AMRight. For a whole range of reasons, I'm getting increasingly
interested in finding out how many weblogs there are in the UK. If we
could demonstrate that a large number of UK-based webloggers exist,
then it could have a whole range of effects: it could encourage
publishers to find constructive ways to engage with the community,
could encourage UK-based people/companies to get more involved in
building weblog-based software (or to spend time thinking around Denton-esque micro-publishing
ventures like Gawker, Fleshbot and Gizmodo). All kinds of stuff.
Now there's no really useful way of effectively measuring these
things, but it occurs to me that we'd probably be able to motivate a
good number of people to make themselves known as weblogers if
everyone who read this post stuck up a mention/plug for one or more of
the major geographical portals onto their sites. So I'm going to
wander off now and check that I'm listed on:
And please - if you've got ten minutes and are interested in
helping to uncover the lost continent of UK webloggers out there, then
stick something on your site about this too.
"certain webl0gs"
"certain webl0gs"
06/05/2004 09:07 AM"Webl0gs.com"
"Webl0gs.com"
02/17/2004 08:53 AMwebl0gs come webl0gs go
webl0gs come webl0gs go
06/16/2004 01:23 PMThe most painful kind of generosity are the promises you cannot
fulfill. The people who were once so grateful then turn on you, and
your self-esteem is sure to take a beating.
Many years ago, in a fit of generosity, Dave Winer offered to host all
early-bird adopters of editthispage.com free hosting of their weblogs.
This included php.weblogs.com.
Well Dave Winer recently announced that he was closing down the
weblogs.com and editthispage.com websites. He no longer runs a company
that can support these sites and they are a personal and financial
strain on him.
I was disappointed, but I had no expectations that Dave would do this
in perpetuity. My momma taught me to keep my expectations low when it
comes to free things. After all, Dave and I have never met, and I've
only exchanged a couple of emails with him.
I had a feeling that something like this was going to happen because
the site has suffering from poor performance this past month. So my
contingency plan was to ship the weblog to a commercial hosting
service like weblogger if need be. During the weekend, just before the
site was cut off, and before any announcement by Dave, I moved my most
important open source project to sourceforge, to
http://adodb.sourceforge.net/.
Today I got an email from Lawrence, Userland's webmaster:
Subject: php.weblogs.com
From: "Lawrence Lee" deleted#userland.com
Date: Wed, June 16, 2004 1:46 am
To: jlim#natsoft.com
Priority: Normal
Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook, Build 11.0.5510
We'll be continuing to host php.weblogs.com, we made special
arrangements
with Dave to keep it running.
Lawrence
I didn't ask for special treatment, so this is a pleasant surprise.
Apparently the people at Userland decided to host this weblog and Dave
emailed me, saying he had nothing to do with this decision. Of course
I don't expect this offer to be permanent either, and I will deal with
that when the time comes. The website's performance is still terrible
though, and I have no expectations about this either.
For those who ever wondered what the icon below each post means, it's
a graphic emoticon of how i feel. I think the jazz singer Billie
Holiday is an appropriate image for this post; her songs are always
bitter-sweet. It sure feels like Stormy
Weather or Come Rain or
Shine.
I would also like to thank those of you who emailed me privately about
this issue. RSS seems the best
way to access this web-site at the moment, as it continues to go down
at random times.
Webl0gs, Inc.
Webl0gs, Inc.
04/15/2005 04:52 AMWeblogs, Inc. Home Page - www.weblogsinc.com .. weblog
'trade-publishing' .. Jason Calacanis .. weblogsinc .. blurb .. WIN ..
It
weblogsinc.com
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Webl0gs.com Needs Help
Webl0gs.com Needs Help
12/17/2004 06:37 PMAs anyone who pings it knows,
weblogs.com is not holding up well
under the strain of the blogosphere’s
growth curve.
Today Dave Winer is
asking for help in getting it re-engineered. He seems to be
convinced that it has to be done in C; I wouldn’t be surprised if a
smart PHP or Java (
Velocity
maybe?) implementation could carry the load just as well. On the other
hand, for someone who’s never
written an Apache module, this
would be a simple one, it’s a useful skill, and that’s about as
close to the metal as you can get. In any case, I’m pretty sure
Dave’s right that it wouldn’t be a good idea for a big company
(like Sun, for example) to step up and say “we’ll do it” because
the suspicion of cheating from outsiders, and the temptation to tilt
the table a little for insiders, would both be a real issue. A pity,
because a big company (like Sun, for example) already has the
infrastructure to support this and wouldn’t even notice the
bandwidth. And a pity because I already know how to write Apache
modules and would like to learn Velocity. I’m dubious that the
notion of “one central place that everyone pings” is going to hold
up for the long term, but for the time being it’s useful and would
be a good project for anyone with the cycles to spare.
Unicode and webl0gs
Unicode and webl0gs
04/19/2004 08:33 AMHossein Derakhshan: We should promote Unicode standard among English
speaking programmers. Many tools do not work well with Unicode and
this
sucks. Spread the meme Please test your clients, servers,
comments, and feeds. ...
Los webl0gs en cifras
Los webl0gs en cifras
07/19/2004 02:45 PMWebl0gs about books
Webl0gs about books
10/28/2003 11:06 PMI’ve recently subscribed to three weblogs about books.
Bookslut [
RSS]
h20boro lib [
RSS]
the Literary
Saloon [
RSS]
Anyone know of any other good ones?
P.S. NetNewsWire tip: you can actually drag the RSS links above into
your Subscriptions pane to subscribe. This works with any link to an
RSS feed, and it often works with links to the home page of a site.
d2r: an introduction to webl0gs
d2r: an introduction to webl0gs
11/02/2003 06:30 AMintroduction .. blog ..
d2R
dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002399.html
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MP3 Music Webl0gs
MP3 Music Webl0gs
08/31/2004 05:56 AMI have been running the wget
script we wrote about several months ago and I am amazed at the number
of songs we are pulling down. Many are from artist I have never heard.
Some are from cover bans and their re-makes of popular music along
with music that has been ripped from a copyrighted CD. Thus far though
it has been a interesting experiment in checking out all the new
tunes. I am sure my Internet provider is happy with me as the run
today pulled 1.6 gigs of music simply amazing.
Here are the sites I poll and if you have any other MP3 weblogs
that you know about drop me a line.
http://senses.typepad.com/
http://www.3hive.com/
http://www.christopherporter.
com/
http://ggth.
typepad.com/media/mp3_blogs/index.html
http://djmartian.blogspot.com/
http://www.bellybo
ngo.com/links/sharity.html
http://www.
free-conversant.com/thom/main/2004/05/26
http://musik.antville
.org/stories/676094/
http://te
achingtheindiekidstodanceagain.blogspot.com/
http://www.fatplanet.com.au/
http://music.for-robots.com/
http://tofuhut.blogspot.com/
http://www.scenestars.blogs
pot.com/
http://blog.largeheartedboy.co
m/
http://www.l
ivejournal.com/community/talkiewalkie/
http://www.kingblind.com/
http://www.mobile-phone-
directory.org/
http://www.redfishaudi
o.com/samples.html
http://www.purevolume.com/
http://newflux.blogspot.com/
http://www.pop77.com/blog/
http://www.scissorkick.com/
http://amillionlovesongs
.blogspot.com/
http://www.moistworks.com/
http://www.o-du
b.com/crates/weblog/blogger.html
http://music.for-robots.com/
http://mul
tsanta.madvision.co.uk/blunts//indexb.html
http://tofuhut.blogspot.com/
http://www.tangmonkey.co
m/blogs/music/
http://copycommaright.blogs
pot.com/
http://the-big-ticket.blogs
pot.com/
http://www.li
vejournal.com/community/talkiewalkie/
http://www.bubble
gum-machine.com/culchah.html
http://fingertipsmusic.blo
gspot.com/
http://www.londonlee.com/blo
g.html
http://www.mysticalbeast
.blogspot.com/
http://www.livejo
urnal.com/users/moebius_rex/
"d2r: an introduction to webl0gs"
"d2r: an introduction to webl0gs"
11/02/2003 03:13 PM"3 million webl0gs"
"3 million webl0gs"
07/08/2004 08:34 AMwww.venturpreneur.com/webl0gs/arc
www.venturpreneur.com/webl0gs/arc
04/26/2004 10:57 PMCarnival of the
Capitalists
venturpreneur.com/weblogs/archives/000335.html
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Webl0gs for Capitalists
Webl0gs for Capitalists
01/22/2004 02:43 AMOn February 5th I’ll be speaking at Fastlane Ventures
"How to
Capitalize on Blogging" seminar in Dublin, CA. My presentation...
Are Weblogs A Threat or
Opportunity For Enterprises?
Where do blogs fit in? Are enterprises ready? Do blogs present a new
marketing communication tool? If yes, how can they be used to
understand customers? What are the benefits of using blogs? How are
blogs used in an enterprise? Are they just a
craze?
I’ll publish the slides for the talk after
the conference.
"really doesn't like personal webl0gs"
"really doesn't like personal webl0gs"
01/08/2004 07:18 PMOn comments and webl0gs
On comments and webl0gs
01/22/2004 02:18 PMI've thought a lot about comments on weblogs over the years, and
for a mailing list I'm on, I finally summarized some of my thoughts.
Since it might be useful for others, I'm reposting them here. They're
a few questions I ask myself related to enabling comments on weblogs
posts I make. With the proliferation of commenting-ability in today's
weblog tools, it might make sense for people to think a bit before
blindly turning on comments, whether for an individual or group
blog.
1. Do I want feedback on what I'm writing?
I never turn on comments on megnut unless I specifically want
feedback, and
I'd encourage people to think about this when they're posting to their
sites as well. Are you writing about something that can engender a
discussion? And
do you want to have a discussion about it? Not everything needs a
discussion, and if it doesn't, think about disabling comments for
a post, if only to avoid spammers and trolls.
2. Do I have time to manage a conversation right
now?
It's easy to turn on comments, it takes work to host a discussion.
Especially when the post is controversial or inflammatory, the poster
needs
to be prepared to stay on top of the thread. Do you have the time to
nurture
that discussion and keep on top of it, delete the trolls, refocus the
discussion when it gets derailed, etc.? If not, perhaps posting, or
turning
on comments, isn't such a good idea. I know I try and help out if I
see a
thread going awry but I believe it's the poster's responsibility to
make sure
her thread stays on target and remains as civil as possible.
3. Is this conversation over?
There comes a point in every thread when the conversation is done,
either
because posts have petered out or because it's gotten so out of
control and
unpleasant that it needs to end. Either way, the poster should go back
in
and set comments to "Closed." This will prevent people/spammers/trolls
from
posting in old threads, and keep the discussions alive and active on
"current" posts.
Rather than just having a blanket rule -- whether that's "comments on"
or
"comments off" -- it would be nice if we could consider these
questions
before posting. Turning on comments is an opportunity and a
responsibility.
"Me repatean los webl0gs"
"Me repatean los webl0gs"
01/25/2004 08:35 PMWebl0gs in education
Webl0gs in education
09/21/2004 04:29 PMVia Scripting News, I see a post by Michael Feldman of Dowbrigade
wishing for a stronger uptake of weblogging in the classroom.
Michael's a professor at Harvard and/or Boston University (I couldn't
quite figure it out) and has one class...
"Webl0gs Harvard Law"
"Webl0gs Harvard Law"
12/19/2003 11:55 AM"Webl0gs in Journalism"
"Webl0gs in Journalism"
01/26/2004 09:50 PMInternet Course WebLogs
Internet Course WebLogs
01/27/2004 09:13 AMThe Internet Courses - Weblogshttp://www.hi.is/~Eanne/w
eblogs.htmlAn excellent resource by
Dr. L. Anne Clyde of the
University of Iceland. The site includes
links to the following resources on Weblogs: Information and Articles
About Weblogs, Weblog Software and Resources, Directories and Guides
to Weblogs, Other Weblog Resources, Examples of LIS Weblogs, Examples
of Other Weblogs, Weblogs About Blogging and RSS.
Just don't call them webl0gs
Just don't call them webl0gs
02/11/2004 12:07 AMLots of people who write weblogs seem to take great pleasure in
debating what a weblog is, and more importantly for some, what a
weblog isn't. While trying to understanding what the new tools enable,
and how they are changing the nature of the net, journalism, and
public discourse, seems like a worthwhile enterprise, I never saw the
point of spending a lot of energy debating what was a weblog and what
wasn't. One might as well debate how many Angels can dance on the head
of a pin. I saw a great example of this today. One of the more
interesting sessions at ETech today was a presentation by three people
from different units of Disney, describing how they are using three of
the tools customarily associated with webloggers: weblogs, RSS and
wikis. During the talk, Mike Pusateri described his secret for getting
people to adopt weblogs as a tool for communicating information at
Disney, "don't call them weblogs." He just told people working in
Disney's 24/7 operations center that he had a better tool for a task
they were already doing. They were already creating what they called
shift logs to keep track of information that the people coming in on
the next shift needed to know, using a proprietary application based
on FoxPro. He told the op center staff that with the new tool (Movable
Type) they would now be able to edit and revise and format their
information, and that the information would be viewable on the
intranet. They loved it, and, as he put it, they never knew that they
were blogging. Similarly, he got the staff to start using RSS by
having Movable Type generate the feeds, and having the staff all adopt
Newsgator, an RSS aggregator that plugs into Microsoft Outlook, the
standard email client at Disney. To the users of Newsgator, the
updated RSS feeds just looked like email, and they could deal with the
feeds they same way they were used to dealing with emails, filing them
or forwarding them with comments, using the same interface they were
used to dealing with for email. So the users didn't have to change any
existing habits, and they had little new UI to learn, but they got a
lot more functionality. All at a very low cost to Disney, compared
with their traditional methods of developing custom applications. We
technologists are often so...
What webl0gs are news?
What webl0gs are news?
10/29/2003 01:13 AM
Every so often I hear from a person with a weblog who has asked
to be included in Google
News, was turned down, and is not happy about it. I understand
this must be difficult for Google, how do they decide? Some of their
choices are puzzling. And it seems to matter what CMS is used. If it's weblog
software, it can't be included, if they use a more expensive CMS, they
can? If it's one person writing, they can't; if there's more than one
they can?
Here's what they say when rejecting a site for inclusion in
Google News: "Thank you for your email. We have reviewed [url] but can
not include it in Google News at this time. We currently do not
include news-related blogs. If there is a non-blog news site
associated with this movement, we would be happy to review it. We
appreciate you taking the time to contact us and will log your site
for consideration should our constraints change."
Has your site been turned down by Google News? Comment
here. Doc
Searls is also interested in this question.
Webl0gs and authority
Webl0gs and authority
05/24/2004 12:54 PMcam reminds us all what actual blog science looks like
Webl0gs Content API
Webl0gs Content API
03/13/2003 01:00 PM
Don Box: Tim Ewald, Joe Beda, ChrisAn and I are trying to
get the new format for exchanging items working. Here's a
preview of what it looks like now
This format has a number of interesting twists. First, it
is document literal XML which
Anonymou
s
[presumably Gary Burd] doesn't particularly feel is vi
compatible. I'd bet that Don's example was entered in
Emacs. Note that the cited xhtml namespace incorrectly points
to the same namespace as the blog content.
Like
prior iterations from Don, the content is included literally,
with no need for encoding. This brings up two questions: if
literal XML encoding is acceptable for the body, why is it all of a
sudden unacceptable for headers? And how should multi-line
headers, like the short description (sometimes referred to
excerpts) be encoded?
What is also interesting about this example is that it separates
the metadata from the content. While this surprised me, it
does makes sense from a SOAP processing model perspective: the one
element in the body it intended for the ultimate destination (in
SOAP parlance, this is the default actor) and must be understood,
the others may be handled by intermediaries and/or disregarded.
I'm not sure what the right split between data and metadata is
in this instance. The split that Don, et. al. proposes does
have the disadvantage of precluding the ability to the functional
equivalent of
pingbacks.
[Note to Joe: can you put some anchor tags in your Comment API
proposal?]
On Collaborative Webl0gs
On Collaborative Webl0gs
05/31/2004 12:33 PMWWDC Webl0gs
WWDC Webl0gs
06/03/2004 03:39 PMJonas Luster is
collecting links to
weblogs of people who will be blogging from WWDC.
Of course, as Jonas points out, like Vegas, “most things that
happen at Moscone West, stay in Moscone West.”
Google Webl0gs
Google Webl0gs
05/17/2004 10:25 AMOpen Directory - Computers: Internet:
Searching: Search Engines: Google: News and Media: Weblogs: Behold
— a DMOZ category specifically for Weblogs about Google.
Slicing that taxonomy a little thin, aren't we?
Via ResourceBuzz<
/a>.
Click here to comment on this entry
Yahoo! Webl0gs
Yahoo! Webl0gs
12/30/2002 04:51 PMThere's been some discussion recently about weblogs at Yahoo. It's not
the first time, but it came up again. My co-worker Michael Radwin (who
hasn't enabled TrackBack so that I can link this entry to his) posted
his views recently....
Webl0gs to the rescue!
Webl0gs to the rescue!
12/30/2004 09:17 PMAnd to all of those people out there that claim that blogging is
nothing more than a venue for mindless rants, check this out.
According to the BBC, Webloggers from all over southern Asia region
have come together to help show both the devastation they have endured
as well as the best ways people can help them with their plight. While
you may have heard that a picture can tell the tale of a
thousand…
Direct and Related Links for 'Weblogs to the
rescue!'
"Webl0gs der TU-Mnchen"
"Webl0gs der TU-Mnchen"
03/27/2005 06:21 PMAOL To Offer Webl0gs?
AOL To Offer Webl0gs?
12/16/2002 08:22 PMAs noted by a co-worker... an interview with AOL's VP of Community
Products: Q: AOL is getting into weblogs? Weblogs, over the last
several years, have migrated to replace, in some cases, people's home
pages. It's natural that the blog...
Grok Description matches for The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality
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