judith meskill - soc.media.rocks

To the The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com.... See you there... (^:

InternetNews :: BitTorrent, 'Gi-Fi,' and Other Trends in 2004 by Ryan Naraine
 
Blogging on Steroids
 
...If you were caught off guard by the wild popularity of blogs (define) in 2003, wait till you see what 2004 has in store. The next wave could be dubbed blogging-on-steroids -- as blogging technology is merged with wikis (blogging "best-practices" sites) (define) and integrated into social networks (the Friendsters of the world) to create a truly-connected world of online journals, Web collaboration and personals networking.
Researchers at Microsoft are already testing a networking tool called Wallop to explore how people share media and build conversations in the context of social networks. The word around the industry is that Google will hook its Blogger software to a Friendster-type network (via an acquisition?) to tap into the ever-more-connected, open-standard-driven computing world.
 
In 2004, the evolution of the weblog/wiki/personal network will make a huge impact in the way information is shared on the Internet. Doubters need just look at the way the heavyweight politicians have embraced blogging to take advantage of the conversational nature of the technology...

Paul Gillin, TechTarget 'Editor in Chief,' gives his 2004 outlook: VoIP to rise, Sun to set.
In his 'Stuff to Avoid' category Paul Gillin warns that:
 
"...Blogging's wave has already crested now that millions of online diarists are realizing that not that many people actually read this stuff .... Social networking sites like Friendster. Puh-leeze. Don't we have better things to do? ..."

Bruce Bartlett, in Blogs galore!, gives his list of those who are, in his opinion, the most notable 'economic' bloggers - regardless of their 'political views' and affiliations:
Brad DeLong, Max B. Sawicky, Donald L. Luskin, Steve Antler, Ray Fair, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Stephen Bainbridge, Glenn Reynolds, and Eugene Volokh.

In the Washington Post today, Leslie Walker shares her 'short list' of some of the hottest Internet services of 2003 in 'A Year For New Paths To Friends, Music, More.'
Leslie Walker's 'Web Watch' short list of 'hottest services' includes:
 
Apple - iTunes, Friendster, Vonage, Skype, Amazon, Google (and their acquisition of BLOGGER), Kazaa, and There.

Web User News :: Website names top words of 2003
...The word "blog" has been picked as one of the top words of 2003 by a US website specialising in language.
Website yourDictionary.com, which offers more than 2,500 dictionaries for more than 300 languages, has compiled a list of what it claims is the top word, phrase and name of the year.
According to the site, weblogs have come of age in 2003 and "regrettably, this lexical mutation [blog] with them". The word "blog" was ranked as the second top word of the year.
 
The top word of the year was "embedded" - the word used to describe news correspondents embedded in military units in Iraq. The word "SARS" ranked third. The top phrase of 2003 was "shock-and-awe" - the US strategy in US - and the top personal name of 2003 went to Saddam Hussein.

"This year the Iraqi War has dominated the English language as it has dominated the news," said Robert Beard, chief executive at yourDictionary.

However, Paris Hilton, the hotel-chain heiress, also featured in the list of top personal names following the "internet distribution of her extracurricular activities".

yourDictionary.com has also published a list of president George W Bush's top-five mispronunciations, including "new-cue-ler" (for nuclear) and "a-merr-ca" (for America), and top product names, which includes Apple's download service "iTunes"...

and so i wish for you this holiday
a heightened sense of all that lights your fire
for passion is the thing that, come what may,
will help to manifest your deep desire.
 
so thank you for your praise of my tech prose
and in your heart please know that all you share
comes back to you and often overflows
with that for which your heart has steadfast care.
 
and as we find that 'sense in action' counts
with blogs and wikis in a 'socialtext' we'll see that interest in our action mounts
as we with knowledge fill our 'social decks.'
 
twas lilia inspired here this prose to 'actionable cohorts' - this 'sense' flows...
©2003 judith meskill

Once upon a time, eons ago by weblogging measure, Dina Mehta traveled from India and visited the USA and Europe - meeting face to face with many of those who populate her 'blogroll.' When I met Dina, she told me of conversations with Stuart Henshall who wanted to form a 'troupe' of individuals from all over the world who have a passion for making true collaboration happen. This was an idea on which I had also been ruminating and had planned to discuss with Dina at our lunch meeting in Philadelphia.
And then, as often happens in weblogging land, a meaningful conversation began to emerge - among thought leaders and like-minded individuals - around creating an 'actionable sense.'
 
A partial list of cohorts who have been blogging about our 'actionable sense' collaboration follows - to their descriptions and 'conversations' I do defer:
 
Lilia Efimova - 'actionable sense' Ton Zijlstra - 'Making Actionable Sense,' parts I, II, and III. Dina Mehta - 'actionable sense'. Stuart Henshall - 'Actionable Sense Troupe.'

Back on 19 September 2003, Jim McGee referenced a post by Jon Udell on Kimbro Staken's new science experiment, Syncato. And now - actually twelve days ago - Silicon Valley Biz Ink published a press release - Sleepycat Software Honors XML Innovators.
Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB announced results for the 2003 Berkeley DB XML Innovation Awards. XML technology consultant Kimbro Staken took the second place award for developing Syncato, a weblog or "blogging" application that combines an easy-to-use online personal idea log with advanced knowledge management and publishing capabilities. Staken's system stores each personal log as XML that can then be searched via XPath.
"Syncato maximizes the value of people's ideas and information in blogs by making them easily searchable," said Staken. "Under the hood, the Syncato weblog system is a XML fragment management system that relies on the flexibility of Berkeley DB XML to store XML natively alongside non-XML and semi-structured data."

DecisionCast announces IDG's InfoWorld as Media Sponsor for RSS WinterFest 2004, a free, two day Webcast, wiki, and Weblog event on January 21-22, 2004, that will explore the uses, applications, and future of RSS and Internet content syndication. "More and more companies and organizations are using RSS to alleviate e-mail overload as well as to manage projects, deliver important information, create effective knowledge management and content management systems, and push information to their customers."
Featured speakers include:
 
-- Anil Dash Vice President, Business Development, Six Apart -- Jon Udell, Lead Analyst, InfoWorld Test Center -- Chad Dickerson, CTO, InfoWorld Media Group, Inc. -- Bill French, Co-Founder, MyST Technology Partners -- Robert Scoble, Technical Evangelist, US-.NET Platform Strategy, Microsoft -- Scott Johnson, Founder, Feedster -- Greg Reinacker, Founder, NewsGator -- Chris Pirillo, Founder, Lockergnome -- Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext -- Greg Lloyd, President & Co-Founder, Traction -- Cynthia Carlson, Founder, KnowLogix Consulting -- Graham Rasmussen, Consultant, KnowLogix Consulting -- Matt McAlister, Vice President, General Manager, InfoWorld Media Group, Inc. -- Derek Scruggs, Founder, Escalan

Huh, you say? Well, blosxom is a lightweight weblog implementation, created by Rael Dornfest, that describes itself as "the zen of blogging." Simon Cosens' Bryar is a modular, extensible weblog tool - more complex than 'blosxom' - primarily in its extensibility. A Bliki, according to the 'Wikipedia' is quite simply, a weblog with wiki support. If you are still saying 'Huh', then skip Simon's article and just read his conclusion excerpted below. Otherwise, in O'Reilly's Perl.com, Simon Cozens writes about 'Blosxoms, Bryars and Blikis.' - a worthy read for the 'Perl' and 'CGI' savvy.
Simon concludes with: "I consider the emergence of interest in social software to be one of the most fascinating trends in software engineering this year. Two of the most powerful and popular aspects of this, wikis and blogs, are particularly well-suited for extension and embedding, and Perl is a particularly well-suited language for achieving this.

Although part of the point of this article was to demonstrate Bryar, there were several other important points. First, that there are plenty of Perl implementations of both wikis and blogs that you can choose from; second, that Perl makes it really easy to create your own blog or wiki and customize to your own purposes, including embedding them in an existing application.

But finally, the point was to encourage you to think about good design and the power of extensible applications; if you can create a tool that is both powerful and generalizable -- just like Perl itself -- it may end up doing wildly different things to what you initially intended!"

In an OJR article: A Look Back at 2003, and What's on the Horizon for the Online News Universe, Mark Glaser reflects on his predictions for 2003 regarding, among other things, weblogs and blogging, and then offers up some predictions for 2004.
One of Mark's 2003 predictions was that "smart bloggers get their due, become famous, and can get paid for what they do. Media companies get it, and start assigning blogs as real jobs and not just extracurricular activities." Mark reflects that "Now a month doesn't go by without another media company announcing new Weblogs -- Fast Company, MSNBC.com, Variety.com, Wired Magazine, New York Magazine."
Read the article, it has an interesting Q&A section with a diverse array of opinions on - "the proliferation of people with camera phones breaking spot news stories; the rise of Google and Google News; the soap opera at (AOL) Time Warner; the continued inroads of paid content; RSS feeds; massive online coverage of the war in Iraq; viruses, worms and spam overwhelming newsrooms; the struggle for independent news in Zimbabwe, China, Iran and Iraq; and political rhetoric and election coverage." - among other things.

EContentMag :: IMN, Inc. Releases Integrated RSS Service
...Emarketing firm IMN Inc. (formerly iMakeNews) has launched an RSS service that is integrated into its enewsletter and DirectBlog platforms. IMN customers can now publish their enewsletters or blogs so that they are automatically picked up through RSS content aggregators. The service is designed to offer marketers multiple ways to distribute their content, including email, the Web, or RSS feeds, increasing the number of alternatives for breaking through and engaging qualified recipients.
Through IMN's new service, marketers set their enewsletters or blogs to be published as RSS feeds at the same time that they post them to the Web. The process is designed to be transparent to IMN clients, who then use the same procedure to publish their content simultaneously as an email, Web site, and RSS feed. They use the same Web-based templates that they depend on to develop, publish, and distribute their content, and to measure customer behaviors in response. Phase two of IMN's RSS service will be available later in December and provide IMN's behavioral tracking capabilities, the same as those currently available through the company's newsletter and DirectBlog services...

If you utilize Movable Type for your weblog this is mandatory reading:
Musings: More MT Spam Vulnerabilities

Danah Boyd speaks out on Friendster, social behaviors, online environments, and social architectures.
 
Mentioned in this article, in order of appearance:
 
danah boyd, Friendster, connected selves, Joi Ito, Sixdegrees, Jonathan Abrams, Burning Man, Pretendsters, Fakesters, Sarah Tuttle, Intel Research Anthropologist, Genevieve Bell, Tribe.net, Mark Pincus, Peter Lyman, and SIMS: School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley.
The New York Times :: Decoding the New Cues in Online Society By MICHAEL ERARD
 
...quote... A SOCIOLOGIST among geeks and a geek among sociologists, Danah Boyd has 278 friends who link her to 1.1 million others.
 
So says Friendster.com, whose millions of members have transformed it from a dating site into a free-for-all of connectedness where new social rules are born of necessity. A 25-year-old graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Boyd studies Friendster, hovering above the fray with a Web log called Connected Selves (www .zephoria.org/snt) and interviewing Friendster users. Her irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors.
 
"She's definitely a Pied Piper for a bunch of different people," said Joichi Ito, a high-tech venture capitalist who lives in Tokyo. "At the same time she, as an academic, is able to articulate what is going on in a way that the people building the tools rarely understand or can articulate."
 
Ms. Boyd explained Friendster this way: "It allows you to purposely say who the people in your world are and to allow them to see each other, through a connection of you." An individual registered at Friendster has a home page with photos, a brief profile and photos of people to whom they have agreed to link. That person can then browse his or her network or search it for dates or activity partners.
 
Ms. Boyd says that the real world has a set of properties, which she calls architectures. With its deceptively simple set of features, her thinking goes, Friendster bends or replaces all of the real-world architectures.
 
For instance, when two people speak to each other, they assume their conversation is fleeting, but e-mail and instant messaging, by making that conversation persistent, offer a new architecture. When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other's social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how...
...end quote...