permalink.gif 2004-07-05

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Mon Jul 05 22:15:06 BST 2004  Permalink 

In BlogTalk 2.0 Thomas & crew have, once again, brought together a lot of interesting people & wherever possible conversations are flourishing as evidenced by tonights get together. It was good to meet Phil again after a year and to meet Mikel for the first time, especially as his talk prompted lots of interesting ideas we might look at for K-Collector. After a day where I had felt very tired and jaded I found the atmosphere quite reviving.

I had the pleasure of dining with Paolo, Mark Bernstein, Stephanie Hendrick, and Therese Örnberg. Mark gave a very interesting keynote this morning which provoked lots of questions for me. Stephanie & Therese gave, I think, the most stylish presentation of the day (including an amusing near-death audioblog to end) and their discussion of presence and spaces was stimulating. From my perspective a happy coincidence that we all ended up together. We had an interesting discussion about a range of topics spanning language, blogging, literary discourse, topics, flame wars, comments & trackbacks, software tools and how you build them, tinderbox, Dave Allen, and test first development.

Taking antibiotics means I cannot drink alchohol so my opinions whilst maybe better formed were far less robust than usual & I was open to colonization ;-) I got persuaded that comments are bad and that even trackback requires considerable architectural revision to work properly. Mark's suggestion of making trackback default to being private (i.e. you get a file of trackbacks and you decide what, if anything, to do with them) seems to be a good one. I think this can be assisted by some sort of intelligent filtering of trackback contents & authorship to help you decide about those you do & don't want to handle. I think emulating the LinkedIn FOAFOAFOAFOAF network model could be useful in this regard.

Also, based on comments by Stephanie and Mark, I have finally concluded that I must do something in K-Collector for the Lilia's and Jim McGee's of this world who used (and maybe still cling to) liveTopics. I think that part of my problem has been misunderstanding where they are coming from. liveTopics, for me, was a stepping stone towards a larger vision which, at that time, I couldn't achieve. But for them it was actually what they were looking for. No wonder then that I've had a hard time convincing them that K-Collector is better.

I haven't quite worked out the answer yet but I think it may be as simple as offering some kind of discriminator where you can choose whether K-Collector should default to showing you only your own work, or the work of the community as a whole. We may even have enough smarts in the database to do this without requiring additional work but I'll have to get some clear space (i.e. after STES) to think this through properly.

permalink.gif BlogTalk 2.0 begins with Social Physics

Mon Jul 05 08:19:22 BST 2004  Permalink 

Thomas is making some opening remarks and wishing us a fruitful conference.  Available bandwidth seems very low so i'll be using bits sparingly.  Mark Bernstein has just started on the social physics of blogging -- interesting stuff.