connecting*the*dots

(photo snapped by Яick Harris and photoshopped by miss_rogue)

Let me fan out my geek cards on the table, face up, before I begin this post…

I’m all about open source, open content, open collaboration, etc., but I’m also East Coast, so please, FOC’s on the West Coast, help me out with this whole FooCamp debate.

Why do some consider Tim O’Reilly’s annual invite-only event of a few hundred friends, employees and people he thinks are interesting to collaborate and have some fun with, such a bad idea?

Dave makes an argument that the closed aspects of FooCamp sync up with the mindset of investors financing a narrow set of “proven” technology, which, he argues, leads to the formation of a bubble culture.

But couldn’t that be said about any closed event? I mean, Yahoo! has “Hack Days” for Yahoo! employees. Isn’t this the ultimate example of a closed event? (thanks to Chris for letting me know in the comments about the open Yahoo! Hack Day coming soon)

At least O’Reilly sends out invites to people outside of his staff… right? Or am I missing something here? Tim O’Reilly’s words:

…”You have to understand the objectives of the event. Its primary purpose is to make sure that O’Reilly’s editors, conference planners, and technical strategists are exposed to new thinking from people who are on our radar but haven’t necessarily been part of our community. Second, it’s to make sure that our individual contacts become collective contacts. Third, it’s to create a great mix of old friends and new, so that it doesn’t become “same old, same oldâ€?, and there’s always new blood.”…

That actually sounds progressive, especially from a business management perspective.

I mean, I dig what Dave’s saying on a philosophical level regarding closed-mindedness, but O’Reilly’s explanation seems to put that puppy to bed pretty quickly. Also, while I’m completely supportive of Chris and Tara’s BarCamp explosion as an alternate, open collaboration vehicle, even Tara accepted her FooCamp invite… so how can it be so bad for the industry?

If we could wipe out closed-events from the face of the planet, maybe open events-only would dent a VC-driven path to another bubble. But back on Earth, in this capitalist society of ours, people go after the short-term buck with the most tested approach available. Absolute conference “openness” can’t compete with the corporate investment mindset of my fellow East Coast money-men (I’m not a money man, I just lived next to them in a past life ;)

And seriously though, doesn’t this noise kinda give the influence factor of Foo a uranium supercharge?

Along those lines, does anyone know O’Reilly’s position on Israel’s right to exist? (heh)

Dave Winer has expanded on his “It’s the users, dummy!” statement and I couldn’t agree with him more:

There’s actually a neater solution, especially if you’ve put a piece of software on the user’s desktop to facilitate uploading and editing of the data — keep a copy of all the data on the user’s desktop, and just mirror it in your web app. There goes the problem (or is it an excuse) that your competitor would be using your CPU cycles to grab a copy of the user’s data (with the user’s permission, I should add, you need a username and password to get access, so the argument that they’re protecting against scrapers and abusers doesn’t hold water).

Following the Beyond Broadcast conference in May, Nate Aune and I began jamming on a similar concept; something we loosely called myTag.

(click for entire .pdf)

The major difference in our approach is that we’re trying to create a “piece of software” (actually, an online service) that can work across all online services, serving as a meta-data hub for all personally tagged information objects — blog posts, photography, video, audio, social bookmarking and possibly service metadata, such as Amazon tagging.

Unlike Dave’s example, we would scrape external services for newly updated, tagged objects. The goal is to centralize people’s meta-data and provide ownership of said meta-data, not to interfere with people interacting with these decentralized services. The scraping would only occur when a person accesses myTag to review their current tag universe, so the impact on external server CPU cycles would be innocuous at best.

Dave’s idea focuses specifically on the data editing and management issues that exist when users attempt to move their data across existing services:

With a local copy, the user can point any service at the data, and it can suck up a copy, and the competitor’s app would run on the user’s desktop too, using their (abundant) CPU cycles. The vendor’s server (in this case Flickr) wouldn’t even know that a copy of the data has been made, and since it’s the user’s data, that’s exactly as it should be.

Yet another reason to use rich clients. I use Flickr Uploadr, always. It’s just a bit easier to work with than the browser-based method of uploading, and that bit of easiness has proven to be worth it. Then of course the competitor has to offer a desktop tool as well. We do it with the OPML Editor. The server components, the directory browser, blog renderer, work with a copy of the data, the originals reside on the user’s machine. It also protects against a system failure, or a company failure.

I completely agree with his ownership point regarding meta-data, and his perspective of safeguarding information objects from system or company failure is extremely valid as well.

So how could we extend his concept of locally managing data (both the information object itself and its meta-data) across same-type services (flickr, zooomr, riya, etc.) to include culling meta-data across different-type services that leverage tagging (del.icio.us, YouTube, flickr, WordPress, etc.)?

See, the reason we’re sketching a thin client is because our primary goal is to enable individuals to be able to review and curate various slices of their own concept terminology — meta-data or tags — as they’ve been applied to information objects over various services and periods of time.

The way I look at it, an aggregate of tags can serve as a looking glass into the personal linguistic structure of each of us, as we make explicit choices when applying specific concept terms to our objects. As competition to flickr and YouTube enters the market, our POV’s will undoubtedly become further dispersed across the web, increasing the findability of our objects, yet conversely affecting our own understanding of our perceived output.

If we’re going to arm citizens with media tools, then we need to provide intuitive, smart representational interfaces for accessing and modeling our own strategic output. Why? Well, we need to be on-point, constantly iterating our understanding of our own perspectives and biases as we venture further into producing our own media.

Otherwise we fall into the same trappings of the mainstream media.

An example… take the limited nature of my tag cloud on this blog as an example. Click on a term, such as Greensboro, and a narrative will unfold over the period of time that you choose to explore and read. While it’s useful to understand more about my relationship with and perspective on Greensboro, the cloud doesn’t include my photos tagged with Greensboro, nor my video clips tagged with Greensboro.

Citizen media operatives need an centralized interface to access decentralized information objects. From my perspective, the value of these interfaces is huge — both to the content creators and potentially to the content consumers.

The first two scenarios I mapped out in the above sketch were for searching and browsing ones existing tag library. Any other primary scenarios jump out at you?

…blogging is now an expected channel of communication with at least some customers, with developers and the press. Amazon has customers, and presumably wants more. And they have a developer pitch too, and they have stories they want to communicate to the press. So if some of the people you want to reach like to receive information via RSS and blogs, why would you not want to provide it? To me, asking why you should use blogs is like asking why you should answer the phone. It might be a customer, a developer who wants to use your services, or a reporter who wants to write about the company. Your competitors answer the phone, so you should too.

Preach on, brother.

No more than a day after posting an open letter to Roger Cadenhead about the past and future of RSS, Dave Sifry backs out of the scrum.

Folks,

Effective today, I’m resigning from the RSS advisory board. I was honored to be invited to the list, and give thanks to Rogers Cadenhead for asking me to join. I think that given Dave Winer’s position on the state of the board, and at his personal request, that it is best for me to resign.

Dave

–
David L. Sifry
Founder and CEO, Technorati, Inc.
dsifry@…
415 846-0232 (Mobile)

Winer, think you could write an open letter to someone, anyone, regarding the American occupation of Iraq?

Blogging is a strange beast.

I was on ScriptingNews yesterday, reading Dave Winer’s spot-on post about Google web clips. Frankly, it surprised me that it was a new feature to him, as I’ve had it displayed above my Gmail client for what seems months now. Maybe Google is releasing features in chunks of user groups? I digress…

Just as I began to create a post about the differences in my mental model when I’m searching for information and performing specific tasks to accomplish a specific goal within an application (with the former being the proper place for RSS advertisements [which is what they are] and the latter a place that should be free of such junk), I happened upon his post which used an out of context quote from Tara Hunt’s post as a lead into a somewhat self-aggrandizing post. Well, that shifted my posting focus.

Within 10 minutes I had moved from one blog to another, uncovering the gist of what her quote actually referenced. In the end, I found myself watching a 3 minute-long clip of Mena Trott and Ben Metcalfe going at it at Les Blogs conference in Paris. This somewhat common interaction in the midst of a conference (speaker and attendee getting worked up in debate) was different because it came into being due to the backchannel IRC conversation being presented behind Mena, which led her to call Ben out of the audience to back up his off-comment.

So instead of dropping a UX post, I found myself clued into who Ben Metcalfe is and this practice of presenting IRC conversations "to add texture" to a conference presentation—a practice which, I feel, is completely fucked up. Don’t agree? Feel free to create more noise for the sphere to devour. Monitoring the sheer amount of conversations that posted following the Mena-Ben exchange has been almost humorous. Yes, this post is my second referencing the “event.”

Look, blogging is empowering; it connects us individual human beings, allowing us to have a voice within the mass markets of consumerism. To Dave’s point, it’s also a hell of a lot more than that, as human behavior is impossible to predict or map out. The great thing about the blogoshere is that there is little to no organization or editorial control across blogs, but a snapshot of the conversation across the blogosphere might tell a different story.

We’ve already moved beyond the purist definition of a blog (or a web-log) into a sphere peppered with collaborative blogs, some laced with specific editorial agendas, others serving as a virtual world for friends in the real to pool their perspectives of the world. This evolution begs a bunch of questions to be asked:

• What happens to these voices in this ecosystem as the blogosphere continues to evolve?
• Is there a tipping point for these new blogs to leave the support system of the blogosphere and enter the capitalistic fray of the mainstream media?
• What signifies that initial shift; a weekly email between contributors agreeing upon editorial direction and goals, possibly?
• How about an advertsing or revenue model that only subtly effects the subject matter of posts?
• A blog isn’t a blog simply because of it’s posting and interactive features… or is it?

Are we moving towards creating more brand in the ether or is it the first step to creating grass roots, organized, activism with a catchy name to evoke information scent within the greased-palm structure of the mainstream media?

Oh, and about social tagging…

Dave Winer, who I read often and agree with a good chunk of the time, is acting pretty shady with his latest post, "Hmm, not so sure about that."

In order to write a post about the ill-conceived notion of people "defining" what the blogosphere is "all about" (I happen to agree with him, it’s all in the eye of the beholder), he quotes a provocative one-liner from Tara at HorsePigCow saying:

"The blogosphere is all about subverting those power structures."

Dave then goes on to frame his position in any debate regarding the topic of blogging:

"It’s weird when someone who’s been blogging for months says what the blogosphere is all about and it doesn’t match up with what I, who have been blogging for years, thinks.

It’s one of those things where she can think what she wants and I can think what I want and the world goes on.

But anyone who thinks they know what the blogosphere is about is as right as someone who thinks they know the meaning of life, and potentially as dangerous (in a not-nice way) because maybe they’ll try to force you to see it their way."

Well, that’s a surgically chosen bait quote there, Dave. How about grabbing a quote which included a bit more context to her entire post, something akin to:

"For me, though, it comes down to power. I’m all for empowering the individual. (dot)Ben, being merely a conference participant, was able to voice his own dissension to the subject matter, but was called out by the speaker, who, had the power in that room. The blogosphere is all about subverting those power structures. The ‘me’conomy is rising, folks."

I read her post and followed her good links to find out that, apparently, tension at Les Blogs conference erupted as a speaker (Mena Trott) was criticized (with a "bullshit") by a member of the audience (Ben Metcalfe) via the (publicly displayed) conference backchannel discussion. Subsequently, Mena decided to ask the mystery handler to stand up and back his/her comments and the hilarity ensued.

Tara’s post was primarily gleaned analysis via Technorati’s "Top Searches This Hour" feature, commenting that it was a signifier of the blogosphere’s affinity to the little guy (Ben, the audience member) not the empowered (Mena, the speaker).

After doing my own hyperlink chasing through Tara and Ben’s posts, I stumbled across the fact that Dave was apparently present for watched the event on vidcast afterwards and left his comments on Ben’s squash-attempting post about "the incident." So if Dave was at the event, and participated by having discourse with Ben on his post about the incident, why the fuck didn’t he attribute a more contextual quote to Tara?

Instead, following the out-of-context quote he framed within his own rhetoric, he pushes his own false-positive agenda to the forefront (emphasis mine):

"I did an interview earlier this week, talking about the relationship between blogging and professional journalism, and I reiterated my old line, that I don’t want to do away with the pros, I grew up reading them, and I think they serve a purpose. But they have to lose the arrogance and get creative if they want to have a chance in the new century.

Now I imagine from Tara’s point of view I look like as much of an obstacle to her getting what she wants as the pros may have looked to a blogger who started when I did. I heard this in North Carolina at a session where I was used as an example of what blogging was rising against, the middle-aged white male. I was horrified, because I gave up a lot, personally, so that these people would have a chance to blog. Now I’m being projected on, it’s the Chinese Cultural Revolution all over again. Grandfather is a bourgeois counter-revolutionary, even if he marched with Chairman Mao."

So is this an example of less arrogance and more creativity? Ugh.

The net effect on the majority of Dave’s readers with less time on their hands than me, is that they are now led to believe that Tara is a whiner, craving more reach, incessantly striving to get on the A-list, all based on her out-of-context quote. My conscience is forcing me to drop this post because "old school Dave" doesn’t believe in the value of comments on his own blo (blogs without comments are only partial-blogs), but did you notice that Dave will flame somebody within their own blog post comments?

And he’s the old guard netizen?

Dave finishes off his post (after waxing poetic on issues ranging from being a Boomer to Apple execs in Africa to a smart Carl Sagon reference) with this gem:

"When people get the idea that they’re on some righteous path that’s exclusive of others, that’s when I start shaking my head. It doesn’t matter who they are, who they work for, or how much (or little) money they have. Get a clue, we’re all bozos on this bus, and none of us gets out of this alive."

How very true, but how very pathetic to so blatantly step on someone to get a seat on said bus.