Meg Hourihan's talk on "Edges of the Writable Web"

From O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference 2003

Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

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[[missed the beginning]]

If you only read blogs from your region, you get the added benefit of going out
for beers with bloggers after reading them.

Blogs exist in many languages, and it's hard to interlink language-mismatched
blogs.

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Blogs are growing more explcit in their relationships:

* Trusted Blog search tool -- will restrict Google search results to your
friends' blogs

* FOAFNet

[[It's hard to "reject" someone who wants to be your friend on Friendster]]

Conversational relationships

* Trackback

* More like this from others

Topics metadata

* Easy News Topic

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The Power Law distribution

How do we help people on the other side of the power-law curve to be heard?

Antisocial Software:

* RSS Readers (individualistic, greedy, loss of personality, bad headlines,
inconsistent syndication, not designed for blogs) (but good enough for now)

Blog writing tools are sophisticated but reading tools are not. Your blog might
get pinged every 5 min by an RSS reader, even though you update only once a day.


More social software:

* Daypop (word bursts)

* Lafayette (expand existing ideas with collab filtering)

* Technorati (newcomers)

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Personal KM approach -- keep track of your own stuff with a blog

Public KM, pointer to all Web contributions -- an outboard brain

Non-human conversations (i.e., server logs in RSS) -- my server talks to me
every day, why not a blog or RSS?

Adoption in professional environments (lawyers, academics, educators,
politications)

Vlogs, audblogs, photoblogs, moblogs, etc

Broadcast weblog -- how different will Instapundit be from a Yahoo News story
with 4K comments at the end of it?

Marketers blog -- way to push products, find influencers (extreme milk beverages)

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Themes:

* Too much info

* Find what's best for us as individuals

* Extend online relationships into meatspace

* Rention between local/small/trusted and broaders/larger/breadth of info

* Geek overload: OPML/XML/RDF/FOAF -- too much technical knowledge is required

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The future?

* More mays to enable local info sharing and connecting, i.e., Ludicorp's demo ConFab

* Post RSS readers (centralized? p2p?)

* Post-geek (writing is easy now, can reading be easier too?)