b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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IBM Knowledge Research
Bypassing Radio's ftp
We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us
Ink Jetting the DMCA
Opera and MSN.com
Ventura Arrives on MSNBC
Sunday, February 9, 2003
The Root of Poverty
Buried in this little bit of social theory is an explanation of why the 40-year, multi-hundred trillion dollar "War on Poverty" and other social engineering efforts have failed. And why they will continue to do so in a free society (actually, in any society.) Funny what one can learn from a little blog analysis.
How blogs got an A-list. Clay Shirky's latest piece on the "A-list" of blogging and the means whereby power-law distributions emerge in all online communities is fantastic.
A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world...(via Hack the Planet) [Boing Boing Blog]Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.
In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution...
If we assume that any blog chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically. Alice, the first user, chooses her blogs unaffected by anyone else, but Bob has a slightly higher chance of liking Alice's blogs than the others. When Bob is done, any blog that both he and Alice like has a higher chance of being picked by Carmen, and so on, with a small number of blogs becoming increasingly likely to be chosen in the future because they were chosen in the past.
IBM Knowledge Research
This is another example of the quality, free research available on the Web -- one could spend a lifetime just trying to absorb the ideas and insights available in the intellectual commons. Lilia has provided this list she found while conducting research for her own work. I took a look at "Social Construction of Knowledge and Authority in Business Communities and Organizations."It builds on data collected from 20 companies to derive four models of how knowledge is originated, refined, authored, and authorized in business. An interesting aspect is the authors' discussion of the contrasts between the business models they found and the academically-derived models they expected, supporting the idea of significant differences in knowledge behavior between hierarchical and non-hierarchical communities.
IBM research papers on communities, learning and more.Trying to find a paper on-line gives you a lot of other interesting things. So, I came accross public papers of IBM Watson Research Center. These are some I'd like to check out:
[Mathemagenic]
- 02-07 Understanding the Individual, Community and Organizational Benefits of Work-Based Communities
- 02-01 Understanding the Benefits and Costs of Communities of Practice
- 01-06 The Dynamics of Social Interaction in a Geography-based Online Community
- 01-03 Social Construction of Knowledge and Authority in Business Communities and Organizations
- 00-07 Coming to the Crossroads of Knowledge, Learning, and Technology: Integrating Knowledge Management and Workplace Learning
- 00-06 New Workplace Learning Technologies: Activities and Exemplars
- 00-05 Designing Learning: Cognitive Science Principles for the Innovative Organization
Saturday, February 8, 2003
Bypassing Radio's ftp
Today I am experimenting with something dangerous -- automatic synchronization between a local folder on my hard drive and the remote ftp folder holding all my Radio-generated web pages. I just can't accept the miserable performance of Radio's pathetic built-in ftp driver any longer, so I'm looking for some way to bypass it.Thanks to help from the Radio Discussion Group, I found Radio's fileSystemDriver which allows Radio to render all it's pages to a local hard drive. After a little configuration and testing I have this upstreaming one of my Categories to a local folder. Now I'm working on the ftp synchronization process.
This isn't as easy as one might think. My regular ftp client doesn't support synchro, so I downloaded a couple of shareware programs -- WS_FTP Pro and FTP Voyager. Both support synch'ing folders, but Voyager seems only to do a brain-dead bulk copy. WS_FTP seems to have the right scheduling and synch'ing options, but it tries to delete all sorts of parent directories on my remote drive. Bad! I know this has something to do with configuring exclusions, but I don't know how to fix it. Yet.
In the end I will have a crufty, kludgy, inconvenient workaround for upstreaming my Radio pages to my domain. But at least it should be reliable. It should run without sucking up 95% of my CPU cycles and a 60%-70% failure rate. I have a lot of time invested in building my sites with Radio, and I appreciate all the nifty things the program can do. But this is a web publishing software package, and it damn well ought to be able to publish to a standard ftp server without puking all over itself.
ftp upstream problems are among the most common topic on the discussion group, so lots of people have issues with the way this (doesn't) work. It needs to be fixed, or else removed from the program entirely so that Userland makes no pretense the program can publish to a standard server.
Friday, February 7, 2003
We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us
Patriot II -- Ashcroft rides again. On the one hand, we need no-nonsense leaders who will go after the bad guys. On the other hand, we need leaders who have some sense of who the bad guys are. And we certainly need leaders who haven't forgotten that we have a Constitution here. Once again, we have unelected, unregulated, bureaucrats and policy wonks drafting sweeping legislation behind closed doors, endangering the freedom and liberty of every American.Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to America under the Control Freaks.
Justice Dept. Drafts Sweeping Expansion of Anti-Terrorism Act
Center Publishes Secret Draft of Patriot II Legislation[...] The Center for Public Integrity has obtained a draft, dated January 9, 2003, of this previously undisclosed legislation and is making it available in full text (12 MB). The bill, drafted by the staff of Attorney General John Ashcroft and entitled the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, has not been officially released by the Department of Justice, although rumors of its development have circulated around the Capitol for the last few months under the name of the Patriot Act II in legislative parlance. [...]
Ink Jetting the DMCA
I could explain this to you, Doc, but it would be a violation of the company's copyrighted intellectual property...
J st Wond ri g.Why is it that ink jet printers refuse to print because they say a print cartridge is out of ink when the printer software says the cartridge is more than half full?
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
Opera and MSN.com
Without regard to the nature of MSN's actions, Opera is buggy. After using Opera exclusively for almost two years, I give up. Version 7 stinks. It was supposed to be the most standards compliant browser, yet it breaks at the vaguest hint of DHTML. If you want a great embedded browser for cell phones or PDAs Opera is probably a great choice. But don't waste your time trying to use it on a real computer.
MSN.com plays dirty with Opera. MSN.com misforms their page on purpose to make it look like Opera is buggy. Very naughty. [andersja's blog]
Ventura Arrives on MSNBC
NYT says former wrestler/governor Jesse Ventura has signed a $2 million deal to host a program on MSNBC. The article also says Phil Donahue's show is near to being cancelled. This seems to reinforce the idea that the general public has lost its taste for sniveling whiners and is more interested in butt-kicking attitude. In any case, at least "The Body" is funny, something Donahue never figured out how to do.
[...] The arrival of Mr. Ventura to cable news, in the works for several months, was received throughout the industry as a symbol of the medium circa 2003. When the Fox News Channel first surged in prime time with boisterous and headstrong hosts like Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, it was derided by competitors as the "World Wrestling Federation of television news." Now that Fox News is in first place, the others are trying to capture similar magic. [...]
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