Monopoly on the net October 10, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : video , 1 comment so farIn the wake of the Google aquisition of YouTube, Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge writes “What is truth? or, the old patterns repeat” concluding with
We can’t afford for one company (or any algorithm) to organise information for the world.
I have a response which is waiting in the moderation queue, which for some reason prompts me to publish it here right away. ( Impatience appears to be one of the possible negative by-products of a connected lifestyle).
….
The trend for markets to become dominated by irreversible giant monopolies has been documented for a century or two now, so this process is hardly new. Perhaps there’s nothing intrinsically different about internet technology which is going to somehow protect it from the greater influences of ownership and control in society. But that isn’t a forgone conclusion for me. I suspect that the network infrastructure itself is a progressive thing, but that the superstructure which is built on top of the network, by such as google, is subject to the normal laws of prevalent economic and social relations.
So having said “We can’t afford for one company (or any algorithm) to organise information for the world.” what do you propose we do about it?
More anti-trust laws?
Intervention to try and reverse market forces in order to preserve the illusion of a healthy market?
Siezure of the means of production and distribution of information as a commodity, to be reorganised under international democratic workers’ control and management?
(Well you did mention Trotsky…)
Back to the primacy of the network, I suspect that if services such as Google begin to become not useful to the network, then the network will innovate once more and pretty rapidly come up with alternatives to reliance on Google.
Prato Dialogue October 7, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, blogs and community, COP , add a commentThis Prato dialogue is taking place here in Florence, now. Photos etc to follow, meanwhile here’s the link to the Blog http://pratodialogue.wordpress.com/
The Weather in Florence October 6, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , 2comments
Most Significant Changes on the Blogosphere October 2, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : distributed research, Wiki , add a commentWhat is the Most Significant Change across the blogosphere? asks the Zahmoo Blog. You can help to answer that.
“Most Significant Changes” (MSC) is a story-based evaluation methodology. The topic kicked off some interest and discussion on the com-prac list at the beginning of last month, and I set up a wiki page to keep track of the links which various people offered (currently “Page of the week”)
So now the Zahmoo blog is being used to conduct a piece of research into the blogosphere by asking for individual stories.
What’s the Most Significant Change across the blogosphere?
Are you a blogger? Maybe you blog professionally. Maybe your blog supports your business in some way. Maybe you blog inside an organisation. Maybe you have a personal blog.
Whichever it may be, we’d like to invite you to join in Zahmoo’s exploration of the Most Significant Change across the blogosphere and share your story around what has been the most significant change since you’ve been blogging. This is the first phase of our exploration. We will be providing information regarding the next steps in due course.
In the meanwhile, we would like to invite you to use the comments section of this blogpost to provide your answers to the following two questions:
* Describe a story that epitomises the most significant change that has resulted from your blogging .
* Why was this story significant for you?
I’m not quite clear yet as to how the stories are going to be analysed afterwards, or even by whom, but I was quite happy to submit one of my own, It’s in comment number 5. Why not add one of yours right now?
Emergent coding analysis facilitated by mediawiki October 1, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : folksonomy, Action Research, tools, Wiki , add a commentEmerging structure from tags on the DAR wiki.
I decided to spend a little time systematically tagging some more of the pages in the DAR wiki.
The mediawiki software has a facility to extract a list of all uncategorised pages automatically, and this is accessed from Special:Specialpages and then Special:Uncategorizedpages.
So I went through the list and added one or more tags (called categories in mediawiki) to each. For the sake of consistency, I kept another browser tab open with the list of all categories Special:Categories to refer to.
At the end of this process I had about 40 categories for the 70+ pages of content, and that’s far too many categories to list on the front page in the manner which has evolved up until now. I wondered if I could group clusters of them together into much broader categories, perhaps ending up with just a handful of top level tags. At this point I remembered noticing another special page endearingly named - Uncategorized categories. This suggested that category pages themselves can have category tags added to them and that this is also cross referenced somewhere in the database so worth a try. I added the category “Projects” to the category pages for both “drupal” and “Barn Raising” lo and behold a protopage for category Projects can be accessed which states
Category:Projects
Subcategories
There are 2 subcategories to this category.
B
* Barn raising
D
* Drupal
So I had instantly created a hierarchical structure with three levels. Main category, sub-category, and individual pages. And all without having to declare any categories or structure in advance. The meaning can emerge out of the development of the resource itself rather than having to be pre-defined with all teh constraints that imposes. This is a very powerful tool indeed, highly flexible and emergent, and particularly rewarding of the emergent design methodology which I ventured to adopt in the first place, although it did take nearly 12 months to reach this stage, nearing completion of one of the long cycles begun in my final year at Ultraversity.
To explain in more detail what can happen here:
New pages of content can be created in isolation, without any reference to how they might fit in with the rest of the dynamic resource hosted on a mediawiki.
At the point of creation or any time later, pages can be tagged with category descriptions just by inserting the code similar to the following at the bottom of the page:
[[Category: COPs]] [[Category: Links]]
The software then automatically picks up the creation of a new category code or the addition to an existing one. Category pages are special pages which list all of the pages to which the code has currently been applied. Category pages can themselves be tagged by the same method and this is also recognised by the software which can then list all of the sub-categories hanging off that tag.
Thus one of the recommended methods for emergent coding analysis of data is perfectly facilitated by this type of system, with the proviso that the data being analysed is loosely structured around a concept of pages. It probably wouldn’t work with lists or conversations. The amazing thing to me is that there doesn’t seem to be any conflict or tension between the loosely organised, unstructured, emergent method of collecting and developing the data and ending up with a highly organised strictly hierachical taxonomical index.
I then added the tag “Main category” to the page for “Projects” just to round things off, and all I have left is to work my way through the uncategorised categories from time to time and perhaps merge any duplicate concepts with similar names.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
