On 1/16/06, Jeff Dooley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Interestingly, the web isn't immune to problems of "centralization" or > whatever you want to call it. Over time, some sites become more > popular than others which leads to more word of mouth or press, which > leads to more popularity, etc. I found Clay Shirky's essay on Power > Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality to be a very interesting read.
Okay, I just read the essay. I liked it. He has a clear and logical style of writing, and about a subject (subjects) I'm interested in. As for how it applies to this conversation, consider: "At some point (probably one we've already passed), weblog technology will be seen as a platform for so many forms of publishing, filtering, aggregation, and syndication that blogging will stop referring to any particularly coherent activity. The term 'blog' will fall into the middle distance, as 'home page' and 'portal' have, words that used to mean some concrete thing, but which were stretched by use past the point of meaning. This will happen when head and tail of the power law distribution become so different that we can't think of J. Random Blogger and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit as doing the same thing." Blogging itself is a ghost that will disperse and vanish the closer and closer we look at it. As more people apply their ideas to the practice of blogging, it will splinter (speciate?) into a number of different forms. Some of it will become the New World Order, and some of it will seed the next system change. The fact that blogging came into existence and has taken such an important role in media today is evidence that there is no central lock-in. That the peak of the power law will track the thing that deserves to be there. Technology is having the effect of making that tracking more responsive, and maybe more accurate. Which all, I believe, logically follows from Shirky's essay. An essay of his I don't like is "The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview". He says: "The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms." "Syllogisms are Not Very Useful" and concludes that therefore, "the Semantic Web will not be very useful either". The essay is rife with logically messy inaccuracies. He claims that because humans frequently use ambiguous statements, the Semantic Web will never be able to parse them. I very much disagree. And he uses some of the written documentation of this very early stage project to imply that the people thinking about it and working on it don't know what they're doing. Of course they don't! If they did it would be up and working already. Bah humbug, Clay Shirky. -todd -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
