On 02/02/2008, at 3:25 AM, Jay dedman wrote: > Hmmmm.....so are you saying we need some service to do track these > conversations? > tell me how it works from a user's perspective. >
yes > how does a tracker help me follow conversations across different > sites? that might be the wrong question. If you could map link structures between blogs then the patterns that form, and the clusters (eg your blog would be a dense node since many others link to it) provide ways of visualising and *discovering* relationships. There are mapping tools that already do this well. But if you take this down to the post level, then things get really interesting. This is because it is all about granularity, so if you can see that there is a cluster (a series of connections between parts) then you can discover new things, precisely because the structures that emerge in blogging (relations between blog posts) are emergent rather than predetermined or hierarchical. If we could quote video, or refer in video to video, then you could do the same thing in video posts. So my video post which refers to your post, and Sull's, and Andreas', and is also refered to by 3 other people, well all these linsk would be available. I could then map these patterns (zooming up and down), and I could follow them as links just like the old fashioned web link surfing way. A tracker helps because it makes visible these connections. t/his is one of the biggest achievements of blogging - trackback. HTTP as a protocol sucks at letting you know who connects (links) to your content. I know who my pages link to - I wrote the links, but how do I 'see' the links in to my page (once again as Mike pointed out, Ted Nelson saw and described all this in the mid 60s). Trackback partly solves this, but if a link comes from a site that doesn't support trackback (any site that isn't a specific type of blog) then I still don't really know about it (though I can use Google to find links but that's a very slow way of going about something). The next step, in relation to text, is to apply a thesaurus, since then you can use link anchors (what text hte link is from) to get a metric for how 'abstract' the connections are, where a good and simple rule of thumb is that the more abstract the link anchor then generally the more theoretical or abstract (or 'high level') the conversation. Eg a links that keep going from words like "idea' and 'epistemology' suggest a different sort of discussion and connection than links from "home', 'their blog' etc. YOu can also use the link text to build tag clouds.... (sometimes I really should be snaffled up by some start up....) cheers Adrian Miles [EMAIL PROTECTED] bachelor communication honours coordinator vogmae.net.au
