I really like this little infographic on “How News Travels on the Internet” (even if infographics make me think USA Today which is *not* a good connection). This is definitely one sphere of blogs. Of course, i immediately thought about creating my own infographic (except that i despise infographics) on “How Gossip Travels on the Internet.”

The thing is, things twist all around when you do that. The “Dark Matter” becomes the SOURCE, personality tests become the “Dark Matter” and “Offline Media” become the “Traditional Big Media.” Plus, instead of having greater/lesser blogosphere based on visits/day, you have hipsters/dorks based on internal perceived fashion (note: everyone thinks that *they* are the hipsters and that everyone else are the dorks so these graphs are inevitably individual-centric). What’s important though is not getting to some “MetaNews” but affecting Friendster Profiles and getting loads and loads of support in the comments. That way, everyone knows that you’re gossip is way more valuable than anyone else’s. And then, of course, there’s Gawker.

Also, Chandrasutra pointed me to this fun Village Voice piece called Blogging Off. It’s all about the social disasters due to blogs. (For example, how much have you given up daily chatter with people cause you know what their doing cause of their blog?)

My favorite line: “There were four or five of the blog-free in attendance (all of whom admitted to being on Friendster, however, which is basically just a gateway drug [to blogging]).” Hmmm…..

I had a analogy moment today. I’ve been talking to more people who don’t identify as bloggers but who self-proclaimed bloggers label as bloggers because the activities are seen as the same. I’ve heard this rhetoric before. From dykes and lesbians.

A lot of dykes engage in activities that lesbians would recognize. Lesbians call dykes lesbians and dykes rebel against that label. Lesbians roll their eyes at the dykes, failing to understand what difference the dykes feel.

The difference is that identity labels are not simply based on activity. Identity labels are a way of self-identifying with a culture, a set of practices, and a set of values. Even when dykes and lesbians engage in the same practices, the dykes don’t see themselves as part of lesbian culture or embodying lesbian values. Part of this has to do with gender identity; part of this has to do with politics. And of course, the boundaries are not so cleanly rigid. Some people identify as both dykes and lesbians, depending on what fits at that moment for them. But there are also quite a few on extreme ends (see Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival).

One assumption about dykes and lesbians is that they just sleep with women. What about tranny boys/bois? Or what about the various self-identified dykes who have sex with bio boys… but whose only sex practice is anal sex where the girl penetrates the boy with a strap-on? It’s not exactly “straight” as most people would recognize…

So, how does this translate to blogging/journaling?

We have a tendency to label people based on their activities. Yet, identity is self-prescribed. Outsiders can certainly label people based on behavior, but to engulf them into their identity simply because of shared practice is dangerous for all. It means that the two groups who might otherwise share a commonality have a repulsion because one feels oppressed or devalued because the other has tried to enforce a foreign label onto them.

What are the implications for bloggers/blog tool creators to see people who identify as journalers and try to enforce that label on them? How does this affect tool design, community understanding and cultural development? Although i’m only just beginning my interviews, i’m already fascinated by the subtle differences in what people identify as valuable. Both groups talk about community, but the kinds of support and the relationship between the community and the text seems to be different. More motivation for interesting work.

PS: If you’re going to be at SXSW and would love to do an interview and you identify in this spectrum, let me know!

Ben Chun asked me an interesting question about graphical smilies last night and i thought that someone out there might know.

IM clients, freemail clients and BB software very commonly uses smilies. They turn textual smilies into absurd graphical ones, sometimes even animated ones. Yet, each client renders its own version of the smiley. Thus, even if you are using AIM, the type of smiley you will get will depend if you’re using the AIM client, iChat, Fire, etc. and whether or not you turned on conversion in the first place. How much do the differing renders affect how people read what is being said?

Of course, all i could do was ask more questions. He’s asking how the technical artifact affects the impression given. I’m curious how the way smilies are read differently because of cultural and individual context. For example, i was suprised to get an email from a woman i met in Mexico *filled* with smilies. They were jumping off the page. What communities use smilies regularly and why?

How much of the smiley representations are functionally textual and how much are they adornments, kinda like the tchotchkes that people add to their phones? Are they used to express emotion, to reframe the actual text?

We’re curious if there is any research on this (or if anyone has any insight).

A while back, i blogged part of a story sent from my friend Devon who is working in the Congo. She sent me another bloggable post today so i thought i would share. If you have the means, it would be great to help her program out. $50 pays for 2 students in the school there. They are applying for grants, but those take a long time and thus any support that you can offer would be fantastic!

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working with these women continues to be an entire life of itself: births and deaths, sickness and true healing, new arrivals and going home, and being together at every different hour of the day: all those early morning chores, heat-of-the-day lessons, rainy afternoons stuck in the church singing songs, social hour evenings, and worship at sunset. I’ve started a new project to take down the each of their stories: just interviews and photos. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with them yet, but, for so many reasons, it just seems important that they be recorded. Maybe that will finally be a use for my blog.

But just one now the girl I interviewed today is seventeen, quiet now, but with teh most beautiful voice. When her village was attacked, she was abducted by the Mai Mai, raped and beaten. Apparently angry at her for crying, they tore out her eyes and left her on the road. People from her village found her and tried to bring her with them as they fled into the forest but she was unable to keep up, so they abandoned her again. Eventually she was found and taken to one of the docs counselors out at a rural clinic. From there, she was brought into the hospital but there is nothing that can be done for her eyesight and she is also almost deaf, from injuries to the head that got infected. She has no idea whether any of her family survived and has been terrified to leave docs, not knowing where she can go. but lyn, through the network of services and people she works with here, has found a hotel owner who will pay her to do basic kitchen chores and a room in a widows cooperative where she can live; there are kids there that can bring her too and from work. Its so much more than any other hospital would do for a patient and yet I still dread the day when she’ll leave this community of women who are all healing each other to live on her own. I’m selfish, but i hate to have them leave; though the actual goodbyes are always uplifting, with the whole tribe out singing and celebrating, a mix of being happy for the woman who is leaving and, i think, the hope that it brings them for themselves.

the gsf project is coming along beautifully. my connections with people and places from my last visit haave helped me immeasurably and every step just seems to be falling into place. feels charmed, or meant to be. more on that soon.

politically, we had a little scare when the RCD (rwandan party that used to occupy this area) pulled out of the transitional government. almost comical to have jo aka. my dad, head of docs, senator, just a general congolese “big vegetable,” called away from dinner because one of the two govenors of a town was using his personal army to defend an arms cash from the other govenor. everyone is in duplicate here, as the organizing theme of this transitional period is to let the past lie, invited everyone to take part in writing the constitiution, and not oust anyone, even as a new system is set up in its place. a UN presence combined with a figurehead leader so far are managing to keep everyone in line, with the hopes of having the second congolese democratic election (the first being in 1960, with independence.) a new friend here is looking for the funds to start a civil education program to prepare the community for elections but where do you start when so many people can’t read, most of the country is inaccessible by road (there are fewer roads now than there were in 1960), and there are over 200 political parties, all oriented locally or tribally. but this guy is amazing and if he does manage to put together a project, i’ve offered him the gsf school in the evenings to hold his classes. its amazing the gravity of an open physical space for events, trainings, programs, possibilities.

Huy Zing’s description of his orkut death is a riot.

During this period, I slowly saw the count of my list of 750+ communities (600 created by me) get halved, then drop by 20 at a time, then slowly 1 by 1 until my list of communities reached 0. Watching the list of my communities slowly drop meant only one thing: impending death at the hand of none other than a human!

Some anonymous poster decided to point me to this Wired article on blog attribution and virality.

I found myself sighing. There are some key assumptions built into the critique that bloggers borrow (a.k.a. steal) ideas from “lesser known bloggers.” First, there is the assumption that the goal of blogging is to become popular by spreading good memes. Certainly, there are many people for whom this is their goal. But damnit not all bloggers have the same goals.

On more than one occasion, i have blogged something and attributed it and been asked to remove attribution either to the individual or to their blog. Not everyone wants their name attached with the things that they uncover. There are politics involved. After a couple of awkward situations, i have reverted to not attributing unless known to be appropriate.

For example, when someone emails me a link to blog that they think is interesting, i never attribute it. But when they email me a link to their blog about something that they thought that i would find interesting, i do attribute it. I figure that if it is public enough for them to put it out there and tell me about it via their link, then they want to be attributed. Perhaps i’m making a mistake in this distinction. [If you’re one of the people who send me things and want attribution, just say so.]

Over and over again, i am told by look-at-me bloggers/technologists that blogging is public and everyone should be AOK with being seen. Guess what? Sitting in Golden Gate Park talking to my friends is a public activity, but i don’t really want/expect everyone in the world to be there too. The concept of public is far more complicated than we often realize.

When i link to someone’s blog, there are various ways that this can be read. It is not always about respect; sometimes, it is about exposing someone. That is not something that everyone wants. I’m finding myself increasingly frustrated that those covering blogging seem to think that there is a consistent goal, need and mode throughout bloggers.

I think that it is fascinating that HP is studying blogging along the lines of infection, but this is also quite problematic. Those studying infections are always obsessed with the source. Even if we are going to realize that meme sources are considered ‘good’ (while infection sources are considered ‘bad’), what on earth makes anyone think that all ‘good’ sources want to be found any more than ‘bad’ sources?

[Btw: can you tell that i’m getting interested in blogging? I’m finding myself vocalizing my frustration towards all things blog related these days.]

I logged into Orkut today and was pleasantly surprised to find that the first two connectors were neither Joi nor Marc. Instead, they are two men from outside the States (Brazil, Czech Republic) with a relatively small cohort of friends (73, 19). This is intriguing.

Now, i know that there are games being played, so i checked out their friends. Almost all are from their countries of origin and most have relatively few friends. Now, this would make sense in a normal model, but i’m curious who these central bridges are – how are they playing such a significant role on the network?

I also received an email from Marc Canter encouraging people to make more friends so that he can be more of a connector. This was a kind reminder of how fake the data really is.

Since it’s fake anyways, i encourage all of you geeks with times on your hands to play. The trick to being the biggest connector is not a game of collecting people. It’s a graph theory game. You need to bridge the most disparate groups as well as connect to the hubs strategically. Remember: it’s an algorithm of average path length. Thus, you don’t want exceptionally long path lengths factored into the average. But, if you bridge the hubs and the disparate groups, you’ve reduced the average for everyone.

Anyhow, i’ve got to get back to work and should not focus on this instead of writing, but it’s a really fun math problem that i’d love for someone to solve. What is the algorith to minimize your average path length? Given the data, what strategic connections need to be made for a newcomer?

When i first started using RSS, i was ecstatic. Rather than relying on going to each person’s page, i could just throw them all in one place and go through them. I’m a bit more disillusioned now.

I got all excited and started adding every blog that had an interesting thread. Almost humorously, i started breaking after about 150 regularly updated blogs. Worse: i miss half of the interesting posts that i want to read because i’m too overwhelmed.

This made me sit back and think about what kind of an RSS feed i want.

First, i want to be able to choose to watch an entry, a topic or a person. I don’t want to be forced into a person only; this unit of view is way too big.

Following a person should be like now – i see everything in their feed.

Following a topic means that i can specify things like “all entries by this person related to ‘echo chamber’.” As such, i can follow whatever this person has to say on something. This is particularly relevant for following bloggers who have a topic of interest to me, but whose entries are by in large, not of interest. Of course, i know that this means that all of you YASNS followers will never read my V-Day writings. But alas, i know you don’t care about my politics anyhow.

Following an entry is a bit more fun. Say that i find an entry that i think is of interest – either in my feed or out there on the web. I should be able to add/mark the entry so that the entry tells me when there are new comments and all new trackbacks get inserted into my feed as single entries too.

Personally, i’d like to tap into the graph of blogs. Technorati knows the linking structure. Forget blogrolls. We can see who links to who embedded in their blog. We can determine blog topology. Why can’t i have topic-based RSS requests. “Tell me anyone within 3 degrees of my network who is talking about ‘rape’ or ‘domestic violence’.” In theory, Google should help me on this but that’s overload! Plus, i can’t pull out just the blogs (a feature that i’m STARTLED they haven’t implemented after having purchased Blogger).

Finally, every day trusted friends of mine send me URLs. When i surface for air, i have to fish through thousands of emails to find those interesting tidbits. I love getting recommendations from friends. Why can’t they just drag a URL into my RSS feed? Why can’t i have a feed of “every URL that Ronen thinks i should read”? Frankly, this would be so much more efficient to reading things. Plus, my friends know what is of interest to me. Another thing is that it should be possible for me to have a public dump. Anything that people in the public think that i should read.

I don’t want automated recommendation systems. I want tools so that my friends can do what they already do – pass on information that they think is relevant. But i want to make it easy for them. And perhaps have a mechanism to say “THANK YOU!”

As more and more people blog, RSS is going to break on the social/attention level. In many ways, it already has for me. I’ve started interviewing bloggers and i’m fascinated by how hard it is for them to consider adding something to their RSS. Overload. Overload. If anyone wants to know why the early players get all of the attention, it’s because RSS feeds focus on people, not ideas, and the early players are too overloaded with following the other early players to consider new people.

Anyhow, just an idea… Although i’d love anyone’s thoughts on this approach. [Perhaps there are tools out there… So far, i’ve only used Bloglines, Shrook and NetNewsWire]

I love Cameron. Today, he announced his new art project: Radio Vox Populi. Blog entries are turned into speech, which is broadcast in a fun way. It’s pretty surreal to tune in and let it play in the background.