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From: Gary Lawrence Murphy 
Subject: Send in the Blogs
To: info@plesman.com
Cc: dwebb@itbusiness.ca
Date: 19 Mar 2002 22:00:34 -0500
Organization: TCI Business Innovation through Open Source Computing

Dear Editor,

Dave Webb's article "Blogging a dead horse" is very interesting for
two reasons. First, it is posted on a news website that is anything
but interactive (after a hunt for a "to the Editor" link, I gave up
and wrote to the main page "Help" link) Second, the article which sets
out to criticize blog culture summarizes itself by demonstrating why
blogging is suddenly so very popular:

"By the way, The Ellison quote? Lifted from the ineffable Ethel the
Blog (stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/ethel/blogger.html), one of your
better quality blogs."

"Better quality blogs" --- Dave Webb has become what we call a
"recommender", and Ethel has just moved up a point in the recommender
ratings for all those readers who know and trust Dave's judgement. I
could rest my case at just that point. But I won't because I enjoy
flogging the horse.

Blogging taken as isolated instances, nay anything online taken as
isolated cases, misses both the point and the value. What is a web
page? Diary, Biography, Links, Forum. What is Usenet? DBLF. Email
mailing lists? DBLF ... you probably detect the pattern.

What is a Blog? What's different here? David Weinberger's term
"Small pieces loosely joined" (www.evident.org) comes to mind. The
average blog is just one node in a great network of blogs, each
feeding the other, each monitoring, sifting, evaluating and
reproducing the other. Blogs are the Internet grapevine.

How are these blogs connected? Two ways, one explicit, one implicit
in the modern web. The implicit method is known to everyone: It's
called Google.

The explicit method is more reliable and far faster, and most often
built into the blogging software and is known in the trade as RDF. Our
company blog at www.teledyn.com, a very conservative but nonetheless
self-published 'zine-let on "open source and internet" exports a tiny
(XML) file containing our news headlines. This file is picked up
12,000 times a day; we don't know by who, but we do know that a recent
blog article about a Linux virus-writing (and defense) guide caused an
international fury on the author's website within hours of our
posting.

What the virus-guide author's webhost experienced, and what Dave Webb
betrays in his confession on the Harlan quote, is what blog culture
calls "recommenders". Yes, each source blog itself is typically a
very low signal-to-noise ratio, but when filtered through the network
of recommenders feeding recommenders feeding recommenders, the signal
is very quickly refined; I just don't have the time to wade through
SlashDot (slashdot.org) but nary a day goes by when I don't learn of
some big news that broke first on its pages. What we have in blogging
is a human-intelligence controlled, highly efficient and massively
parallel content evaluation and distribution network.

Many blogs (our own included) are "meta-blogs", recommender
recommenders which distill the mash by personally selecting from many
sources, commenting on the value of the content of a few (adding
meta-data). Other people select their favourite meta-blogs and
summarize those, and then republish on their own blog, extending the
recommender process, adding meta-data.

There are also tools to assist this recommender process. For example,
here at TCI, in addition to mailing lists and personal contacts, we
use Rael Dornfest's highly experimental and (ahem) less than robust
Peerkat (www.oreillynet.com/~rael/lang/python/peerkat/) to merge over
200 blog and news-service channels. We coallate, summarize and
re-distribute these feeds over our intranet in about a dozen different
topical categories.

Other tools include Dave Winer's Radio Userland, OpenPrivacy's Reptile
(a similar project which is building recommender-rating into the feed
process), OpenCola who apply the blog-recommender
model to content discovery, the left-wing network of www.indymedia.com
makes the global local and vice versa, and the most ambitious of all,
the Columbia Newsblaster
combines blog-recommender methods with advanced semantic processing to
provide hot tips for journalists.

Does it work? Yes and very well. IT insiders (and not just the kids
but even us more "chronologically endowed") know that other insiders
will get the news long before any ITBusiness journalist. We know that
our collegues will get the news straight the first time, and we know
the blog network ensures that what some lone insider might publish
before their workday begins might reach ten thousand desktops before
lunch.

[ "chronologically endowed" is a term that appears in
this month's print edition of Plesmans' Computing Canada, in an article
claiming us old-guard are somehow resistant to innovative technologies
(to which I say "we just know a bad idea when we see one") and no,
I'm not forgetting the utter irony that this lowly weblog posting
will probably result in more eyeballs on Dave Webb's article than it's
being posted as a front-page item on itbusiness.ca -- gm ]

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