phenomenologic.blogspot.com
Cloud Street: The people with the answers
http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2006/09/people-with-answers.html
Monday, September 18, 2006. The people with the answers. Larry Sanger, the controversial online encyclopedia's cofounder and leading apostate, announced yesterday, at a conference in Berlin, that he is spearheading the launch of a competitor to Wikipedia called The Citizendium. Sanger describes it as "an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance.". Picking on an old favourite of mine, here's the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the Red Brigades.
phenomenologic.blogspot.com
Cloud Street: Back in the garage
http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2006/09/back-in-garage.html
Tuesday, September 05, 2006. Back in the garage. I have begun to see what I think is a promising trend in the publishing world that may just transform the industry for good. S Many-to-Many post on publishing draws some interesting conclusions from the success of Charlie Stross's Accelerando. Nice one, Charlie). but makes me a bit nervous, partly because of the liberal use. Setting aside the formatting - and the evangelistic tone, something which never fails to set my teeth on edge - this is all interesti...
phenomenologic.blogspot.com
Cloud Street: When there is no outside
http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-there-is-no-outside.html
Thursday, May 25, 2006. When there is no outside. Nick Carr's hyperbolically-titled The Death of Wikipedia. Has received a couple of endorsements and some fairly vigorous disagreement, unsurprisingly. I think it's as much a question of tone as anything else. When Nick reads the line. Certain pages with a history of vandalism and other problems may be semi-protected on a pre-emptive, continuous basis. And Thomas Vander Wal (! As well as me on 'anomie'. To reiterate, both openness and authority are vested ...
phenomenologic.blogspot.com
Cloud Street: I couldn't make it any simpler
http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2006/06/i-couldnt-make-it-any-simpler.html
Monday, June 05, 2006. I couldn't make it any simpler. I hate to say this - I've always loathed VR boosters and been highly sceptical about the people they boost - but Jaron Lanier's a bright bloke. His essay Digital Maoism. Doesn't quite live up to the title, but it's well worth reading (thanks, Thomas). Again, I don't know for sure, but I suspect the answer would be another shrug: the wiki's open to all - and tagspace couldn't be more. There's nothing inherently wrong with the process, except that you'...
phenomenologic.blogspot.com
Cloud Street: The users geeks don't see
http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2006/07/users-geeks-dont-see.html
Wednesday, July 05, 2006. The users geeks don't see. Writes, provocatively as ever, about the recent 'community-oriented' redesign of the netscape.com portal:. Nick cites a post titled Netscape Community Backlash. From which this line leapt out at me:. While a lot of us geeks and 2.0 types are addicted to our own technology (and our own voices, to be honest), it's pretty darn obvious that A LOT of people want to stick with the status quo. You do get the fifty pages of owl pellets first.). The fact that t...
phenomenologic.blogspot.com
Cloud Street: Great big bodies
http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2007/02/great-big-bodies.html
Wednesday, February 07, 2007. I think the thing that really irritates me about the Long Tail is just how basic the statistical techniques underlying it are. If you've got all that data, why on earth wouldn't you do something more interesting and more informative with it? It's really not hard. (In fact it's so easy that I can't help feeling the Long Tail image must have some other appeal - but more on that later.). You can do something similar with 'posts in last 100 days':. My question is this. If yo...
phenomenologic.blogspot.com
Cloud Street: We're all together now, dancing in time
http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2006/08/were-all-together-now-dancing-in-time.html
Thursday, August 31, 2006. We're all together now, dancing in time. I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest big stories, customise the content of my Netvibes home page and build a MySpace page. But you know what? I don’t have time and you don’t either. Here are the apps which got more than one vote:. And, er, that's it. S doing it, even if the relevant definition of 'everyone' looks like a pretty small group to you and me. That's not to say th...
phenomenologic.blogspot.com
Cloud Street: The cloud of knowing
http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2005/06/cloud-of-knowing.html
Monday, June 13, 2005. The cloud of knowing. Has got me thinking again (cheers, Dave). 1 I had been planning on beginning by talking briefly about Aristotle's discovery of the shape of knowledge: To know this robin is to see its place in a hierarchy of similarities (it's like other birds) and differences (it's different from other birds), an incredibly efficient way to organize complex systems. 2 I had been planning on ending by talking about knowledge as a property of conversations. The key point here, ...
phenomenologic.blogspot.com
Cloud Street: If I drew a detailed map
http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2005/09/if-i-drew-detailed-map.html
Monday, September 26, 2005. If I drew a detailed map. Several months ago, I wrote. Regarding the Wikipedia page on ' anomie. For what I'd want to know about a concept like that, that page is pretty dreadful. It veers wildly between essentialism (there is a thing called 'anomie' and we know what it is, across time and space) and nominalism (different people have used this combination of letters to mean different things, who knew? What's not there is any sense of the history of the concept. Is a long and p...
what-i-wrote.blogspot.com
What I wrote: Business, community, discipline
http://what-i-wrote.blogspot.com/2006/11/business-community-discipline.html
Before I had a blog. Wednesday, November 08, 2006. Business, community, discipline. Business, Community, Discipline: the Strange Triumph of New Labour. Written 12th May 1997; not published. I didn't vote Labour on May 1st. At my first general election in 1979 I voted Liberal, an early tactical voter in Conservative Croydon South. I found out afterwards that the Labour candidate had lost his deposit: every vote did count after all. Ever since then I'd voted Labour at every opportunity.
