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December 31, 2004
“生机论“的复活
对于电脑来说，不管电脑是用什么材料造的，其计算行为的实质，不是“结构”的硬件，而是“组织”（也就是一种抽象控制结构）的软件。
那么生物体的“生命力”，也似乎应当是存在于分子的“组织”之中，而不是在分子本身。
不过，“有生命的系统似乎总是自下而上地。从大量极其简单的系统群中涌现出来，而不是工程师自上而下设计的那种机器。 ”
肯在讨论中强调的，正和这样的说法一致：为了产生类似生命的现象，要
～模拟简单的单位，而不是去模拟巨大而复杂的单位。
～运用局部控制，而不是运用全局控制。
～让行为从底层涌现出来，而不是自上而下地做出规定。
～要把重点放在正在产生的行为上，而不是放在最终结果上。
～有生命的系统永远不会安顿下来。 （《复杂》）
Posted by Xiao at 11:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 27, 2004
虚拟身份－Virtual Identities
身份（identity）这个概念，一个重要的源起是传播理论中的“象征互动观” （symbolic interactionism Perspective），由Erving Goffman等发展而来. 这个学派的一些基本假设包括：转播经由创造共享的明显的象征符号而发生；自我是经过传播而建构；社会活动通过角色扮演的过程才成为可能。或者说：我们是他人的产物。
在公共的虚拟空间，身份是怎样被建构的呢？
网络给了那些边缘化的群体以声音，对于残疾人，新移民或者极权统治下的独立知识分子，网上社区的建立就格外地重要。而这些声音和虚拟社区的总和可以帮助这些边缘化的人们在现有的权力社会结构下重新谈判与建构身份。
在这重新（通过虚拟空间）建构身份的过程中，原有的身份也被转换了。重要问题是：这样的身份转换，究竟是增强了，还是消弱了这些群体的社会责任呢？
Posted by Xiao at 05:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 23, 2004
Social software reading list
Liz's recommendation: mamamusings: social software reading list:
* Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, by Steven Johnson.
* Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan Watts.
* Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, by Howard Rheingold.
* Linked: The New Science of Networks, by Albert-L�szl� Barab�si.
* Small Pieces Loosely Joined, by David Weinberger.
* “The Strength of Weak Ties,” by Mark Granovetter [from the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 6. (May, 1973), pp. 1360-1380.] RIT faculty can retrieve a PDF of this article by going to the JSTOR database via the RIT library, and searching for author=Granovetter and title=weak ties in the Sociology journals.
Some of the feedback suggestions are also interesting.
Posted by Xiao at 12:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Clay Shirky: Flickr-as-web-services edition
Clay wrote in Many-to-Many: Notes from ITP: Flickr-as-web-services edition:
"More importantly for social software generally, both the Flickr API and the inclusion of del.icio.us-style tags have turned Flickr into a service as well as a site. Both 24in48.org (24 people documenting 48 hours in NYC) and Bickr.com (photo contests) simply use Flickr as their back-end, as Flickr handles the uploading, tagging, and re-sizing, and has a fantastic set of APIs."
Posted by Xiao at 11:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Indochine
依然记得无以伦比的结尾：
“你就是我的母亲。......怎么啦？”
“没有什么，鞋跟断了。”她转过脸去，看着雾蒙蒙的日内瓦湖。(身后的旅馆里，一个国家正在诞生。）
Posted by Xiao at 12:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 22, 2004
D-Lib Article on RSS in Science Publishing
From Many-to-Many, you saw the link to The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web; which was published in this month’s D-Lib Magazine.
"It gos on to provide an excellent overview of what RSS and syndication are and how they work, as well as relevant uses and implications for publishing. Well worth a read." (thanks, Liz.)
RSS is one of a new breed of technologies that is contributing to the ever-expanding dominance of the Web as the pre-eminent, global information medium. It is intimately connected with—though not bound to—social environments such as blogs and wikis, annotation tools such as del.icio.us [1], Flickr [2] and Furl [3], and more recent hybrid utilities such as JotSpot [4], which are reshaping and redefining our view of the Web that has been built up and sustained over the last 10 years and more [n1]. Indeed, Tim Berners-Lee’s original conception of the Web [5] was much more of a shared collaboratory than the flat, read-only kaleidoscope that has subsequently emerged: a consumer wonderland, rather than a common cooperative workspace. Where did it all go wrong?
These new ‘disruptive’ technologies [n2] are now beginning to challenge the orthodoxy of the traditional website and its primacy in users’ minds. The bastion of online publishing is under threat as never before. RSS is the very antithesis of the website. It is not a ‘home page’ for visitors to call at, but rather it provides a synopsis, or snapshot, of the current state of a website with simple titles and links. While titles and links are the joints that articulate an RSS feed, they can be freely embellished with textual descriptions and richer metadata annotations. Thus said, RSS usually functions as a signal of change on a distant website, but it can more generally be interpreted as a kind of network connector—or glue technology—between disparate applications. Syndication and annotation are the order of the day and are beginning to herald a new immediacy in communications and information provision. This paper describes the growing uptake of RSS within science publishing as seen from Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG) [6] perspective.
Posted by Xiao at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)
December 18, 2004
RSS: Show Me the Money
Adam L. Penenberg wrote on the Wired: "Lately there has been a lot of discussion on the net about how to make money off RSS, which, depending on whom you ask, stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, but which many publishers and bloggers hope will turn into a Really Sweet (revenue) Stream."
‘连线“的相关文章，对RSS有全面的介绍。
Posted by Xiao at 01:23 PM | TrackBack
December 17, 2004
Top 10 Weblog Tools in 2004
Sheila wrote: "For more than 12 months, I've been visiting, trying out and reviewing several weblog tools - from aggregators (blog readers) to weblog software. With a lot of tools flooding the blogosphere right now, bloggers are bound to favor some over others. These are my top favorites for 2004."
Posted by Xiao at 12:37 AM | TrackBack
December 15, 2004
Extreme Blogging
这是Forbes上介绍wiki的文章，只涉及到维基应用的浅层而已。
Posted by Xiao at 09:49 PM | TrackBack
December 14, 2004
Netflix adds social networking
From Smart Mobs: "Tim Finin points to interesting news from Online DVD rental leader Netflix, which is looking for ways to keep ahead of its competators.
In its latest move to fend off competitive threats, Netflix will let subscribers invite friends to peek at DVDs they've watched and read their opinions of the movies. If the invitation is accepted, the sender automatically gets reciprocal rights to read the friend's lists and reviews."
Posted by Xiao at 07:09 PM | TrackBack
传媒与日常生活
郭中实先生的文章思路清晰，提出了一个有趣的问题：什么样的隐藏话语通过什么形式在什么时候以什么名义为什么可以进入公众话语？
Posted by Xiao at 03:34 PM | TrackBack
December 13, 2004
You Don't Know Me, but... Social Capital & Social Software
This is a report written by William Davies who works on the iSociety programme at The Work Foundation. Thank to Liz for the link.
Social capital analysts have debated the implications of the Internet for some years now. But this debate has recently been joined from the opposite side, as software experts and developers are showing an increased desire to understand and improve social networks, both offline and online.This report introduces some of the core ideas of this new unified debate, and outlines possible directions for the future.
Posted by Xiao at 10:57 PM | TrackBack
December 11, 2004
Wikipedia Again
This article is from ongoing blog.
"The Wikipedia’s process is profoundly different in that it has no end. Once you get past that, it has strong points of similarity with conventional reference publishing; the articles are written by external contributors, then they are reviewed by one or more of the contingent of people who make it their business to do this, checking for style, basic adherence to facts, and so on. This is process is repeated—not with 100% reliability—every time an entry is updated. Put another way, entries are cooked, but neither killed nor frozen.
One really interesting part of the Wikipedia process is the person/place/thing naming issue. It’s handled cheaply and reliably by means of hyperlinks. No matter how many spellings there are for Mr. Qadhaffi’s name, there’s only one entry for the man himself, and an excellent level of consistency is achieved simply by getting the pointers right."
Posted by Xiao at 10:44 PM | TrackBack
December 09, 2004
The Business Of Blogging
"Explosive growth means Web logs are suddenly in Madison Avenue's sights."
As the author said, the business of blogs is in its infancy. But it is rising rapidly.
Posted by Xiao at 10:53 AM | TrackBack
December 08, 2004
Weblogs and the Public Sphere
This essay is a good introduction to such topic.
Posted by Xiao at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2004
Coming conference: Webcredibility
"the world of journalism is being transformed by blogging, and that - similarly - the blogosphere is evolving and being transformed in the process. There can be no question that the phenomenon of blogging, especially blogs focused on politics and public affairs, has changed the way information becomes front page news. "
Here is the conference blog.
Posted by Xiao at 11:05 AM | TrackBack
December 06, 2004
Listening to Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "Every burned book enlightens the world."
He also said: "The reward of a thing well done is to have done it."
Posted by Xiao at 08:50 PM | TrackBack
December 05, 2004
The Cooperation' blog is up
Here is Howard's new course.
Posted by Xiao at 04:58 PM | TrackBack
Interview with Caterina Fake from Flickr
From the egadget: "Flickr is quickly becoming one of the most popular “moblog” and photo sharing site, is it the interface? The APIs? Caterina talks about this and more! "
"Flickr’s originality as an online photo sharing site comes from the marriage of content that users create the online community that they share their photos with…
The network creates a kind of self-organization that makes all kinds of things possible: collaborative curation, group scrapbooking, easy search, dynamically assembled galleries — and has resulted in the best organized collection of photos in the world. Over 80% of the photos in
Flickr are public — you can make it so only your friends or family sees your photos — which makes all kinds of creative collaboration possible.
We also make it really easy to get your photos into Flickr, and really easy to get them out again in whatever way you like, whether that be by RSS feed, posting them to blogs, or, as some of our users have done, making dynamic screensavers built on the Flickr API.
There is a free version of Flickr, limited to 10 MB uploads a month and 100 photos displayed on Flickr; the paid version permits 1GB uploads a month, and unlimited storage (as well as unlimited photosets, no ads and other things). "
Posted by Xiao at 04:32 PM | TrackBack
December 04, 2004
Word 'bursts' may reveal online trends
不是新文章。但是和上星期“信息的经典物理学'讨论有相合之处。也许”动量“的比喻，还不如下面的的算法。
Searching for sudden "bursts" in the usage of particular words could be used to rapidly identify new trends and sort information more efficiently, says a US computer scientist.
Jon Kleinberg, at Cornell University in New York, has developed computer algorithms that identify bursts of word use in documents.
While other popular search techniques simply count the number of words or phrases in documents, Kleinberg's approach also takes into account the rate at which the word usage increases.
Kleinberg suggests that the method could be applied to weblogs to track new social trends. For example, identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze.
Posted by Xiao at 03:34 PM | TrackBack
eBay and Craig's List Will Merge in 2005 to Create a P2P Media Giant
From The Micro Persuasion, (thanks, Rebecca):
The question comes down in my mind to what is a sustainable media business model. While Rosen points to a couple of stealth projects that will try hard to create a profitable business around hyper-local citizen journalism when they launch next year, I believe they will face massive competition from a successful company that's already right under our noses - eBay.