Here are some chapter headings from a book I read on holiday: The Theory of Spontaneous Order The Dissolution of Leadership Harmony Through Complexity Topless Federations So was it Charles Leadbeater’s latest book or Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything? Nope, it was the book on the left: a 01982 reprint of Colin Ward’s Anarchy […]
Social Software
Give me back my tags: portable attention data
Having recently moved and been caught up in a silly broadband snafu, I spent a couple of weeks without regular Internet access: the previous entry on this blog was composed in the local pub, which offers free wi-fi along with a pint of Youngs bitter. This interrupted form of net access is fine for keeping […]
Of wise and foolish crowds
Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users has written a clear and pithy piece that captures something of the circumstances when crowds are wise and when they’re not. I’ve extracted a couple of her comparisons and put them in table form: Collective intelligence Dumbness of Crowds A pile of people writing Amazon book reviews A pile […]
Blogs, wikis, ‘voice’ and accountability
Photo copyright and cc-licensedby extranoise. In the course of writing my book, I started by describing blogs and wikis as two examples of the same thing — user-generated content. Towards the end of the book, I came up against the ways in which they are opposites: blogs reinforce individual voices, points of view and attitudes, […]
Just what the world needs: another music wiki
I checked the Alexa traffic ranking for this site last week, and it’s down 60% in the last three months… I will be emerging properly from hibernation in a couple of weeks, and livening things up around here. In the meantime, does anyone know what happened (or is happening) to Napster’s Narchive (this link doesn’t […]
Wikipedia to bifurcate?
Just last week I was writing (for my book), “No one is going to set up a new free wiki-based online encyclopaedia any time soon: there can be only one.” Now I’m considering whether I can edit that to say “No one is going to initiate from scratch a…” or should I just delete it […]
Knowledge, power and mobilising a lobby through Wikipedia
Last night I added my tuppence worth to Wikipedia’s entry on the History of Virtual Learning Environments. As manager of an online learning consortium in the late nineties, I helped the software company Fretwell-Downing Education build a pilot web-based Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Though you would not know it from the entry as it stands […]
Does blog marketing undermine the credibility it depends on?
Over on my book blog, I had a go recently at defining some characteristics of ‘blog culture’. One of those characteristics was the emphasis on the authenticity of the voice you speak with when you’re blogging. So, even if you’re talking nonsense, you’re being yourself, you’re not putting on any airs, and there’s no ventriloquist […]
Full versions of articles now available
Last year I posted teasers here about articles I had published on Word of Mouth Marketing and Playlisting and on Remix Culture (the articles were featured in Five Eight and The Spectator respectively). Their value as ‘exclusives’ has expired, so I’ve published the full version of the Word of Mouth piece on my Net, Blogs […]
Blogging, learning, and going off at tangents
I start off questioning the value of blogging an event that you know in advance will be blogged to death from every side. Does it really help anyone to have multiple perspectives on one thing, when the inevitable inconsistencies between them may be confusing? And if there are six accounts already, what added value is […]