Technology

Jon Udell and Ross Mayfield have are talking about the use of social software and trust-circles as tools to find relevant and authoritative content on the web. Sounds familiar. I’ve long thought trust circles (amongst other trust metrics) are key to addressing the “Internet Trust Anti-Pattern“. It may sound incredibly un-hip and reactionary, but to hell with the wisdom of crowds. Watching the crowd might be entertaining, but when I need to work, I can get far better results if I constrain that crowd to a few people whose opinions I have reason to respect. I’d use the word “authority” again, but the word is overloaded. Just as the open access community struggles with “free as in beer” and “free as in freedom”, the user-generated-content crowd struggles with “authority” as in “power” and “authority” as in “expertise.” ...

Will implementing a good information architecture destroy your Alexa rating? Mike Davidson has done a brief analysis of MySpace which basically shows that “Page Views” could be the new “Line Count” in stupid metrics. I’ve often wondered if part of the attraction of MySpace is the air of “authenticity” conveyed by the hideously amateurish interface(s)? And now I can wonder how many marketers will take Davidson’s observations and perversely conclude that the more unnecessary page views they can get people to go through, the better. Usability be damned. ...

In a Guardian article dated Saturday July 8 2006, Pico Iyer talks about how Google and other search engines have distorted the literary interview. He describes how interviewers prepare themselves by researching their subjects online and how search results tend to artificially highlight and emphasize interesting, but effectively trivial information about the interviewee. The author describes how he once, in some long-since forgotten interview, had mentioned Van Morrison as being an influence on his work and how almost every interviewer since has found this tidbit of information and incorporated it into their own interview. This repeated citation of the same fact has served only to exaggerate the actual importance of Van Morrison on the Author’s work. Of course, as these interviews also go online, the problem only gets worse. His Guardian article will make things worse. This blog entry will make things worse. Pico Iyer and Van Morrison are becoming forever intwined. ...

I was recently pondering the characteristics of so-called “cult fiction” and was trying to remember how it was that I learned about certain cult authors back before this thing called the Internet existed. How did I learn about Vonnegut, Pynchon, Roth? As I dredged through my memories I realized that I most probably ran across these authors whilst using an early analog social bookmarking system- the library checkout card. For those who have never seen one of these things, they were little index-cards inserted into a sleeve that was glued to the inside back cover of library books. When you checked out a book, you would sign your name on a line on the card and the librarian would stamp the due date next to your name on the card and then file it. This was how they kept track of who had which books out and when they were due. When the book was returned, the card would be reinserted in the sleeve and the book would be re-shelved. ...

I was relatively late in learning of the term “backchannel”. It describes a phenomena that I have been fumbling to explain to people as being *one* of several reasons for them to use instant messaging (IM) as a regular tool in the office. Whereas the term backchannel seems to be most often used to describe how tech conference attendees use IRC, Wikis and blogs to carry on parallel conversations and commentary during conference sessions, I have observed the phenomena in the office, in meetings and conference calls. I just that, until late last year, didn’t know it had a name. ...