I received rather a sweet email on Friday morning:
I blogged about one small aspect that came up in your most recent post – I hope you don’t think i was poaching your comments. It just needed more detail and I thought it was really important. And I do cite you… still friends?
It was Jenny of course, riffing off my own wibblings.
This set me to thinking about one of the ‘Unconference’ sessions at SciBlog ‘08. I didn’t say much about it in my ‘official’ report, but some interesting things did come up. Basically, Maxine wanted to know how it is possible to track multiple conversations (on—for the sake of argument—one particular subject) throughout the grits teeth blogosphere.
First, the geeks got hold of this and started wibbling incessantly about the ‘semantic web’, which I’m sure was very laudable but left my head spinning a little bit. Things got a little bit weird and meta, with some people seeming to want all conversations about any particular subject to be aggregated into one über-conversation, which caused Jenny, Heather and myself a great deal of head-shaking and grumphing.
Maxine just looked on, bewildered, while people dribbled on about DOIs and citing papers etc. Andrew Walkingshaw, bless him, talked a lot of sense, pointing out that this was a technological approach to a social problem.
Yeah, all very good points, but how the hell do we do anything useful??
We tried to steer the conversation back to how we think multiple conversations about the one subject is a good thing, we just want to know how to track them. Certain people missed the point I think (and started pimping wikipedia, for some bizarre reason), which was a shame, because it’s a real problem. Both Jenny and myself have blogged about something and been told “Oh we’ve already done that”. We, actually, know it’s been done, but our voices are just as valuable and y’know, we might have a take on it that you haven’t thought of.
We got support from the direction of Jean-Claude Bradley, who argued that we should just accept there are multiple conversations (I may have suppressed a cheer at that stage). Different people can have different takes on the same thing, and those voices should be heard. Gathering everything into one place is unhelpful and probably quashes quieter but equally valuable voices.
So the upshot is no, Jenny, I don’t think you’re poaching my comments—at least, I don’t mind if you are. I think this is the strength of weblogs, and we can still be friends. OK?
That Gee character, on the other hand, can sod right off.
Come up to me and say that.
I believe I did, once.
And lived to tell the tale.
I would have thought that a website that aggregates all the blog posts about one particular paper, for example, would be a good thing, as readers could then read all the available points of view on a single page rather than having to trawl the web. Surely this would in fact be very helpful and enable quieter voices at less well-read blogs to get heard?
Or am I missing the point here somewhere?
That’s what we were trying to say Helen, but it sort of got lost in the noise.
Phew! I think NPG’s Postgenomic does something along these lines, although I’ve not checked the site out properly. That’s my weekend sorted then.
I believe I did, once.
And lived to tell the tale.
Maybe. But you came out of the encounter … changed.
This is all getting a bit meta and convoluted – didn’t I actually blog about this point already?
Helen, I don’t mind blog aggregators at all, especially for scientific stuff. It’s more the idea of not feeling comfortable speaking more creatively for fear someone else had already been there, done that.
Richard, I really don’t get the problem. Sure there was a lot of tech-talk, but I didn’t think the main gist of the conversation was to gather everything into one ‘über-conversation’.
Helen nailed what most people in that session were after:
a website that aggregates all the blog posts about one particular paper, for example, would be a good thing, as readers could then read all the available points of view on a single page rather than having to trawl the web. Surely this would in fact be very helpful and enable quieter voices at less well-read blogs to get heard?.
Or maybe it was just too hot in the room and I just didn’t get it.
laughs
I didn’t notice anything about multiple conversations being bad in that … conversation … either – the main points I could hear were:
Is that the same thing you were looking for?
It all seemed a little unsatisfactory, but there was definitely a sense that some wanted to aggregate and unify the conversations, instead of letting them run wild.
Be free, little conversations.
Coming back to “We tried to steer the conversation back to how we think multiple conversations about the one subject is a good thing, we just want to know how to track them.” – if you have any practical views on how you’d like that to work (as a reader), I’d love to hear them.
That’s a good question. Something along the lines of how Facebook suggests friends you might know, perhaps; or some kind of sidebar that says ‘similar topics are being discussed x y and there’. Not sure whether you’d want that in your RSS feed, or on the blog page itself. Possibly the latter.
Now that is an excellent idea. Maybe bloggers could join networks based on their most common post topics, and insert a widget on their blog that automatically searches and displays the best matches from the same network. I would definitely sign up for something like that. I’m sure there’s some genius in our ranks who could at least make this an internal NN feature.
You see Cath, that’s exactly what I wanted to talk about in that session, and I think Maxine did too, but we got a bit
bulldozedsidetracked.The point of semantics, getting machines able to read these topics and tag them appropriately, is still a doozy. We have (yet) to do that manually, which is a drag.
Hmm. I’d heard of Scintilla before of course, and it needs work, but isn’t it basically what we’re looking for?
Scintilla’s ‘similar items’ is part of the solution, yes, and so is the list of terms and links on the right-hand size. FriendFeed, Zemanta and Sphere are all related too, as we discussed in that session. I’ll try and build something a bit more over-arching into Scintilla though, to show up either on your profile page or alongside your blog.
Maxine just looked on, bewildered
That’s my cover blown, then.
Helen and anyone else looking at Postgenomic, hold your breath for a week or two. Euan has built a fabulous new version of it, and it shoudl be launching soon. (He described this briefly in the session he and I held in the morning. Or rather, I blurbled on in my bewildered state, and Euan said a few sensible and clever things.)
Anyway, when it is going, it will track what is going on in all the science blogs that it indexes. Very clever stuff, Euan.
This is all very exciting. I think
weyou should make Sciblog’09 at least a two-dayer.So long as they aren’t over a precious weekend;-)
Well quite. I mean, a Saturday. What were you thinking?
Never mind what I was thinking ;-), it did not go down too well in Certain Quarters.
Maybe bloggers could join networks based on their most common post topics
Well, that’s me completely bu&&e%$d then.
‘bubbled’?