School of Dance

By alex | Published: 7/22/2007

Alan Watts, who finished grad school, has the right idea here.

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The current state of blogging

By alex | Published: 7/20/2007

[I just found this in cleaning out my system. People were reading my unfinished posts–can’t find anything on the ! bug in wordpress. So I cleaned them out. I wrote this on November 15, 2004, but obviously I didn’t finish :). Rather than trash it, I publish. ]

More of the Same

As with every new system or innovation encountered on “the internets,” a common claim about blogging is “it’s all been done before.” I kept a blog before they were called blogs: a frequently updated website, an email newsletter, a periodically downloadable file on “the Source,” an early ISP. And before that there was Plato. Isn’t blogging just BBS software / forums in new bottles? How is the blogosphere substantially different from Usenet? These questions are both inevitable and valid. Too often we thrill to the idea of the latest incarnation of the “virtual community,” and are quite willfully able to forget the hyperbole surrounding earlier technologies. And it is difficult not to recognize the kind of buzz around blogging as similar to these earlier collaborative technologies.

I think blogging has a simple answer to this: none of these other technologies captured the public imagination in the same way that blogging has, nor the same number of users. Sure, there are more who use email, brows the web, or communicate via IM, but these are not really the same special type of large-scale discussion technologies that blogs embody. I think that when future historians look back at the earliest years of this century, two of the things that will show up in the history books will be the mass adoption of blogs and wikipedia. I don’t think that these are the most important innovations of the last few years, but I do think that they will have some of the most important social impact. So part of the answer to that question is simply one of size. Usenet, even at its peak, did not (I believe) have a million people writing, and ten times that reading. We don’t have to fall back on hyperbole: if the story of blogging ended today and no one ever blogged again — and I although I don’t think we’ve seen the peak of public blogging, I would not be shocked if this were the case — we would still have to acknowledge this as one of the most widespread examples of user-produced media, and something worth understanding.

But really what people are suggesting when they say this is that the principles that we have already discovered in earlier examples of computer mediated communication are just being repeated in another form in blogs. One answer to that is “yes, but to a greater degree.” That is, there are more people doing it, as argued above. Or, the impediments to presenting to the web have been reduced further, so that creating and maintaining a web page is even easier than it has been in the past, and has been reduced to some critical level at which there are compounding returns. But this “more” change is not something that should be dismissed out of hand. On the other hand, there are some elements of the blogosphere that I think are, if not unique, especially important. Some of these are reflected in the neologisms and specialized services that have arisen to support blogging.

New words for new ways

One of the ways to identify what makes weblogs special is by noting some of the specialized jargon that has grown up around blogging. Unfortunately the proliferation of these terms have made entry into blogging more daunting in some ways. But they also indicate new ideas or techniques that need to be named because they don’t fit well into previous paradigms. Among these:

Trackbacks, pingbacks, reciprolinks, blogrolls.

RSS, aggregators.

del.icio.us, technorati, blogdex, furl.

The blogging factors

What, then, are the salient differences, the principle components of blogging, that we should be concerned with?

Ridiculously easy publishing.

Forging public voices.

Conviviality, conversation, deliberation?

Planned serendipity. While improving the ability to search is an important need on the web, improving our ability to stumble usefully is also important.

The return of a workable push media: now with more mods.

Convergence of exchanged data, personal server. Todo: Onfolio

Ubiquitous media.

Future

No one is good at predicting the future of communication technology; there are just too many variables. That said, a prediction of the future state of technology is really just another way of saying that you have a good feel for what is important in today’s technology. Neal Stephenson claimed that books like Snow Crash were intentionally placed in the now. The degree to which they seem to be prophetic is directly related to how well they discern the contours of the present. So the future of blogging is “more of the same” where “the same” refers to those elements of blogging that are important or unusual. If the list above is correct, we can expect innovations to continue to develop along the lines they already have.

The barriers to entry, and complexity of the process of blogging will be reduced. I suspect we will see WYSIWYG blogging software within the next year, at the outside. When you want to add or edit a message, you click on it and start typing. The RSS of anything that might ever change is already providing a way of quickly making semantic connections that allow for other kinds of rapid updates, and I suspect that this will continue. We are all blogging with kludges for blog software at the moment, and many of the ways that this needs to improve are already clear.

There will continue to be a place for small and large public voices, but I suspect we will see some serious changes in the way some organizations do business, such that they can make use of the transparency that blogging provides. This will have a real effect on how we think about privacy and how we think about who we are. The transparent and networked nature of our public identities is, I believe, reversing some of the the century-long opinions about the nature of personal identity/psyche and the networked (or urban) society. It was assumed that we would increasingly become divided into multiple selves in service to a number of non-overlapping groups. Unlike in the traditional village, the people we work and play with often do not know each other, and they each know a different form of “you.” This leads to something that appears to be akin to multiple personalities, and the purposive construction of new identities for different kinds of interactions. But the transparency that blogging seems to encourage may mean a reversal, or at the very least a complication, of this process. The identity that appears in my blog is one that looks the same to my wife, my students, my doctor, my boss, my mother, and my colleagues around the world. Maintaining any multiple identities I might have becomes far more difficult with my social circles become enmeshed together.

We can at least hope that those newly public voices will also lead to new kinds of discussion, deliberation, and conviviality. I must admit that I am particularly suspicious of this. I suspect that very little gets done in blogs, and that there is not a good framework for distributed conversations. This may change, but at present, the kinds of conversations that occur on blogs feel somehow asymmetric. I have talked about this before, on this blog and in conversations: many bloggers are the inverse of lurkers: they are “mumblers.” Lurkers read without revealing themselves to the authors. Mumblers write without knowing if there is an audience. Mumbling is good for public discourse, I think, but it may not be as good for discussion and deliberation.

While they may not host collaborations, they might enable them. The discussions that do occur on blogs tend to be a little like the pheromone trails that ants leave. Those trails may not, in themselves, represent any form of useful structure. However, they form the support infrastructure that allows for large-scale collaboration. By providing some form of transparent “contrail” on the web of your work, your interests, your ideas, your social networks, you allow for the intersection of such paths. As a bunch of ants wandering around exploring the intellectual space of our world, the likelihood that our trajectories will ever lead to a useful collision is relatively small. But this increases many-fold when we leave behind bread crumbs for others to stubble upon.

I think people are coming to understand this process of encountering trails. You see this a bit in investigations of knowledge management in the real world. More and more, people are abandoning the idea that you can download expertise into a system. If you could do that (and you can’t), you wouldn’t really need the people in an organization. Instead, you need to build tools that enhance the process of leaving a trail, so that when people don’t know what they are looking for, they know who does.

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[OSI] Knowledge Management

By alex | Published: 7/17/2007

Presenters:
* Dr. Mike Wertheimer, Chief Technology Officer, Office of the Director of National Intelligence
* G. Clayton Grigg, Chief Knowledge Officer, FBI
* Jeffrey R. Cooper, Chief Innovation Officer, SAIC
* Ed Waltz, Chief Scientist, BAE Systems
* Moderator: Thomas Sanderson, Deputy Director of the Transnational Threats Initiative, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Presentations

The session asks how we make use of the expertise of the web, especially blogs, wikis, and collaborative environments.

Early in Wertheimer’s tenure at DNI, he’d get the same story from lots of people. There would be some hard problem, and so they would facilitate getting a diverse group into a room. No one solved the problem, and when you asked why not, they said they didn’t have enough data. Why?

They were mostly introverted, and most people had a pretty strongly-held opinions. They rushed to consensus, that consensus being that there was no good solution. That said, he would ask, is it possible that the answer is in someone’s desk drawer? Yes, they say, they think that is possible. Would they have taken a different path if they had known it was in someone’s drawer? Surprising answer: no. They like the way they do it. And what is that strategy? Task more collection. “The strategy for finding a needle in the haystack is to put more hay on the pile.”

Intellipedia is an effort to expose ideas before they are fully baked. The effort has had some success, but is facing new challenges. The first wave of Intellipedians are zealots, and have a clear idea of how the wiki should be used and shouldn’t. The second wave of people are trying new things, but running into similar problems when their efforts run headlong into policy issues. What do you do when contractors set up pages? [That’s actually a problem with Wikipedia as well.] How should pages for debating whether global warming is “real” be handled? What can you put on your home page? That you like to surf? That you are a Christian? What about a case where someone defaced another person’s home page with a racial slur as a joke? How do you stop this happening, while not encumbering the network with rules.

How do you “manage the gray area” of a system that is designed to be without rules in a community that has a long culture of rules. They are trying to let a thousand flowers bloom, but it’s difficult because of the compliance and security issues. How do you keep it a good place to be and useful to the process, and not sink the mission.

Waltz talked about the exchange of knowledge artifacts at various levels: a chat over the phone, exchange of data, and finally, at the highest and most important level, the exchange of mental models; that is, some understanding of tacit models of reasoning.

Grigg gave a pretty broad overview of knowledge management, looking at managing human resources; issues with knowledge architecture in the organization, and how do you migrate previous knowledge; how do organizations memorialize lessons learned, how do you capture the knowledge of the experienced folks; how to ensure that records are captured and placed into operation “just-in-time.” Finally, he moved on to the issue of collaborative platform, peer-to-peer sharing.

Cooper made an argument in support of analysis as a human and social endeavor, and there is a need to not just give lip service to that, but create systems that support the cognitive work of analysts. Building such systems is not easy. He says that the reasons that analysts’ tools have failed because they failed to understand how analysts actually work. He says the panel should not be about “knowledge management” but rather “knowledge creation.” Not moving and storing information, but helping individuals or groups create (or co-create) new knowledge.

He argues that systems are missing the social element, the temporal element (timeline), and the spatial, physical nature of information artifacts. Knowledge management has only changed in terms of volume. Understanding the social networks that already exist to understand the information problem. Most of this remains tacit, and needs to be understood through the social filter. We need to help people to represent the thinking, not just the answer. “Analysis” covers a lot of material: from the immediate and narrow to very broad, general problems. We cannot expect the same tools to handle this diverse set of tasks. We need to understand how this is done socially now, and draw this into design of support tools.

Sanderson talked about a “trusted information network” program (using Groove), a globally distributed forum for discussing jihadists. A question would be put up, and then it would be discussed by this group. The most important incentive was that it had impact, both in terms of real action and their own work. It was important that by entering discussion they would gain knowledge as well. Need to have moderation to maintain a flow. Need a group willing to challenge one another–who are competitive.

Q & A

If a moderator is necessary, what about Intellipedia and similar non-moderated sites work? Even Wikipedia needs gardeners to keep things together and working. (The panelists kept torturing this metaphor so long, it started to feel absurdly a bit like Being There.)

It’s not just KM: are there gaps in policy at a higher level? Yes, for a lot of reasons. One of them may be that the DNI doesn’t have a big enough stick to lead to change in the community. It’s also a cultural issue: according to a survey those with the highest job satisfaction see the least need to collaborate across agencies.

Cooper argues that we have very little peripheral intelligence: most of it is tasked and focussed. I was actually surprised by this, and I’m curious as to how much is actually spent on keeping watch for unexpected threats.

How do you work practices like blogging and wikis into evaluation of performance, and such? Wertheimer says it’s actually dangerous to contribute. Not everyone needs to be an Intellipedian. It’s fine if the people who want to write write, and others just read. It’s an entrepreneurial time, and entrepreneurs fail. That said, Intellipedia has led to big wins, breakthroughs. They haven’t figured out how to minimize the risk, “but the ones who take the risk are the ones who are exciting to be around.” Cooper notes that the problem of evaluating freely published work is one that academia has been trying to work on for at least a century when evaluating the work of faculty.

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[OSI] Academic Outreach

By alex | Published: 7/17/2007

I’m continuing to only blog the breakout sessions. At least one of the cameras at the plenaries (I counted eight at the last one) belong to C-SPAN (they’ve been broadcasting the sessions it over the last couple of days) and it’s possible to stream a few of those recordings from their website. They are recording some of the breakout sessions, as well, I think, and that is a good thing because especially today, there are a number that I am going to end up having to forgo. There is a session this afternoon on the “Libraries in the Future,” for example, and another on trends in business intelligence. Luckily, they have a crack team of pro bloggers doing a nice job covering things. This morning, I missed a discussion on employing open source in defense of civil rights that I probably should have gone to, since it is one of the areas I am particularly interested in.

The breakout session I did attend this morning was on academic outreach. Several panelists talked a bit about the professionalization of analyst training in the academy. The focus was on the work at Mercyhurst and Johns Hopkins, but there is an effort, both through the DNI and the International Association for Internet Education to establish a baseline description of required capabilities for the analyst, to aid in educating the next wave of intelligence analysts.

I had hoped that there would be more on research articulation. While there was a bit of talk about accessing expertise outside the intelligence community, there was a lot less on the meta-level of studying how intelligence analysts–and intelligence organizations–do their job. I suspect that there is already a lot out there in this regard, however, and I’m just not plugged into that literature very directly.
ni
It was an interesting session, and I am looking forward to tracking down some of the unclassified documents related to training–particularly the mentioned competency inventory–and maybe some syllabi and other materials from the new programs. I do not see Quinpiac getting into the Intelligence training area any time soon, but many of the analytical frameworks and skills are broadly of interest to business intelligence, user analysis, and market analysis–things our current students need to be able to do better.

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