Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: February 2004

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Trackback for Blogger

Kaye Tramell informs us that she came across new Trackback functionality offered by Haloscan. This brings trackback within reach for all Blogger users.

However I don't think auto-discovery works. I, at least, had to manually enter the trackback url for Kaye's post as an URL to ping.

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 26, 2004 12:14 PM)

Gabriela Avram Private Blog

Gabriela Avram one of last years excellent contributors (see her ppt presentation) to Blogtalk, has been using blogs for project and other professional settings. Now she has started her own personal weblog, with some reservations:

I'm a bit nervous. This is really going to be my own blog!

I'm not quite a newbie. I started and maintain 6 other blogs by now. But none of them is really mine! They are project weblogs, community weblogs, paper writing weblogs...

Thanks for adding your personal voice to the multitude Gabriela!

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 19, 2004 08:09 PM)

Tacit Knowledge Transfer through Blogs

Andy Boyd proposes an experiment to see if blogs can be used as a means to transfer tacit knowledge in an apprenticeship situation. His blog readers being the apprentices. Tacit in this case meaning that the readers will learn what Andy would answer to certain KM-related questions. I like the idea.

Reading someones weblog over time gives you good idea of the writer on the aspects covered in the weblog, I think. At least it certainly feels that way. People who have been reading my blog in the last year probably know what my take on KM is. So my hypothesis is that Andy's experiment will show a transfer of tacit knowledge. The question however is, how effective will it be, e.g. compared to face to face time. How much time will be needed for the effect to show up? So Andy will have to ask his readers how often and closely they follow his blog as well.

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 18, 2004 09:08 PM)

Lynch Mobs and Smart Mobs

Great little quote on individual and moral responsibility in evolving and emerging communities:

Lynch Mobs are just as emergent as Smart Mobs (from lago at errant dot org)

Is it being aware of the potential forming of echo-chambers that's the distinguishing characteristic that seperates the smart mobs from lynch mobs? ( see last two posts)

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 15, 2004 07:57 PM)

Echo-chambers

Joi Ito comments on Echo-chambers. Basically he reflects my own thoughts on this. The antidote against echo-chambers is not to regard any group-forming and community-building as suspicious, as seems to be implied by others. That would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

It's trying to aim for the largest possible community-awareness in a given situation (lurkers as bridge-builders again). It's ok being in a small group with loads of strong ties, as long as you are aware of other and larger contexts and do not exclude those contexts from your group's sense of reality. This however presupposes a pro-active stance, with regular excersizes in looking outward. Not an easy thing to do, balancing the feeling of security at the core of the group, with the quest for the unknown on the turmoiled fringes of a group. Making regular excursions outside your own comfortzone is hard, but also one of those human paradoxes we deal with to be able to grow. It's 'optimal unfamiliarity' as I dubbed it earlier in another guise.

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 15, 2004 12:57 PM)

Lurking and Social Networks

While having lunch with Lilia (who gave a great sketch of how our conversation developed) we talked about her new topic of interest, lurking.

Lurking
Lurking, although the word seems to imply a negative connotation, has usefull aspects nonetheless. It is a way of determining rules of behaviour for new comers to a group.

The most obvious characteristic of a lurker is that he�s at the fringe of a group, listening and observing. Being at the fringe may seem like a bad place from the core, but in fact is a good position to build bridges to other groups, and be aware of other groups in the vicinity. In a face to face setting like a pub or a meeting of some kind, a lurker is visible, often shortly introduced after which the focus of attention shifts to the established group members again.

In on-line settings things are different. In some fora lurkers are encouraged to introduce themselves and then adviced to lurk, i.e. observe and learn for a while. But at all times there is no way of knowing how many lurkers are there that you are unaware of.

As lurkers are possible bridges to other groups, I as a blogger, would like to know:

How many lurkers I have, who read my blog but don't comment or post.

Who they are

Serverlogs can give some clues, and I keep a close watch on them. Dave Winer's RSS-tool also brings new info to light.

Weak and Strong Ties
The importance of lurking lies in the fact that they constitute weak ties. Weak ties are where interesting transactions and exchanges can take place. Strong ties imply that all people involved have access to more or less the same information and opportunities so nothing new comes from them.

Looking at social networks, lurkers are probably two or three nodes away (that's how they found my blog presumeably). Most interesting new commenters (de-lurking lurkers) that pop up on my radar screen/blog are coming from that (social) distance.

network with almost only strong ties

Is this mix of strong and weak ties that forms my micro-blogosphere also a major factor of importance if you suffer from the echo-chamber effect? Where strong ties are the source of resonance, and the absence or presence of weak ties determine wether that cluster of strong ties is closed to input from the outside world?

network with strong ties and numerous weak ties, preventing echo chambers

Meshing of Networks
Another angle on this would be looking at the meshing of networks, a well known IT problem; How many meshing do you need to keep up performance of the network when one or more nodes fail.

There are different levels of meshing one can distinguish.

Total meshing: all nodes are connected directly to all other nodes.

Optimal meshing: all nodes are only a few steps away from all other nodes, via multiple possible paths

Sub-optimal meshing: all nodes are only a few steps away from all other nodes, some via only one path (some info might get lost for some nodes, but the network will still perform)

Sparse meshing: not all nodes are connected to all others through a few steps, and a lot only via 1 path. Islands form, connected by a few bridges.

Echo-chambers, my guess is, form most easily in places (groups of blogs) that have total meshing, and have no 'capacity' left to connect to less meshed 'regions' in a network.

Lurkers are in that case nodes in a sub-optimally meshed network. They're there, but you are not necessarily aware of them.

Magic Numbers
Taking it one step further, maybe the 'magic numbers' we see in networks of humans relate these meshing concepts to our mental capacity to juggle social data.

12 being the average capacity to track nodes in a totally meshed network

50 being the average capacity to track nodes in an optimally meshed network

150 being the average capacity to track nodes in a sub-optimally meshed network.

above 150 being the sparsely meshed social network where anonymity and getting lost becomes possible.

If we relate this to blogs and Clay Shirky's power law, teenage diaries blogs are possibly primarily on the 12/total meshing levels, professional content blogs are probably all in the 50 to 150 ranges, with distinct stability levels (my blog went from 0 to 12 inbound blogs then stabilized, then grew to just over fifty inbound blogs and stabilized again.) Above 150 people are more sparsely connected and start looking for beacons or leaders to orient themselves socially. This is the range where the broadcasting type blogs are, the A-listers.

Landscapes
A last and different way to look at Social Networks could be the metaphor of landscapes, with mountains as barriers, and roads and rivers as attractors.
Closely knit groups would be villages, echo-chambers isolated villages with no nearby roads. Larger groups, sub-optimally meshed are towns and cities, where the risk of too little meshing lurks (homeless people, drop outs etc as a consequence). Lurkers might be unnoticed city dwellers, or tourists from other landscapes, that only become visible if they make themselves known as tourists, leave footprints or marks on/in the landscape as it were. (Kilroy was here)

Oh and yeah, we also ate during lunch, not just talked.
The picture below shows my original notes, taken during the lunch :)

UPDATE: Matt starts wondering about tools for lurkers.

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(posted by Ton Zijlstra at February 4, 2004 07:46 AM)

Covey on Management

While waiting at the counter of the local pizza take-away for my order to be ready, I found a magazine there with an interview with Stephen Covey (age 71, author of the 7 Habits, currently willing to come speak for you at $65.000 per appearance)

In this interview he declared management of people superfluous. One manages money, stocks, portfolios, and the like, not people. Give people purpose and a course, and then stop interfering with them.

The interview ended with this quote (emphasis mine):

In most organisations there is a lack of trust, and most employees are powerless. In this era of knowledge-workers we still use the industrial model of control, in which we treat people like objects. It is as if we are still practising bloodletting, although we know all about bacteria and how they work.