For more postings about BlogWalk 2.0, see Topicexchange where they are all aggregated.

Nuremberg, medieval streets

More than enough words for now, on to the pictures.

Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (3) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at May 31, 2004 09:48 PM)

The Emergence of Blogging

Recently I’ve read the book Emergence by Steven Johnson (who also writes a weblog).
In it he explains what emergence is, how we can recognize it, and how it might alter the way we work and live, now that we have entered a new phase in our existence: not only are we observing emergence as a phenomena, we are starting to use it. (p.21)

Emergence

Johnson uses several examples throughout his book, the neurons in our head, the way ant colonies go about their work, and how cities develop. These are complex systems that develop interesting behavioural patterns.

In the introduction Johnson cites Warren Weaver in explaining where the complexity realm can be located. Science in the past dealt predominantly with systems of a small number of variables. Based on that work, al in terms of direct causality, man made significant progress. With the advent of statistics it became possible to put a finger on systems with very large numbers of unrelated variables, such as the behaviour of molecules in gas or hereditary patterns, and healthinsurances (p. 46). But, says Weaver, this leaves a large field untouched. Between the small scale systems and the large ‘disorganized complexity’ of statistically approachable situations there lies the space of ‘organized complexity’ (p. 47):

much more than the mere number of variables is the fact that all these variables are interrelated…These problems, as contrasted with the disorganized situations with which statistics can cope, show the essential feature of organization. We will therefore refer to this group of problems as those of organized complexity.

When we relate this to the realms Dave Snowden distinguishes, than complexity is of the organized kind, whereas chaos is the disorganized variety of complexity. Both the knowable and known realms collapse into one, in Weavers description.

What Johnson tries to tell us is that emergence can account, and in fact does account, for a lot of situations that if we encounter them make us think someone or something is in control and deliberately chose a course of action. When we see patterns in design we assume a designer. We name the egg-laying ant queen, implicitly saying she’s in control of the entire colony. Where in fact she’s just laying eggs. But how else could ants operate in their organized manner, if not by being controlled by the queen. This thinking is of course shaped by the way we have organized things ourselves for most of the time: hierarchically, command and control based situations. When all you have is a hammer, everything quickly starts looking like a nail.

Then how does this organized character of emergent systems come about, if not through ‘pacer’ elements that provide control. One way is leaving trails of what you do. When someone comes across that trail it might alter his behaviour. If the trails become longer and the number of trails becomes bigger it might alter the behaviour of groups/systems. It’s how slime molds group together into a single entity, it is how neighbourhoods come into existence. Not Pacers, but Tracers. Not Top-down but Bottom-up. And although our minds might be wired to look for pacers, we are steadily learning how to think from the bottom-up. (p. 67)

Blogging is much like leaving longer traces, much the same way slime molds do. It creates traces we previously could not leave, and we are finding contacts because of it, that otherwise would have remained invisible to us.
What can we learn from natural emergence when looking to apply it to creating emergence ourselves? Johnson says:

If you’re building a system designed to learn from the ground level, a system where macro-intelligence and adaptability derive from local knowledge, there are five fundamental factors (p. 77)

Feedback is an intrinsic feature in emergent systems as well. It is feedback that can tip the system, and create a phase shift to emergence.

Again looking at blogging, what comes to my mind is how it serves several aspects of the list above. More is certainly different, but I especially think of the increased numbers of random encounters I had since I started blogging. Checking the comments, the serverlogs, browsing the blogrolls of others, random finds through Google, they all put me in touch with literally hundreds of others, all by accident, all unplanned. Some of these encounters have gone on and transformed into closer contacts. They became my neighbours in the blogosphere, and in some senses, except for geographic proximity, are more like neighbours to me than the family next door. As to paying attention to my neighbours in connection to feedback, my earlier postings and thoughts about echo chambers come to mind. I stated that isolated echo-chambers are a certain way to remain ignorant of the world around you, but echo-chambers that are connected to, that still have a large number of random encounters with the outside world are essentially creating feedback effects. Amplifying signals and feeding them back through the channels where they came from. This creates patterns and brings them to the foreground. Blogospheric echo chambers are useful as long as paying attention to your neighbours does not discourage you from having random encounters.

Emergence sheds a different light on my previous observations on information overload as well. Information overload does not exist I said, and emergence might help me formulate a reason why.

If we look from a hierarchical perspective there is a need for having all available information at your disposal. It is what keeps you on top of it all. The usage of the term information overload implies a hierarchical situation. Taking the emergence perspective, information overload dissolves into nothingness: it is not about the individual information items, it’s about the overall shapes and patterns they in combination convey, which you should be alert to. And as I said in my earlier posting, for this you need as much info as you can get, increase the random encounters to a maximum, to be able to look for patterns, and feel the pulse of things. (also see p 103 of Emergence) Just as walking on the sidewalks gives you a feel of the pulse of the city. You don’t have to talk to all people passing by for that. A few will do, while you watch all others passing by. No tourist ever complained that two weeks was too short a visit to talk to all New Yorkers in person, in stead she will tell you how she got to know the city just by walking around, seeing people, and on occasion talking to a juggler in Central Park, chatting with a cab driver, and going to a small restaurant.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at May 13, 2004 01:10 PM)

Blog as Personal Presence Portal

In recent weeks I have been playing around with additional tools to enhance the mix of media I have at my disposal when using the internet.

Of course my blog has been there for a while already, as has VoIP (Skype), but now I have added two Wiki's (one public, one private), Yahoo and MSN IM (After having left using IRC behind 10 years ago as mere play. Also I couldn't get Jabber to work properly, which would be able to combine most other IM services in 1), and a webcam to my 'arsenal'.

All this was triggered by conversations about presence and use of media.

It started with a Skype conversation with Stuart Henshall, which I described to Dina Mehta as:

One or two days ago I skyped with Stuart. While we talked we looked at my blog, I send him links through the chatbox, we edited a page in my Wiki, and visited several websites together. Just as you would in a f2f conversation, pick a book from the shelf and read a passage from it, point to or leaf through a stack of papers on the desk, and jointly doodle on the whiteboard, referring to a presentation poster hanging in the corridor.

Dina expressed her wish to be able to create a flow between the different media we use. This requires an elegant combination of media. Dave Pollard however correctly offers that we still shirk using the media at our proposal, much less combine them effectively, and if we do use them in parallel, there is at least at first a quite distinct feeling of awkwardness involved. Dave asks: how come we have not found work-arounds that yet.

Jon Husband of Wirearchy sums up our challenge quite nicely and says we have to learn how to deal with presence in on-line settings.

These three topics, presence, media mix, and awkwardness are the subject of the next paragraphs.

Presence is Key
As knowledgeworkers we have several issues that make on-line presence key. First, there is a tremendous need to communicate. To test and share ideas, to learn through interaction with others, to make your expertise known. In earlier centuries knowledge workers travelled from university to university, and from monastery to monastery, and the intensive correspondence of great scientists in the early part of the twentieth century served the same need. There has been always a network of people, that crossed over political and cultural boundaries, sharing knowledge and collaborating on journeys of learning. In our times the means to do that have increased enormously, and the number of people with opportunity to use those means have increased at the same rate. We need to create a presence in those media we use as best as we can, to help satisfy our immense need for communication.

There are several approaches to presence through media. An article by Matthew Lombard and Theresa Ditton from Temple University names six of those approaches:

I think of those six three are most relevant to our on-line interaction. Those three are, presence as social richness, presence as transportation, and presence as immersion.

Social Richness points to the number of cues we get from a medium, and relates to the Media Richness theory, that combines it with the medium's characteristics.

Presence as Transportation looks at what the medium does, does it transport you to somewhere (for instance a fantasy novel that brings you to another world), does it bring something to you (like newsbulletins that bring the world to your doorstep), or does it create a place where people come together. It is the last version that is most relevant to knowledge workers; bringing people together for interaction, but both others are part of the picture as well.

Presence as Immersion has to do with how much of you is involved in the communication through a medium. This closely connects to Flemmings posting about being in the here and now. Does a medium succeed in letting you concentrate entirely on it, or does it allow for distractions etc.

As Elmine alludes in her recent writings on how media facilitate for conversation and discourse:

no single medium can offer a platform for discourse, so weblogs as a sole medium can't be seen as discourse. Rather, weblogs are a very good startingpoint for discourse. The weblog can serve as a filter for getting to know people who are interested in the same things. Through weblogs one can have conversations with 'self' and (preferably) others. These conversations can transcend into discourse when people start using multiple communication tools simultaneously (VoIP, chat, forum, e-mail, wiki, webcam etc.), and ultimately start meeting eachother face-to-face.

If no single medium can satisfy all our requirements to reach a high level of presence, that can cater for our need for discourse, than we need a mix of media to compensate for the shortcomings of any one medium in that mix. Elmine, in my view rightly, suggests that a blog is a very good starting point to present the available media mix to potential conversation and discourse partners. It serves as a fixed marker, that contains enough context to build trust and start a relationship through conversation. It also allows you to provide access to other media (e-mail, wiki, Skype, IM, video, documents etc., contact info for face to face) that can build on the conversations started at the weblog, but in themselves are more fluid which makes using them as a permanent marker less useful. Weblogs are much richer fixed markers as for instance profiles at fora, or YASN's, since they are fixed markers in location, but not fixed in content. Our weblog can serve as our Personal Presence Portal, the hub in our communicational flow.

Media Mix

What a lot of us try to do either with blogs or through a wiki, or whatever other medium we use on-line, is to open up space for conversation, dialogue, discussion, and discourse. We tend to bet everything on one horse though, expecting (and often evangelizing as well) that all our needs are served by one medium. Every medium has aspects that serve our purposes well. Blogs create context and thus help build trust, wiki's open up possibilities of collaboration, fora cater to discussions, e-mail to extended conversations, etc. etc. But as I argued in the previous paragraphs, a mix of media is needed to cater to the different factors in building a sense of presence.
In the following table I try to connect the different media to the different aspects of presence. For this I also refer to this piece by Dave Pollard, and this one by Zbigniew Lukasiak

[NOTE: I will add in the table with media later on. No time to do it now, but did not want to wait with posting either, so read the text first, you can do without the table for now]

If we know, and I think, intuitively we all do, that it's a mix of media that serves us best, then why don't we exploit such a mix to it's utmost limits?

Awkwardness
Dave Pollard, somewhat in frustration, asks why it often feels so awkward to start using different media with other people. And apparantly it is this awkwardness that keeps us from using the full mix of media at our disposal.

The awkwardness we feel stems from the difference in richness of media, I think. When I move on from a text based medium like blogs or e-mail to a voice oriented medium, the information richness increases. We get to know more about eachother, but requires that we show ourselves a bit more as well. This might not be a conscious thing, who explicitly is aware that our voice gives away more clues as to who we are then our written words. And when you switch media, you don't know if the other will be welcoming the attempt.

Now when you meet someone in person, there is that same awkwardness, but it is dealt with more or less unconsciously by us. When I picked up Jon Husband, or Flemming Funch from the railway station when they came to stay with us, it was strange to meet a stranger, based on blog-interaction and some short phone calls confirming times of arrival. But our bodies deal with that awkwardness. We look around uncertainly for the other, whom we don't know, then we smile to test whether we found the right person, and we greet eachother. We see eachothers uneasy start, and perceive we are on equal footing in this social interaction. Then the conversation starts, and we manage past the awkwardness.

Stepping 'down' from a face to face meeting to other media is no problem. But stepping 'up' without previous personal encounters is more difficult: we do not see our own awkwardness reflected in the other's body language. To get across it we have to make our awkwardness explicit, since we have no backchannel to deal with it in a more unconscious way.

So to end the awkwardness we might learn to say it out loud during a first video conference, or first skype-call, that it is awkward but exciting at the same time. And that will then launch us into conversation, is my guess.

Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (8) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at May 10, 2004 06:05 PM)

Perfect Elevator Blogging Pitch Takes New Twist

I wasn't aware of it yet, but Dave Pollard informs me that after having been a judge in the Perfect Elevator Pitch for Corporate Blogging contest, now the judges will be the contestants. That means no more criticising the hard work of others, but getting to work myself. Oh my, that is not what Judith initially asked of us :)

But I think it is a great idea. Let's see what I can come up with, now that the 17 original contestants have sharpened my ideas about what I think is important in 'selling' corporate blogging.

I wonder what the deadline is.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at May 4, 2004 08:50 PM)

Remembrance Day

May 4th is remembrance day in the Netherlands, May 5th Liberation Day.

At 20:00 the whole country will fall silent for two minutes remembring the atrocities of World War II, and all victims of armed conflicts since then. In a range of border towns with representatives of villages of the WWII enemy present, which is good.

On Saturday 10 new countries joined the EU.
Maciej Ceglowski yesterday worded the entry of Poland into the EU like this:

I passed two men walking out of a restaurant, one looked at his watch and said to his friend "well, sir, as of five minutes ago we are Europeans".

It was a fantastic feeling. Not only did I now have both an American and a European passport, meaning I could have any Russian bride in the catalog, but it also meant that this silly but deeply beloved country was here for good, was here to stay. It would be come a normal, second-tier European nation, besieged by annoying backpackers and completely unremarkable. That may not sound like much of a national dream, but for Poland it is the culmination of two hundred years' bitter struggle. My own grandfather is older than modern Poland; being in Europe means we can now take the independence and continued existence of this country for granted, a remarkable luxury.

Tonight I pay tribute to those who gave us that luxurious liberty, tomorrow I celebrate it.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at May 4, 2004 07:53 PM)

Music Industry Should Stop Whining II

Just recently I wrote an entry how at Harvard a study showed that file sharing and decreasing CD sales did not correlate, and that the Australian music industry just had their best year ever.

And now this at Buckman's Magnatune blog:

While the RIAA reports 7% loss of revenue, Soundscan reports a 9% increase. The difference: RIAA bases itself on the number of items shipped to stores. Soundscan reports actual over the counter sales.

Ergo: Shop-owners are keeping less stock, and are following demand more just in time.

(found via David Smith at Preoccupations)

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at May 2, 2004 08:00 PM)

Your blog is your front porch

Dina pointed to Brandon Wirtz with this interesting 'late entry' into the elevator pitch contest for corporate blogging:

Blogging to the outside is about building relationships. You don't have to turn every reader in to a dyed in the wool customer, but you turn them in to some one who is willing to consider your company when they go to spend their hard earned money. You build loyalty, and you show that you do care about the feedback you get. Blogging is like sitting on your front porch and waving to your neighbors as they walk by. You don't have to have a great dialog with each of them, but they will remember who you are and think of you when they need something, or be there to help out when they can.

Now, here in the Netherlands front porches would take way too much space, so we do without them. But the cultural icon is recognizable to me, watching American tv shows. I'm wondering what metaphor we should have to change this eloquent pitch into, for different cultural realms. Sidewalks for busy cities? Spending the first few hours of the evening out by the fountain on the market square? The corner café? These are all western examples, but how about India for instance?

This picture of front porches, people passing by, connects (through the sidewalks I just mentioned) to a book, (and it will make sense when you've read it yourself), I've just finished reading: Steven Johnson's Emergence, which connects several of my lines of thought, regarding evolution, blogs as bottom up filtering, and emergent behaviour, and how that to me spells radical change of how we should view and design our organisations. Jon Husband has coined this beautiful word for this new type of organisation: wirearchy. He was also the one who gave me the book Emergence when we recently met, which he in turn borrowed from Euan Semple. So while Jon set out to buy two new books for Euan and himself, he entrusted the other copy, which is starting to look like a well-worn item, to me, with the implicit understanding that I would find someone else to give it to after reading. With the upcoming BlogWalk 2.0 in Nürnberg, finding a suitable candidate won't be too hard to find.

[UPDATE] Sebastien Paquet points me to this post by Peter Kaminski of January 3rd: Blogs are like front porches

Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (3) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at May 2, 2004 12:38 PM)

Welcome New Neighbours

Today 10 countries join the European Union, creating an even more European Union. This is a historic landmark. Fifteen years after the collapse of the iron curtain, middle-European countries, some of whom are in the heart of European history, return to their rightful place in the European family. Building these new ties is a step forward in extending the stability of the continent. It's been a long way since the original six countries (NL, B, L, D, F, I) founded the European Community for Coal and Steel, making it impossible for either one to build a war-industry on its own, by bringing coal and steel production under collective influence. And there is a long way still to go.

For these 10 new member are at the same time the biggest opportunity for Europe, as well as the biggest threat to the European Union. We need to reform the decisionmaking structures fast, radically change the illogical emphasis on farming policies which paralyze the EU financially, and above all turn the pseudo-democratic constructs into democratic ones, or the European Union will drown like a dinosaur in a swamp.

So a heartfelt welcome to

Estonia

Lithuania

Latvia

Poland

Czech Republic

Slovakia

Hungary

Slovenia

Malta

and Greek-Cyprus (who will join only half, as they decided to shape the future by looking in the rear view mirror in last months referendum)

We can use the 74 million extra pairs of hands, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at May 1, 2004 08:39 AM)