Premise

Rebirth

Well, having been comment-spammed to death on my previous blog I've decided to throw myself on the mercy of Messrs Six Apart. I've actually set about about half a dozen Typepad blogs for other people over the last few months, including my now classical-music-blog-celebrity girlfriend, so it is quite nice to be able to use all the shiny functionality myself. I've imported all my previous posts, and I've left the other blog online in order to prevent broken links elsewhere on the web. I have taken great pleasure in turning the comments function off for the last time on that blog, though - the spam was just terrible. I may also have lost some valuable real comments in the cull required to tidy it up. Sorry if I've lost any historic words you may have posted.

So, I can hear you ask - does this move mean that I'm going to post any more regularly? Probably not - I only post stuff when I have what I think are Useful Thoughts. And since I'm not actually very bright, that isn't going to be very often. Sorry!

NotCon Politics Sessions

You may be aware of the recent announcement of NotCon, the UK's hippest, most cutting edge and least expensive technology conference of 2004. I'm part of the management (hoho), and I have the responsibility for organising two subtly different sessions, The Politics of the Net and Politics on the Net. I'm delighted to be able to do this because I've sat through so many terribly panel sessions on similar topics in my life that I think I must have seen all the mistakes it is possible to make. The most common of these is not having any really interesting, meaty-but-tacklable questions, and that is why I'm posting today.

We already have some ideas about what we'd like some of the core topics of discussion to be, but there is plenty of scope for new angles, new topics, new problems. I thought I'd post this just to encourage people to ponder what questions they do and desperately don't want to see asked. And if you feel you should be on the panel, not in front of it, please submit your proposal.

NB I think it is only fair to warn people in advance that anyone heard using the phrase 'I think it is absolutely key that we understand that' in one of my sessions will be forceably removed from the room before they can finish their unstructured, contentless non-question. Looking forward to seeing you there!

ConConUK Speech

The following is a version of the talk which I gave to ConConUK on February 23rd 2004. I've left it pretty much in the form of a speech, but cut out some of the queues for myself. I've also added in some extra little bits of info which are useful, but which could not be squeezed into the original five minute slot.

The other alteration I'd like to say is that this talk is not 'anti digital democracy'. By working full time on mySociety I hope that I have done all necessary to prove that I believe passionately that the net has an important a rapidly evolving civic and democratic roll. But at the same time, if we are to learn from our mistakes, we must admit and analyse them.

Forgotten email attachment warning plugin

What the world needs is an email client plugin that scans your outbound mail for words like "Attached" or "included", and then warns you if you've not attached anything. Easy peasy.

Outboard Braining

Just some thoughts here, inspired by iSociety's lunchtime event with Cameron Marlow yesterday.

First, Cameron's best insight: The blogosphere contains three groups of people. The top 'A list bloggers', the middle ranking bloggers who want to be A list, and everyone else.

This leads to the thought, are we focussing on the wrong groups, by worrying about who's A-list, and what power they have? There'll always be celebrities, but how important is this compared with the distributed usage of blogs by many, many people writing for themselves and three friends? If we are looking at the wrong group, has anyone got any good thoughts on the deep impact of blogging to the majority of bloggers, and the world they live in? I can't remember reading a lot except friendly condescension for this group. Maybe it is time for some analysis.

This also seems to answer the perenniel question "Could the Blogosphere get too full to work?". With Cameron's trio of groups, the answer looks pretty straight forward. The A-list will always be full to the brim, because people can only remember so many celebrities. There may also be some secondary network scale problems, but they're probably not as important as people's inablity to remember names. These constraints will limit the size of the A list and middle only. The vast majority of micro bloggers, though, will keep going until all the world's sand has been converted to hard drive platters.

And finally, for Will Davies and That Demos Debate about emergent structure in organisations. Could it be that unease about the fairness of emergent networks is to do with the lack of responsibility to match the power? Because an internet node has no formal power over any other, it also has no responsibilities. But when power emerges anyway, through heavy linking, it isn't accompanied by any increase in responsibility. Is that the source of unease? Perhaps Mr Davies would be willing to answer below...

Social Software - A Last, Best Hope for Social Capital?

Over at Phil Gyford's blog there is a lively comments debate taking place about the connection between social capital and social software

At one point, Phil says that he's "slightly concerned everyone’s getting carried away with the “social software can improve social capital” idea when just going out and volunteering somewhere in your neighbourhood would make a bigger difference."
With all due respect, I must say that Phil is wrong here.

The Disanalogy between academia and the blogosphere

Allegedly inspired by something I wrote, Tom Coates has been writing a series of articles about the power of the blogosphere to filter and sustain good quality productive discussion. Using as few words as possible, I am going to attempt to respond.