|
Stipriaan
He had to deal with the problem of publish a new branch of research. Further difficulties:
The project´s on a budget (which was crucial for the choice of the software),
people reject the progress due to ignorance. As a journalist he was used to a certain wall of ignorance that could only be shattered through appealing and simple messages.
He got acquainted with weblogs through the Schockwellenreiter, one of Germany´s first bloggers (who by the way held this hilariously formulated but very informed lecture yesterday).
# on 5/24/03; 1:10:03 PM__
Cherfas is not the first one to be very careful about the mentioning of his organization in the conference. Having listened to all these precautionary measures we should read back to what Mr. Kulikauskas said yesterday about copyright issues. Isn´t it odd that a blogger has to justify himself if he touches on anything related to marketing and corporative toorg/sites/blogtalk.net/files (and therefore nearly all the issues out there) ? In Cherfas´ case there´s even only a non-profit organization in the background. You can measure the ambiguousness of it all by listening to Cherfas´ last words, that people are "afraid of empowering the users". Too much legal stuff for me.
With a very english and a very notechie trait in his presentation he amuses the audience by explaining his stony way into weblogs. When he posted for the first time, he was amazed at the appearance of his writings on the screen. He felt very much liberated and immediately went on to advrtise his postings.
His insight into biotech industries allows him to depict some issues that are relevant even in other areas: Above all, it´s speed. You can lose it all if you lag behind by only one day.
We lag behind as well, the amount of eagerness for discussion clearly contradicts one comment on ou´r site that found the first day totally boring. For me as a newbie nearly everything presented so far was of interest. have jumped from near total ignorance (I had only published an article for the Danube University Intern Magazine about the upcoming trend) to a wellbranched orientation in the dozens of benefits and applications of weblogs.
# on 5/24/03; 12:55:39 PM__
Wolf intends to add the missing quantity of bullshit to the conference. He is satisfied with the level of complexity the earlier speakers attained, yet he wants to step back a bit.
The three points he makes:
1) The people writing the blogs.There are even artist who post daily sketches.
2) merging of weblogs with other media, Wolf`s television "has" a weblog.
3) The future will bring techniques that allow to blog things that aren´t bloggable today. BLOG ++. Wolf defends the lack of ambition of people to focus their content on specific toorg/sites/blogtalk.net/files, but he predicts that highly specialized people will come together via Weblog to find solutions to problems that are only interesting to them.
After all the mathematical, statistical, sometimes even egocentrical lectures, Wolf´s lively speech has all the former elements wrapped into an amusing futureoriented concept. I am most attracted by the expected smartness and sophistication of weblogs to come. We are just at the beginning, and weblogs just start to influence other developments and being influenced by them (e.g. Webservices, a topic until now unmentioned).
Communities: Get smart, get WIKI.
# on 5/24/03; 11:22:54 AM__
His lecture develops on the role of weblogs in the media environment. You have a better chance of being read (by potentially millions of people or at least your specific blogosphere) by writing a weblog instead of "posting" your article in alocal newspaper that is eventually only overread.
Copeland´s concept of hubness is made up of hip and hub ( as network hubs, how the hell can you recognize the "hip" factor in the word?). In this kind of environment the involved aren´t blind to their connectedness anymore, they are aware of the mutual communication activity. The emphasis here is not so much on political groupings but on commercial decisions. If 30% percent of my blogosphere discusses the new Matrix film, the need to go out and watch it becomes stronger and stronger
# on 5/24/03; 10:31:42 AM__
From an european perspective Rebecca Blood is a (cyber) punk. You might find her likeness, her face with shaved temples, in an illustration for the Neuromaner series. Once used to her outward appearance, though, you´ll find her very nice and focused on what she does.
What she proposes in her speech is to use more extensively the possibilities of Weblogs. She advocates the shattering of conventions and the laziness of bloggers that surround themselves only with those circles that resemble their own frame of mind. Weblogs are all about the right to be different and the subsequent right to voice this difference. Going about in this direction yourself, you will immediately recognize the other´s unique identity and opinion instead of stuffing them all into the same pigeon-hole.
Weblog might be a "medium to broaden our view", but what incites the individual blogger to make that kind of commitment ? The link provided by the own peer group is always stronger than the gentleman´s (or woman`s) agreement oftwo opposing sides that compromise at least on talking to each other. The clearly optimist estimation of Blood lacks a clear insight into group dynamics.
# on 5/24/03; 10:05:25 AM__
People are slowly crowding in, maybe some of yesterday´s speakers grasped the chance of taking an extended morning walking along the Danube. The majority of the bloggers have never been to Vienna before. The environment is not that impressive compared to NY City standards, but will improve throughout the next years. Vienna will make a strong stance on becoming the most important conference city in the area.
# on 5/24/03; 9:45:38 AM__
Sebastian Fiedler states that Bloggers are per se self-emancipating persons. There are at least built-in mechanisms that trigger an increased sense of reflection and selfreflection.
It was Gregory Bateson (www.oikos.org/baten.htm ) who already in the 1950s pointed to the possibilities of learning by learning on a higher degree, by metalearning. My question to Sebastian is: How do you actually do this ? Is there any favourite way of conversation that sponsors the metalearning more than do others ? And what about the gap between virtual (and transfered in time) talk and real talk that is still faster (if more fleeting) than textbased exchange ? Could we achieve progress in metalearning by simply talking slower, let´s say by establishing a convention that everybody has the right to speak out say 5-6 sentences before the other one has exactly the same time to respond ( as in chess)?
I miss the recipe in S. Fiedler´s theory, although I find his approach very stimulating.
# on 5/23/03; 8:31:02 PM__
The Schockwellenreiter had been observing certain internetprojects for some time and found that the client-server-hierarchy-system was too susceptible to breakdowns since servers easily reached their upper processing limit. The solution in his view was to decentralize data storage. The only server integrated is one or several community server that receives, requests and redistributes information data. This makes possible projects that a community of volunteers contribute to.
# on 5/23/03; 3:59:56 PM__
A policy of nonrestriction that Kulikauskas demands may lead to content that aren´t for the most part considered serious, such as sex and crime. As Hossein Derakshan points out in his lecture, these toorg/sites/blogtalk.net/files are surprisingly successful in Iran. This is an important issue: Making your voice heard means to speak out loud your suppressed desires. Maybe in the Iranian context the "sexual liberation" is part of the struggle of the modern Iranian population to free themselves from a suppressive regime. They are symptons of the state of society, they can bring up toorg/sites/blogtalk.net/files to the surface that are officially banned from public.
# on 5/23/03; 1:04:48 PM__
# on 5/23/03; 2:08:19 PM__
It´s so relieving just to have finished this sentence. And this feeling grows even stronger when I´ve posted the whole thing...
At the moment I feel at odds with myself: Is it even possible to bring all those bloggers together and to make them listen closely to each other ? In what way do the Iranian Weblog situation or the number of Polish bloggers have an impact on the worldwide Blog community ? Can we assume a culture-defined way of blogging, and does it correspond to country borders ?
Maria Milonas is in favor of blogs being a medium of contact betwenn social groups that are alien to each others, straights and gays, parents and kids
# on 5/23/03; 2:06:39 PM__
The fact that weblogs are so popular in Poland falls into the line of the argument I presented before: Societies emerging from regimes that were hostile to free expression grasp the chance to spak out loud what was kept below the surface.
One should see a a futher incitement for international and interlinguistic communication in a crisis like the European-American rift over the war in Iraq. Why did the populations were more or less in line with their governments and did not try to find out themselves what people on the other side of the Atlantic thought ? Why do non-bloggers rely on the (old) media to provide them with a subjective selection of the state of the world ? These media don´t allow for an interaction: Since they cannot be directly put to question, they must not be trusted. If we trust only certain people, our friends, on giving us advice, why do we trust media corporations with a doubtful and purely commercial background to construct our view of the world and therefore our emotions and political behaviour ?
# on 5/23/03; 2:02:50 PM__
It´s so relieving just to have finished this sentence. And this feeling grows even stronger when I´ve posted the whole thing...
At the moment I feel at odds with myself: Is it even possible to bring all those bloggers together and to make them listen closely to each other ? In what way do the Iranian Weblog situation or the number of Polish bloggers have an impact on the worldwide Blog community ? Can we assume a culture-defined way of blogging, and does it correspond to country borders ?
Maria Milonas is in favor of blogs being a medium of contact betwenn social groups that are alien to each others, straights and gays, parents and kids.
# on 5/23/03; 1:22:12 PM__
The discussion of the first panel evolves around the big themes of the earlier lectures. Philosophical problems like identity and community are taken up from the nonelectronical world and don´t seem to lose any of their momentum in weblogs. The general key to "keep things simple" doesn´t suffice to explain hoe weblogs can go forward.
An interesting comment from the public: The problem is not the cumbersome choice for the right ontology, but the insufficient number of ontologies.
hyperorg.com/blogger for further discussion
# on 5/23/03; 12:06:14 PM__
Some people seem to block the blogs, they connect any use of their content, e.g. by direct citation, with the acceptance of copyrights. Andrius Kulikauskas sets up a difficult but valuable hierarchy of information and their construction and modification on different levels, the highest being the things in the world that emerge from a long process of constructions and reconstructions (e.g. through the inventer, proofreader and editor).
Kulikauskas advocates a \93fair use\94 of other people`s content. A simple list of words arranged in a list and published on the web might be the result of a simple typing exercise or poetry. To differentiate, we have to look at the constructive intentions and whether there is an author behind all that.
In my view, there is an important difference concerning an author`s intention: Does he want to gain money or does he simply insist on securing his own relatedness to the work ? Is it a matter of money or ego ?
# on 5/23/03; 11:52:20 AM__
Sonya indicates the loss of interest of some students in the topic of their newly set up weblogs. This hints at the goal of weblogs: They have to support the community character. It only makes sense to begin a weblog at all if you keep your audience in mind. Someone who begins to explore a new topic in his weblog that soon attracts a certain community as the responsiblity to make his content readable, to incite others to participate, to link himself up.
So, before beginning a weblog, it is crucial to think about one´s own relation to a possible audience. Which mission statement does one state in order to be more identifiable to this audience ? That does not mean we have to restrict our freedom to express ourselvs in any way we want, but a certain concentration helps to communicate, as in a real world conversation, where you can`t jump from one topic to the next without regard for the listener.
# on 5/23/03; 11:47:07 AM__
The debate going on (in a pause set off by technical problems) shows that practical issues such as the HIV crisis in Africa are the genuine field of action for Weblogs. Mr. Kulikauskas incited the audience to respond to the concrete ways of dealing with it. They came up with diffuse answers that demanded new channels of communication and a greater will from our side to search and receive this information.
# on 5/23/03; 11:24:37 AM__
Steve Cayzer reminds us one the most important advances brought about by the blog revoltion: Instead of purely textoriented search engines we want to find topicrelated blogs quickly. The intelligence needed for this process is a combination of metadata or "ontology" and markers (vocabulary). These have to be registered by new intelligent blog engines, that assist the effort of the individual blogger to open his blog to the interested public.
A new blog is an attraction, comparable to a street act that attracts people for some time (as long as it is surprising). Not all the people crowd together, some have different things in mind and go about their business, others had different intentions but now stream towards the new event. The only thing is, an accumulation of too many weblogs that look alike and just repeat the same contents won´t be useful or attractive. The golden rule is therefore: Be original, create yourself anew through your individual site. The big step from the old system of hierarchically organized information is just this overload of personality, of bringing in one´s own voice.
# on 5/23/03; 10:31:58 AM__
David Weinberger says that a blog is not based essentially on any technology used to create it (e.g. whether you use Ftp to post your messages) but a social phenomenon. People interact with one another, they don´t just talk (blogblahblog) but comment, bring in their specific personality, and even (re)create their character or the presentation of that character.
What I find interesting is the link of information and person that Weblogs make possible. Information isn´t a stable input that your mind receives and saves into its memory, but is constantly transformed and interpreted, it is personalized by interaction and mutual reference. For the journalist Weinberger objectivity is of course an important aim which will however be put into the wider context of a worldwide blogger network. In my view "information" is part of an old hierarchy
Weblogs sponsor all the elements we rely on when we meet personally: Spontaneous reaction, creating roles for the self, longterm establishment of discussion threads, playful encounters.
# on 5/23/03; 10:00:58 AM__
It seems that everybod enjoyed the hike to the Heurigen outside meeting "Wine and Weblogs" yesterday. It was just the right entry stage for a conference that touches on web issues, even more so that the temperature outside is gonna rise to 30 degrees C.
# on 5/23/03; 9:43:49 AM__
Archive-Sebastian | 
.
.
_Sebastian Kreth________
