Blogs and academia

As I mentioned earlier, one of the most interesting talks at Web2.0 was given by Stowe Boyd. Since then, I've started digging into his writing a bit more to see what he is all about. In this post, he responds to Andrew Keen and everyone else that says that blogging and other participatory media are actually damaging our society more than they are helping. I wanted to post the link, because I think he (Stowe) makes a lot of good points and because I've had similar debates with close friends now beginning their careers in academia as young professors (Dr. Greg and Dr. Anil). (Stowe isn't writing about academia specifically, but I think most of his arguments are applicable).

Both Greg and Anil (who I thoroughly respect), always caution against really believing in things like Wikipedia and Greg is particularly critical of scientific blogs.

In a recent email conversation, Greg said
[Greg]
For the academic world, I'm not too hot on blogs. I guess my "blog" is my list of papers on my webpage. Want to know what I've been up to? Well, there it is, peer-reviewed and written with care, editing and revising (well, most of the time). Blogs are much better than most online content, in that they are not anonymous (my big problem with wikis).
[/Greg]
[Ben]
Umm.. for now, blogs can certainly be anonymous and/or collaborative if you want - and lots of wikis are just as 'signed' as a blog.
[/Ben]
[Greg]
There is too much information out there, and I have a lot of faith in peer-review, so I'm not convinced how useful they are for disseminating information.
[/Greg]
[Ben]
I don't think there is too much information out there - its mostly a bit of a mess at the moment, but organization is the second problem to solve, not the first. When the comments are signed by identifiable 'peers', they seem to me to act as an excellent form of 'peer review'. There are lots of other benefits of blogs aside from disseminating information. Perhaps they are better for moving ideas around rather than 'results'. I see a lot of value in the conversations that they enable and store for posterity - and I think the idea of thinking openly in a public information space is the best way to generate the good new ideas that science requires.
[/Ben]
[Greg]
An advantage is the ability to post random, less developed thoughts, or comments on papers. But again, these already appear in editorials, review papers, and tech reports. It's not that I necessarily trust what's written in peer-reviewed papers, but looking at those papers accepted into a high-quality journal/conference provides a useful filter on all the information that's out there.
[/Greg]
[Ben]
Sure, I think the concept of professional publications acting as "filters" is a good one, but I also think that this concept of filter has to be extended and thought of at a very personal level. A journal or even a set of journals is not likely to capture and present all of the documents coming into the web that I would like to see with maximum precision and recall. The additional 'filters' (or 'streams' if you flip it around) that I apply to the web now include things like RSS feeds of all sorts - blogs, bookmarking services, news etc. These other forms are just as useful as my subscriptions to peer-reviewed journals, they just serve slightly different functions.
[/Ben]
[Greg]
The academic world is already "free" enough, anyone could publish, the real problem is organizing it and sorting through all the crap, which is what your work is all about, right?
[/Greg]
[Ben]
Sure is! But that is a long story...

See also Pedro Beltrão's blog post and associated comments about an article that I published that he, as well as another commenter, liked but thought should have been published only as a blog..

“Software intended to shape culture” - on talk by Stowe Boyd at Web2.0 Expo

This entry is about a talk given by Stowe Boyd at the Web2.0 expo about "building social applications". Stowe appears to be essentially a professional blogger/high-powered social computing consultant.. His talk was engaging, discussing some simple formula for developing “software intended to shape culture” (apparently a phrase he coined way back in the day when the web was young) and ultimately ending with a slightly sublime insight. Like just about everyone else at this conference, he must have mentioned twitter.com about 20 times in his two hours. He also spent quite a bit of time on last.fm, basecamp.com. Some highlights

“individual is the new group” – so you need to satisfy them (duh.)

“buddylist is the center of the universe” – your connections define you. (See touchgraph.com for a cool visualization of Google’s view of a website’s universe).

Reputation systems are crucial. See eBay’s afterthought system, DIGG’s extensively thought-out adaptive system. “Swarmth” – using the WoC for establishing reputation (which is tightly, importantly related to identity).

Seek successful motifs and add them to your site (tags, wikis, ... ) (duh)

Add mechanisms to import existing social networks into yours
o also related theme is that mashing up various successful apps into yours is no longer just a good idea, it is crucial.

3 steps – “me, mine, market”. Start with an individual purpose (e.g. buy a dress), move through a social space (e.g. ask your ‘friends’, ask experts, talk to people about it somehow..), satisfy purpose in the market (buy the one you want). Very simple recipe for building a “social application”.

Ok, those were the basics for the talk, but this was the interesting bit. I’ll have to go dig out an exact quote, or you can find it in his talk, but his idea is that people’s primary motivation for using the Web (or likely doing much of anything) is discovery. In particular, discovery of self.

As I’m learning now from an identity woman , “identity [self] is and has always been socially constructed” (which reminds me of the book “The Social Construction of Reality”). Web2.0 is enabling this social construction to happen online. So what.

Communities in reality operate based on trust. {If||when||already are} online communities are to really succeed, we need mechanisms for establishing trust. Stowe points out that this is already sort of achieved via things like linkbacks to blogs. Clearly there are lots of ways to approach this, but there is one crucial thing that they are all (as far as I can tell) dependent on – unique identification.

Trust is built on past experiences. To link multiple experiences together, you need something unique, like a face or (), to associate with those experiences. Now, trust can be associated with a person/ online agent within the context of a particular social application. I can estimate how much I might believe what bgood @ linked_in has to say based on his network and how well it might overlap with my own, but so far it is quite challenging to carry this reputation, this identity across into something new – say a new account like benjamgo on some new web2.0 application like blogger.com.

This is, of course, a standard data integration issue that is solvable in principle via unique identification. Here is where ‘user-centric identification’ (e.g. OpenId) comes to play. Forget that database of logins and passwords you keep, the day is approaching where you will only need one. Because of this, it will be easy to bring your social network, your contacts, beliefs, actions, your ‘self’ with you wherever you go.

Cool right?

I think mostly yes, but there are things to think about carefully.

We are talking about the potential end of anonymity on the Internet - and eventually everywhere else.

Is this good? Bad? Why? How?