-the organization of discourse-

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about structures of discourse communities, and that led me to get more and more frustrated with the organization of weblogs.

What organization, you say? Exactly.

Seb Paquet, in his article on structured blogging and his weblog more generally, has pointed out that blogs have to move beyond their ad hoc structures:

Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on. Now, say I've written a review of the latest Radiohead album into my blog. I'd like others who are interested in Radiohead, or in music reviews in general, and who may not know me, to be able to pick out my review from the common pool in a simple way. Interesting people may come my way because of this.

I would take it one step further. The power to permanently collect and connect all this data is crucial for blogging to truly come of its own as a publication venue. We have to move beyond the blogroll (as much as I love mine).

However, organizational schemes beyond the blogroll haven't really kept my interest. Generally, newsfeed aggregators work to make blog reading a more structured reading experience. Indexes make blog searching a more structured experience while spotting general community trends. Visualizations make pretty pictures while showing relations between individuals. We need to ask ourselves what knowledge structures we want, and what is the best way to achieve those structures.

Seb commented in my last post, asking whether I like the possibilites of user-ratings as an organizational device for discourse communities. I do.

I'm not sure blogs are an end, in all honesty--at least to create useful academic structures. I'm not sure that the kind of structures needed to achieve to achieve a sort of permanence of form can really be achieved with grassroots metadata structures alone (though Seb's idea for structured blogging offers some hope).

I guess it will really depend on the central structures we choose. I, for one, would like to see central topic-based sites which utilize the social net of weblogs to organize aggregated data. In other words, I want an Epinions for webdata, which utilizes the blogroll as a "web of trust", organizing sources and data within various fields. I want to be able to browse topically or search for a term and have those results sorted based both by "my web of trust" and by community ratings.

I know this can be done. The benefit of a structure like this is that is uses metacontent that already exists: the blogroll. But it uses it in a way that has proven useful in organizing topical knowledge communities: through rating based self organization.

Posted by brandon barr at March 25, 2003 05:34 PM | TrackBack