Manufacturing Taste

In a comment to my rant on naysaying, Carl Dyke posted the following link (to a Josh Ellis piece from 2003):

Mindjack - Taste Tribes

The piece itself is rather unremarkable. Although, it does contain comments about a few things which became important topics in the meantime such as recommendation systems and the importance of music listeners for individual artists. I’m not too concerned about the piece and I realize it’s “nothing new.” It mostly made me think about a number of things about which I’ve been meaning to blog.

I could react to the use of the term “tribe.” And there are obvious things to say in terms of social groups (family resemblance, community of experience, community of practice, communitas, homogamy, in-group knowledge, social network analysis, etc.).

But I guess my take is at the same time more personal and more cultural.

Contrary to what my Facebook profile may lead some people to believe, I am not a fan of anything or anyone. I’m not saying that I don’t like things or people. I do. In fact, I pretty much like everyone. But fandom isn’t my thing. Neither is fanboyism. So I don’t relate so well to Ellis’s description of networks based on appreciation of a band. Sure, in the past, I’ve participated in similar groups, such as online discussions about one of my favorite tv shows (which still has a fairly active online fanbase). And I did join several Facebook groups about things or people I like. But my personal attitude makes me react rather negatively to fanclubs and the kind of “taste-based community” Ellis so regrettably called “taste tribes.”

Nobody’s fault but my own. I just feel these groups tend to be too restrictive, too inward-looking and, well, too opinion-based.

I’m too much of a social butterfly to spend much time in any one of these groups. My engagement to a group of people can run deeply and my allegiance and faithfulness are sometimes rather strong. But I don’t like to restrict myself to certain groups.

Maybe I’m an “alpha socialiser” after all.

The cultural dimension also seems quite important to me, but it’s harder to explain without giving off the wrong signals. Not only do I react to what I perceive to be abuses of “pop culture references” (in part because I find them exclusionary), but I perceive a kind of culturally significant attachment to individual “cultural items” (”media,” as Ellis seems to call them) in “English-speaking North American popular culture.” I’m not saying that this tendency doesn’t exist in any other context. In fact, it’s likely a dimension of any “popular culture.” But this tendency is quite foreign to me. The fact that I conceive of myself as an outside observer to popular culture makes me associate the tendency with the common habits shared by a group I’m not a member of.

I’m sure I’ll post again about this. But my guess is that somewhat shorter blog entries encourage more discussion. Given the increasing number of comments I’m getting, it might be cool to tap my readership’s insight a bit more. One thing I’ve often noticed is that my more knee-jerk posts are often more effective.

So here goes.

How Do I Facebook?

In response to David Giesberg.

How Do You Facebook? | david giesberg dot com

How have I used Facebook so far?

• Reconnected with old friends.
  • Bringing some to Facebook
  • Noticing some mutual friends.
• Made some new contacts.
  • Through mutual acquaintances and foafs.
  • Through random circumstances.
• Thought about social networks from an ethnographic perspective.
  • Discussed social networks in educational context.
  • Blogged about online forms of social networking.
• “Communicated”
  • Sent messages to contacts in a relatively unintrusive way (less “pushy” than regular email).
  • Used “wall posts” to have short, public conversations about diverse items.
• Micro-/nanoblogged, social-bookmarked:
  • Shared content (links, videos…) with contacts.
  • Found and discussed shared items.
  • Used my “status update” to keep contacts updated on recent developments on my life (something I rarely do in my blogposts).
• Managed something of a public persona.
  • Maintained a semi-public profile.
  • Gained some social capital.
• Found an alternative to Linkup/Upcoming/MeetUp/GCal?
  • Kept track of several events.
  • Organized a few events.
• Had some aimless fun:
  • Teased people through their walls.
  • Answered a few quizzes.
  • Played a few games.
  • Discovered bands through contacts who “became fans” of them (I don’t use iLike).

Less Than 30 Minutes

Nice!

At 20:27 (EST) on Saturday, November 17, 2007, I post a blog entry on the archaic/rare French term «queruleuse» (one equivalent of “querulous”). At 20:54 (EST) of the same day, Google is already linking my main blog page as the first page containing the term “queruleuse” and as the fourth page containing the term “querulente.” At that point in time, the only other result for “queruleuse” was to a Google Book. Interestingly enough, a search in Google Book directly lists other Google Books containing that term, including different versions of the same passage. These other books do not currently show up on the main Google search for that term. And blogs containing links to this blog are now (over two hours after my «queruleuse» post) showing above the Google Book in search results.

Now, there’s nothing very extraordinary, here. The term «queruleuse» is probably not the proper version of the term. In fact, «querulente» seems a bit more common. Also, “querulous” and “querulent” both exist in English, and their definitions seem fairly similar to the concept to which «queruleuse» was supposed to refer. So, no magic, here.

But I do find it very interesting that it takes Google less than a half hour for Google to update its database to show my main page as the first result for a term which exists in its own Google Books database.

I guess the reason I find it so interesting is that I have thought a bit about SEO, Search Engine Optimization. I usually don’t care about such issues but a couple of things made me think about Google’s PageRank specifically.

One was that someone recently left a comment on this very blog (my main blog, among several), asking how long it took me to get a PageRank of 5. I don’t know the answer but it seems to me that my PageRank hasn’t varied since pretty much the beginning. I don’t use the Google Toolbar in my main browser so I don’t really know. But when I did look at the PR indicator on this blog, it seemed to be pretty much always at the midway point and I assumed it was just normal. What’s funny is that, after attending a couple Yulblog meetings more than a year ago, someone mentioned my PageRank, trying to interpret why it was so high. I checked that Yulblogger’s blog recently and it has a PR of 6, IIRC. Maybe even 7. (Pretty much an A-List blogger, IMHO.)

The other thing which made me think about PageRank is a discussion about it on a recent episode of the This Week in Tech (TWiT) “netcast” (or “podcast,” as everybody else would call it). On that episode, Chaos Manor author Jerry Pournelle mused about PageRank and its inability to provide a true measure of just about anything. Though most people would agree that PageRank is a less than ideal measure for popularity, influence, or even relevance, Pournelle’s point was made more strongly than “consensus opinion among bloggers.” I tend to agree with Pournelle.

Of course, some people probably think that I’m a sore loser and that the reason I make claims about the irrelevance of PageRank is that I’d like to get higher in a blogosphere’s hierarchy. But, honestly, I had no idea that PR5 might be a decent rank until this commenter asked me about. Even when the aforementioned Yulblogger talked about it, I didn’t understand that it was supposed to be a rather significant number. I just thought this blogger was teasing (despite not being a teaser).

Answering the commenter’s question as to when my PR reached 5, I talked about the rarity of my name. Basically, I can always rely on my name being available on almost any service. Things might change if a distant cousin gets really famous really soon, of course… In fact, I’m wondering if talking about this on my blog might push someone to use my name for some service just to tease/annoy me. I guess there could even be more serious consequences. But, in the meantime, I’m having fun with my name’s rarity. And I’m assuming this rarity is a factor in my PageRank.

Problem is, this isn’t my only blog with my name in the domain. One of the others is on Google’s very own Blogger platform. So I’m guessing other factors contribute to this (my main) blog’s PageRank.

One factor is likely to be my absurdly long list of categories. Reason for this long list is that I was originally using them as tags, linked to Technorati tags. Actually, I recently shortened this list significantly by transforming many categories into tags. It’s funny that the PageRank-interested commenter replied to this very same post about categories and tags since I was then positing that the modification to my categories list would decrease the number of visits to this blog. Though it’s hard for me to assess an actual causal link, I do get significantly less visits since that time. And I probably do get a few more comments than before (which is exactly what I wanted). AFAICT, WordPress.com tags still work as Technorati tags so I have no idea how the change could have had an impact. Come to think of it, the impact probably is spurious.

A related factor is my absurdly long blogroll. I don’t “do it on purpose,” I just add pretty much any blog I come across. In fact, I’ve been adding most blogs authored by MyBlogLog visitors to this blog (those you see on the right, here). Kind of as a courtesy to them for having visited my blog. And I do the same thing with blogs managed by people who comment on this blog. I even do it with blogs by pretty much any Yulblogger I’ve come across, somehow. All of this is meant as a way to collect links to a wide diversity of blogs, using arbitrary selection criteria. Just because I can.

Actually, early on (before I grokked the concept of what a blogroll was really supposed to be), I started using the “Link This” bookmarklet to collect links whether they were to actual blogs or simply main pages. I wasn’t really using any Social Networking Service (SNS) at that point in time (though I had used some SNS several years prior) and I was thinking of these lists of people pretty much the same way many now conceive of SNS. Nowadays, I use Facebook as my main SNS (though I have accounts on other SNS, including MySpace). So this use of links/blogrolls has been superseded by actual SNS.

What has not been superseded and may in fact be another factor for my PageRank is the fact that I tend to keep links of much of the stuff I read. After looking at a wide variety of “social bookmarking systems,” I recently settled on Spurl (my Spurl RSS). And it’s not really that Spurl is my “favourite social bookmarking system evah.” But Spurl is the one system which fits the most in (or least disrupts) my workflow right now. In fact, I keep thinking about “social bookmarking systems” and I have lots of ideas about the ideal one. I know I’ll be posting some of these ideas someday, but many of these ideas are a bit hard to describe in writing.

At any rate, my tendency to keep links on just about anything I read might contribute to my PageRank as Google’s PageRank does measure the number of outgoing links. On the other hand, the fact that I put my Spurl feed on my main page probably doesn’t have much of an impact on my PageRank since I started doing this a while after I started this blog and I’m pretty sure my PageRank remained the same. (I’m pretty sure Google search only looks at the actual blog entries, not the complete blog site. But you never know…)

Now, another tendency I have may also be a factor. I tend to link to my own blog entries. Yeah, I know, many bloggers see this as self-serving and lame. But I do it as a matter of convenience and “thought management.” It helps me situate some of my “streams of thought” and I like the idea of backtracking my blog entries. Actually, it’s all part of a series of habits after I started blogging, 2.5 years ago. And since I basically blog for fun, I don’t really care if people think my habits are lame.

Sheesh! All this for a silly integer about which I tend not to think. But I do enjoy thinking about what brings people to specific blogs. I don’t see blog statistics on any of my other blogs and I get few enough comments or trackbacks to not get much data on other factors. So it’s not like I can use my blogs as a basis for a quantitative study of “blog influence” or “search engine relevance.”

One dimension which would interesting to explore, in relation to PageRank, is the network of citations in academic texts. We all know that Brin and Page got their PageRank idea from the academic world and the academic world is currently looking at PageRank-like measures of “citation impact” (”CitationRank” would be a cool name). I tend to care very little about the quantitative evaluation of even “citation impact” in academia, but I really am intrigued by the network analysis of citations between academic references. One fun thing there is that there seems to be a high clustering coefficient among academic papers in some research fields. In some cases, the coefficient itself could reveal something interesting but the very concept of “academic small worlds” may be important to consider. Especially since these “worlds” might integrate as apparently-coherent (and consistent) worldviews.

Groupthink, anyone?

How Can Google Beat Facebook?

It might not be so hard:

As I see it, the biggest shortcoming of social-networking sites is their inability to play well with others. Between MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tribe, Pownce, and the numerous also-rans, it seems as if maintaining an active presence at all of these sites could erode into becoming a full-time job. If Google can somehow create a means for all of these services to work together, and seamlessly interact with the Google family, then perhaps this is the killer app that people don’t even realize they’ve been waiting for. Google gives social networking another go | Media Sphere - Josh Wolf blogs about the new information age - CNET Blogs

Some might take issue at Wolf’s presumption. Many of us have realised in 1997 that the “killer app” for social networking services is for them to work together. But the point is incredibly important and needs to be made again and again.

Social Networking Services work when people connect through it. The most intricate “network effect” you can think of. For connections to work, existing social relationships and potential social relationships need to be represented in the SNS as easily as possible. What’s more, investing effort and time in building one’s network relates quite directly with the prospective life of SNS. Faced with the eventuality of losing all connections in a snap because everybody has gone to “the next thing,” the typical SNS user is wary. Given the impression that SNS links can survive the jump to “the next one” (say, via a simple “import” function), the typical SNS user is likely to use the SNS to its fullest potential. This is probably one of several reasons for the success of Facebook. And Google can certainly put something together which benefits from this principle.

Yeah, yeah, Wolf  was referring more specifically to the “synchronisation” of activities on different SNS or SNS-like systems. That’s an important aspect of the overall “SNS interoperability” issue. Especially if SNS are important parts of people’s lives. But I prefer to think about the whole picture.

Another thing which has been mentioned is the connection Google could make between SNS and its other tools. One approach would be to build more “social networking features” (beyond sharing) into its existing services. The other could be to integrate Google tools into SNS (say, top-notch Facebook applications). Taken together, these two approaches would greatly benefit both Google and the field of social networking in general.

All in all, what I could easily see would be a way for me to bring all my SNS “content” to a Google SNS, including existing links. From a Google SNS, I would be able to use different “social-enabled” tools from Google like the new Gmail, an improved version of Google Documents, and the Blogger blogging platform. Eventually, most of my online activities would be facilitated by Google but I would still be able to use non-Google tools as I wish.

There’s a few tools I’m already thinking about, which could make sense in this “Google-enabled social platform.” For one, the “ultimate social bookmarking tool” for which I’ve been building feature wishlists. Then, there’s the obvious need for diverse applications which can use a centralised online storage system. Or the browser integration possible with something like, I don’t know, the Google toolbar…

Given my interest in educational technology, I can’t help but think about online systems for course management (like Moodle and Sakai). Probably too specific, but Google could do a wonderful job at it.

Many people are certainly thinking about advertisement, revenue-sharing, p2p for media files, and other Google-friendly concepts. These aren’t that important for me.

I can’t say that I have a very clear image of what Google’s involvement in the “social networking sphere” will look like. But I can easily start listing Google products and features which are desperately calling for integration in a social context: Scholar, Web History, Docs, Reader, Browser Sync, Gcal, Gmail, Notebook, News, Mobile, YouTube, Ride Finder, Blog Comments, Music Trends, University Search, MeasureMap, Groups, Alerts, Bookmarks…

Sometimes, I really wonder why a company like Google can’t “get its act together” in making everything it does fit in a simple platform. They have the experts, the money, the users. They just need to make it happen.

Ah, well…

To a Newbie Blogger

 

Lisamm, who just commented on two of my own blog entries, is asking about blogging:How to Increase Your Blog Hits « Books on the Brain

Blogging is new to me. I haven’t learned the lingo. I don’t know the etiquette. I don’t know what a meme is (Do I want one? Do I need one? Is it fattening?) What is the deal with bloggers giving other bloggers awards? No one has challenged me, or tagged me, or whatever it is people do. I’m totally winging it.Someone told me recently that I could increase my blog hits with an intriguing title on my entries. Hmmmm. This one might get noticed. I guess we’ll see how it works.Speaking of blog hits, I seem to be getting a lot (I guess). What is a lot? How many do other people get?What is up with my obsessive desire to check my stats? How I love to see the blog stat graph go up, up, up. Is this normal? Why do I care? Do other bloggers do that? Will the obsession wear off soon????Experienced bloggers, I would love to hear from you. I’m hoping my insanity is only temporary.

My answers:Simply put, meme is an idea which propagates itself. Think “viral marketing.” Among bloggers, it often refers to a kind of tag-like game by which one blogger asks other blogger to post about something (say, eight random things about yourself) and to do the same with other people. It’s a fun (and non-fattening) way to connect with fellow bloggers.Awards are a bit similar. Bloggers tend to enjoy kudos, praises, marks of recognition, etc. Some awards (the “thinking blog” one is an example) are given as a way to connect bloggers who perceive to be of the same calibre, in one dimension or another.Intriguing titles do help increase traffic and bloggers are often (semi-secretly) proud of their clever titles. In this sense, we’re no different from journalists! An issue with titles, though, is that the type of traffic it increases might be the type of headline-reading which does relatively little good to a blog. My best example is my Facebook Celebs and Fakes post which is getting good traffic, apparently for the wrong reasons… ;-)As anyone can guess, “a lot” of blog hits is a really relative measure. Some bloggers get thousands of hits every single day, others get a few hundreds a month. From November, 2006 to February, 2007, I was getting an average of about 180 hits a day (with a peak at 307 hits in a single day). Since then, I’ve been down to about 100 to 130 hits a day. I still consider this to be a lot of hits, especially when I compare it to the number of comments I get. I also notice (by looking at the WordPress.com statistics page) that many of the hits I get come from Web searches about terms for which my entries aren’t that relevant (cf. “celebs and fakes” above).Many bloggers are obsessed by stats even if they know that they don’t tell much of a story. Bloggers often discuss measurement tools, especially if their blogging has a financial impact. Personally, I do check my blog stats regularly but I don’t really care about the numbers. It’s more of a way to observe tendencies, to learn more about effects of blogging, and as a way to assess differences between blog entries. Besides, the way WordPress.com works, the stats page is where incoming links are displayed. Now, having said all this, it’s probably true that I get a pleasant feeling when I see my numbers going up and I probably was slightly disappointed when they dropped. But those feelings are really transient.Speaking of graphs going up. It seems to be a common effect among bloggers that a site’s traffic will increase pretty regularly, regardless of what the blogger does. At least, that’s what I figured until my March, 2007 drop. I’m still a bit puzzled about this, actually.As for insanity, I think it comes with the territory.Main point of blogging is: blog the way you want to blog. Have fun, experiment with things, don’t take yourself too seriously. Blogging is just a system for making content available publicly. There aren’t set rules about blogging. In other words, don’t listen to any piece of advice.Now, a few words of advice. ;-)It’s probably a good idea not to make too much of stats. They’re fun to look at but they don’t say much about blogs. A blog with a small but dynamic reader-base is often better than a blog getting a lot of hits. Technorati and other measures of influence are similarly misleading as blogging isn’t “about that,” for most people. Yes, there are “A-list bloggers” out there (blogging celebrities, very influential bloggers). But starting a blog to become an A-list blogger is like learning a new language to become a best-selling author in that language.Use the bookmarklet in your blogging system. I can’t paste the WordPress.com one because WordPress.com doesn’t accept JavaScript in blog entries (for security reasons, allegedly), but it’s the one at the bottom of the blog writing page. I personally find those bookmarklets to be among the best features available anywhere. When you see a web page you want to blog about, select a piece of text and click on the bookmarklet from your bookmark bar. You then have a new blog entry with the title of the page, a link to that page, and the portion of text you selected. This part is so ingrained in my blogging habits that I often look for a page to start an entry from instead of creating a blank entry. That part may sound silly but it makes sense in my workflow.Speaking of workflow, it’s probably a good idea to take on tabbed browsing if you haven’t done so already. One blogging use of browser tabs is as placeholders for would-be blog entries. Kind of like a “to do” list for blogging. Notice something potentially bloggable? Keep that tab open so you can come back to it when you have time. I know other bloggers are doing this too because some talk about the number of tabs remaining in their browsers.Which leads me to one of the main hazards of blogging: you end up thinking about all the things you could say and you never find time to do much of it. As a general concept, “Information Overload” refers to something similar. Hence the need to adopt a blogging strategy. Personally, I haven’t find the best way to do it yet but I am decreasing my “blogload,” somehow. In fact, blogging itself does make me more efficient as it provides a central place for putting things I would otherwise repeat. (Though I end up with something like seven blogs…) So, my advice here would be something like: think about ways to control the number of things you want to blog about.One way to think about it is that, with “big issues,” other people have certainly blogged about them. Though there’s something intimidating about this, it also means that you may not need to blog about something if it’s likely to become common knowledge soon.Many bloggers seem to crave the latest thing. They want to “scoop” a story, be the first to blog it. Though it pains me to do so, I must say that I’m probably as guilty of this as the next blogger. Problem with this is that it requires a lot of effort to keep up with everything which is happening. And while being the first to blog about something might be the best way to get incredible traffic, the outcome may not be worth the effort.I try to take a longer view on things. If I can, I like to bring multiple items together in the same blog entry. Kind of like a “roundup,” if I can. It’s also a lot of effort, but it’s less likely to make you crazy than the quest for the first post.This all reminds me of a blog post I read about types of blog posts. IIRC, it was a presentation file and it had some things to say about the effectiveness of those posts. Though this kind of thinking makes a lot of sense for media-oriented bloggers, there’s a lot more to blogging than trying to build readership.Which leads me to the more social aspects of blogging. In the past several months, my blogging activities have probably decreased as my Facebook (Fb) activities increased. While Fb and blogging are quite different from one another, connections are quite clear. Posting notes or other items on Fb is almost exactly like a simplified form of blogging.There are disadvantages to posting things on Facebook.com, by comparison with blogging. There aren’t (AFAICT) RSS feeds for Fb Notes and Posted Items. Only your Fb friends can see (and comment on) things you post on Facebook. There isn’t a WYSIWYG editor for Fb notes (though you can use basic HTML). Fb notes don’t have categories or tags (though you can tag Fb friends). And you don’t get neat stats.But there are nice things about Fb notes and posted items. Since those items are seen by people who already know you, it’s often easier to get feedback through Facebook posted items than through a (public) blog. And because posted items are put on your Facebook profile, there’s a special connection between your items and your Facebook persona. Not to mention that blog entries can be posted directly on Facebook, which kills two birds with one stone.To get back to social dimensions of blogging… No matter how much bloggers like to talk about blogging as a social form of writing, it tends to be one-to-many, not many-to-many. In fact, most people who leave comments on blog entries are bloggers themselves. Though blogging is very “democratic,” it’s not the most efficient community-building tool available online.Anyhoo…I do tend to ramble a lot. There’s a lesson about blogging, somewhere…

Facebook for Teaching and Learning

My friend Jay Pottharst has created a Facebook group for a section he’s teaching. Thought about doing the same thing myself but I still prefer Moodle for learning and teaching contexts.

One thing which could be quite useful is Jay’s Tips for people who are concerned about joining Facebook. Though he wrote those three tips for his students, they could apply more widely. They’re quite straightforward and sensical. (Which shouldn’t be surprising as Jay’s in math at Harvard. If he were to not make sense, the world might collapse.) Summarised (from Jay’s already brief tips): use privacy settings, think about using a pseudonym, get a friend to register for you.

Personally, I’d say that it’s probably best to heed the first of the three tips. While Fb does encourage members to post all sorts of potentially sensitive information, it’s good practise to carefully treat any information you may provide online. Despite the ongoing media coverage on privacy concerns on Facebook and elsewhere, the main point here is that there are varying degrees of privacy which can be applied to information distributed on- or offline.

There’s a lot more to say about learning/teaching uses of Fb.

Of course, there’s a Facebook group about Teaching & Learning with Facebook. And I created a moderated group for passionate teachers on Facebook.

One thing I like about Fb in educational contexts is that it encourages a type of candour or, at least, some amount of transparency. Public information about members of a class (registered students, instructors, assistants, auditors…) can be very helpful as a course progresses. In fact, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Fb-like features in Moodle, such as elaborate profiles, ability to build links across courses, ad hoc groups, etc. Moodle and Facebook share several features and there could be a rich integration of features from both.

Friendship: The Next Generation

A quick “off-hand” post.

My Facebook network is giving me a lot of joy. Been reconnecting with some long-lost friends, meeting new and fascinating people, organising impromptu meetings with people at cafés and brewpubs…

Yes, I’m a social animal.