There is a whole bunch of things that can be discussed on the nature of social interaction on the Net. Social dynamics are very interesting. Most popular sites experience an early period of intense activity. As the community grows, first there is a growth on social involvement of its users, that can be measured by the average number of comments and messages left per user; but later, the sheer growth of the site causes a dillution of its base, in such a way that the social interaction is gone. Why does it happen?

I have a few ideas of my own regarding this problem. A very simple one is the "novelty effect" thesis: people go to new places, and forget it quickly, going to some other place. Although probably right to some extent, it's also fairly simple minded, and probably can't explain all the behavior involved. Another alternative is the "optimum size" thesis; it says that any community has an optimum size that maximizes social interaction. Examples are cities - small cities have a too small population, metropolis have it too big, and the optimum lies somewhere inbetween.

Another alternative is the "hierarchy of attractors". In this model, individuals are divided in two classes (using Internet-related analogies here): 'content generators' and 'readers'. In other words, some people like to write content, other ones like to read and comment sometimes. Great content generators become 'attractors', and remove some of the traffic from lesser writers. But this also reduces the richness of the media, and reduces the level of social interaction. In this model, the more people you have, the biggest the difference between the top-level attractors and the low level ones will be.

How can a big community handle these problems? By breaking it up - pretty much like the biggest and most succesfull cities in the world do. New York is the prime example of this - a big city with lots of small (and lively) communities. The Internet has to do the same. However, this does not mean that it will become fragmented or balkanized. But this is a big enought topic for another story.   ¶ 12:03 PM   0 comments

  We all know what blogs and Wikis are, but what the heck is PKM? The
acronym means "Personal Knowledge Management", and it describes a new
category of software, bigger and more dynamic and interesting than old
fashioned PIMs. I have my own PKM dream, and that's why snippets are
important.

For those rare souls who don't know what I'm talking about, some
definitions. Despite being relatively new in the web scene, blogs are
very popular now, and Wikis, albeit a little less known, are also hot
with the hardcore Net community. Both are exceptionally easy to use
tools to manage information. Blogs allows for non-structured, personal
information to be published chronologically, which is the logical
approach for something done for we humans to use; that's the "my
diary" of the Net age. Wikis are perfect to structure arbitrary
networks of information in a fairly straighforward way; they allow any
user to write about concepts, and the relate them between each other,
doing things that no physical card filers could ever do. You can jump
from info to info, define new terms, and relate everything with a
minimum of syntax required.

Having said that, what is a snippet? Well, a snippet is just a small
piece of information. A blog entry can be a snippet. A Wiki entry can
also be a snippet. Anything is a snippet. The snippet is the smallets
block of information in my dream's PKM.

What I have in mind is a fairly flexible framework, where snippets of
information can be stored and structured in different ways, depending
on the way you like it to be. Basic to the system is the snippet
store, where all snippets are kept. To keep things easy, the design of
the system must no be particular about the nature of the store. I'm
thinking for now about using the filesystem, pretty much like simple
Wikis do. One file per snippet, that's all.

The snippet server just takes a snippet, formats it accordingly and
presents it. It's a small HTTP server, one that knows at first very
little about the snippets. And that's where things start to get
interesting.

Every snippet has some little metainformation about it. Some of it can
be inferred indirectly by looking at the snippet itself. For example,
file extension or contents can store information about the type of the
snippet. For example, text files can be identified by the extension
(.TXT, .HTML, and so on); the first line of the text file can also be
used to infer some of the information; graphical images can be
detected by the file extension, so.GIF or .JPG files are easily
recognizable. When the snippet server is about to serve a snippet, it
looks at the snippet type, and than act accordingly.

Up to this point, nothing is different. But snippets can be related to
each other using, and classified, forming different things depending
on the way you look at it. Snippets can be used to keep a blog, using
chronological metainformation to order them. Snippets can also be
structured as a Wiki; in this case, the snippets themselves can
cointain the internal links, or crossreferences, needed to keep the
Wiki working.

Depending how do you refer information in the Snippet server, you can
have either a Blog, or a Wiki - or both! That's the idea, but I'm
still working out the details... But I hope to be able to have
something working fast!
  ¶ 4:47 PM   0 comments

  Well, nothing like a newbie with lots of enthusiasm! So that's my
first post by email. That's something that will make keeping my blog
up-to-date easier...
  ¶ 3:52 PM   5 comments

  Well, I'm back to the House of Unfinished Projects. It's been a long time since my last post - almost one year! But since then I've been out of the Net, working at some entirely unrelated business; I had no Internet connectivity at my office, and I had to resort to LAN houses for my web surfing. I had no time for blogging at this time.

Now, I'm back online. I'm still looking for the perfect blogging solution - something like a 'personal knowledge management' framework, where I can post comments, articles, short notes, rants, and etc. I like Kuroshin's community-oriented style, but it lacks a lot of the tools that I want. The same goes for Blogger. On the other hand, I implemented my own personal Wiki on my own PC; it's not available for the public, but it's helping me put my own notes in perspective.

Well, that's enough for now. Now I need to go back to my real projects...
  ¶ 9:58 AM   0 comments