Eric’s ready
Next year’s Etech should be interesting.
Eric (PeopleAggregator) Sigler has his proposal ready.
I’m waiting till Sunday to write mine up.
It’ll be called “New Kinds of Micro-content” and I’ll get all the leaders of each area - to appear - all at once united in our determination to get this to happen.
Meanwhile - here’s Eric’s post on his proposal:
Thinking out loud
So the deadline for Emerging Technology 2005 papers is the 27th. (You know, that geek thing in California I always go to).
In a disturbing sign of preparedness, I’ve actually been thinking more than 24 hours ahead, and so I’ve got some ideas for proposals. Beyond that, I’m actually planning out where I’m looking for ideas and where I’m not.
It’s not exactly Tufte, OK? Distance and positioning mean very little. Rather, this is a sort of blog tech tree, showing what the dependencies are to get from one thing to another. While it’s rough, it does provide some interesting observations.
- Blogging software is at a very critical part of this setup, yet clearly makers of blogging software don’t have the kind of chokehold that you would expect might happen. Interesting.
- All of the really new and interesting things are happening at the outer edge of this diagram. Does this mean I drew it badly, didn’t fill in enough detail, or that the core of things are settling down?
- I threw in the note “social sharing” because I really didn’t have the energy to try and break down all the incredible things happening lately in this area, but things like both del.icio.us and Flickr are in that category. Probably worth going over again and expanding out.
- The left-hand side of the diagram probably also needs to be tinkered with. I put the label “act of creation” in there because it’s as generic as I wanted to think up. But there’s lots of room to tinker with how certain types of information make it to the blogging software. (As evidenced by the recent hubub about what moblogging is or isn’t).
- One disturbing thing that I wished I could put in here, but haven’t found anyone really using widespread, is all the machine-readable licensing metadata out there. Screams for a plugin or two in my opinion.
You’ll note I also use the label “proto-DLA” to describe where the blogging software resides. This is a tip of the hat to Mr. Canter, who has done a lot more thinking about this than anyone else in the world. (A “DLA” stands for a digital lifestyle aggregator, and while I can’t tell you want the end product will look like, I have a feeling that blogging software is mutating in that direction.
I’ll probably revisit / redo this tomorrow, but I just wanted to get what I had out in case life got busy again. So, what are your thoughts? On this diagram at least, there are several edge-pieces that could be connected together but aren’t. What would be most important to you?
