Tom Morris has responded to my previous post on “mass amateurisation” with a thoughtful piece on the personalisation and decentralisation of the web:

While personalisation and decentralisation may be just buzzwords at the moment, with the rise of the independent web we might see these becoming much more important: your own agent search engine finding you information, you recording it in your weblog for later discussion with friends and strangers and instant publication and dissemination with others.

What I like about these ideas, and what I love about blogs as well, is the mixing of production and consumption, the instant transformation of “consumed” content (like search results) into “produced” content (your blog posts) which is then picked up by others, who transform it, disseminate it, or disagree with it, depending on their own unique position in the cultural ecosystem on the web and beyond. It seems impossible that the “broadcast” or “centralised” gatekeeping portal models, even the “customised” ones, can in any way compete with the sheer vitality of this mass turn to DIY content retrieval and production. I share Tom’s optimism about that. As Earl Mardle of A Networked World in rebuttal to, quoting Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger, says:

“Take the value out of the centre and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points.” Yes please, can we have that?

Like Earl, I think the Berners-Lee model of the semantic web accrues more power to the developer than it does to the user: I think it is really the developer who will appear to gain “omniscience over the vast resources of the Internet”. Not that I would want omniscience anyway. What I dream of is intense, meaningful social and creative networks: I want to engage more deeply over longer periods of time with fewer people whose work, and whose opinions on my work, I value. Again, a nice quote along the same lines from A Networked World:

Annotation is more important than metadata. There’s a lot of talk about metadata, ontologies and the semantic web. I don’t listen to much of it because it hardly matters what you think your document or resource is about, or how you think it can be used, or how good it is. What matters is what I think about it and how I use it, then what the people I respect, and the people they respect, think of it and how they used it.

In terms of “content nodes”, I would like to be less omniscient – I want to see less but understand it and immerse myself in it more. But at the same time, as my own interests and obsessions mutate, my networks must be able to do the same. I want smaller, more intense networks that can participate in the viral mutation that keeps culture alive.

So in terms of the flourishing discussion about the 150-person limit on social networks that is flourishing at the moment (see firstly zephoria, then plasticbag, then follow your nose!), I would come down squarely on the side of those who argue that bigger is not necessarily better, or at least not currently feasible. Danah
Boyd writes:

This is where i fundamentally believe that humanity matters. Keeping up social relations is not simply about remembering everyone you’ve met or having a structure to keep track of them. It is also about having the time and ability to manage those relationships, keep information flowing, etc. Social networks are not simply about people that you can store to use as appropriate. Thus, i don’t fundamentally believe that an augmented version of your network will give you the tools necessary to maintain more meaningful contacts.

I really can’t stress enough the importance of meaningful as opposed to prolific networks here.

Value and the Blogosphere

As far as I am aware (please, post a comment to let me know if I’m wrong!), the meta-sites that collect and disseminate information about the blogosphere are still based on quantitative data. That is to say that the “most influential” blogs are still thought to be those with the highest number of inbound links. Now measuring links is a big improvement on measuring hits, because at least it gives an indication of which blogs are actually valued by other bloggers. But because people tend to link to blogs that other people already link to (in a hope of somehow sharing the A-list spotlight, perhaps?), the more popular a blog becomes, the less provable it is that the links are based on value (hmm, might have to rewrite that sentence). It’s a bit like celebrity: people become famous (usually) for doing something that other people really like, but after a time they are famous simply for being famous.

What if we could measure the intensity and depth of engagement between one blog and another instead? What if we measured the frequency of link exchange between blogs, the depth of analysis of particular topics between 3 or 4 networked blogs? Then we’d be talking about qualitative value, and not just crunching numbers. That seems to me to be the most exciting of the semantic web’s possibilities.