These are the blogs that give a fresh view to the blogosphere. Some of them follow the current news and provide a different perspective. Others are simply out of any trends and tactics and just blog for the fun of it. And then there are the ones, that are just very well informed; you say something and their answer is right on spot.

In simpler words, these blogs do the boogie-woogie.

1. Digital Media World. An extensive study of social media and social networks. His insights on online fooling-around are very intriguing. Can your sex-life online influence your real-life relationship? A VR user once said: “RL [real life] is just a window among others, and not necessarily my favorite one”
2. CyberStreetReport. Although Reno wants his blog to evolve into “the ultimate link dropping station”, he still suggests to reduce your posting rate.
3. Social Networking Articles. Live from the field. All the nasty stuff you need to know about social networking. Even the, sometimes ‘unsocial’, web designers get some juice here.
4. Blogging Bits. This guy has found a way to get your blog more traffic and subscribers will you’re sleeping. Forget writing, just have a nap.
5. Dembot. Staying true to traditional blogging. A variety of issues covered (from the Kenya crisis to the Gilmore Girls).
6. Kasi-Blog. One more traditional blogger, with a revolutionary flare. Hope he continues blogging, while writing his Master Thesis. Hang in there Karsten. It’s just a phase, it will pass.
7. The Ed Techie. I can’t really explain it, but this blog is always on the top in my RSS Feed aggregator. Maybe because he sometimes mentions Wittgenstein and you just can’t argue with that.
8. Social Media Trader. When we surf the web, he rides it. His lists are just incomparable.
9. RoboRobert. He is robots and you can too! Great name, great header, great robots.
10. EpiBlogger. If you hate teletubbies as much as I do, maybe it’s time to reconsider. There is knowledge everywhere.

So that’s the list of my freshest subscriptions in the blogosphere. I’m always trying to expand my feed, so stay tuned in. More dancing blogs will be introduced.
If you want some more boogie-woogie blogs, take a look at my blogroll. They sure can dance.

I tried repeatedly yesterday to log into bloggingzoom and it just didn’t work out. I thought it was a typical maintenance or something of that kind. But it seems it was cracked. Cortney Tuttle ascribes this act to the fact that

BloggingZoom is growing very quickly and that obviously poses a threat to quite a few different people. I’m not going to name any names but there are a few different groups and individuals that would stand to benefit if they could slow down the growth of the site.

A couple of bloggers have also posted about this, but it seems there hasn’t been a big fuss about it. Digg didn’t have any post about it (I just submitted one), stumbleUpon’s post was liked by 13 people and I just posted the subject on mixx. I wonder why.

Maybe BloggingZoom isn’t the kind of site that will bring waves of traffic to your blog, but the community is serious enough and is really participating in the blogging process.

By participating I mean, that users are actually reading the posts, subscribing and adding comments. Something that happens very seldom in digg for example. Also the fact that a submitter must write an at least 350letter description, speaks for the earnestness of the users.

Anyway, hope they get out of the problem soon.

Just a small footnote here: Hackers are people who enjoy exploring the potential of software and technology without any malicious intent. Crackers are the nasty ones.

What defines the value of a social network? Is it its users or is it the network itself? Who should have the last word in a self-organizing community? The users or the administrators?
The digg debate, although resolved raises some very important issues on the future of self-organizing platforms.

The users

The top diggers yesterday revolted against Digg, because it enabled a new, more ’strict’ algorithm. The debatable part of this algorithm is, that when a post is dugg by you and your 100 friends, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will reach the frontpage.

So what the algorithm brings in, is diversity. Top diggers disregarded this variable, since it treats their posts (and consequently their network) unfair. The logic behind this revolt is, that

Top users are top users because they submit high qaulity material. They should not be required to get more diggs simply because of the great job they have been doing to reach that top user status.

I don’t see this as a plausible argument. These communities give control to the end user; every end user and not only a ruling few. Regardless of the quality of content these top-users provide, they are considered authorities in their platforms (may it be digg, stumbleupon, slashdot, etc) and their opinion is highly praised. This authority alone, is a reason for their content to be promoted. Sometimes regular users are digging top-user content, just because it is top-user content.

The network

Digg (and all sites of the kind) started out with a main principle of self-organization. They provided the tools for the creation of an active community, which discovers and promotes content - and let it self-organize.
Indeed, the presence of administrators is very subtle in most cases.

But the functionality of such communities doesn’t rely only on self-organization.
Indirect control is sometimes required. When users post spam, when they have multiple accounts, when they behave improperly, an administrator is needed to set things right.

Similarly when these networks are actually managed by few top users, then another main principle of the system is at stake. Diversity.
Without diversity, the content is usually about the same subjects and very often from the same sources.
But when Digg decided to control this behavior and give the opportunity to other users to bring content forward, the ruling diggers revolted.

It is of course logical. They have worked hard to create a steady friends network, which in a way guarantees lots of diggs for every post they make.

The resolution

After this mini-revolution, digg founders came forward and explained their position. The way I see it, they diplomatically remained on their position on the subject, saying that content will not be directly undermined when posted by a top digger, but it will have trouble reaching the front page if it is promoted only by their friends. I find it fair.
In the drilldown, where the discussion was held the question posed at their last post is:

If Digg is a game then we are ready to play for keeps. What happens if the most powerful users in the community decide to leave? Will others join? Is Digg anything without us? Let’s prove it.

Would the community fall apart because the top users aren’t a part of it anymore? Would the quality of the content degrade?
I don’t think so. Digg is a very popular social network. The move, that digg did opens the road

• for more users to submit content
• for more users to join the network (hence more diversity)
• for more users to participate actively in the community

The issue

I believe that the value of a network is mostly defined by the users participating in it. But the way the network indirectly regulates the community is a fundamental aspect for the success of the system.
What do you think? Should digg stay out of the way and let the community evolve the way it was evolving, or was it a good decision to endorse a more strict perspective of popularity?

I love last.fm, yes I do.

It was always a cool service, with a great community and intuitive design. Sure, you could listen only 30secs of commercial tracks, but nonetheless, last.fm was great.

Now it is even greater. Why?

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Read the full announcement.

EMI, Sony BMG, Warner and Universal are all on board. The concept is, that users are allowed to listen to full length tracks up to 3 times and then are asked to sign up for a new subscribition service.

Although I personally find it sad, that last.fm isn’t printing any money to pay the artists and the labels, I find their approach also really good:

We already have licenses with the various royalty collection societies, but now unsigned artists can put their music on Last.fm and be paid directly for every song played. This helps to level the playing-field—now you can make music, upload it to Last.fm and earn money for each play. If you make music, you can sign up to participate for free. [...] we are paying artists and labels a share of advertising revenue from the website.

Additional information on the subject can also be found in Mashable.

Think of the social web as a huge town.
Like each town it has central squares, where many road lead. It also has central authorities, which have enough connections to direct you almost everywhere. Finally, like any city it has your friends, acquaintances but also people you hardly know. Depending on who you know (the mayor, a police officer or a salesman), you can get some jobs done much faster, while others require days and days of hard work.
But if you have the right connections and know which roads to follow, the town lies in front of you, like an open book.
The best way to learn your way around this city (and any city) is to have a map of it.
This is a list of static and interactive tools, which will reveal how the town called social web work. The static tools are mostly visuals of well-known social networks. The interactive tools are free software, which will let you study your own social networks.
Purpose of this list is to provide the instruments to help you decode the social web. Maybe if you try a hard enough and read between the lines, you’ll understand how the social web is connected.
Now you have the tools to find who are the hubs in your networks.

Static Tools

Les Miserables: The network of interactions between major characters in the novel Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, divided in 11 communities represented by different colors.

Flickrland: Network analysis of the Flickr population, based on data collected on March 14th, 2005.
Vizster: Vizster is an interactive visualization tool for online social networks, allowing exploration of the community structure of social networking services such as friendster.com, tribe.net, and orkut.
Enron’s email pattern: This graph produced by The New York Times reveals a map of a week’s e-mail patterns in May 2001, when a new name suddenly appeared.
Mapping the new testament: One of hundreds of interesting visualizations in Many Eyes is the Map of social relationships in the New Testament.
Data Visualization of a social network: Different aspects of a real life social network.
The spread of obesity in a large social network: The prevalence of obesity has increased from 23% to 31% over the recent past in the United States, and 66% of adults are overweight. In order to better understand this phenomenon, the authors in this study performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic.

Steroids network in major league baseball: Sen. George Mitchell’s 409-page report on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball describes a thriving underground market for steroids and human growth hormone. This is a visualization of Mitchell’s report.

Interactive Tools

Fidgt: A Social Networking Address Book, which keeps track of all your friends and their media across different social networks (flickr, last.fm, msn messanger and other network supported).
Social Circles: Social Circles intends to partially reveal the social networks that emerge in mailing lists.
LJNet: LJNet is an interactive visualization of LiveJournal.com (LJ) members’ social networks. It shows the friends and friends of friends of any given LJ member.
TouchGraph: Another LiveJournal visualization tool. Now for Facebook too.
Email Constellations: This project aims to be a free, flexible, and easily modifiable visualisation tool that allows a user to intuitively understand their online social group structure.
Tracking the threat: TrackingTheThreat.com is database of open source information about the Al Qaeda terrorist network, developed as a research project of the FMS Advanced Systems Group.
Map of MySpace Friends: This is a simple force-directed graph that maps the relationships between myspace users.
Comment Flow: Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and edges (friend-links), the system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account.
Mapping the digg community: Using the Digg API, Brian Shaler created a map of Digg users and how they’re connected to each other.
Facebook friend wheel: colorful wheel that maps all the links between Facebook friends.
Nexus: Nexus is a friend grapher for Facebook built on Graphviz twopi and neato. It calculates friend similarity by parsing profiles (through the Facebook API), and highlights links between friends who share interests and groups.

A post in the ReadWriteWeb a couple of days ago, guided me to a very interesting document. A summary of Project10X’s Semantic Wave 2008 Report (available here).
I just finished reading the report, which provides some very insightful information about web 3.0. The semantic web will transform the web from an information-centric to a knowledge-centric system, by developing 4 fundamental attributes:

1. Knowledge

The web is a fragmented place. Knowledge is scattered in all its corners, sometimes locked in operating systems and complex algorithms. The semantic web, will pursue to change this. It will facilitate technologies, which will extract knowledge and

will enable communities to create, curate, and share knowledge in human readable and machine executable forms.

2. Transparency

Information will evolve in knowledge, through its encoding in a semantic form, which will be transparent and accessible at any time to any machine. Knowledge was previously stored either in human readable or in machine readable form. In the semantic web, it will be stored transparently, so that users and machines will be able to read the same piece of data. In that way, it will be possible for data to be used, validated and combined with other data. This will allow

a system to “learn” to do things that the system designer did not anticipate.

3. Connectivity

To overcome the limitations and restrictions of OS platforms, the semantic web will encourage a real time usage of automated and semi-automated methods, of interaction between man and machine:

Web-tops; platforms spanning multiple OSs connected over the internet
Mash-ups; two or more data sources or works combined to become a new data source or work
Context-aware mobility; dynamic composition and personalization of services across devices, networks, locations, and user circumstances and
Semantic service oriented architectures; using machine-interpretable descriptions of policies and services o automate discovery, negotiation, adaptation, composition invocation, and monitoring of web services.

4. Technology

The key of the sematic web is the usage of technologies, which represent meanings and knowledge seperately from content, in order to be interpretable from humans and machines. Such representations will range from pattern recognition, analogy and reasoning with uncertains to deep linguistics and causality.

The integration of social Web and semantic technologies in Web 3.0 allows new synergy that lowers the cost of data and knowledge creation, and raises the computational value of gathering.

The semantic technologies, which will power Web 3.0 will concentrate on:

• Semantic user experience (how the user comprehends things)

• Semantic social computing (how users communicate and collaborate)

• Semantic applications and things (how products and behaviors can be seen empirically and objectively)

• Semantic infrastructure (interobjective network-centric systems and ecosystems)

• Semantic development (how meanings and systems can share what they know)

Epilogue

The report refers also to semantic technology markets and other interesting points. It explains the the information I shortly mentioned above very well and I definetely suggest you to read it.

The 4 attributes I listed above gave me the impression, that they are the key traits, which will revolutionize the online experience. Where, the emergent behavior of the whole system will bring user interaction in new levels. I believe, that the development of services such as data portability and openID are steps to this direction. But, to a certain degree, it is a personal preference.

I’m interested to see, which attributes of the semantic web do you find most revolutionary.

I had a post the other day about Facebook and one of its rivals “Kaioo” and the discussion came to the subject of data portability.
M@ri@nn@ expressed her skepticism on the project. This short video (found at Partcls.blog) sumarizes the concept of data portability very well. Enjoy.

Sorry, I had to remove the video because it really messed up with the look of the blog…

Get involved in data portability.