Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a Blog Discussion and Citation
Tom Coates weighs in with a great analysis of discussion and citation in the world of weblogs, seeking to refute the claim made at iWire that the blogosphere environment actually conspires against the successful evolution of difficult ideas and drawing on Microdoc News’ dissection of the dynamics of a blogosphere story.
His central analogy is sound - when weblogs seize on a subject, the combined use of hypertext and discreet blocks of content comes to mirror academic citation in research papers, with valuable contributions to a given debate gaining exposure thanks to a form of peer review, with blogs at the margins serving as arbiters of quality by linking to points in the conversation they see as significant.
Think of this post as an essay by an obscure postgraduate researcher, riffing on the ideas in Tom’s, which is equivalent to a paper delivered at conference to his professorial peers — I’m not bringing much to the debate, but my citation adds value to the original assertion. Unfortunately, academia and the world of weblogs share other characteristics, including a hierarchical structure - vide the many whinges about an ‘A-list.’ And that structure gets in the way. Say I had something earth-shattering to say on the topic of information flow in weblog conversations and posted it here, referencing Tom’s piece (I don’t, but that’s by the by!) Sure, Blogdex, Technocrati et al would register my citation, and push the post I cited up the indices, cementing its position at the centre of the debate, but my earth-shattering proposition would go unheeded because few folk read Submit Response in the first place, and those that do don’t have weblogs (hard to imagine, I know).
I’m not doubting that, as Tom says, debate across weblogs self-organises in a pretty useful way at the moment, but I would say that this self-organisation is too close to the academic research prototype. Weblog conversations are just like accelerated, miniature academic debates, but the potential is there for a new model that replaces the pyramid of a grouping of influential commentary supported from below by a mass of citation with a flatter structure, where ranking by ‘microcontent vote’ is combined with some sort of semantic indexing to draw valuable points made at the bottom of the pile toward the top. Of course, I have no idea how this might be acheived — how could a future implementation of Blogdex know that, say, a link is in the context of a refutation, not a supporting citation? — but an inclusive, flatter view of weblog interaction would be a valuable one.
I could go on to draw a further analogy, aligning my position with the hardline Marxist view of a truly stateless society post-revolution, and Tom’s with the reformist, so constrained by pre-revolutionary bourgeois systems that he cannot conceive of unstructured organisation by the people. But that would be silly.
Thanks very much for your comments! It’s a good response that calls me up on a couple of things. I’m particularly interested in finding alternative models and ways of improving the mechanisms behind the way citation and commentary are bringing content to the fore. I think this stuff has to be improved at the technical level - how do we draw attention to the best posts more effectively and how do we help discussions from niche groups of people manifest themselves with the bluntness of tools like Daypop and Blogdex…
Posted by Tom Coates at 7pm on 25.05.03
Those are big ‘hows’ aren’t they? I guess something along the lines of Memigo woven into the fabric of weblogging tools and RSS readers, combined with a FOAF-style recommendation network is the way to go… but the problems that the large scale of weblogging brings seem unsurmountable and a system that allows a little-read, unlinked to blog post rise to the top of the pile on merit alone seems an impossibility…
Posted by Jack at 4pm on 26.05.03
The impossibility you talk of, the little read link, is where the idea of meritocracy in weblogs flounders. Self organisation in blogdom does not mirror academia. Most blogs involve the dissemination of links and subjective opinion, they have no individual merit until they’re validated by other subjective opinion. Not all academic research involves objective analysis, with proper controls and experimentation. This leads to a debate of what’s academia and that’s a trap I would rather not fall into.
The Marxist view is interesting, but what of the anarcho-syndicalist? Railing against scientific socialism. Silly of course.
Posted by Gummi at 4pm on 27.05.03