I’ll be presenting Thursday evening to the Berkman Blog Group. It’s kind of an honor, since I really don’t see myself as one. I associate with bloggers, I befriend them, I research their methods… and I hope they don’t mind if they accept me as different.

In an ideal publication, every online article has a consistent URL format, which remain permanent, and every article allows threaded comments. In reality, few major newspapers follow these simple rules. This alone partly explains the popularity of weblog and CMS platforms like Drupal (used here), which support these. (Incidentally, Clark Hoyt announced yesterday that the Times will be supporting comments on every article.)

Over the last year I’d learned through my work on compliance software about the Global Rules Information Database (now organized under the Object Management Group’s Governance Risk & Compliance Roundtable).

I had some questions for the Intellipedia project, the wiki-based, open-editable encyclopedia for use in the U.S. intelligence community.

I’m a bit late in responding to Clive Thompson’s article Open Source Spying in the New York Times Magazine from December. Naturally the subtitle "Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?” caught my eye, due to my work in teasing out the different claims of technology boosters claiming to have solved the larger problems of information retrieval. Case in point? It’s not just the ability to find information; I was able to find the article by giving Google the search terms Thompson Times Magazine. I also needed to evaluate the quality of that article, and whether any information was out of date. That problem is hard (ie., not yet automated). The blogs, by themselves, don’t do anything at all to solve it. The favored blog search engine, Technorati, lists 341 blog posts linking back. How do I find the needle in that haystack? (Wikipedia was at least helpful by suggesting related sources for Intellipedia.) The general problem of a blog community as an echo-chamber I have discussed at length in the New Gatekeepers series of two years ago.

Here’s a write-up of what I learned in the sessions at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management in San Francisco two week ago.

It is not a complete account for a number of reasons. First, I was unable break the laws of physics and attend every session. Second, I didn’t take as detailed notes as I should have, but this exercise should encourage me once again to do so. Third, I’m reserving some information for the entity that sponsored my attendance to the conference, my employer.

It inevitably follows that in becoming a man of letters– a title which should encompass both "personal publisher" and "freelance researcher"– one has to keep in mental shape by going to a conference every now and then to meet and greet. This impulse is checked only by the need to anchor oneself at the home office to actually get some work done. My home office shared my interest in my going to this particular conference, the Gilbane Conference on Content Management, so I ventured to San Francisco for the opportunity to do so.

When I started the civilities project over two years ago, my aim was to put forth a cohesive theory of communications media to underlie my software work. I called the theory constructive media. The ensuing research has helped me validate it, which, for the passing time, was more important than selling it. I have not till now revisited the original definition, so I will preserve that on its own, and replace it with the definition here.

Today, a typical publisher demonstrates their RSS savvy by the amount of flavors they support, including RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom– not by the depth of richness of metadata that comes with the feed. None offer support for categorization, threading, discussions through RSS. Blog posts represented in RSS feeds remained really simple. And that was Winer’s vision. Most of the personal publishing that reached millions on the web derived from his style of weblogging (the pure journaling/diary-writing developed independently later, according to chronicler Rebecca Blood).

In March 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape introduced RSS as alternative way of bringing content to users; it stood RDF Site Summary or subsequently, Rich Site Summary. Just how “rich” it would be– how much structure through the RDF Resource Data Framework to employ– was open to discussion. The basic premise of syndication was to deconstruct web content content into its logical components: headline, title, publication time, author, content, in order to be re-assembled by the user. It was a bit of a fluke for its time: websites were trying to be ever more flashy and interactive, and RSS undermined that experience somewhat.

I’m returning from my summer break away from writing. As I hinted three months ago, I’d be on a bit of a break for a while– work had gotten pretty intense, and I was in the process of moving across town (which caused two outages of over a day last month: one by my poor planning, one by Verizon’s mistake in fixing my phone line), and then setting up the new place. And I wanted to get some normal sleep.

Yesterday I posted the article Fixing a Blog in Time, which was a little experiment in reading a particular blog, and trying to understand how it covered 26 different posts over a period of a little over two weeks. I chose Robert Cox's The National Debate. I did not make fully clear, with each post, how much I was mixing my initial impression of reading it with subsequent understandings. This begs a larger discussion about the tradeoffs inherent in impressionistic news.

Bob sent me the following response via email this evening. I post it in full here with my brief reactions interjected.