SSwID :: Blog

It's a little more complicated than this, but here's a good basic indication of how spodes would look in machine terms.

  

 

The grey squares are computers like the one you're sitting at now. Using an RPN Toolbar, you compose and post an entry. The entry is stored both on your computer harddrive and at your webposition (website, blog). The black squares are webpositions. The white square is a network, such as elgg.net, groups.drupal.org or wordpress.com. The entry is visible from various webpoints (blogs or forums), but is stored at your webposition. The large circles are posts. The small circles are comments. The dotted lines indicate that the connected posts and comments may be  the identical entry.

 

 

 

Ben, Dave,there's a problem with linking community blogs to Technorati. Since we can't change themes or otherwise alter much of our owned communities, we can't claim them in Technorati. You have to be able to insert the java script somewhere in your code.

A post by Chris Sessums led me to take a look at Second Life. It has some of the features I'd like to see in SPODEs. Most importantly, there's a map. On this map there are symbols indicating three types of interaction (events, postcards and land for sale). A SPODE map would differ somewhat, probably looking less like a real world map for one thing. It would probably consist of spokes and nodes, the nodes indicating activity. I expect that little flags would flicker on and off all over the map, drawing your attention to the various topics under discussion.

I suppose the concept could be expanded to include more than discussion. Your personal interface could be instructed to display any combination of types of activity.

A post by Nils Peterson got me thinking how a truly globally integrated SPODE would allow you to participate from your own site, or fully personal "web position". I suppose you would download or otherwise access software that would allow you to construct such a space, tailoring it to your fancy, linking how you liked. This idea is exciting to me because it expands the SPODE concept to webrings.

Chris Sessums (may I call you Chris?) tipped me off to a new Google interface that might be a step in the direction I'm facing. It's hard to tell. My quick follow up only led to the odd shrunken screenshot. Apparently the new interface pops up randomly (from the user's perspective).

I'm looking forward to the day when blogging and conferencing are combined and when different "landscapes" are crosslinkable, so that from my favourite landscape I can access other landscapes as if, or almost as if, they were part of my landscape. That's where the search engine would come in. I would have the option of instructing the landscape to seek particular tags, titles and text in other landscapes. The engine would compile, perhaps rank, a list from which I could choose likely leads. I could then go to those leads and integrate them into my landscape so that they become part of my "garden" and are accessible, through my garden, to other users who find or enter my garden.

Chris typed  the term spode as an acronym, SPODE. This got me thinking about another name for the kind of system I'm talking about: Search and Plug Online Discussion Environment.

 

The more I explore this blogging business, the more I think we need some heavy integration, not only of CMCs and blogs (and whatever else), but also of the various systems.

For example, a "friend" in Me2U (Athabasca University's application of Elgg) posted a link to another a propos source and forum that led me a little further on to Weblogg-ed. I checked it out. It looks interesting, even promising. But I don't have the time to cruise and schmooze in all these online locales. I need to be able to tell the system what I'm interested in and find myself linked to everything and everybody everywhere that fits the parameters I devise.

I guess I'm talking about something like a search engine that kicks in everytime you log on, offering links that you can investigate and incorporate. Again, I think it's a matter  more of integration than of invention. Most of what I'm talking about in this community can be done manually to some extent, but, again, the time involved is debilitating. Please, someone, put it all together!

Well, here it is. My take on the evolution of social software. With Elgg, as I see it, we are currently in the ELL phase. Perhaps imminent adjustments will move us rapidly ahead.

Some explanation is given in the diagram, but I'll add a bit here, just to make things abundantly clear.

So-called single- and multi-socket events (posts and comments) are events which allow either a list of isolated reactions (single-socket) or a series of connected reactions, one reaction in reaction to the one before, a sort of chain of reactions (multi-socket). To date, as far as I'm aware (and I'm new to all this, so I could be devastatingly wrong in my assessment of the state of the art), only computer mediated conferencing allows chains of reactions, or threads. Blogs tend to isolate reactions, the focus being on the post, not on discussion. Elgg, to my knowledge, acquired over a brief acquaintance, sticks to single-socket post-and-comment clusters. Threads in Elgg consist of stacked posts.

What I envision (and whimsically name a spode) is a system that combines conferences, blogs and community blogs, and allows an event (post or comment) in a conference to also serve as an event in a personal blog and an event in a community blog. All events would be multi-socketed, allowing threads within conferences, blogs and communities.

There would be several advantages to this, in terms of structure, navigation, content and time management.

In terms of structure everything would be (potentially) interlinked. You could go from a conference to my blog to one of my communities, or from my blog to a community to a conference, or from a community to a conference to a blog--or whatever. 

In terms of navigation, you could map, gate or tunnel your way through the network.  Think of the network as a city, corners of which you could access from the air (mapping), ground (gating) or underground (tunneling). Accessing (or entering) from the air would allow selective entry into communities, activities or events of your choice. Accessing from the ground would allow guided entry by way of paths with which you feel comfortable because on them you meet people you know or ecounter placards that entice your interest. Access from below ground would allow random entry, saving you the trouble of looking ahead, perhaps leading to a profitable discovery in some corner you would never have searched had you been forced to decide a course.

In terms of content, contributions to conferences, personal blogs and community blogs would increase and tend to be richer, because contributors would be able to invest more time in fewer events while participating in more activities.

Some of the benefits I've mentioned here are reached at by certain features of ELLs, such as weighted lists of topics, lists of friends, display of community blog entries in pesonal blogs and of all public- or logged-on-user restricted blogs on an all-posts page that appears at first access to the site. I doubt that any possibilities represented by the spode model are currently out of reach. I for one would love to see and participate in such a system. Perhaps becoming such a system is the destiny of Elgg.