Wonderful Seb Paquet posted a formal paper on “Personal Knowledge Publishing” a while back, and I wanted to get back to it today. That’s the way it goes, being behind in life; I’ll actually write about authority one of these days, too, though by then the Tutor may have forgotten he asked me to.
The first half of Seb’s essay considers weblogs. The first sections of this half concern the definitions of weblogs and the history of weblogging, and I’ll pass over those, in part because I don’t think I know enough to add to Seb’s review, in part because anyone who ever comments on the history of weblogging seems to invoke the wrath of somebody who feels slighted (everyone invented weblogging, all at once and seriatim, everywhere, sooner or later) (but not me—I haven’t invented it yet, though I hope to someday).
My temerity engages with the third question, where Seb discusses “how weblogs foster quality.” Seb makes a virtue of what we sometimes identify as a drawback of blogs: where we sometimes decry the ways that blogrolls and links lend themselves to popularity contests, Seb notes that these mechanisms serve as a continuous, dynamic mode of peer-review. Seb’ quite right there, although I’d flag the question of who counts as a peer, and what the criterion for review might be. If this is a peer-review system, it’s a distinctly populist system, with all the strengths (open, unruly, anti-elitist) and weaknessses (low-common-denominator, unexamined criteria, nouvelle-elite) of that approach. The populist peer review disarms various institutional A-lists, bringing highly-cerdentialled people like Seb into conversation with people who don’t know what they’re talking about (like me)—but it tends, as Anne reminds us, to institute a new A-lists.
We may atake a half-full/half-empty view of this, but neither view should occlude the other. We can’t afford to see only the ways in which hypermedia provide yet another way to reproduce venal schoolyard power law distribution of poularity and status, lest we neglect the ways that hyperusers circumvent, defuse those patterns. Likewise, we can’t afford to romanticize the infinite frontier of hypermedia, or power will squash us flat.
Seb doesn’t go either direction, as I read him, but points out that the hyperlink constitutes a way that blogs make metadata about the value of linked-to sites.
In section four of his essay, Seb identifies four “uses of weblogs”: selection of material, personal knowledge management, conversation, social networking, and information routing. I see all of these in blogs, and yet I tend to respond uneasily to the possibility that a careless reader may take these as definitions or laws about what what one may use blogs for (and the notion of “using” blogs seems slightly off kilter to me, too). So long as we acknowledge that these are categories that come readily to mind, not distinct canonical divisions of applications, then I’m fine. I could probably think a few more, if I put some time into it.
Section five explores the textureof innovation in weblogs, of which he cites aggregation and blogging ecosystem tools as examples. This sounds fine to me. Section six wraps up with some sound suggestions for further reading.
Then Seb mnodulates into the “Personal Knowledge Publishing” half of the essay, which (I reckon) may be the beating heart of his specific interest. He distinguishes PKP from “k-logging,”—by-passing the intra-organizational emphasis of k-logging in order to focus on the ways in which PKP affords the opportunity for an individual to address the world with reflections deriving from her or his research and expertise. He cites as examples Lawrence Lessig, Ray Ozzie (who hasn’t updated his site since last November), Jill Walker, and others.
Seb’s evidently aiming at a specific, relatively narrow phenomenon: certified scholars/leading practitioners writing a blog that involves their special interests, as a sort of incremental, casual complement to more professional publications. How useful, though, is the segregation that this definition effects? Doc Searls: PKP-er or not? I’ not sure, on Seb’s definition. Doc blogs out of his personal knowledge of the information and technology industries, but it’s not at all a matter of research expertise—but then, Ray Ozzie’s blog wasn’t that different from Doc’s, and Lessig’s blog often divagates into personal matters.
The problem doesn’t arise form thinking about the specific mode that Seb’s culling; it arises, I think, from supposing that the blog itself constitutes the PKP genre. What about a “personal knowledge posting,” which then comprises a greater or smaller proportion of a blog’s postings? This might also relieve some of my qualms about the research/expertise angle. In light of Seb’s earlier point relative to popularity, vaule, and linking, the field-status of PKP seems a shade trickier than Seb would suggest.
Seb sets PKP in the context mostly of scholarly academic communication. He compares blogging to other modes of communicating research: conference papers, small-group conversation, web-publishing academic papers. In this context, Seb appreciates the greater fluidity of the blog, its capacity to serve as a filter and amplifier (ignoring less important information, and highlighting especially valuable perspectives). It cultivates richer relationships than the mere exchange of volleys at large conferences, and serves as an informal sketchbook of one’s ideas (with feedback from interlocutors, especially if the writer enables on-site comments).
Moreover, blogs attract attention to ideas and writesr that may be less well-known, indeed perhaps only just emerging into the professional discussion. Rather than waiting around for referees and panel-pickers to recognize the worthiness of the blogger or her promising idea, the blogger can disseminate ideas and receive attention without the limitations imposed by institutional organs for restricting knowledge.
All these things Seb gets right. The paper’s academic provenance provokes me, however, to wonder about the twilight areas between the PKP stars and the mere bloggers who participate in the rest of Blogaria. From my own experience, I find that I have taken part in illuminating, challenging discussions on theology and on postmodernism (my areas of specialization, perhaps even “expertise”), but that few if any of my conversation partners have themselves been theologian/postmodern theorists. Those conversations shed light on my interests in ways that more strictly academic conversations don’t, and they draw me into conversations where I’m clearly out of my depth (in which others have charitably answered me with more respect than my expertise merits).
This element of PKP blogging, I think, would complicate and strengthen Seb’argument. It would complicate Seb’s point by introducing more variables (and less academically reputable ones, as well); it would strengthen his argument by amplifying the reach of the knowledge in question, drawing “knowledge” outside its academic captivity and cross-fertilizing it in the discursive wilds with conversations from outside institutional hothouses (and Seb explicitly points to these, even as he emphasizes the discourses of knowledge that bear an academic imprimatur). One of the hyperbolically important dimensions of the hypermediatric moment, I suspect, involves the ways that hypermedia generate a both-and riptide of communication. Many will prudently stay ashore, where the powerful currents can’t touch them; many others will incautiously paddle out and suffer the consequences of unanticipated crosscurrents; and some will learn to adapt, to negotiate the ins and outs of hypermediated discourses, and they may ride an oceanic catapult to quite unanticipated destinations.
If Seb’s essay does its work, maybe his cautious readers will more readily receive and appreciate reports from those strange coasts—but that will involve suspending, disrupting, their academically-constrained imaginations to a somewhat greater extent than Seb indicates.
That’s too much said already, as Margaret points out. How does this sound to you?
Posted by AKMA at January 31, 2003 12:51 PM | TrackBackWow AKMA, I'm very grateful for such a wonderful and detailed review! I don't have time now to reply to all the interesting points that you bring up, but just let me explain why I wrote about "uses" of weblogs.
The driving idea is to see weblogs as tools for (personal, collective) thought. Tools have uses, and some have more than one. They let you get something done, and that's one way to view weblogs, as implements that let you build a record of personal knowledge, generate conversations and social ties, etc., all of which are useful things for inquisitive minds.
But I'm sure many people rather view blogging as a practice in which they engage rather spontaneously, without an intention of getting some definite task(s) done. Still, the activity has the same effects, whether they be intended or not.
I picked up the "tool" angle because I wanted to handle the "So why should I spend time blogging?" question coming from people for whom self-expression is not a matter of course, e.g., many engineers and hard scientists. (My background is in physics and computer science.)
Actually I‚'ve been trying to sell these guys onto the blog thing, and it's more difficult than it looks! (see The Case for using K-Logs in Research and the follow-up Blogging, scientists, humanists, and complexity). People like Jacques Distler (mathematical physics) and Lance Fortnow (computational complexity) are lone conquerors for the time being. I wish that others of their clan would join them (and wonder how much time they'll last without drying up) but it seems like they're too busy writing papers for formal peer review...
Posted by: Seb at February 2, 2003 07:11 PMNote first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.
Posted by: Silvester at January 13, 2004 02:30 AMNote first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.
Posted by: Rees at January 13, 2004 02:31 AMSince the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.
Posted by: Thomasina at January 13, 2004 02:31 AMFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: Matilda at January 13, 2004 09:50 AMLet's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:
Posted by: Jerman at January 13, 2004 09:51 AMA variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
Posted by: Harman at January 13, 2004 09:51 AM