Four Interesting Articles

I'm still struggling with the question of whether "Social Software" is just a new name for the same concepts that I have been using and building in software for 20 years, or a truly something new. As is true in so many things, I think the answer is probably "a little bit of both", but I'm still willing to be convinced one way or the other.

In my reading on this subject today, I've come across a few articles of note. First, here is an article that analyzes the way that storied develop in blogosphere. I don't really find this article all that interesting. Much of what it says seems entirely self-evident, but Tim Coates drew upon the self-evident and found an underlying interpretation that was not so evident, and wrote about it here, and here. Tim shows that citation networks in academia work well, and they look a lot like the network of links that evolves around blog topics, and less like the network of links in a threaded discussion. While I've certainly been aware of the limits of the threaded discussion model, I had never really thought about the structure of the discussion as a distraction from the flow of ideas. That's a really interesting idea. No structure is better than threaded structure, because threaded structure can be misleading. Hmmmmmmm....

Then, there's this atricle. There's an awful lot to absorb there. I confess that I have not finished reading it. But I will. I predict that much of it will also seem self-evident, especially given how much I've learned from Carol Anne Ogdin over the past ten years. But perhaps there will also be an underlying interpretation here, which will emerge and enlighten me yet again.