TeledyN

The idea of blowing up the entire British Royal Family, government and Parliament is so grotesque as to seem a joke—the whole establishment going up in one bang. A Jesuit historian, Father Francis Edwards, did not think the usual story of the plot held water, so he took a fresh look at the evidence. He found he was uncovering fascinating new clues about the shady people around the plot.

Only, let's get the story right this time ...

Mind you, I don't expect it will put any damper on the revelries and bonfires to let it be known the whole thing was a false-flag op fabricated by an upwardly mobile hunchback Machiavellian power-grabber. By comparison the whole candy-payoff for the witches and goblins thing seems downright wholesome!

Good to see I'm not the only one pondering incestuous feedback loops in blogspace: Rob Corr writes

"an analysis of weblogging in terms of the five propaganda filters demonstrates that in spite of its apparently democratic structure and the absence of opportunity for conspiratorial control, systemic bias towards powerful interests prevails in the blogosphere."

Of course, Rob does miss one small detail...

do tell! do tell all! do tell all about! do tell all about it!!

In a large enough Universe, just about all observations are true. While Rob's assessment may hold merit within the closed networks of blog-buddies locked into the DayPop/blogdex sphere, it says little about what might occur in the vastness of space outside the fold.

Outer Visions

I will grant Rob the observation that any change is not going to happen by accident or by any emergent property of blogspace; it is going to take the initiative from those of us who control the current space to open the doors, something the geek community is not renouned for doing. But given that access, while it may be true that the traditional blog-addicted readerships will neglect the infrequent posts of a Peruvian farmer, that won't stop Google from tallying that farmer's link-votes -- they may not gain any celebrity status of an Instapundit or Doc Searls, but they still have a valid voice in shaping the search-weights in a semantic web, and in the long-run scheme of things, which is more important?

Just as the mostly-academic gopherspace evolved to a web just as likely to contain pictures of someone's cat as United Nations development project summaries, so too in blogspace the compartmentalization (c18n) into interest groups is not a bad thing; at present, there are only a few groups, parallel to the few gopherspace servers circa 1990, but given time, and especially when granted access, these closed loops of common-interest blogs still provide identity, community, and, well, we're only intelligent in the space between us.

Blogs as Societal Scaffolding

As a case in point for where this is needed, collegues of mine reported on a project to outfit street youth in urban India with free-access internet terminals, only to then discover there was no compelling content for these kids to access! Blogspace, in my fringe and disenfranchised opinion, is a critical component to deploying a social infrastructure on which we can then build the technological and economic networks for development.

It's for this latter reason that I, as one of those white middle-class male geeks in possession of the keys, have submitted a proposal to the Ontario Native Literary Coalition and also to the Nunavut Department of Culture, Language, Elders and Youth. It's also why I have approached the WCC/IFIP Youth Initiatives Program, and while, so far, all three are ignoring me (or more probably just don't understand) it's still worth our bother to persist.

Submitted by mrG on Wed, 2002-10-09 07:54

Trust and trustworthiness online is a subject of some concern to those of us who live the life of telework and dream of internetworking ad-hoc business-webs of entrepreneurial free-agent nanocorps. The highest trust metric comes from complete identity, but that's only feasible in tribal groups, and it's not obvious how this is going to work in the online global village.

Hokkaido University's Toshio Yamagishi has thought about this too: His latest study, "Improving the Lemons Market" (pdf), suggests positive reputation systems, while slower to build than fault metrics, remain more stable and can build to rival trust qualities of complete identity.

It's just as Mama told you: "if you can't say something nice about someone ..." Now we know why.

Submitted by mrG on Fri, 2002-10-04 07:24

This is a first article on an ongoing thread on the nature and origins of "trust" as it relates to online identities and telework; this thread would go on to become one of my most cited series of articles.