I received rather a sweet email on Friday morning:<\/p>\n
\nI blogged about one small aspect that came up in your most recent post – I hope you don’t think i was poaching your comments. It just needed more detail and I thought it was really important. And I do cite you… still friends?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nIt was Jenny of course, riffing<\/a> off my own “wibblings”:http:\/\/network.nature.com\/blogs\/user\/rpg\/2008\/09\/11\/on-science-blogging-2008\u2014part-1. <\/p>\n
\nThis set me to thinking about one of the ‘Unconference’ sessions<\/a> at SciBlog ’08. I didn’t say much about it in my ‘official’ “report”:http:\/\/network.nature.com\/blogs\/user\/rpg\/2008\/09\/12\/on-science-blogging-2008\u2014part-2, but some interesting things did come up. Basically, Maxine wanted to know how it is possible to track multiple conversations (on–for the sake of argument–one particular subject) throughout the grits teeth<\/em> blogosphere. <\/p>\n
\nFirst, the geeks got hold of this and started wibbling incessantly about the ‘semantic web’, which I’m sure was very laudable but left my head spinning a little bit. Things got a little bit weird and meta, with some people seeming to want all conversations about any particular subject to be aggregated into one \u00fcber-conversation, which caused Jenny, Heather<\/a> and myself a great deal of head-shaking and grumphing. <\/p>\n
\nMaxine just looked on, bewildered, while people dribbled on about DOIs and citing papers etc. Andrew Walkingshaw<\/a>, bless him, talked a lot of sense, pointing out that this was a technological approach to a social problem. <\/p>\n
\nYeah, all very good points, but how the hell do we do anything useful??<\/em>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nWe tried to steer the conversation back to how we think multiple conversations about the one subject is a good thing<\/em>, we just want to know how to track them. Certain people missed the point I think (and started pimping wikipedia, for some bizarre reason), which was a shame, because it’s a real problem. Both Jenny and myself have blogged about something and been told “Oh we’ve already done that<\/em>“. We, actually, know<\/em> it’s been done, but our voices are just as valuable and y’know, we might have a take on it that you haven’t thought of.<\/p>\n
\nWe got support from the direction of Jean-Claude Bradley<\/a>, who argued that we should just accept<\/em> there are multiple conversations (I may have suppressed a cheer at that stage). Different people can have different takes on the same thing, and those voices should be heard. Gathering everything into one place is unhelpful and probably quashes quieter but equally valuable voices.<\/p>\n
\nSo the upshot is no, Jenny, I don’t think you’re poaching my comments–at least, I don’t mind if you are. I think this is the strength of weblogs, and we can still be friends. OK?<\/p>\n
\nThat Gee character, on the other hand, can sod right off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I received rather a sweet email on Friday morning: I blogged about one small aspect that came up in your most recent post – I hope you don’t think i was poaching your comments. It just needed more detail and … Continue reading