The metacommunity concept as a framework for OPML based communities
A new concept is sprouting in the OPML landscape.
The allusion to flora is not accidental, even if banal.
Consider these two unrelated posts, the first from Lisa Williams,
OPML’s biggest impact will be in making it as simple to add a record to a self-assembling worldwide directory as it is today to write a blog post. (Did that make any sense at all? I hope so.)
Yes, that makes sense Lisa.
It sounds like an “organically” created web directory, seeded and fed by the natural actions of an ecological-like community.
Next we move on to James Corbett, commenting on one of my posts,
I’ve been wondering if we should label these multimedia Reading List as…. SEEDs = Sensory Feeds. Seeing as SEEDs are the fruit at the leaf nodes in a tree I think this will tie in nicely with the direction some feed grazers are going. And as a SEED meme accumulates momementum it can actually spawn a whole other OPML tree, just like a real SEED.
Before we get lost in this placid garden imagery, we must also note one of Corbett’s posts that indicates there is also a food chain, or feed chain, if you will, that is in intense competition for our ravenous attention.
He concludes,
Of course the fleet footed Feed Aggregators won’t die out, they’ll just evolve Feed Grazing capabilities.
Our current crop of aggregators are likened to reptilian eating machines. The next generation of consumers, the mammals, will use adaptability to flourish where the reptiles could not.
Man, however, is the only creature in history to have conquered agriculture. Thus, the information consumption tool that wins will not only hunt and forage, but harvest.
This, I think, is a key conceptual transition that must be made to address the growing attention inundation issue.
To consume what is available naturally will not be enough. Social structures must be built to enhance the bounty which abounds.
Adam Green’s River of Feeds is certainly pointing us in the right direction. Annotated lists turn that river into a mill. Lisa Williams hints that we are at the dawn of a new type of information economy, one built upon the small actions of the masses. And so we stand at the launch of a new era, similar in many respects to the industrial revolution.
Large economies of scale, mediation and complex societal structures were produced by the historical industrial revolution.
In this metaphorical one, we will produce some of the same, but moreso, an ecosystem. Both economy and ecosystem, stem from latin for household or habitat.
It seems to be largely held that these social communities can be sown out of the metadata that exists like tagging, linking and subscribing.
I’m going to conclude this post by contending that a more definitive gesture will arise that will create smaller communities among the larger ones that we conceptually know of today.
In fact, I’m going to borrow a concept from the science of ecology called the metacommunity [PDF].
{End of Part I}
[…] (part 1 is here) First, let’s address why we need communities smaller than the blogosphere istelf. As the number of use cases that can be made for blogs continues to grow with initiatives like structured blogging, microformats, SSE and the recent web clipboard, will this necessitate a change with the way we interact with the blogosphere. In other words, will it become more common for blog readers to only want a subset of a particluar blog’s feed? If blog use becomes what startups like Edgeio seem to be implying, then the answer is probably yes. Consider an example where a particular blog routinely posts about tech, family, cooking recipes and also sells hand made products. You may only be interested in the tech post and not the recipes. Tags help, but are both ambiguous and impractical. Collective intelligence in tagging and bookmarking can help. We often need a tighter loop with less noise and more signal. This notion is prompted by Scoble and Winer saying the blogosphere is adopting some of the negative usenet and mail list traits. By it’s virtue of being so open, it will necessarily grow in noise, much of which could be createde by good citizens using the system for structured blogging. We can’t expect everyone to maintain a blog for every topic they wish to contribute to, so we either need to filter in a very sophisticated manner, or evolve into complex, segmented metacommunities. It seems to me that reading lists can play a big role in creating metacommunities, acting like a topic-based buddy list. In this way, we can direct some posts toward actual communities, even if they are still available to the greater system. And once we have an open standard on explicitly replying to a post, rather than implicitly assuming such from a link, tightly bound, threaded conversations can co-exist with the general posts that are common-place today. (end part 2) Mar 10 2006 11:58 am | RSS and SSE and Tags and winer and davewiner and OPML and microsoft and Glists and scoble and blogging and eirepreneur and jamescorbett | […]
[…] (part 1 is here) First, let’s address why we need communities smaller than the blogosphere istelf. As the number of use cases that can be made for blogs continues to grow with initiatives like structured blogging, microformats, SSE and the recent web clipboard, will this necessitate a change with the way we interact with the blogosphere. In other words, will it become more common for blog readers to only want a subset of a particluar blog’s feed? If blog use becomes what startups like Edgeio seem to be implying, then the answer is probably yes. Consider an example where a particular blog routinely posts about tech, family, cooking recipes and also sells hand made products. You may only be interested in the tech post and not the recipes. Tags help, but are both ambiguous and impractical. Collective intelligence in tagging and bookmarking can help. We often need a tighter loop with less noise and more signal. This notion is prompted by Scoble and Winer saying the blogosphere is adopting some of the negative usenet and mail list traits. By it’s virtue of being so open, it will necessarily grow in noise, much of which could be createde by good citizens using the system for structured blogging. We can’t expect everyone to maintain a blog for every topic they wish to contribute to, so we either need to filter in a very sophisticated manner, or evolve into complex, segmented metacommunities. It seems to me that reading lists can play a big role in creating metacommunities, acting like a topic-based buddy list. In this way, we can direct some posts toward actual communities, even if they are still available to the greater system. And once we have an open standard on explicitly replying to a post, rather than implicitly assuming such from a link, tightly bound, threaded conversations can co-exist with the general posts that are common-place today. (end part 2) Mar 10 2006 11:58 am | RSS and SSE and Tags and winer and davewiner and OPML and microsoft and Glists and scoble and blogging and eirepreneur and jamescorbett | […]
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