Sincrético

I just came accross this brilliant quote from George Bernard Shaw, Irish literary critic and playwright, literature Nobel laureate in 1925.

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

It verbalizes very simply — of course, and poetically — the whole issue about copyright vs. read-and-write culture, collaborative knowledge and the democratization of the means of intellectual production. I found this upon reading a text from Sérgio Amadeu, one of the champions of the free-software movement in Brazil. It’s a fierce defense of the values of cultural diversity through digital diversity. The text is here. (only in Brazilian Portuguese)

In this part I will present an analysis of the data presented on part 2. Below are some charts which I will comment on at the bottom of the post. The analysis is strictly related to this simple scenario.

General data for both searches (blog and news)

Chart 1: entries per day (with all key words combined)

Chart 2: entries per day of the week (all keywords combined)

Blog search

Chart 3: entries per day (broken down by subscription)

Chart 4: ratio between unique and repeated entries

Chart 5: preselections and bookmarks per day, next to unique and total entries

News search

Chart 6: entries per day (broken down by subscription)

Chart 7: ratio between unique and repeated entries

Chart 8: preselections and bookmarks per day, next to unique and total entries

Some obvious things first

Observing charts 3 and 6, where the number of new feeds per day are broken down into the specific searches, say, “dissemination knowledge culture web 2.0″ and “culture 2.0″, we can notice that the less keywords used, at least in this very specific scenario, the higher the number of results achieved. This should not by any means come as a surprise, as it is also with their results: less keywords yield more general results.

Gruhl et al. [1] have found in a study about information diffusion of information through the blogosphere, in which they analyzed a set of 401.021 postings, with an average of 2k-10k posts per day, among 11,804 RSS feeds, that weekends are low in intensity while midweek peak. As my humble observation shows, this is also the case here.

Number of unique entries

When comparing charts 4 and 7, one can clearly notice that the blog search turn up a much higher ratio of unique entries: 81.5 % of the blog search feeds where unique, whereas only about half of the news feeds (56.85%) where not repeated. I assume that this has to do with how many blogs there are in the blogosphere, compared to the rather limited universe of news providers searched by Google. What I also realized during the collection phase, is that many news feeds tend to be repeated during 1-2 cycle, therefore showing up in the next day of collection. Naturally, the set of keywords, which is progressively reduced in complexity but still with some of the same words, the results showed within the more complex ones (with more words) are likely to be shown also on those of lower complexity (with less words).

Preselections and bookmarks

Charts 5 and 8 show the number of preselections and bookmarks for both the blog and news searches. Here is clear that the blogosphere is a much more fertile ground when it comes to results. Of all unique entries, 18.16 % of the blog feeds were preselected for further reading (adding star in Google Reader), while only 9.04 % of the news feeds have resulted in preselections. In relation to the total amout of entries (unique and non-unique), this difference becomes even more blatant: 14.80% of all blog search feeds became preselections, and as opposed to a third of that (5.14%) in the news search.

Bookmarks stretch the difference even further. In the blog search the number of bookmarked entries is of 6.69 % of all unique entries and 5.45 % of all entries. This figures are 2.11% and 1.20% for the news search respectively. That means that the blog searcher returns nearly 3 times more of bookmarks than the news search, and almost 5 times as much when all the entries are taken into consideration.

[1] D. Gruhl, R. V. Guha, D. Liben-Nowell, and A. Tomkins. Information di®usion through blogspace.
In WWW, pages 491{501, 2004.

I just stumbled upon this video of a water balloon exploding shot with a high-speed camera, at 2,000 frames per second, just madness. Just to imagine how much beauty is out there that we just miss.

Via: Jerz’s Literacy Weblog

As I described on part 1, I have been running a little research to verify whether RSS feeds generated by blog and news searches are of any worth. On the following parts I will be presenting the final data, some analysis and conclusions. Please refer to the original post in order for a more detailed explanation of the methodology and its motivations.

Scope

The scope of this research is very narrow and can only be applied for the selected keywords below. Therefore, the results should not be generalized. A more representative research would need a much larger sample of random keywords, possibly in different languages, using different search engines and more rigorous data collection. Nonetheless, the results shed some light on using RSS feeds as an additional way of information gathering, specially in the exploratory phases of a research.

Data collection

As described in the introductory post, I created a series of subscriptions with some keywords for a Google blog and a Google news search. The keywords, based on the title of my master’s thesis “Dissemination of Knowledge and Culture on Web 2.0: a Case for Brazilian Music”, were based on the first part of the title, and used for the different searches in different levels of complexity, as follows:

• “dissemination knowledge culture web 2.0″
• “dissemination knowledge web 2.0″
• “dissemination culture web 2.0″
• “knowledge culture web 2.0″
• “knowledge web 2.0″
• “culture web 2.

I observed each subscription on Google Reader daily, for a 30-day period, from 19 March until 17 April. For each set I considered the following variables:

• Total Feeds: the daily number of feeds for a subscription
• Overrides: how many repeated feeds were found within a subscription or across the whole set
• Preselections: feeds that have been marked (or starred in Google Reader) for further reading
• Primary leads: interesting leads that may serve as a reference derived from a preselection
• Secondary leads: any interesting lead found within a primary lead
• Bookmarks: effective sources found in the chain of leads that are bookmarked and tagged
• New RSS feeds: new rss subscriptions generated as a result of good content found within a blog or site that contains other articles of interest, and may serve as an expanding sourc

Table 1: Consolidated data table for the Google Blog Search (all keywords combined)

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Table 2: Consolidated data table for the Google News Search (all keywords combined)

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I recently stumbled upon the concept of stock and flow of information. In simple words flow is everything that is occurring within a time interval, and stock everything that can be observed statically. For example, RSS feeds and blog entries such as this one are flow, archived blog entries and structured content to be found later such as a Wiki entry are stock. In less prosaic style, flows are the rivers, stocks are the reservoirs.

The terms, which are widely used in economics, business and accounting, are distinguished by their relation to time. Stock variables are measured on a given time, whereas flow are measured within an time interval. The concept was originally devised by system dynamics scientist Jay Forrester, who originally referred to the terms as Level (stock) and Rate (flow). [Wikipedia]

I haven’t been able yet to find any academic studies of stock and flow related to online communication, they are mostly associated to stock markets and system dynamics. CommonCraft has 3-part easy introduction to the topic in relation to the circulation and archival of information on the internet. Although the concept here seems to have been borrowed from other disciplines, it’s relevance is not all too inappropriate.

I came across an article from Paula Martini in iCommons, where she gives interesting insights about Overmundo, a web 2.0 platform that attempts to closes this gap in cultural coverage and diffusion within Brazil. If you live in Brazil and outside of what is there called the “eixo Rio-São Paulo” (the Rio-São Paulo axis), you mainly don’t get any cultural coverage in the media, and when so it is from the view of the center, not from the “periphery”. It is fully made by user-generated contributions and completely automated, drawing inspirations from many Web 2.0 platforms such as Digg and Slashdot.

In the video below Dr. Ronaldo Lemos, from the Center for Technology and Society of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in Rio, one of the founders of Overmundo and chairman of iCommons, receives the Nica Prize for best community project in the Ars Electronica Festival in Austria. I know this is old news, but the video contains a very good explanation of what Overmundo is. Since I will use it as one of the case studies for my thesis, why not showing it again.

Via: Paula Martini at iCommons

Following up on the documentary “The Truth About Wikipedia” I received this RSS entry from FORA.TV showing a debate between Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, and Andrew Keen, the writer of the The Cult of the Amateur: Why the Internet is Killing Our Culture. If you’ve got around an hour to spare, I highly recommend it. The debate about amateurism vs authoritativeness showns no sign of slowing down. Sorry, I couldn’t help to use Wikipedia as the source for information about his book.

In the last few days I have gathered some time to read Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age from Duncan J. Watts, professor of sociology at the University of Columbia and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference from Malcolm Gladwell, a New Yorker columnist and writer. In an earlier post, based on a article found a Fast Company, I have opposed the two, saying they were representing two different currents of thoughts in relation to the spread of ideas in the so-called web 2.0. I have to rectify myself: they are actually talking about very similar topics, albeit with varying degrees of optimism (and realism), different empirical foundations, and approaches.

Dr. Watts, the academic, the realist, is one of the leading figures of the science of networks, a relatively new discipline that draws its theoretical frameworks from physics, mathematics, biology, sociology and other sciences. His main object of study are small-world networks, a project that spans since his time in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell University, done in collaboration with his adviser Prof. Steve H. Strogratz. Revisiting the “Small World Experiment“, the seminal work of social psychologist Dr. Stanley Milgram which gave legs to the myth of the “Six Degrees of Separation“, Strogratz and Watts developed, with the help of modern computing muscle, a mathematical model to study the phenomenon, in which any given person can be connected to anyone in the world through a small chain of just five connections.

In his book Watts gives a very thorough explanation of the small-world phenomenon and other types of network, making a very solid case for the science of networks and its possible applications. The reading is insightful and the requirement of mathematical knowledge in order to understand it, close to none. As a man of science, Watts keeps a very critical view at the phenomenon and does not fully believe that trends can start by design: “… a series of small random events — events that would go unnoticed under normal conditions — can, at the critical point, push the system into a universally organized state, giving the appearance of having been directed there strategically.” In another passage, he maintains that “… a successful cascade [information cascade, in the language of economics] has far less to with the actual characteristics of the innovation or even the innovator, than we tend to think”, describing that a seed alone is not enough, that trees spread their seeds hoping they will land in the right place.

Gladwell is a trained science journalist and has been able to amass an interesting body of ad-hoc knowledge for his work. He’s although a bit more optimistic than Watts when it comes to the phenomenon of social contagion, or word-of-mouth epidemics. His theory is manifested in three concepts: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor and The Power of Context. The first deals with “gatekeepers”, people that are able to start a social epidemic. Gladwell names them Connectors, those with very high social capital; Mavens, people with extraordinary knowledge and with a social motivation to spread it; and Salesmen, individuals with a high capacity of persuasion. The second part of theory explains how certain ideas posses a higher capacity of maintaining themselves for longer in the collective psyche, by having a higher stickiness factor. Lastly, Gladwell considers how having the proper context, or to change an existing one, is also a necessary condition to start a social epidemic.

Watts deals with a larger topic, the science of networks, but one is able to find in his work some scientific rationale to support the ideas proposed by Gladwell. Gladwell sustains a top-down, pyramid-like network, what Duncan describes in his book a “scale-free network” (Barabási and Albert, 1999), governed by a “power law”. In these networks, highly connected individuals “can have an influence that is disproportionate to their number”, ergo the Connectors, who are highly connected nodes within the network. They both explain, with varying degrees of empirical evidence and examples, that there is a moment in which ideas, trends, innovations or diseases catch on and propagate exponentially within networks, this phenomenon is called by Gladwell, the tipping point, and critical point by Watts, who says “… these changes of state are not steady and gradual, but sudden. One second is raining, the next snowing.”

The two books are by no means whatever an exhaustive explication, but they have served as a good introduction to the topic. I regret however my reading order. I started with the more scientific oriented work of Watts and moved to Gladwell’s rather business-like journalist approach to the subject. I would reverse the order if I would have to read them again.

This is a very interesting documentary from Duch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen that further stirs the Web 2.0 controversy. It opposes, Tim O’Reilly (coiner of the term “Web 2.0″), Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, the founders of Wikipedia, to the author of The Cult of the Amateur Andrew Keen and Bob McHenry, former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Via: Techcrunch