Sincrético

My relatively short research about different categories of knowledge has led to me to conclude that there are only two kinds: scientific and non-scientific knowledge. The former is objective and considered as true knowledge, the latter is everything else: everyday knowledge, narrative, culture, personal knowledge, ideology, common sense, religion, and so on. Is a cultural product such as music a piece of objective knowledge because it’s recorded? Is cultural knowledge, in the form of music able to grow? When music is recorded, its growth is put to rest, momentarily or indefinitely.

I think that’s the case when music is protected by more stringent copyright systems. Although it’s existence is more stable, it’s cultural growth is certainly impaired. Because some of these systems are so draconian, the products which they govern seem to reach a final stage. Naturally, there is the central aspect of which business model musicians should take; everyone has to make a living. To that David Byrne wrote an interesting article about it on Wired.

But that’s not the concern of my research. My interest is to find out whether the communicative strategies of the Web 2.0, such as podcasts, blogs, social networks and collaborative spaces, are able to  create a growth in cultural and non-scientific knowledge. Dissemination of information does not necessarily entail that what is communicated will generate new knowledge. What will certainly happen is a growth of the social aggregate of knowledge, that is, more people will know.

By using alternative licenses, such as those offered by Creative Commons, we may able to ascertain that growth will be maintained. The idea is very obvious and simple. An artist records a song and makes it available on his website under a CC license. Someone downloads it, changes it, remixes it, uses it as a sample or whatnot, and also puts it on her website, following a similar CC scheme. Given that licensing and all the attributions foreseen are respected, the process is continuous and new cultural knowledge is generated. In the case of traditional copyrights, the possibility of creating new cultural knowledge is as good as none, finito.

Kind of continuing on the previous post about the creation of new knowledge. Lilia Efimova has wrote some interesting papers on the nature of blogging and it’s relation to knowledge. Although writing from the perspective of knowledge management within organizations, she establishes interesting concepts in which blogging may be useful in one’s stride to organize his or her knowledge. One may use a blog as personal content management system, I certainly have been doing that. Sometimes posts might not even be published, but just the fact that you must put them into readable thoughts, may help you in structuring your ideas for future access.

We can also use this space to create a conversation, which is a way of maintaining knowledge alive for a period of time — as long as the conversation is going on — and a way of polishing your arguments, which in itself may not be considered new knowledge, but as refinements of existing thoughts. You can gain however insights from comments and conversation, assuming that you amass the right audience for your topics. I personally am new to blogging, just about over a month, and the more I write it, it seems, at least, the more comfortable I feel about it. This is also another topic covered in one of her papers. Later I will certainly come back to them in more detail.

If you are interested in insightful research on blogs, here are some of Efimova’s papers on the topic.

• Efimova, L. Blogs: The Stickness Factor. Blogtalk: A European Conference on Blogs. 2003.
• _________. Discovering the iceberg of knowledge: A weblog case. Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Organisational Knowledge, Learning and Capabilities. 2004
• Efimova, L. and Hendrick, S. and Anjerwierden A. Finding “the life between buildings”: An approach for defining a weblog community.” Internet Research, Volume 6. 2005
• de Moor, A. and Efimova, L. An argumentation analysis of weblog conversations. Proc. LAP 04, New Brunswick. 2004.

Does the Web 2.0 actually increase the stock of knowledge held by those with access to it, or does it maintain the existing level and merely transmits it? Me and my Thesis supervisor, Prof. Paolo Paolini at the University of Lugano, haven’t really arrived yet at any conclusion. I set out to a little investigation on the epistemology of Web 2.0, I found of some papers, not specifically on the topic, but mainly in relation to the creation of new knowledge with the help of new technologies.

Without yet so much theoretical support I risk to say that, perhaps, the increase of knowledge comes through the otherwise non existing connections of different knowledge pools, in other words, through the interconnection of different disciplines, which is made nowadays much easier with the use social technologies, and an exponential augmentation of serendipitous knowledge finding methods, leading to new “open doors”. Today I read Lyotard’s “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge“, which has thoughtful and acute insights in this direction. Although written in 1979, some of his predictions were actually spot on, especially related to explosion of “computerization” and the almost ubiquitous access to an overall knowledge “data bank.” It’s cute how old folks talk about technology.

What he has not predicted was that those that would have access to this knowledge would also be able to alter it, mash it, remix it and give their interpretation on it. And also the speed in which information goes through “nodes” (us) today does probably affect the way in which we are able to acquire this knowledge, it is probably more than ever just in a transient state. We might not even acquire it, we are just permeated ad-hoc by it upon need. There is much more to his arguments of course, and it is not about technology, it’s about how people have lost their belief in a grand metanarrative or ideologies, and how this leads into new ways for the legitimation of knowledge. Anyway, it’s a thin — I mean in the number of pages — and thought-provoking read.

Anyway, going back to the beginning question of this post… anybody there knows it?

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.

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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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.

The research methodology for my Master thesis is largely based on rss feeds, with good leads leading to tagged bookmarks (with del.icio.us) for future reference. The best possible outcome is not only achieving a usable concrete reference, but also other rss feeds that may serve as an expanding source.

The methodology

In order to demonstrate and test tee effectiveness of the methodology I have been running for 9 days now a little experiment. My Thesis runs under the title “Dissemination of Knowledge and Culture on Web 2.0: a Case for Brazilian Music”. Using the first part of the title I have created RSS feeds based on Google Blog and News searches. I have tried to make Technorati and Digg subscriptions, but they have returned unreliable results*, specially with Google Reader**, my RSS reader of choice.

The complexity of the queries, without prepositions and conjunctions, is as follows:

• x.1 “dissemination knowledge culture web 2.0″
• x.2 “dissemination knowledge web 2.0″
• x.3 “dissemination culture web 2.0″
• x.4 “knowledge culture web 2.0″
• x.5 “knowledge web 2.0″
• x.6 “culture web 2.0″

Every search query used has become essentialy an rss feed subscription for a blog search (A) and a news search (B), ergo A.1, A.2, B.1, B.2, etc. With the subscriptions in place, I have used a few variables to control them, individually, on a daily basis:

• 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
• Pre-selections: 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 pre-selection
• Secondary leads: any interesting lead found within a primary lead (e.g. a hyperlink inside of a 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 source

Preliminary results

Within the 9-day period, between 19 March 2008 and 27 March 2008, the blog search (A) and the news search (B) have returned for the combinations of all their subscriptions, a total 182 and and 198 entries respectively, a rate of 20.22 articles per day for the blog search, and of 22 for the news search. When we look a bit closer at the numbers we see that the news search had a higher repeat rate, 78 articles, whereas the blog search had only 37 repeats. Therefore, the blogsearch had a higher rate of unique articles, 79.67% (145 entries), as opposed to that of the news search of 60.6% (120 entries).

The blog search had 27 pre-selections out 145 unique entries, amounting to 18.62% ratio. Out of my readings, 6 out these 18 have turned out to be primary leads (22.22%). In the news search, 18 out 120 unique entries became pre-selections, a rate of 15%, and 4 out of these pre-selections became primary leads, coincidentally a rate of also 22.22%.

To make it more readable:

(A) Blog search:
Total entries: 182
Repeated entries: 37 (20.33% of total entries)
Unique entries: 145 (79.67% of total entries)
Pre-selections: 27 (18.62% of unique entries)
Primary leads: 6 (22.22% of pre-selections)
Secondary leads: 4
Bookmarks: 7 (70% of all leads combined, 25.93% of pre-selections, 4.83% of unique entries)
New RSS Feeds: 2 (20% of all leads combined, 7.41% of pre-selections, 1.38% of all unique entries)

(B) News search:
Total entries: 198
Repeated entries: 78 (39.39% of total entries)
Unique entries: 120 (60.61% of total entries)
Pre-selections: 18 (15% of unique entries)
Primary leads: 4 (22.22% of pre-selections)
Secondary leads: 2
Bookmarks: 5 (83.33% of all leads combined, 27.78% of pre-selections, 4.17% of unique entries)
New RSS Feeds: 0

Early observations

In 9 days of observations it’s safe to point out that news searches have a much higher repeat rate than blog searches. This maybe due to the limited number of sources used by the Google News search and differences in their search algorythms. Without getting to the subjective quality of the content (a bit more to that later), both the blog and the news searches gave roughly similar results in relation to the number of bookmarks generated.

I will be trying to expand this observation a bit further and will be posting the results here.

—
jp
Notes:

* Techonorati and Digg feeds didn’t produce feeds if there were not any results in the first search.

** Maybe I am part of a vendor lock-in, but I have also used Google Reader as my RSS reader of choice. Although it lacks basic sorting functions and it’s statistics tools are limited to only the last 30 days, it has served me well for the purpose of this studies and it’s online, accessible from anywhere.

*** Interesting is a very broad term here. It denotes what I would personally find fit to use as reference for my thesis research. Naturally, other subjects would have preselected and bookmarked different entries. The purporse of this analysis is primarily to describe how RSS feeds can be used as exploratory research method, not the quality of the leads found in the results.

**** Secondary leads also include any leads found within the navigational path starting at the primary lead. For example, a preselection has turned up a good primary lead, say, a blog entry from Prof. John Doe. In his article, Prof. Doe mentions the work of Dr. Lorem Ipsum (a secondary lead). In this secondary lead, the article of Dr. Ipsum, there’s a link to another piece of information, and so it goes.