blogdex - the weblog diffusion index In class I mentioned that Joe User and Blogger provided free, easy to use tools for keeping on-line journals. This whole blogging phenomena is fairly new to me. Prior to my current expirement, I had read many blogs, mostly through Salon, though Rabbit Blog will always be special to me. I had also seen some social networking projects (there's a few listed in the column over on the right.) But its only when I started putting the current project together that I really began to feel that I understood the framework that makes up this particular variety of communication. (I won't call it emerging. In fact, its about as complete as these things get, the history of the internet is littered with networking, communicating and publishing technologies that went nowhere, chat-bots and push technology anyone? With my luck the interconnected blog world is about to be eaten by the next big thing.)

The possibilities are reall intriquing. For instance, blogdex - the weblog diffusion index is a really interesting software project, it searchs its list of blogs in search of new links, then it tabulates the most important giving a picture about what bloggers are writing about, what the most important "news" stories are. The internet, in its current form, provides a great deal of flexibility in customizing one's information diet. Its very easy to get information that's already tailored to your own interests and biases. While this can save us from boredom, it also makes the world a little too safe since it removes the danger of suprising information or positions that we don't already agree with. By looking at what the composite of blogs finds interesting, blogdex returns the surprising and the weird to the online readers media diet.

I guess there was never really a shortage of the surprising and weird on the internet, but blogdex makes it easier to find.  ¶ #

0 comments Post a Comment