link

This 2002 interview discusses some cool ideas about emergent properties of online communities. This interaction struck as particularly prescient about the personalization tasks that frassle hopes to take on, which were more recently spelled out by Robin Good.

Dornfest. What's interesting is that Slashdot worked for me to a certain degree, and then to a certain degree it worked for me only to the extent that I was an average Slashdot reader — which I'm not. Even if I turned off everything but the highest rating posting, I still find a lot of noise to signal. What has emerged in the weblog community is that I don't have to become an average Slashdot reader, I can say, I'm kind of like Cory, and I'm kind of like Steven, and I'm kind of like Dave Winer in a certain sort of way. I'll read their things, and they'll point me to the appropriate things, including Slash articles.

So you have this wonderful after-market community. And if I decide, for example, that Dave Winer's focusing too much on politics, I may stop reading his blog, but I'll still get stories from him, via somebody else.

The result is that when I wake up in the morning, I get to see a lot of the stories that come through Slashdot or from the New York Times that are interesting to me, without having to wade through Slashdot to find them.

Johnson. That's a great point. I know people are working on creating the meta-blogs, and I feel there's an incredible opening to create that — the thing like Slashdot that sits on top of all the blogs, and is collectively filtered by all those bloggers and their readers. There are a lot of different versions of that, but I don't see one that's really solved the problem. To me, the thing that has to happen to the individual blogs is that they're still too centered around the personality of the blogger him- or herself. They're still too limited to emailing the blogger, or a crude bulletin board. What I would love to see is, one way or another, by force of personality or whatever, to have these clusters of 100 or 200 or maybe 1,000 people who offered real contributions and collectively owned the thing.

read the whole interview »

How can these writers bear to have such far-reaching, broad, prescient visions but not go and try to implement them? Isn't it a gnawing frustration, having to wait for someone else to try it and watching them bungle it up? Or is it that these visioniaries have seen how difficult, messy, and error-prone the implementation process really is, and they'd prefer just to sit in the background and have their occassional "I told you so"?

link