In web2.0 (lack a better term, so I use this) the web is really changing from a tech-top-down to a user-bottom-up structure. The result is that there is more information on the internet than ever before and it’s growing speed is going up each day.

Where six years ago Lev Manovich wrote that the key essence of new media is that it’s programmable, now this seems finally possible. Thanks to a whole new wave of web applications (instead of web sites). Low-tech users finally have the possibility to publish their ideas on the web.

It also change the way knowledge is created, In the old days written knowledge was made by professional writers, journalists, university research, professional writers etc. These days also non-professional writers have joined up. On their weblogs they comment on research reports, online articles and other weblogs.

When I was reading The Cathedral and the Bazar about open source software, I saw the possibilities for his theory about Linux’s success story as a way to describe the blog discussions. He discribes how he used the linux rules to make a succes of his own open source project.

• I released early and often (almost never less often than every ten days; during periods of intense development, once a day).
• I grew my beta list by adding to it everyone who contacted me about fetchmail.
• I sent chatty announcements to the beta list whenever I released, encouraging people to participate.
• And I listened to my beta-testers, polling them about design decisions and stroking them whenever they sent in patches and feedback.

As you would translate these points for open source software into “Open Source Knowledge” Than you would get what is happening now

• Release early and often write a blogpost as soon as you think you are “on” something.
• Make sure your rss feed is working, and get as many people on your feed as possible
• Write everyone that you have a weblog and that you post anything. Only if people know you exist, you exist.
• Listen to the comments that are made, and write a new post soon
• Subscribe too all the blogs of the people who post comments on your blog

Note 1. In the open source software community there is still a leader, in the open source knowledge area there are no leaders. There are some self acclaimed experts, and some community sites, but there is no real core.

Note 2. The only good examples for the open source knowledge communities are the ongoing discussions about Tags (folksonomies, tagclouds, clusters etc). And a friend of mine told me about the discussions about the impact of roll playing games.

Having read An argumented analysis of weblog conversations (2004) I got some extra information on how weblogs can be used to conversate. they split up blogposts in 4 categories

Weblog conversations, also known as blogosphere stories (Jenkins, 2003), develop around a number of weblogs and other information sources. The analysis by (Jenkins, 2003) describes the typical dynamics of blogosphere stories by distinguishing four types of blog posts found in most such stories:
(1) opinion posts that define a topic, and usually contain between 3-15 links, one of them being the instigator of the story,
(2) vote posts where a blogger (dis)agrees with another post,
(3) reaction posts in which a blogger responds to a single post on another site, and
(4) summation posts where the blogger summarizes various other blogs.

A second usefull quote is

As a result at any given time a blogger is involved in two types of conversations:
(1) conversations with self
(2)conversations with others (Efimova, 2004).

Another helpfull quote for me was

“One of my constant frustrations is not being able to keep track of a conversation when it’s spread across weblogs and comments on weblogs. There’s an interesting comparison with the traditional published literature where citations allow the reader to follow a thread across many journals. The lack of formal writing structures in weblogs often means that citations are not present and the narrative is broken.” ((Davies in http://radiocomments.userland.com/comments?u=109961&p=1110, March 6, 2004))

I implemeted the footnote ((sw’as Footnotes 0.9 Plugin for WordPress 2.0.x)) plugin as an experimental tool..