(2002-02-07) f

Jon Udell on Swarming to group-filter Reputation Management. Here on Radio's community server, a variety of interest groups are forming. The shared infrastructure (directory, rankings) will, over time, become less useful to the community as a whole. Emerging interest groups will need and want their own infrastructure. So how do hives of bloggers swarm (Group Forming)? It's not enough to run individual instances of, say, Moveable Type. A new hive needs the kind of community Infrastructure provided by Radio or Blogger. To satisfy this need, these services will likely become partitionable, or deployable, or both.

To the extent there's broad use of open standards, the distinction can fuzz. But i think there will always be a healthy tension (hopefully) between the benefits of only using the universally-accessible tools and gaining a potential advantages from specializing... That is, hopefully yesterday's best specialized tools become today's universally-accessible tools. --JohnAbbe