(2002-03-04) f

Jon Udell gives the big-picture review of Radio Userland.

Jon hits (again) on the blog-vs-OnlineForum topic as it relates to scientific/academic research/progress. There is a separation of these informal conversations from the more formal communication seen in scientific publications. These writings also form a kind of conversation, but one that is less immediate and more reflective. Monitoring the flow and interconnectedness of this meta-conversation, by means of citation indexes, is central to the way science creates shared knowledge.

One feature related to Group Forming Networks is the WebBug that lets a Radio writer find the people reading his blog via Radio, even if they aren't linking to him. Because transparent measurement of influence and interconnectedness is one of the key ingredients of the Radio experience.

Jon's long-term goal is the ability to collaborate in many communities using the tools of hypertext, indexing, search, and cross-referencing... Radio doesn't yet know how to occupy that middle ground (between email and public blogs). But it has the tools people need to do the experiment: a distributed scripting engine and object database, Web-services protocols. When Radio's currently-centralized community engine itself becomes distributable (as is planned), I expect to see an explosion of group-forming activity. This gets back to managing Overlapping Scopes Of Collaboration, which no tools do really well (in terms of controlling membership). Once you belong to lots of closed blogs, which actually matter to you (more than as entertainment), then I can see where RSS has more value, as long as your aggregator makes it easy to prioritize this need-to-know stuff from the fluff; which is a feature totally lacking from Radio so far. OK, I take it back! In that scenario I'd still rather just have a list of subscribed blogs with their mod-date (and maybe tracking a last-visit along with it). Because the more the info matters, then the more the context of the overall blog matters. Though I suppose what this supports is using RSS as a pointer to a specific blog/wiki item, rather than its full contents.