• InformIT: Death March –
  Tags:books startups it business

Social Software hat sich seit dem ersten Buch BlogTalks (2003) von einer Innovation zu einer Konstante in Diskussionen über Wissensmanagement und E-Learning entwickelt – letztlich eines meiner großen Ziele für BlogTalk – siehe auch meine Einleitung zum vorliegenden Buch.

Das von der Friedrich Ebert-Stiftung beauftragte Gutachten (sic!) widmet sich der Frage nach den Enstehungsbedingungen und Erfolgsfaktoren von Online-Journalismus in Deutschland.

Was mir gefällt:
Treffende Analyse über die Rahmenbedingungen und Effekte aktuellen Online-Journalismus in deutschsprachigen Landen. Im Gefolge von Spiegel-Online und erfolgreicher Unterhaltungs-Sites mutiert die journalistische Handarbeit klassischer (=aufgeklärter) Prägung zur Optmierung von Inhalten und Sites nach der Logik von Suchmaschinen und der Wahrnehmungspsychologie. Dem Klick werde alles untergeordnet. Entsprechend der Befunde der beiden Autoren führt das zu einer Einebnung und Verflachung journalistischer Inhalte im Web – Boulevardisierung der Online-Medien nennen sie das. Reichweiten-Geilheit reduziere nicht nur die Qualität, sondern macht es Nischenanbietern nachgerade unmöglich sich aus Werbeeinnahmen zu finanzieren.

Es gibt ein Blog – no na – zum Buch : werkkanon.blogspot.com

Was mir fehlt:
die Einordung von Online-Journalismus in die Phänomenologie des Webs. Das Web ist letztlich nur unter anderem eine Broadcasting-Medium, d.h. der potentielle Wert liegt nicht in der Distribution von Inhalten und damit im Verkauf von Werbung, sondern in der Bereithaltung der Möglichkeit virtuell Interessensgruppen zu bilden, kollaborativ Inhalten zu gestalten, zu manipulieren etc. Das Web ist ein Netzwerk der neuen Art, wenn man so will: Algorithmen haben da ihre Berechtigung sowie Nischen. Das Gutachten hat diese Aspekte völlig unbeachtet gelassen – selbst in der kurzen Passage zu “sozialen Netzwerken” als Aufmerksamkeitsattraktoren.

Mein Fazit:
ein kurzweiliges interessantes Büchlein zum Thema Online-Journalismus mit garstigen Beschreibungen zum Alltag. Der Online-Journalismus erscheint als Travestie auf den Anspruch des Qualitäts-Journalismus oder vielleicht gar als Ankündigung des Endes einer von der Aufklärung geprägten Vorstellung von Objektivität und Transparenz.

Meine Aufforderung:
sucht euch die Quellen im Web, die für euch interessante und relevante Inhalte generieren und versucht selber solche zu schaffen. Das wird vermutlich nicht ökonomisch von Bedeutung sein – zumindest nicht direkt sehr wohl aber indirekt – aber dem gerecht was das Internet am besten kann: der Vernetzung von Menschen, Maschinen und Ideen.

Ein (virtuelles) Netzwerk an Gewährsleuten und die adäquaten Tools: wer braucht da noch Online-Journalismus aktueller Machart. Oder andersrum in einem verteilten Netzwerk ist v.a. die Infrastruktur von Bedeutung die Inhalten und Zentralitäten bilden sich (i.d.R.) von alleine.

I can tell you all those self-publishing services are time bandits. First it took me two months to figure out that Booksurge (an Amazon company) is supposedly run by inverse mechanical turks. Either my sales agent didn’t reply for weeks or was not capable to answer my questions and sometimes after some time she (or it) sent me commodified marketing mails about their service. That really drove me nuts. She would have failed the Turing-test in any case.

Eventually I decided to cancel my engagement with Booksurge for the sake of making the book public before the turn of the decade. It’s a pity though because – and that was my interest in the first place – I wanted the book to be part of the Amazon.com directory and not only the Amazon.de one. I have no clue how to achieve that – I’m grateful for any help on that.

In the end I decided to go with Books On Demand (German) again: Another pain in the ass (ask Jan) to get the files the way their publishing engine can accept it. And we haven’t seen any results yet.

For your information here is the cover and the link to my (very personal) intro to the book.

After 2 months of usage that certainty made it evident for me that with blogs and the related networks we do have a very powerful personal publishing tool available that will augment our personal scope of networking as a base for learning enourmously. I was quite certain that this will not only effect the private usage but even more the organizational usage of it. Since then I am most interested in transfering the lessons learned in the open web into the professional and organizational context.

So in 2002 after a brief introspection I decided to organize a conference on that topic and together with Max Scheugl the first draft of BlogTalk – the first international conference on weblogs – was created. It turned out to be a huge success and had a successor in 2004, thanks to Markus Toyfl for helping to design it, and eventually turned for its third edition – that was conceived and organized together with Jan Schmidt – into a more general conference on social software – a practice and phenomenon that took shape already in late 2002.

The conference and the people that dropped by – from all over the world – to either present their visions, research, projects and ideas or to listen and to talk to each other represent what you could call a gathering of lead users that sought and are still looking for innovation – on several sometimes contradictional levels. We all – and I dare to claim that – are still looking for better ways to communicate and relate to each other be it for the exchange of knowledge or the exchange of experiences. And finally we are all aware that it is about connecting with like-minded people. A connectedness that primarily benefits us personally and on a second level it somehow creates what you might call a collective awareness and value that surpasses what we were used to accept as the boundaries of human intellect.

That might be entirely conventional from an anthropological perspective. Human beings are here for conversations as a prime base for anything else that can come to one’s mind. After all we humans represent and create networks of conversational animals. To imporve on that by shifting it to the virtual realm makes it a relevant aspect for me: it is where the virtual becomes indistinguisghable from the real.

During the last years I had the change to participate in a paradigm shift. On the one hand the web is clearly an effect and cause of what is termed globalization on the other hand it has a lot to do with innovation. And I am extrmely happy about that latter part. Experiencing innovation, even being part of it is exciting in itself and challenging on the the other hand. Just think of transfering your experiences into a world that does not participate in that innovation. A world that by the very virtue of not being part of the innovation is creating that notion of innovation at the same time. Just think of translating that for them and it becomes quite clear what is at stake. I realized – mediated through the conference and its aftereffects – that language and images are the relevant membranes that separate innovation from its acceptance. And if something truely new is here to stay than you first need to find the right words (metahphors) for it.

Hence, a new media evolved from being a mere instrument for doing a lot of things better and faster into a phenomenon that now constantly creates new concepts of how to make use of it. Concepts that by far transcend the simulation of existing media. The last 5 years were the most exciting ones and I have to thank the the people that build the web that connected me to that pieces and people.

Thus please go ahead and consult this volume as a representation of what the conference BlogTalk and its related conversations were about.

Thomas N. Burg, March 2007

Messages from the Lost Continent: “Five agents are sent to a mysterious continent on a mission so secret that not even they are told anything about it. Their only link back to headquarters is an encrypted (t d f) e-mail channel through which they receive instructions and report back the results of their investigations. Soon, they find themselves being followed by sinister adversaries who do not hesitate to eliminate them if necessary. As the agents slowly uncover the connections between an 18th century watchmaker (t d f), a number of ancient artefacts and a piece of cutting-edge modern technology, they find themselves in the middle of a massive conspiracy that could destroy the entire planet… This unique and at times hilariously funny blend of thriller, science fiction and fantasy novel was first published as a fiction weblog between June and December 2005.”

I wonder if social software as a term, concept, and especially interaction (t d f) metaphor depends on quantitative analysis.

The Dumpster: “The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has “dumped” another. The project’s graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain”

Book recommendation: Pattern Recognition.

(Reading Roundup): “I’m up to my elbows in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus for the second time, and am getting a little more out of it this time. It’s still agonizing, thanks for asking — sort of like reading the book of Leviticus, only with more S&M references. But I’ve also been doing some other reading which is shaping how I see some of the issues I’ve been working through.

For instance, when I mentioned Zuboff and Maxmin’s recent book to my invaluable colleague Mark Longaker, he immediately recommended Deleuze’s final chapter from Negotiations. I’ve read it a few times since then, and once again today. The argument has quite a bit of relevance for what I’m doing. Deleuze argues that whereas the 20th century was primarily marked by disciplinary societies (in Foucault’s terms), control societies are taking over. Disciplinary societies are based on confinement and centralization (p.178). Think in terms of Taylorism, or Foucault’s prisons, or hospitals, schools, factories, families. But all of these confinements are breaking down, Deleuze says, and in its place is control: ‘the ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control that are taking over from the old disciplines at work within the time scales of closed systems. … With the breakdown of the hospital as a site of confinement, for instance, community psychiatry, day hospitals, and home care initially presented new freedoms, while at the same time contributing to mechanisms of control as rigorous as the harshest confinement’ (p.178). Deleuze quite clearly sees this control society as a threat as bad as, perhaps worse than, the disciplinary society Foucault described. In the disciplinary society, factories produced a body of workers that could be controlled en masse by management, as well as an avenue of mass resistance via unions. But in the control society, we’re not talking about factories producing goods, we’re talking about businesses producing services; in this society, individuals relate to each other, compete against each other, and their wages fluctuate continually, ‘bringing them into a state of constant metastability punctuated by ludicrous challenges, competitions, and seminars’ (p.179). This metastability is brought into education as well: ‘school is being replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It’s the surest way of turning education into a business’ (p.179). So you have a sort of ‘endless postponement’ (cf. Body-without-Organs in A Thousand Plateaus) rather than a defined avenue of development; you travel in continuously changing ‘orbits,’ you ‘undulate,’ you find yourself switching jobs and careers and positionalities (p.180). The factory is gone, as are unions and lifetime employment; the best way to get a raise, as a friend once told me, is to switch jobs.”

(Via spinuzzi’s blog.)