I look at every comment made on my blog. I try and find out who the commenter is. If someone links to me, I try and find out who it is and what they’re interested in.
Manual collaborative filtering. It’s not about ego. In fact, I don’t understand why someone would blog if that someone wasn’t interested in what other people said and what common AND different interests the others had.
It’s part of the point of blogging. Wisdom-of-crowds meets madness-of-crowds and emergence and serendipity and network effects.
So this morning I walked over to Mind This, since I saw a link and a comment. Liked the commented story, added and improved on bits of my Opposable Thumbs post. Rolled a snowball away, I know not where. Thank you Lars.
And then I saw this post by Lars. Probably been done a million times before, but it was a eureka moment for me.
A marriage is a conference is a concert is a marketing event is a school play or sports day is a community ritual gathering is a rite of passage.
We don’t call the tools social software for nothing.
And it is in the socialising of social software that better social software will emerge. For new purposes. For unthought-of purposes.
“…..O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ He chortled in his joy. From Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.
When I feel frabjous I feel very, very good indeed. Following up on something Clarence Fisher said about chess and 13-14-year-olds, I think Lewis Carroll is also a must for them. Pillow Problems and A Tangled Tale were seminal books for me.
Comment reposted, thanks to coComment:
One of my earliest memories from childhood is my mother reciting Jabberwocky to me – ’twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe’ – not to mention ‘come to my arms, my beamish boy’…usually when I was in trouble!