layout: post title: "Joi Ito: Attention Concentration and becoming a place" created: 1055210220 categories:
- Social Media
Joi Ito talks about running something in public versus running something personally:
In the past, I have run mailing lists with names like "netsurf" which I put a lot of energy into setting up and running. At some point, these "places" became public places and I ended up becoming a custodian. It's like having people come over to your place to party leaving you to clean up the mess. I lost control of the community, but not the responsibility. If it was called "Joi Ito's list" I think people wouldn't have come into the discussion thinking that it was a public place.Yup. Of course, both Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim have put their comment-ers on notice -- they can and will delete or otherwise mark-up comments.Also, I think that putting my name on the blog makes it clear that it's my personal perspective and point of view -- nothing more, nothing less.
Also, I can't help but notice the parallelism between blogs and profiles -- no matter your "other" affiliations, they are very much "you". This other bit from Joi Ito seems to point in the same direction:
I don't know what the wiki equivalent of that would be. I have a sense that wikis and irc channels work better with multiple contributors and are inherently places, compared to blogs which could turn into identities and voices that participate in places that are conversations across blogs.Evan and I had talked about this before, especially when we weren't both running Drupal which easily lets you post using your "home" identity.
My rules went something like this:
Write about / comment on an idea at the original poster's home, unless the other person doesn't have comments (no longer true for Brendon) or you are inspired by the idea and are taking it in another direction and always link to / give credit.
With TrackBack (which I don't have here on Drupal -- I think there might be a module somewhere...), everywhere can keep "their" thoughts / conversation / opinion at their own home. It definitely keeps things more intertwingled. And ever more critical that you keep your current system up and running, at the same address, and using the same links. Just think of the holes that could be created...
Makes me shudder about the prospect of migrating this here Drupal system. I'll wait until 4.2 is final AND debugged for a bit before I make the leap...
Final thought: blog == identity / identity == blog
(so what does this say about me? I keep this front page -- the main RSS feed -- separate from my personal blog; it has it's own feed, but likely only my parents and friends would be interested in it)