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Links for August 5, 2006

5 08 2006

I’ve been “wandering” online a bit more lately, rarely with a destination in mind, and rarer still to reach one. This morning (it’s Saturday - boys in the basement getting their fix of KidsWB) - Jon Dube’s Technorati cosmos and tagcloud caught my eye during a brief stop at CyberJournalist.net, which led me to wander over to Six Apart to browse the MT plugin collection there, and then on to Wordpress to check out the plugins there. No conclusions - it looked to me like MT had a bigger collection, but that may be wrong - WP has plenty. And, at any rate, I somehow wound up here, and intrigued by Markku Seguerra’s Recent Links plugin, which I hope to play with. So far I’m pleased with WP, but the default Links generator for the sidebar is NOT one of its strengths. Meanwhile … I’m liking Diigo more and more - it’s also a hnady way of collecting links and then posting a few in a daily “links” post.

wp-recent-links is a WordPress
plugin (hack!) for adding a links blog to your WordPress–powered site,
similar to kottke.org’s
remaindered links.

Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing

From the June issue of Wired, which, sorry, I did not devour as soon as I got it. … The strength of weak ties is the value of a broad, expansive network that includes many different skills, capabilities and perspectives. This fits precisely the goals of the We Media Network, and it’s the exact opposite of what happens through traditional professional and trade associations, in which networks may be large but are also homogenous - monocultures vs. communities or ecosystems.

“This shouldn’t be surprising, notes Karim Lakhani, a lecturer in technology and innovation at MIT, who has studied InnoCentive. “The strength of a network like InnoCentive’s is exactly the diversity of intellectual background,” he says. Lakhani and his three coauthors surveyed 166 problems posted to InnoCentive from 26 different firms. “We actually found the odds of a solver’s success increased in fields in which they had no formal expertise,” Lakhani says. He has put his finger on a central tenet of network theory, what pioneering sociologist Mark Granovetter describes as “the strength of weak ties.” The most efficient networks are those that link to the broadest range of information, knowledge, and experience.”