It's Out: Beginning the Dialog on PIKII

Props & thanks to Lilia at Mathemagenic and Chris at Usability Views for spotting:

Edmonds, K.A, Blustein, J., & Turnbull, D. (2004). Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator.  Special Issue of  the Journal of Digital Information, Future Visions of Common-use Hypertext. 5(2).

The issue's not quite live, but since it's been discovered by some dedicated internet researchers and I've been quietly soliciting feedback since the originally scheduled November '03 publication, here it is.  It's densely anchored, here are a few highpoints:

• The Beginning
• The Next Big Thing is being grown organically, cultivated by software developers and pruned by personal Weblog publishers. The rising Weblogging space of the Internet is looking more like traditional hypertext than the Web of the 1990s.
• Reading Weblogs
• While the simple representation of a single author's Weblog posts is more aptly termed syndication, the rise of merged XML documents from multiple authors on related topics approaches Nelson's vision for transclusion in a way that user's find useful. A key issue that the current Web tool set has dealt with is preserving authorial credit.
• Connections Between Blogs
• In addition to site-level links, individual posts create a network of related links. Two systems exist currently for promoting bidirectional links. Trackback is a simple HTTP notification system in which a linking page requests a reciprocal link.
• Current Issues
• Granular and easily modifiable access control to personally crafted content collections is needed. Today we can search the content of blogs that have been broadcast with RSS-based tools such as Technorati (Sifry) and Feedster, but we have no tools that enable automatic content negotiation between users' software agents or even between two users.
• Conclusion:
• The growth in the amount of digitally captured and hypertextualized information in the coming years will be even more astounding than the growth of the Web over the past ten years. There are significant technical challenges to overcome, but the standards-based organic growth of Weblogs and the Internet shows methods by which these challenges might be overcome.
• Trackback
  

We've looked forward to kickstarting a discussion in the blogosphere.  Admittedly, since we wrote this, much progress has been made, notable among them XFN. More to come on this from myself and Jamie & Don.
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Posted at 17:3