Yours truely quoted in Wired's OhmyNews article "Citizen Reporters Make the News" by Leander Kahney.  I never thought I would be in the news for being a Korean-American.

While my son is watching Saturday morning flood of cartoon, I am playing with GraphViz, a neat tool for visualizing graphs.  Visio is nice, but it can be tedious and writing out complex structures in dot is much easier than the usual Visio routine.

Given its popularity, its lack of ready-to-use Python binding is weird (please don't mention Perl, I am allergic to it).  It should also support Flash and Visio output.  Still, a very cool tool and a joy to use.  I could sit here for hours generating pretty graphs.  Wouldn't it be really cool to hookup Technorati with GraphViz?  Wooo.  RDF and GraphViz also go really well together.

Lets face it, Blogland is as flat as LA and sprawls like it too.  Hotspots, quiet neighborhoods, noisy industrial areas, linked together by freeways and byways.  If today's Blogland is LA, tommorrow's Blogland will look like NY with skyscapers reaching for the sky.  By a skyscraper, I mean a nested group of blogs forming a hierarchical structure.  From little two story buildings for startups to equivalents of Empire State building for mega-corporations.

I started with my observation that, while hierarchical structures are common in the real world, this is not the case in the Blogland.  The real world is populated by individuals, but groups tend to form a hierarchy.  To project these groups into Blogland, we need hierarchical blogs.  I chose skyscrapers as a metaphor to deliver the idea more vividly.

As a company gets larger, flow and storage of information becomes crucial.  Blogging technologies can help in this area, but typically chaotic network of blogs could do more harm than help.  A CEO is not likely to know about about, let alone subscribe to, a lowly QA engineer's blog.  Noises generated in a large network of employee blogs also needs to be managed.

Introducing hierarchy to a blog network will help us solve these problems.  Exactly how this can be done remains to be solved, but I am absolutely convinced that this is where blogging technology is heading.  If we can raise productivity with blogging technologies, companies will pay.  I believe introduction of hierarchy is the first step.

Update: My zealot-style of writing can sometime work against me, so I thought I should clarify that I am not proposing absolute hierarchy for blogs, just adding hierarchy to what is already there to reflect real world structures.  This helps orient bloggers in the group and eases understanding of built-in information flow (up, down, sideway, etc.).

Scoble writes about advertisers pressuring Google to devalue webloggers, a Must-Read according to Dave.  I agree.  My own post (in March something) about the effects of blogs on Google PageRanking algorithm is here.

While I am a blogger, I want Google to either provide separate search service for blogs (maybe combine it with News) or reduce the weights for blogs.  PageRank bias for ndividual item or date pages don't seem to be too bad.  It's the main page that cause most of the problem because it:

• changes too fast - by the time you find it on Google, previously indexed content is gone.
  
  
• heavy with links unrelated to content - blogrolls, etc.
  
  
• covers wide range of topics

One simple solution is for blog tool developers and services to voluntarily 'mark' main blog pages by adding a META tag with NOINDEX attribute by default.  This solution:

• removes the need for Google to identify blog pages
  
  
• is not Google-specific
  
  
• works with Google as it is now
  
  
• requires bloggers to intentionally unbalance PageRanking

I wish there was a standard way to do the same at block level to hide blogrolls on item or date pages, but this solution will do until W3C provides us with a way to specify NOINDEX at block-level.