I started with an intention to explore ways to lazily increase connections in BlogLand, using randomness as primary means.  Steve Wilhelm (at Reuters?) suggested trackback ticker and random faces appearing in blog search engines.

His suggestions lead me to weird combinations of the concept like Face Tickers (similar to Joi Ito's Random Faceroll except it really [sc]rolls ;-) and Blog Faces (similar to blog comments except a reader is associating a face with a blog post) which lead me to thinking about multimedia comments.

When I read a blog post that I like, I don't always have something to say.  Still, I might like to leave something.  What if I was to leave a small photo of myself that shows up either at the bottom of the blog post or where comments are displayed?  People will see at a glance that so-and-so read the post.  If I did make a textual comment, the image can link to the comment.  Otherwise, the image can link to my own blog.

This feature can be added to news aggregators or to browsers using a browser extension.  Just click a button and a visual representation of your opinion gets added to the article (as a comment for now).  At the same time, link the article could be added to your daily recommended article list published at your own blog.

Although I got sidetracked, I thought this was an interesting enough idea to share.  At least, I think Marc might like it since this idea is in the neighborhood of his visual endorsement stamp idea.  Of course, you can already do this now by inserting HTML into the comment.  But HTML support is not ubiquitously available and those comments usually appear in one-off area like second-class data.

Here is a crazy experiment that might reveal something interesting: a meeting where participants talk only via a speech synthesizer.  Obviously speech synthesize has to be really good and have to support multiple voices so participants can identify individuals by their 'synthesized voice'.

The point of the experiment is to measure the effects of separating a person's thoughts from his or her physical body.  While the effect should be most pronounced for the speaker, I think listeners will also be affected.  I am not sure what kind of effects this form of communication will have on individuals and the group, but it sure will be weird.

Anyway, this was just a dump (as in core dump).

After reading Marc's rocking response to my images-as-blog-comments post, I realized that I was actually describing a wiki masqerading as a blog post: a small stand-alone wiki initially created by a blogger and 'completed' by contributions from others, a Micro-Wiki, if you will.  No one has complained about the ordering of blog comments, so Micro-Wiki is a one-way street too in that contributors are only allowed to add to the post.

Trackback?  That's just an entry in a Micro-Wiki.  Comments?  Same thing.  Endorsements?  Yes to that too.  Thinking about all this leads naturally to structured blog post (fine-grained structure within a blog post) and extensible types of blog post contributions.

Imagine news aggregators that presents you with an updatable list of actions you can take with the selected item (subitem if its structured).  Strutured post allows reader to endorse the product being talked about in the post instead of the post itself.  Woohoo!

OASIS Security Technical Committee approved SAML 1.1.  I am still playing around with SAML 1.0 but, like fashion, latest is where the action is.  Get it here (850K ZIP File).

Responding to my Introducing Chaos to Social Software post, Chuck Lawson nails the issue I was wrestling with in his post titled Where's the love, Baby?  He wrote:

"These systems seem like great ideas, but like Don, I’ve found that it takes a degree of effort I’m not likely to make to really benefit from them.  I signed up for “Friendster” awhile back, and after a half-hearted cruise through my address book, managed to get four people to sign up in my network.  I guess they’re not any more gregarious than I am, since they haven’t signed anyone else up.  Since browbeating people I’ve already sent invitations to feels a little bit too much like trying to peddle mlm distributorships, my “social networking” efforts are pretty much at a standstill."

"So, until folks like Don, and aggressive networkers like Marc Canter (on whose site I found the link to Don’s article) work out some sort of automagic system to drag the rest of us introverts into the social network revolution, the best idea I can come up with is to park an invitation here." - Chuck Lawson

I particularly love the word 'automagic'.  It's one of the things I try to strive for when working on UI.  Although I hardly qualify as an introvert, I hate to disturb other people.  Unless I am in midst of my gregarious fit, of course.  When you see me yacking 1000 words a minute, run like hell.  It's worse that core dump after a full meal.