Sociologist-créateur of the brave new web/world
Other essays I completed during the second half of my time at King’s are (from 1st halve are here): Keywords in context (a mixed bag, on concordance analysis of Hannah Arend’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, the process of concordancing, and collective responsibility), and Critical mass in collaborative hypertext environments (on critical mass in hypertext environments in general). This latter essay is available on LogiLogi
A poster on LogiLogi, and it’s “Quest for Critical Mass”, was presented at Digital Humanities 2010. And we won an European Science Foundation bursary for it. On our poster we report on recent improvements of LogiLogi, provide some background theory about critical mass, and identify factors that can be of influence on attainment.
The conference has just ended, and it was a great event, featuring topics as diverse as literary ...read more
LogiLogi, and it’s Quest for Critical Mass will be presented (as a poster) at the Digital Humanities 2010 conference in London, this June. First of all we will analyze the concept of critical mass, as it applies to collaborative (hypertext Digital Humanities) web-applications, and at all the factors that come into it, such as network-effects, and bifurcation points.
Surprisingly little has been written ...read more
I just came back from the ‘second snow workshop’ of the LiquidPub project in Ovronnaz, Switzerland. Besides the location (first time at a winter-sports resort for me), the topic of the workshop was fascinating. It gave me a better understanding of the LiquidPub project, and while I had read most of the papers on LiquidPub before arriving, nothing can replace some face to face interaction with those in the project. There ...read more
LogiLogi is, as of today, ready for translation. We have worked on this because a German philosophy journal will start using LogiLogi some time within the next months. They asked us if they could have it translated. In addition it was something that was on our todo list for some time.
We use the I18n (Internationalization) framework provided by Rails, and the Translate Rails plugin for editing the ...read more
In addition to this, you can now also use LogiLogi to read, and comment on, my thesis for History. It is about the justifyability (or lack thereof) of Intellectual Property throughout history. It is called: Enclosures of the Mind: Intellectual Property from a Global Perspective. On LogiLogi you can find it here, and a .pdf of it can be downloaded here.
I (Wybo) have just been at the LIRMM lab in Montpellier, France for a week, working on LogiLogi. The LIRMM lab, under the leadership of Michel Robert, and with the guidance of Jean Sallatin, will be using LogiLogi to write and discuss their self-evaluative documents, and their mission-statement. The LIRMM really is an inspiring place, where 180 staff and about 170 PhD & master’s students work on topics like robotics, ...read more
Just got back from the ECAP (European Conference on Computing and Philosophy) 2009 in Barcelona. Though it was quite a broad conference, and the quality of the presentations sometimes varied, I found it to be a fascinating and definitely recommendable event. Last year I also attended and presented at it, in Monpellier. A video of this is now available in ogg format, (and flv, slides of 2008 are here).
Drawn from the ...read more
In a few days (4th of juli) we will be presenting the difference between LogiLogi and Philosource/Philospace at the ECAP 2009 conference in Barcelona.
Over the summer we will continue improving LogiLogi. We will especially be adding something to keep track of comments and new logis, and what we will call read-paths (chains of logis), so LogiLogi becomes practical to use when a bit busier, and also for texts that are a bit longer.
In addition ...read more
The Philosophers Rally – The Future of Philosophy was a vibrant, interesting, local conference. We had many interesting discussions, and there were good talks to attend, not just of the keynote speakers such as David Gamez, but also of Johnny Søraker, on virtual worlds, of Marleen Moors, on technology, certainty and death, and of David Koepsell, on copyrights in the nano-age.
And of course LogiLogi was also presented ...read more
Some of the challenges could be the neatly splitting up of things into logis of max 1.000 words, and keeping the set of tags for each part meaningful. In addition it will be a challenge to balance between the multi-dimensionality of hypertext and the need for a linear ordering of everything in the final paper version. Also – and I need your help with this – I hope we can see how things work out if more logis compete, and ...read more
Also when speaking more broadly, Digital Humanities is a very promising and socially useful field. Promising because whereas for example in physics a digital revolution has already happened, in the Humanities, because of their different and complex needs, there is still a lot to do and to discover.
And it is useful for society because applications and improvements for Historians and Philosophers – when successful – ...read more
The FOSDEM was pretty amazing. The Friday night Beer-event was overwhelming to say the least, and on saturday morning there was a very interesting keynote talk on the future of ‘Free and Open’ with many applications moving into the cloud by Mark Surman, of the Mozilla Foundation.
And there were many other good talks, of which for us quite a few were on sunday in the Ruby and Rails developer room.
I arrived ...read more
This week we released 3 ruby-gems. They were extracted from LogiLogi. As the site is mostly working now, it seemed time to do all those little cleanups and todo’s that were still left. And thus, during Christmas I sat with my laptop on my lap in the livingroom (what else are laptops laptops for ? :), cleaning things up, and preparing the release of some re-usable parts of LogiLogi as gems.
The first gem is Diff Longest ...read more
Last monday we heard that we will receive a small grant from OFSET for the develoment and hosting of LogiLogi. Ofset is an international foundation, mostly based in France, that promotes Free Software for schools and uni’s. We are very happy with it, and will use it well!
Also yesterday our first paper on LogiLogi (presented at the Digital Humanities 2008 conference) appeared in the journal of the student association ...read more
LogiLogi Manta is as of today also working in Internet Explorer Seven (keeping fingers crossed). Supporting IE7, together with Firefox 3, which was already supported, means that about 70% of web-surfers can now use LogiLogi without problems. Which is, well, not that bad percentage for an interesting app like this one.
We will improve the usability of LogiLogi a bit more with things like simple (non-OpenID) accounts and ...read more
We’d like to let you know that another paper about LogiLogi has been written. It is about the differences between LogiLogi and Talia/Philospace. It was written by Wybo Wiersma, of LogiLogi, and Stefano David, who is working with Talia; and for the Digital Humanities 2009 Conference. You can download and read the paper here.
After weeks of thinking, tinkering, designing, discussion and development it’s finally there; LogiLogi Manta with a new UI. For the first time – we hope – it’s now possible to call Manta usable. At least somewhat :)
It’s still a very basic UI, and there’s more functionality to come, but at least the basics work, and seem to be working well from an usability perspective. Currently the only supported browser is Firefox ...read more
Yesterday we were at the Software Freedom Day kickoff in Baarn, the Netherlands. We gave a presentation there on Freedom on the Brave New Web, and on LogiLogi.org, and a bit on our current efforts to make it usable to the max. It went well, and there also was a nice discussion afterward.
The slides of our presentation can be found here. A video might also become available, and in any case here is already a pre-view of ...read more
And the FKFT was a great experience too. I’m typing this some days after the conference while waiting during the night at the Airport for my early-morning flight to Amsterdam. A few days after the fact because not just the conference was great: Barcelona also is; I love this city. It’s one of the best of Europe: grandiose architecture; not just Gaudi, but everywhere, public culture, statutes, museums, street ...read more
The RMLL was a really cool & interesting event. The atmosphere rocked, and there were plenty of good & interesting people around :) Sadly enough I could not speak with many of them, and follow even fewer talks, as the RMLL was French, very French. I did not expect this as they announced it as an international event. But I should have guessed it as they used the word “mondial”, instead of “global” ;) Anyway, their friendliness made up for ...read more
The Digital Humanities 2008 conference was the conference to visit! It covered topics ranging from computer linguistics, dialectology, corpora, digital text-editions, and last but not least information- systems for people from the humanities and philosophers. In this last category there were 2 projects presented that we think are are especially interesting; of course besides our own project, LogiLogi :-).
The first was Discovery ...read more
The ECAP08 was held in Montpellier, France, from 16-18 June. It was a very exciting, fast and inspiring conference, about the cross-roads of philosophy and computer-science/informatics. Talks ranged from the philosophy of information, gender and information- ethics to (ideas about) applications for philosophers.
And in this last category 3 interesting live systems were presented. The first was wiki ...read more
And the good news just keeps coming: LogiLogi Manta will be, besides at ECAP, at Digital Humanities, and at the RMLL conferences also at the Free Knowledge, Free Technology conference, in Barcelona, Spain, from the 15th till the 17th of July. At this conference we will especially be going into the peergroup-system and into how we think to be able to combine quality and openness.
And for the development ...read more
Last weekend our server has been down. It again was due to a broken harddrive (the 3rd in 5 months). No data was lost however (as this time it was only one of the 2 disks in the raid-set that broke down) and everything is working again now.
In the meantime we are looking for possibilities of getting a new, dedicated server, instead of the old, colocated one we have now. We are because managing your own server- hardware ...read more
This new version is a real milestone. It, for the first time, really enables better, and easier discussions. The earlier version, LogiLogi Plancton, was not much more than a modified wiki, which was basically only used for sharing lecture-notes by a hand full of people… LogiLogi Manta, now that it takes a swim, does bring a substantial improvement! It will make for a beautiful, fun, and interesting site.
Swim, yes, as ...read more
It’s there!, almost… LogiLogi Manta will go live as public beta in just 4 days; on the 6th of May, 2008 AD.
The last two and a half week – since we planned the release – we have done a lot of heavy coding and radical refactoring. And we still have four days ahead of – quite intense – preparations, but it’s now really getting there…! We are now mainly tweaking the layout, writing some prelimary help-documentation ...read more
Steffen is and was the best bug-squasher of all; the legendary exterminator, killer, crusher, and slayer of bugs with all and every amount of creepy legs, kind and form of gruesome tentacles, degree of sliminess, number, placement, color and shape of disgusting eyes, wings, snouts and not to forget crispy, crunchy, shields in all sizes, &… …of all bad bugs for Manta’s sake!
Our second-best bug-crusher of was Bart ...read more
We have good news again, and this time there is no first of April in sight. Our submission to the European conference on Computing and Philosophy has been accepted! So besides our general presentation at the Digital Humanities 2008 in Oulu, Finland (June 25-29) we will now also be presenting in Montpellier, France (16-18 June). The presentation we give at ECAP will especially be about the philosophy behind Manta ...read more
As Miguel Lezama finally sensed some time early in the evening, the Yippee Yahoo :) news indeed was our (Wybo and Bruno) contribution to April’s fools day, or as we say in Dutch, it was an “first of April” joke ;)
It seems that most of the Nijmegen team, and also at first Miguel, and many others did believe it. Which of course is not all together that strange, as it is quite close to the truth that we are doing something really interesting ...read more
It just was confirmed by Yahoo that they are willing to sponsor the LogiLogi project! Yoohoohooo! :))
They already contacted us a week ago with their intentions, but today it was confirmed! To what extent and how exactly is still up for negotiation, but they said it is certainly going to be some funds and all the free advertising on the yahoo- network needed for a professional & smooth launch of Manta! And most importantly today they also ...read more
Both bugs and bug-fixes will be good for points. A bug and a fix for a bug will each be good for one point. So finding a bug and fixing it will give you 2 points, while just finding one will give you 1 point. Exceptionally hard to find bugs or difficult/big fixes may be rewarded with 3 points each.
Bugs are to be chased without mercy! Manta is to be twisted, turned, squeezed, slapped, jammed, racked, swung, smacked and rocked in all ...read more
Then we will be improving Manta with the features and into the directions that the users want… To make this more concrete we will also be organizing a usability-test with a focus-group of philosophy-students & humanities people. Here we will test the UI and take note of all opinions and ideas for new features, which we will then implement.
During the whole process we will only be using Agile / Extreme programming techniques ...read more
We just received the happy news that our submission to the Digital Humanities 2008 conference has been accepted!
So some time between June the 25th and the 29th LogiLogi Manta will be presented in Oulu, Finland. The presentation there will be all-round; about Manta as a platform, and it’s (& the web’s) connection to the philosophical and wider academic tradition…
We also submitted abstracts on various aspects (philosophical ...read more
As of this week Miguel Lezama is doing his internship with the LogiLogi Foundation. He already was involved in LogiLogi as a FOSS-developer for some time (as a Javascript-wizzard), but now he can get study-credits for it too! :)
>>>> 
His internship is made possible by Jan MikáÄ, who is part of the (also quite interesting) Web Adaptation and Multimedia-project of the Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble. We thank him ...read more
After that there was some good news: the introduction of the Free Knowledge Institute. They promote freedom of use, modification, copying and distribution of knowledge in the fields of: education, technology, culture and science. Big thumbs up! We share with them the goal of enabling and promoting insightful communication of information, viewpoints and opinions world wide.
And now here back in Groningen after ...read more
Odile Bénassy of the OFSET foundation has done the great job of translating our paper LogiLogi A Webplatform for Philosophers into French! It can be read here en Français.
Version 3 of the Affero GPL has just been released by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It seems that the FSF is endorsing the Affero GPL more openly now than they used to: “The FSF recommends that people consider using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network”.
It seems now finally the FSF is no longer taking sides in the sense in which Archis – even if currently working for ...read more
If you’ve been wondering what LogiLogi (Manta) is, you can now finally find a clear and short description of it, it’s philosophy and it’s relevance in this 1500-words paper:
The growth of the web has been quite invisible for philosophy so far, and while quite some philosophizing has been done about what the web could mean for the human condition, not much has been said about what it could mean for philosophy itself ...read more
This differentiation into separate services happens because, among other reasons, expectations grow, and building sites that do everything simply becomes harder… Also scaling up relatively narrow applications is easier than doing this for bloated sites or P2P applications due to complexity-problems. Still the main reason for the success of Web 2.0 applications, is that they rapidly become more useful for ...read more
I (Wybo) am back from the PICNIC Conference in Amsterdam. It was totally 2.0. Many things were really outside the box, like the totally incredible analog red-fluid bottles SMS-screen, and what about a food serving dress?
Anyway, it was definitely interesting, especially the European Bloggers Conference, with among others Corry Doctorow of BoingBoing, and many famous European and Dutch bloggers. And besides I also visited ...read more
OgOg.org has received a big code cleanup, and some new features, among which a Top 3 Posts of All Times listing, and the default listing of new posts since one’s last login. Also feeds and users are now tagged with the tags of their posts, which makes browsing the user- and feed-rankings quite interesting.
Also we are still looking for OgOg ambassadors, so have a look, get up, and lead your language :)
LogiLogi Manta did not receive – by a tiny nibble of contingency – the grant we applied for with the digitale pioniers programme. After the expert-panel rated 10 of the 20 pre-selected projects for the grants we were placed at the top of the reserve list; at position 11. We were even invited to give a talk in Amsterdam. But unlike most previous years no single project dropped from the list during the intake-talks; happy ...read more
As you can see OgOg.org now has a language-code prepended, like en.OgOg.org & all content is now stored in utf8. We also added gettext-support to OgOg (thank you Bram) so it can now be translated with gettext.
We already made a start with translation to Dutch, but if you want to help out with that, or any other language, you’re most welcome!
OgOg.org is also looking for ambassadors now. If your language is Japanese, or German ...read more
Today OgOg received ‘I-have-already-voted’-checks. One is now allowed to vote for each post at maximum once a week. This law-in-code became necessary as more people joined OgOg.org today, and some of them liked to experiment with what would happen if they gave dozens of 5-star (unsurpassed) ratings to their own posts… ;)
Also I applied some tweaks to the layout of OgOg. I hope you like it.
And for something ...read more
After our announcement on e-hub, and on a few forums, the word about ogog started to spread.
Today OgOg has been getting quite large numbers of visitors and today alone 10 bloggers signed up. Bet this is only the beginning…
Besides all this some improvements were made to OgOg in response to user inquiries:
But while the software in web2.0 applications is functioning like a natural law, it does not stem from nature. The laws of nature are not of human origin and cannot be changed by us. The laws embedded in software, however, can, just like the policies can; The virtual world is uniquely malleable.
Then how does change in these virtual laws come about ? Most often they are made by a lofty programmer-king adding ...read more
Great to greet you, as a foundation, via the web now. While LogiLogi has been there for a while already, the LogiLogi Foundation did not have a site for some time. And that has changed now!
Now what is the LogiLogi foundation ?
In short we think that web2.0-apps and -communities are not too sexy to become Open Source, and we are willing to show it in practice with our projects OgOg.org and LogiLogi.org…
And ...read more
We launched OgOg.org today, a side-project applying a simplified version of the the logilogi rating system to blog-posts from RSS-feeds…
You can take a tour here
On OgOg.org, you can rate RSS posts and receive good rankings and extra voting power when your own posts are rated as being good. You can carry your user-ranking and voting power over to other sites via OgOg’s API (and your OpenID).
Check it out and let us know what you ...read more
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