I finally got a chance to listen to Matt Pasiewicz' interview with Brian Lamb during EDUCAUSE 2005. What a great discussion. Always fun to listen to Brian talk about subversive activities in the Academy :-)
Main points I took away from it:
- I owe Brian a few bucks for mentioning me so positively - perhaps a round of brews during Northern Voice 2006 will suffice? :-)
- I have to check out AGGRSSive - sounds very cool for an rss aggregator and tagger. I saw a preview of it a while back after stumbling across it in my referrer logs, and it was very cool. It's kind of like an RSS rip-mix-burn-omatic.
- "Mass amateurization" - the concept that social software is at the point where it gets amateurs to 80% of the output quality that a professional would produce, with only modest technical skills and effort required. I've used the term myself a few times, and love what it implies about the read-write web.
- Blogging as "narrating your work" - Brian mentions (almost apologetically) that his blogging has shifted with the advent of tools like del.icio.us - less impetus to "link blog" new finds, as they just get hurled into the social bookmark bucket. His blogging has shifted to be much more personal in nature - more in tune with his daily activity. Brian mentions that he's sure he's got a smaller audience, but is getting a much more intimate/rewarding experience. I fully agree. Over the last few months I think I've switched to be doing much the same thing, with the blog providing a narrative journal of daily work/projects/interactions. IMHO, this kind of blogging is actually much more useful (or perhaps more meaningful or thoughtful) than the previous link-blogging style.
Anyway, give the interview a listen. Brian is always entertaining and engaging. And every single time I hear him talk about social software, I find new ways of thinking about it, or of applying it, or just of describing it. He is such a deep thinker about this that I am truly humbled as a mere software geek :-).