NewMediaConvergence

another IslandTopic requiring some love

NewMediaConvergence is what's happening when you can't figure out whether to say something in your blog, e-mail to a public archived list, or a wiki.

You could also say it in private, or on a web page, in print, etc, and there are issues of which list or wiki to use, but those are different questions. Those are questions of audience; the problem here is that even with exactly the same audience, there is a question of media.

The term NewMediaConvergence is intended to evoke Negroponte's vision for the Media Lab sitting at the convergence of Old Media (print, television, and what was the other thing?)

I chose to focus on convergence instead of divergence, because I would like to see these converge. I want to express a proposition, probably in English but maybe partially in RDF, and have my expression distributed and preserved in an appropriate manner. (Of course I don't presuppose what that manner is: some things I say are completely disposable; other things I'd pay real money to keep around.) -- SandroHawke

I'm imagining posting something with a .sig like:

This message is being radically cross-posted.  It is appearing on 
instant media (IRC, Jabber), stored media (several web sites), mailing
lists,  livejournal, ... and maybe more.  Its most robust archival
web address is probably 
   http://www.w3.org/mid/4423bdf8-ae23-11d7-8b87-0000c057910b@hawke.org
while its most maleable form is at
   http://esw.w3.org/topic/FooBarBaz
where everyone is free to edit it to say what they like (and is
particularly encouraged to correct and improve it).

... but when something is mutable, what is it? Is the proposition constant, but the expression subject to change? Is every message immutable, but some "supercede" others or something? That gets us into metadata: are some parts of a message more meta than others? Probably -- but aren't those just other messages? So an e-mail is really two messages, the header which is about the header and body, and the body which is about something else. Or something? I may agree with a message's main point, but not with the notion that it supercedes some other message.

Some more thought here under the guise of OpenJournal.