According to a May 2009 presentation he made and currently hosted on an SAIC website, Andrew Potter serves as the Chief Scientist for Sentar, Inc., and is Sentar’s Program Manager for the National Cyber Range." My employer is also working on Cyber Range, so this was certainly of interest. But before this connection had been made, I Googled across an abstract for one of Potter's papers titled "Topic management in asynchronous learning networks." The abstract begins with mention of "topic drift" in online discussions. Potter alludes to previous research "conversational coherence and rhetorical structure." He cites "chained explanation" and "parallel association" as two patterns associated with topic drift. I'm unfamiliar with this work, but on the surface it does seem to have relevance for Twitter conversations, as well as more structured discourse that probably evolves in settings with Yammer, a sort of intranet Twitter offering.Less clear is whether it would help solo bloggers from drifting from blog topic to blog topic, or, perhaps worse, from blog to blog.
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