BookBlog

Social network for voter education

Deborah Bowen tweeted the other day about the use of social media for voter education. Here's an idea. Thing is, people get voting recommendations through their social networks. I don't know about you, but when I'm looking at initiatives, downballot races, and other nonobvious choices, I look to maven friends who have some knowledge and perspective. The standard voters guides are somewhat useful, but they lack the perspective of a knowlegeable friend.

So, the opportunity is to have a social network application that enables mavens to fill out sample ballots (in full or in part). For each choice, the maven can add a comment and links to provide explanation and reference about their choice. Anyone can be a maven by filling out part of a ballot and explaining their choice.

Voters can choose to follow one or more "mavens". Mavens who are connected and well-respected will gain more followers. The maven's activities can be visible in an existing social network (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), so people can discover mavens in their social network. A maven can choose to have their profile and ballot be "public" (anyone can follow them), "private" - they need to approve new followers before followers can see their choices, or "networked" - your friends friends can see your ballot.

The system can display top "public" mavens, so followers can discover new sources of recommendations. Voters should be able to see the public and networked mavens followed by their friends.

This system would build on the existing social networks people use to make voter decisions, and would expose people to a wider range of information and opinion through the social network. Experts and influential people would rise to visibility. The ability to share comments and links will drive education around the ballot. And the roots of the system in the social network ought to encourage civil behavior, which could be severely problematic in a public opinion-oriented system.

What do you think? The comments on this blog are still broken (I'm planning to upgrade to fix the problem this coming weekend), so send email at alevin at alevin dot com with comments and I'll post).

Games and politics 2.0

Had a lovely brainstorm yesterday with Nicole Lazzaro about the connection between game design and politics 2.0. Nicole is a game designer and theorist whose new games are coming out soon. Her games combine entertainment with sustainability themes, and her company is devoted to the triple bottom line.

The new forms of social network political engagement have attributes of games. Whether it's Beth Kanter's Birthday Cause to raise money to send Cambodian kids to college or the Courage Campaign's Please don't divorce us collaborative photo album, organizers are leveraging social incentive to affect actions and attitudes.

Nicole's focus is in the emotion of game design, which is particularly important for social action. When implementing game design for social change, do you stimulate empathy (the Please don't divorce us Campaign), catalyze peer pressure to contribute (Kanter's Cause), or trigger disgust at behavior you want to be socially unacceptable (like, say, throwing out recyclables).

Social movements take advantage of the technology of their time; the international anti-slavery and women's rights movements were facilitated by international mail service and ocean transport that was low-cost and safe enough for activists to occasional travel and meet.

Meanwhile, today's mainstream social action and political campaigns are still in the world of big fundraising, massmedia and bulk email, and haven't yet gotten the coordinated social network mojo of the Obama campaign, let alone the grass roots improvisatory spark of Join the Impact. This seems like a world of opportunity.

I'm not the target audience for Nicole's current games, though I think they are beautiful and cool. (Sorry Nicole). I'm not about to re-test my ability to play computer games while holding down a job and carrying other social obligations. And even Nicole's gentle social incentives aren't quite enough for me. I'm much more driven to play and create real-life, nomic games that affect the social and natural 3d world. And I see some pretty powerful ways of connecting Nicole's principles with that.

Thomas Vander Wal - Tell me something I don't already know

Thomas Vander Wal wrote as a comment to How Buildings Learn, for social software

This idea of ease of finding people to talk to around popular books, but difficulty finding more niche books is something the dating tag site Consumating.com called quirkiness. Ben Brown explained they had a measure for quirkiness that surfaced quirky connections between people. It was just above outliers to a few 10s higher. With 300k people in Consumating the quirkiness factor ran from 7 to about 40.

Quirkiness was people who had relatively rare tags in common. This rare commonality was something that was really difficult to find in the wild. This is one of the benefits of using digital means to connect people. Consumating found the relationships that were lasting quite often were grounded in this quirkiness. This came up on a panel I was on w/ Ben Brown, which was moderated by Heath Row who met his wife on Consumating as they were both Manhattanites who were tagged "mountain climbers", hence quirky.

This is the drawback of popularity-based recommendation systems. Sometimes they tell us things that are new and hot that we haven't seen already. But often they tell us things we already knew. If you liked Harry Potter Book 5, you might like Book 6. Statistical improbability, social filters, and the combination of the two can lead to more interesting results than popularity alone.

Comments on this blog are broken, and will stay broken til I upgrade to the next version of MT or to WordPress.

Blog aggregation state of the art

I've been wanting to recreate the Austin Bloggers magic, and just found a tool to do it.

Back in the day, I was part of an Austin Bloggers group that set up the Austin Bloggers blog aggregator. The site is still going strong is a fun way to check in on Austin-related people and things. The cool thing about the site is that it aggregates only blog posts that people make about Austin. Your blog can be about a variety of topics, but only the posts about Austin will be aggregated. Blogs need to register to be automatically posted. Otherwise, posts are moderated. Registration and moderation is needed to prevent spam.

I really love this model. It pulls together an interesting site, out of the independent actions of decentralized bloggers. By linking to each of the bloggers, it gives credit and traffic to the individual blog. By aggregating posts in a category, it pulls together a coherent site, without forcing the participants to change their writing, and requires minimal editorial effort.

For various reasons, we built the site using TrackBack to aggregate the posts. Lead developer is Chip Rosenthal. The tool is open source, but wasn't really packaged to make it easier to use for other purposes. And if the site was put together today, RSS would be a reasonable choice.

Easy Automated Aggregation

I've been looking for tools that do similar aggregation, in a packaged and reusable way, since then. I've recently found it. FeedWordPress is a WordPress plugin that aggregates posts from multiple sites via RSS. It can be set up to pull posts by category/tag, and to link to the authors' blogs. It's easy to install and works as described. The bit that is missing is a tool for bloggers to register themselves. Currently, the editor needs to add the urls of the blogs manually.

Calendar Aggregation

Calendar aggregation is a piece of the puzzle that isn't quite there yet. It would be really cool to be able to aggregate calendar events from decentralized sites. Calendar aggregation today appears to be where blog aggregation was in 2003. Calagator is an open source ruby-based project. developed by and for the tech community in Portland to create a master calendar of tech events. To share an event stream, participants add a url that contains data in any of several popular formats: iCalendar, hCalendar, Upcoming, and MeetUp. The tool with then import new events as they are posted.

Like AustinBloggers, this tool is first being developed for a specific community, for a specific purpose. If the developers wanted, they could make a more re-usable tool. Or, the idea and the code are available for extension.

Why not FriendFeed

I love Friendfeed. Friendfeed is a wonderful tool for building a crowdsourced link blog, with links, posts, tweets, photos, and more. Items are posted to Friendfeed by participants. If nobody posts a link, it doesn't get aggregated. There a way to filter by topic. And fundamentally, Friendfeed is Friendfeed. You can set up a FriendFeed room about a topic, but you can't turn that into a destination site with a url and identity of its own.

Aggregation and community

In a world with decentralized organization and creativity, aggregation can be a powerful tool for building useful resources from decentralized contributions. I can see uses in political / civic organizing, local journalism, creative communities and more. With the WordPress plugin, an aggregator site is now a simple install.

Groundswell

Last week, I had a meeting with a staff person at a public service organization with a traditional approach to interacting with customers. He is interested in experimenting with social media for customer service and communication. But the organization as a whole react with fear and anxiety at the thought of using internet tools. Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Benioff came immediately to mind. The book is targeted at business people whose companies fear engaging with their customers online, but are attracted to the opportunity -- or don't have much of a choice.

Groundswell lays out step by step processes for engaging with "the groundswell" - the masses online who are talking about you and your products whether you want them to or not. The beginning of the book is a catalog of fears - exposes, PR disasters, digital mobs, displacement by internet services. The rest of the book is a how-to-guide for stepping into the roiling waters and engaging the groundswell.

A few things I liked about the book.
* The authors give good counsel about starting small, experimenting, and being patient. The well-known success of the Dove "Evolution" viral video took place after the champion spent two years laying the groundwork for it. Building social media takes time, and cultural adaptation takes time.
* Your customers want what your customers want. A company imagines that its customers are interested in their products; and the customer is cares about what they care about. The best example was the beinggirl.com forum sponsored by P&G. Young teen girls don't want to talk about menstruation, they want to talk about their lives, and the forum provides a supportive environment for them. And by the way provides information about products.
* How does this help my business? Each section has a sample business analysis to help champions cost-justify engaging the groundswell.

One core Forrester technique used in the book is simultaneously helpful and somewhat iffy. A survey segments the behavior and preferences of customers by market and company. Organizations can use these demographics to choose which social media techniques to use to engage their customers. Customers are characterized as "creators", "critics", "collectors", "joiners", "spectators" and "inactives" based on their use of tools: a blogger is a creator; someone who rates things on Amazon is a critic, someone who bookmarks things is a collector. To some extent this is basic channel analysis. A business whose customers aren't on Facebook, or even online, shouldn't be wasting their time on Facebook. A business whose customers are active raters has a significant opportunity to incorporate ratings into its online presence.

The flaw in the tool is that the the characterizations are moving targets. This is definitely true about tools. Facebook is only four years old, and its demographic has increased in just a few years from college students to business networkers. And it may be true about behavior as well. It is a well-established observation that large communities have only a few percent active participants. Most people lurk, a few people take small actions, and a very few are highly active. This doesn't take into account learning. How many more people take photographs because of flickr and digital sharing services. How many people start by watching youtube videos, and eventually make and share videos? I would be surprised if there wasn't mobility among the categories. Some people move up the engagement curve as they learn and model after their friends. Some people move down the curve as they focus their attention on other things.

While the authors do a good job telling corporate readers that it's not about them, the structure of the book has that focus. The book is targeted at Forester's customer base: big consumer products organizations desiring and fearing web 20. Forrester identifies their fears and sells them reassurance and good advice. For organizations who are in this situation -- like the staff member at the nonprofit - this book really hits the spot.

Open source science with social software

Jean-Claude Bradley talks to Jon Udell about his use of social software in research and teaching in chemistry. Bradley's lab at Drexel uses wikis as their lab notebooks (the norm in the field is still paper). Then, they use blogs and friendfeed to share links. By sharing their work in progress, they have found people to collaborate in related disciplines. He's working on synthesizing malaria drugs, and has found bioinformatics specialists to predict compounds to test, and specialists who do clinical trials to test the compounds they synthesize. Scientists have traditionally found collaborators at conferences; the magic of google and friendfeed expands the circle of potential connections.

The patterns of social software use were familiar to the ones used in technology and business. It's delightful to hear about the patterns proving valuable in the practice of science. The discovery of collaboration partners is especially useful where there is the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration among people who wouldn't necessarily find each other, because of organization structure or discipline boundaries or geography.

As a professor, Bradley uses podcasts to completely replace lectures. He uses the saved time to spend time with students in small groups and 1:1, coaching students in areas where they need help. Lectures remain a required part of the program - students need to listen to learn the material. But there's no need to attend lecture hall.

The most unusual aspect of Bradley's use of social software in science is his use of second life. He holds seminars and poster conferences in second life. It's not required for students, but is a vibrant part of his teaching. Part of the value is the 3d nature of the subject - Bradley uses a special 3d modeling tool to explain chemical structures in second life. Bradley found that the avatars and social body language added valuable dimensions unavailable to text chat -- avatars reveal more about people's personality, and the virtual presense seems to make it easier to join conversations.

I was pretty surprised -- and Jon Udell was also -- that second life was being woven into something useful. Uses of Second Life to complement the real world had seemed more like stunts than natural augmentation of existing communication. Apparently Second Life has a strong presence in the chemistry field, with active presence by professional associations, making second life a useful way for undergrads to network with potential employers and grad school programs.

Other than the 3d modeling tool used in Second Life, Bradley doesn't put much time into the tools. He's happiest that social software evolution has made simple tools available to him and his students for free (they use wikispaces and google blogspot), so they can devote their technical attention to the practice of chemistry.

p.s. it's fun to listen to podcasts during weekend housecleaning. This podcast complemented the cleaning of three bicycles. Thanks, Jon Udell and Simple Green.

Wikipediolympics

NBC's internet-like coverage of the Olympics doesn't let you watch coverage from another part of the world. Apparently they use IP address to segregate viewers into national ghettos. If you try to say you're in Argentina or Andorra, they bounce you. It's annoying enough that the NBC coverage for US viewers is mostly US athletes, with human-interest patter drowning out the events. With the Olympics you have no other choice, unlike most other events of international interest, where you can dip into international coverage and get multiple perspectives.

The Olympics are able to constrain the coverage because they have a scarce resource. The Oympics happen once every 4 years. It is feasible to constrain media and presentation. But imagine if the Olympic coverage was handled very differently.

With this year's online Olympics coverage, you can select from a variety of recorded events, with easily searchable topics. Overall, there is more footage than anyone who's not on bed rest can watch. Then there are little informative snippets, like a champion weight lifter explaining the Olympic lifts, or a gymnast explaining the judging rules. But it's all from one perspective. The Olympics are the tip of a large iceberg of sports that are usually obscure. The good news is that the rest of the year these sports are obscure, so college gymnastics can be found on YouTube.

So, imagine if you could watch coverage from any nation. Imagine you could watch coverage from multiple perspectives, including the knowledgeable folk who pay attention to these sports all year long. Imagine people could add links to the YouTube videos of the obscure meets throughout the year. Imagine if people could add links to the coverage of these athletes in their local papers. Imagine if coaches could post tips on running and swimming based on the performance of these world-class athletes. Imagine if there could be ways to find your local clubs for cycling, swimming, volleyball, rowing.

Without a video monopoly, a site that could link together a broader and deeper array of content and conversation would reward more engagement. It would provide more opportunities for sponsors to make money. Broadcast network coverage would probably stay popular because of the production value and brand, even if the monopoly was lifted.

It is not even that large a stretch. Recently, other publishers of popular culture artifacts have started making peace with fan communities, creating hosted, sponsored sites for fans willing to take them up on the offer, and treating independent communities with benign neglect instead of persecution.

The Olympics would benefit from this approach. The producers believe that keeping a monopoly ensures they make money. They are not seeing the large amount of money they are leaving on the table.

Why Twitter updates are better than Facebook feeds - or not

Gregor Hochmuth has a fine but overinterpreted explanation of why twitter updates are better than facebook. I think that Gregor's article attributes to the features of tools something that belongs as much to the differing uses of the tools.

Gregor observes that that Twitter messages go to a defined audience, whereas Facebook newsfeeds don't have the same effect because the items show in the newsfeed are selected by algorithm. This is a good insight, but misses something important - the usage patterns of Twitter and Facebook differ from community to community and from person to person. I recently went on a group mountain bike ride with a group of women who aren't tech geeks. They weren't millennials - ages ranged from mid-thirties to mid-forties. The conversation turned to Facebook. Turns out, they use Facebook like people I know use twitter. They post message updates for their friends to see. And, they don't use Facebook like people I know use Facebook. They don't have lots of apps installed -- not the social, "buy-you-a-drink" apps that presumably appeal to the young and partyish, and not the movie/books/music/scrabble sharing games. It's a lightweight way to stay in touch. They don't use twitter, and they don't need it, because they use Facebook like Twitter. Without the updates "so-and-so rated 12 movies", the personal updates are visible. So its not just about Facebook, but how people use Facebook.

Individuals also vary in the way they use the two tools to describe their social circles. Some people use Twitter to collect friends. Others constrain their following to a degree of relationship. Some people use Facebook to collect friends. Other constrain their friending to a degree of relationship. The patterns vary by tool and by person. So for some people Twitter is more like broadcast. For some people Facebook is more like broadcast. It depends.

Gregor's piece also misses a fun and useful attribute of the more diverse nature of Facebook feeds (for users who use Facebook that way). The diversity of applications -- and the fact that notices are grouped by app not by user -- results in interesting kinds of serendipity. You see movies, or books, or parties, or groups that you wouldn't always run into because your acquaintances happen to mention them. Facebook multiples referral serendipity. Because Twitter affords and rewards reply, it intensifies conversation and news, but has less diverse serendipity.

Context is people

As usual, an insightful post from John Udell about what it takes to make sense of government data - or other data - online.

Udell has been covering the emerging array of tools to expose government and legislative data online. Then he tried to use the tools to follow a bill he cared about:

What I found is that, even with power tools like GovTrack and MAPLight, it’s really hard to make those connections. That’s partly because we lack good mechanisms to track the flow of bits of legislative language through an evolving assortment of bills, and to relate those fragments to the activities and interests of their sponsors.But it’s also because a novice who tries to read and interpret this record lacks context.

In order to understand the progress of a bill, you don't just need a bill number and a tool to show differences in document versions -- you need to understand committee process, legislative calendars, procedural maneuvers; written and unwritten rules; social and political dynamics.

Udell points to tools like GovTrack which are attempting to create a substrate for communities following bills. I'm seeing a trend that is fascinating and a little bit lower tech. National blogs like FireDogLake, local blogs like TransBayBlog, social network communities like the Get Fisa Right network in MyBarackObama.com, provide their communities with more detailed context on the dynamics of legislation and the process of adding ingredients to the sausage. In the context of a community, members learn more about the legislative process than civics 101 class, or than getting email from the Sierra Club.

The data-driven tools that Udell envisions, where the system allows citizens who are tracking the same bill to find each other, are cool, visionary, good right and true. A lower tech solution is here today. Bill numbers are good search terms. Google a bill number and you'll find resources on the bill. The ability to google for a bill number, find a great blog and discussion, and engage in some informed networking and activism, is here today.

Why branded communities fail

These are some good reasons that branded communities fail: focus on features; lack of facilitation; lack of success metrics. The title of the piece implies one more reason -- the concept of branded community itself!! The term "branded community" telegraphs the wish that the community will will be about and for the host. Being a good host will surely enhance the reputation of the host. But hosting a party is about making the time and place comfortable and fun for the guests. Communities focused on the goals of the host more than the goals of the participants won't keep participants around very long.

Organizing inside MyBarackObama.com

When Barack Obama reversed his position about the bad FISA bill (that updated US surveillance law by pruning the fourth amendment), Obama supporters didn't just get mad, they organized. What's new is that they used Obama's online social network, MyBarackObama.com to organize their opposition to their candidate's position.

Barack Obama's campaign has been innovative in using online social networking to organize his supporters -- it's a milestone like FDR's use of radio, Kennedy's use of television, and Viguerie's use of direct mail. But a social network is not like radio or direct mail. Participants can talk to each other and organize. This is the first well-known instance of a candidate's supporters organizing using the candidate's tools. I don't think it will be the last.

The FISA opponents lost this battle. Marcy Wheeler's debrief shows that the participants are learning lessons for the next battle, not just about online organizing or even messaging, but about longterm strategy and tactics, understanding the unwritten legislative process; dogging committees; and organizing primaries against key adversaries.

The discourse about social media often sounds like marketing rebranded; how to market to the buyers inside the social networks. But the people in social networks can talk to each other, and that's a fundamentally different thing.

Data Portability Summit: Data Sharing, Privacy and Context

At the Data Portability Summit, there was some excellent discussion about Data Sharing, Privacy and Context.

In conventional wisdom, data sharing and privacy are seen as black and white opposites. Everything is locked down, private, non portable. Or everything is open, public, and free-flowing. But data sharing and privacy are not black and white. In real life, people share and present information based on social context. There are gradations of privacy and information sharing.

Here are some of the stories we came up with regarding gradations of privacy and sharing. The ideas came from the session, plus pre- and post-conversations with Joseph Smarr and Thomas Vander Wal

Truly Private information

There are times when it is right to share data in a way that preserves privacy. Family members use different photo services, and want to share photos with each other but not the rest of the world. A group working on mergers and acquisitions absolutely needs to keep information confidential. In these cases one give permission to family, friends, or business associates based on membership in a group.

Signal to noise, social context

There are many circumstances where information isn't truly private. But people choose to share with smaller groups. Someone doesn't want to bore all of their friends with information about knitting or rock climbing, when that information is relevant only to a few. Information about one's political or religious affiliation isn't a secret, but it may not be the information one chooses to share when meeting new people at a professional conference. In these cases, it would be useful to have the ability to create tags for the relevant groups, and share by tag. The tags can capture the nuances of subgroups: knitting hats vs. knitting sweaters, say.

Progressive disclosure

There are circumstances when people want to start by sharing with a smaller group, and invite more people. Or start by sharing a little bit of information about common interest, and later share more sensitive information.

Stream filter

The signal to noise and progressive disclosure patterns are about the person sharing information. Stream filtering is for the recipient. Sometimes one wants to "people watch" a diverse stream of information. And sometimes one wants to focus on the current work project, or upcoming social events. Stream filtering is used by individuals who want to apply a context to the information they receive.

Persona

People use identifiers -- dress or email address -- to represent more than one persona. The same person wears different clothes, with co-workers, at a customer meeting vs. a barbecue.

Personal vs. organizational control

In organizations, there are some things that an individual may want to control, and some things that admins want to control. A person might want to share soccer pictures with the soccer league. An admin may want to ensure that people aren't sharing the sports illustrated calendar widget.

Wiki notes on data sharing and privacy

Data Portability Summit: Everyone is famous

The session on data sharing and privacy was combined with Kevin Marks session on digital publics. We talked about people's experiences handling the increased visibility of internet life.

Managing reputation

People share about their experiences in order to get their side of the story out and create a public image. Among digital natives, "it's not a real breakup until you've listed it on facebook.

Handling fame

Before the internet, there were only a small number of people who had more followers than people can comfortably manage socially. Now many more people do. More widespread fame means that more people have the issues with stalkers and pestering fans.

Cautionary and instructive tales

At the session at the data sharing summit, the conversation turned to cautionary tales about social data sharing gone wrong.

Failed white lies

Someone begs out of a work-related social event by claiming the flu. His boss discovers a picture on flickr of the guy wearing a skirt and holding a drink. The picture is timestamped at the same data as the work party. His boss sends him a note suggesting that that may not be an effective way to recover from the flu. The lesson here is that some things that feel private are more public than we think.

Social network molting

It is socially awkward to unfriend people. Some people get around obsolete lists of friends by "forgetting" their password and needing to invite their current lists of friends with a new password. The lesson is that declared, public friends lists are in

The ex-girlfriend effect

The list of "people you should know" in social network recommendations often includes exes and enemies. These are people who are part of your social graph - but you are not connected to directly. In an organization, similar algorithms might locate internally competing projects. The algorithm doesn't know that some gaps in the social graph are deliberate.

Recent Changes Camp: Media and Science progress toward open content

At Recent Changes Camp, I heard signs from two very different directions -- fan fiction and biomedical research -- that open content business models are finally reaching the mainstream.

Laura Hale of the Fan History Wiki talked about how, since 2005, big media companies have stopped harrassing independent fan groups with takedown notices and other threats. Instead, they have set up their own commercial fan hosting sites, and use those as a way to promote their brand's content. Independent communities still exist. The big media companies can dismiss them as "unauthorized". The indies think of themselves as un-coopted. The main story is, the business model has changed, and the media companies think of communities as ways to make money, and not worth legal prosecution.

Ehud Lamm, a researcher in the philosophy of science, shared that the NIH, after years of debate, had mandated that researchers taking NIH money must make their papers available to the public. This decision was ratified into law in December of last year. Since the NIH is a major funder of biomedical research, this will have a transformative affect.

When the internet reached the mainstream, models based on open access to content and active user communities became more powerful than models based on limited access to physical artifacts. It's taken a decade for institutions and business models to adapt. But the times are changing, and the participants in wiki communities are seeing up close the results of the change.

Social software as a collaborative game

Ralph Koster gave an interesting talk at etech about lessons from game design for social software. There were several things that seemed right and useful.
* challenge. Overcoming challenges and learning are key to fun. Games are designed to provide a successive series of challenges. By contrast, the software design paradigm is focused on ease of use. This is right for an ecommerce site that a user uses once, but is wrong for applications that people use and learn over time.
* contextual interfaces. in a game world, the monster acts differently if you approach from the front or behind. Game designers create information architectures that present different behavior depending on context. By contrast, the software IA paradigm is about consistency.

The talk was also missing a few things, I think. His psychological model was individualistic. It was all about the individual player, and didn't talk about the social factors - decoration, storytelling, came creation. And his social model was purely competitive. "Of course,", he says, "people are playing the game to win. " But people play games with a variety of motivations, and social software includes ways to play individually and collaboratively, in addition to competitively.

This topic is really interesting and needs some more fleshing out.

Inevitability, social network merging, and Jane Jacobs

Inevitability is a rhetorical technique used when someone is trying to steamroll some highly debatable activity.

The first time I really noticed the technique being used was when doing public interest lobbying. Legislators pushing a bad bill would say that passage was inevitable. This tactic would put inexperienced activists into a tizzy. But it wasn't fact. They were just trying to get you to give up. opposing their deal.

Another way this is used is technical determinism. A given action is technically possible, and therefore it is inevitable that it will be used the way the speaker wants. This is bogus. Automobiles can easily do 70 mph. This makes it possible to construct many-lane, banked boulevards that allow cars to careen through neighborhoods. But it doesn't make it inevitable. The design of the road system is a social decision, not a purely technical decision. Localities can choose speedways or traffic calming.

The folk pursuing the social network graph experiment are claiming that reducing the inefficiency of digital social networks is inevitable, just as 60s traffic engineers claimed that reducing the inefficiency of local roads was inevitable. Some amount of social network friction is socially beneficial. Someday, digital networks will need to make this decision as policy choice. There will be the network equivalent of robots.txt, or some other aggregation calming technique. Brad Fitzpatrick is acting as the Bob Moses of social networks, someday we will need social network Jane Jacobs.

Facebook Developer Bubble

From Facebook Developer Garage a presentation two developers about going into business on their own. "You can write your application nights and weekends. Then, once it gets big, quit your day job. One of the most important things we learned was "time management 101 - the need to leave time to have conversations with people other than each other."

There was an early-boom land-rush vibe. A tall VC in oxford and chinos lured developers with a pitch that Facebook will go public for billions, and users on Facebook apps are worth $1 to $10 each. The race is on to attract millions of users with viral applications, and cash out before users get annoyed and quit the app. Virality is becoming social spam -- one of the apps has come up with a way of doing "reply-all" via SMS. Uh, thanks for bringing that into the world. There was envy and hatred for the "big incumbent players" (who started 3 months ago), who create new million-user apps by cross-promoting from their existing million-user apps.

The atmosphere was reminiscent of dot.com -- without some of the sleaziest aspects of fraudulent dot.com business models, but also with less of the idealism about opening information and improving the world. The median age at the event was about 21.5.

There is also a somewhat dizzying look into the future. The handful of developers at Facebook who took questions at the last session were talking about allowing apps to add elements to the API (yowza!), hosting applications (!), strengthening groups. Platform looks like this, not like Microsoft. The decisions that the crew of developers on the couch in front of the room make now will affect how software works years from now.

The euphoria and the leap from virality into social spam still isn't the interesting bit about Facebook to me. I've been walking around with various ideas for social applications for years, and Facebook provides a platform that makes it easy to bring those ideas into reality. There are all kinds of useful things that can be done, with an application based on people being able to communicate with their friends. Some of those things are socially useful, and some remunerative. The "get a bazillion users and sell out to a greater fool" model isn't so interesting.

I guess that makes me a chump from the perspective of profit maximization, but I feel the same way about quizzes and horoscopes as about celebrity weddings and movies where things go boom -- I don't mind, as long as it doesn't get in the way of doing things that might be less momentarily popular but are worth doing.

Connecting the Social Graph: the cure is worse than the disease

Who cares most about putting together a holistic picture of your friends and associates:

• you? You can eliminate the repetitive task of adding friends to networks
  
• marketers? They can infiltrate the social network and spam you through your networks of friends
  
• government analysts? They get to more easily trace people who know people who oppose government policies, attend anti-war demonstrations, protest factory farms.
  
• insurance companies? They can tailor your coverage based on whether your friends smoke or are sexually active

Ross Mayfield pointed to privacy concerns here, and Danny O'Brien of EFF talked about them in a privacy session at BarCampBlock, the raw notes are here

An SNS caste system?

danah boyd has written an interesting and controversial essay documenting an observation she has made in recent months that there seems to be a socioeconomic/cultural division between young people using MySpace and Facebook. Privileged kids are gravitating to Facebook; lower-income and otherwise marginalized kids are staying on MySpace. There are a lot of very serious concerns about increasing inequality and decreased social mobility in the US. And if I was looking for domains to worry about it, Facebook and MySpace would be somewhere near dead last.

Like other folks who have commented on danah's essay, I would be watching out for change. The demographics of Facebook changed rapidly when they opened it up. The population is likely to change further with new applications. Maybe developers will add apps to Facebook that have more media and decoration features, so kids who want music and more pictures will be able to have those things on Facebook. Without more research, it's hard to say how much of the relative preferences have to do with overall visual style, vs. features, vs. preferential attachment. Not to mention, sns's are the subject of fashion, like physical clubs. What is considered "cool" will change in different social groups, too.

I don't see an increased concern about the creation of an SNS-based caste system. People group themselves, that is nothing new. A person will go where their friends and perceived peers are. We're talking about MySpace vs. Facebook, so digital divide access issues are factored out. Free social network services have much less built-in stratification than: selective colleges; the ability to pay for higher education or private education; racial profiling in shopping areas and on the street; clothing; transportation; neighborhood safety... any number of factors in the real world that differentiate strongly by income inequality, and are much higher, more persistent, more tightly closed barriers than social groupings on Myspace or Facebook.

One of the reasons that the article was controversial was that danah wrote about her anecdotal observations before going and getting quantitative data. I think it's fine to blog prepublished, unfinished and informal things. I would very much look forward to danah's cut of the analysis based on data. Once source might be the Pew data set which has socioeconomic information. The Pew study doesn't have the psychographic categories that danah is talking about, but they do have household income, education level of parents, race and ethnicity, and age, and might be a place to seek to validate some of the hypothesis.

Why shouldn't Toyota foster a Prius users community?

TechDirt has a snarky article about Toyota's effort to create a web community with Prius owners, referring to previous flops: a failed Walmart customer community, and an "anti-social software" application that let people sms others based on license plate number.

Toyota's implementation sounds flawed, but the idea has merit. Walmart shoppers have little in common other than they like cheap stuff and are willing to drive to get it. Prius owners, on the other hand, may have more in common, including maintaining a fairly new product, as well as interests in other green purchases and green policy.

The Toyota site, by news report, allows toyota owners to create profiles of themselves, and search profiles of other people. But what Toyota owners have in common isn't the desire to date or hire other Toyota owners (the motivation in MySpace and Linked In sites with this format. It's to share information about owning a Prius, and being generally interested in responsible household energy use.

The need would be better served by a traditional blog/wiki setup, where owners could tell stories about their Prius use, Prius products, and other experiences using and seeking green products. A profile might be a feature for the system -- and individuals could choose how much to disclosed about their personal identity -- but it wouldn't be the first thing that a user would do. There are other features more important than profile detail and profile search -- the ability to create local "prius club" events, for example. A built-in wiki would help Prius users build information about hybrid technology.

There are reason for Toyota not to host the site themselves, as TechDirect suggests, but to sponsor an independent site. Prius owners might be interested in third party modifications, such as plug-in conversions, that would void a Toyota warranty. Toyota might not be willing to foster plug-in mods under its own roof, although they would certainly benefit from learning from those early adopters. It would be useful to have a ratings service for mechanics and third-party products, and Toyota might not want to sponsor this directly, either. Prius owners might be interested in organizing to advocate green policy at a local or national level. Toyota might or might not be interested in being directly assocated with this.

So, the best solution might be for Toyota to be a sponsor in a third-party hosted community, rather than hosting itself. And, while profiles could be a useful part of the tool set, it wouldn't be the place to start. Prius owners are probably more into their shared interests than personally interested in each other.

Netvibes and portals

Like Yahoo and Google, but
* with widgets from anywhere to get out of the walled garden
* with lovely slideable ajax boxes that want to be a common design pattern

I hate the "everything-one-one-browser-screen". It is horribly distracting. Multiple Windows are good.

Back in the day, I used to use a 3M sticky note application that let you type things on stickynotes and organize them on bulletin boards. Only problem was it had godawful memory behavior and if you had too much information it would kill your computer's performance.

So, like NetVibes but with desktop widgets you can move around, bundle and snap together. Or a physical gizmo, the size of a deck of cards, with 5 or 7 or 12 display cards held together with a keyring. Plastic cards with a matt finish, slightly raised edges like coins, and a display. You can shuffle them so you see one or two or three at a time, or collapse them together. Each one is a widget; a clock or feedreader or a calendar. You configure the widget set from your desktop computer.

In front of your attention when you want it. Away and closed up when you don't.

VOIP your congresscritter

Does this exist yet? It's like the widgets that let you email your legislator, but instead it uses Skypeout, Gizmo Callout, or other service. You have reminder text about the bill number and the topic. You push the button to ring out to the congresscritter and talk to a staffer or leave a message. If the service was developed in a brandable fashion, it could be subsidized by EFF or the Sierra Club or the NRA or whoever.

For that matter, Congress needs VOIP service. A public office could setting up a voice presense handle and use it for inbound calls. Is anybody doing this yet?

Wiki investigative activism

At the Sunlight Foundation event, several tools were using wiki and wiki-like features. Eugene Kim and I led a session on effective wiki practices. One of the people at the session was at a traditional NGO, and wants her group to be more open, potentially using wiki for distributed information gathering around their core coverage. One of the barriers to wikification is the fear of "anyone editing" and the potential impact on quality. The NGO benefits from the specialized nature of its information. There are 10,000 regular users of the database, which feels like a lot to the NGO. But with a community of 10,000 readers, one might expect to start small, and build to a group of contributors in the hundreds to low thousands, which is quite a manageable size. Also, the "watchlist" feature of larger wikis enables subcommunities of specialists to watch and protect the areas they care about most, and develop social norms to maintain quality. Another cultural barriers to wikification was that the staff considers readers -- mostly journalists -- as an audience, and not yet as a community. The main cultural transition is to consider the readers a participatory community, and to evolve from a private, letter to the editor model to a peer contribution model.

The barriers faced by this NGO seem common to the sector. Traditional public interest organizations see their audiences as traditional journalists and legislative staff. Their content is not-very-accessible databases and pdf reports; the websites have little about the people involved in the organization; the membership, when their is one, is seen as a source of credit cards and petition signers, but not organizers and active participants. NGOs need some new cultural concepts to take advantage of the new tools.

There were some interesting wiki ventures at the event, and new in the world. CongressPedia was at the event. One of the strengths of that model is the ability to build a persistent and easily google-able reference source. Another Sunlight-funded tool, Open Congress, is aggregating bill and blog data to provide more visibility into the bill-making process. The foks building the tool plan to add a "wiki" feature for collaboration. Not sure how that would work, that seems like an invitation to edit wars and disinformation because of the frequently competitive nature of the legislative process.

I'm most excited about the potential of the Adopt a Committee project of the Daily Kos community. This is starting with a community of likeminded folk to grow and protect the information; enables distributed information gathering and group memory for a large number of people with mixed amounts of time; and seems like a great way to shed light on the committee process where bills take shape. Perhaps the role models for successful use of read/write web tools will be new groups that aren't burdened by traditional top-down-media orientation. If the dot com revolution is a model, startup organizations will pioneer new techniques, which will eventually get rolled into the ordinary way of doing business.

WeMeme and interestingness

Ross asks for a meme aggregator that shows him what his social network is looking at. In order for this to be really useful it needs a feature that Amazon had in its apparently now defunct purchasing ciricles. You could look up what people in Austin, or people at Cisco were reading. But the algorithm stripped out the most popular products, and showed the things that people in Austin had distinctively in common. So you wouldn't see the non-information that a lot of people watch the superbowl, but you would see that a lot of people saw a particular Jon Udell podcast.

Rashmi Sinha on Designing for Social Sharing

Rashmi Sinha hits the nail on the head. Being social is more about sharing than declaring. Sharing meals, sharing music, sharing gossip and news, sharing activities, all of these kinds of shared experiences are the stuff of social life, beyond the "hello" and the tribal handshake.

Rashmi's insightful presentation on "Design for Social Sharing" explores the design patterns of "second generation social networks that put objects at the center: tagging, video, news creation". Design patterns include passing on a cool video, tagging and rating. Social sharing apps combine personal social value. Tagging a link helps me remember it, and helps others find it too. Creating a playlist or group of pictures helps the person who makes the list, and other who come later.

One insightful pattern is sensing the presence of others. The is the magic of recent changes in a medium-sized wiki, where you can have a window into what your colleagues are thinking. The conventional wisdom is that "presense" means synchronous presense -- I can see that you are there and I can interrupt you if I want to. Asynchronous presense is differently good, you can see the flow of others' activities without interrupting.

Rashmi Social Sharing as a "second generation" of social networks, beyond the first-generation of explicit tools like Friendster. I think the generational terms are more about the hype cycle than what's been going on. While the Friendster fad flared, LiveJournal and Flickr fostered community and fun, and MySpace skyrocketed. Now, the design patterns and the nature of social apps are better understood - it's not just about saying hello.

Washington Post writes the "fear of wikipedia" article

Sunday's Washington Post is running a version of the mainstream media "concern troll" article about Wikipedia. Parents and teachers are dismayed that kids are plagiarizing homework assignments from Wikipedia. The answer comes from a new product from AOL, called "Study Buddy", which, er, contains authorized material for kids to plagiarize from? The answer, of course, that kids are supposed to be learning critical thinking skills. They're not supposed to be plagiarizing articles from the World Book Encyclopedia either. They are supposed to be learning to look up more than one source.

The article sniffs that "User-created content, such as entries found in Wikipedia, the open-to-most online encyclopedia, comes with varying degrees of trustworthiness." Of course, and human-created content comes with varying degrees of trustworthiness.

Amazon still doesn't get links

One of the persistently frustrating things about Amazon's reader reviews is that they don't have permalinks. Reviewers can't respond to other reviews, or even bring in references to reviews of other books. This prevents people from talking to each other. It prevents flamewars, and it prevents community.

Recently, Amazon has added several new "features" that borrow from the forms of social software. A "plog" looks like a weblog. It is a listing, in reverse chronological order, of posts about products you've seen or expressed an interest in. Unlike a "blog", which consists of posts the author has written, a "plog" is a marketing newsletter, with messages from authors and others who are trying to sell you things. Apparently the right to write is bestowed by Amazon upon slected authors or marketers. The recipient of this unnatural hybrid has very little over the content. You can make a comment, and comments even have permalinks. But there is no venue inside the Amazon sprawl to use these links to write back. The user doesn't have obvious ways to write or link. This is the opposite of user-generated content, it is content inflicted on the user.

In the same family of mutant social software is Amazon's wiki feature. The so-called wikis appear near the bottom of a well-shaft-long scroll of various product description and review features. If you log in with a username and credit card (!), you can edit a page about that product. I need to upgrade my credit card, apparently, in order to see if the wiki even has a linking feature. It is clear from perusing the top wikis that linking isn't part of the idiom. People who are writing collaborative commentary about, say, the XBOX, aren't building a rich , interlinked history and knowledgebase of the games market, trends, and technology, unlike the WIkipedia entry. Instead, the Amazon "wiki" is a short and shallow review that happens to have been written by more than one person. The Amazon XBOX wiki doesn't even have it's own link as far as I can tell, all you can do is get to the xbox page and scroll all the way down. This is the opposite of the design pattern of atomic entries, identified by links, and interconnected by links, that allows the Wikipedia entry to grow and deepen with links to Microsoft, components, games, market trends, and related information.

The problem with Amazon's reviews is that the absense of links inhibits the creation of community. The wikis are antithetical to the concept of building a rich knowledgebase using shared vocabulary as links. The plogs don't allow user-generated content. In all of these "features", Amazon's interface designers have borrowed the appearance social software but missed the meaning and the social dynamic that makes the whole of blogs and wikis to be greater than the sum of the parts.

Affective computing: the mood thermometer in the lecture hall

Here's the anecdote that was most telling about the wrong track taken by Affective Computing, the book by MIT's Rosalind Picard about the digitizing of emotion.

Picard writes about giving a lecture as part of an elearning program. She was troubled by the fact that she could not read the emotional responses of people in the audience, unlike a physical lecture hall, when you have visual signals of interest. Her suggestion was to wire the audience, and get a digital readout of the emotions.

In recent years, conferences and remote meetings have developed a different mechanism to read the response othe participants. A simple text chat enables people who are engaged to show and share emotions with smiles praise, questions, or heckling. In great presentations, the backchat is dead silent, as the audience is spell-bound.

Unlike a physical room, where even someone silent may reveal emotional signals through physical signs of boredeom, excitement, or anger, a backchat reveals nothing from someone who is silent. That's not quite true - someone who wants to telegraph excitement or displeasure in a 3D meeting room will also use backchat signals. In small groups, silence in a teleconference and backchat is also revealing. A group leader can ask someone who is unusually silent to say what they are thinking.

Another big difference is that in a lecture hall, or a remote presentation with backchat, participants have substantial control over the emotions they display. Picard's hypothetical mood thermometer might pick up on involuntary emotions, or emotions the participant might want to hide. A participant might be feeling angry at a family member, or lustful for a fellow member of the audience, or exhausted because of a small infant at home. Picard's hypothetical mood-reader would transmit those emotions to the lecturer.

Picard herself notes that all known emotion-detecting technology can be fooled by skilled humans. So emotional surveillance in the virtual classroom would lead to unnatural emotional repression. what's weirder, the mood thermometer is one-way -- the lecturer can see the mood of the audience, but the audience can't read each other. Backchat is very different from the mood thermometer. Like same-place emotions, backchat allows participants to feed on each other expicitly. This difference comes directly from Picard's belief that affective computing is "personal" -- her model doesn't include the social aspects of much of human emotion.

The backchat model can be extended to include emoticons, color feedback, and other signals to share emotions with other participants and the leader. These nonverbal signals can complement text chat; allowing people to do the thing they're good at, combining thoughts and emotions in communication.

Picard's theories rely on complex tools to automate emotions, rather than on simpler tools that allow people to share thoughts and emotions with each other. I think her theories are misguided, in an interesting and revealing way.

Campaigns without people

I've found three slick websites supporting greenhouse gas policies. This Climate Choices site from the Union of Concerned Scientists, focused on the California Legislative session is nicely designed, links to the bills, has videos and action alerts. But no obvious people, and no direct feedback.

This national site from Environmental Defense focuses on getting signatures in support for the languishing McCain Lieberman bill in Congress. It has a petition and videos, as well as gizmos you can put on your site, including banners, instant message icons, and PC wallpaper. But no humans, no way to provide direct feedback, no obvious way to meet fellow activists. I can see that over 100,000 people have signed the petition in California. Uh, yay, I guess.

This National Resources Defence Council has an action alert, a postcard to send, and a place to sign in and see the history of actions you've taken. . But no humans, no way to provide direct feedback, no obvious way to meet fellow activists. I can see that over 100,000 people have signed the petition in California.

These campaigns use the internet as if it were a fancier form of direct mail. A beautiful brochure, with some more widgets and animation. No opportunity to take advantage of the ability to meet to the people behind the scenes and to talk to each other. None of the messy, potentially unpredictable consequences of actual political organizing.

Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia Community

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, gave a talk at Stanford last week. The bits that struck me from the talk were about the human model of community that makes wikipedia work.

Jimmy described two models of online communities. In one model, people are ants. Information emerges from the unwitting contribution of the masses. Individuals are not powerful. In this model, reputation is a number. In the second model, people are a community, a few hundred active volunteers who know each other and interact based on kindness and trust. In this model, reputation is human.

Despite the high traffic - 5B page views per month at last count, Wikipedia is a tight community. 50% of edits are added by 615 people, and 73% of edits by 1746 people.

Wikipedia is a network of encyclopedias in different languages. The "tipping point" when an encyclopedia has enough critical mass to succeed is a community of 5-10 people, producing about 1000 articles. An encyclopedia gets reallyl useful at 500,000 to 100,0000 pages.

Jimmy gave two stories that showed the value of open access and community-defined process.

Say you're going to open a restaurant, and you're going to serve steak. There are steak knives that can be used to kill people. What do you do? You lock people in cages (he shows a very sad gorilla in a small cage on a concrete floor) By increasing barriers the barriers to doing bad things, you prevent people from doing good things.

Wikipedia has a very simple and flexible model for voting about whether a page is to be kept or deleted. It is just a wiki page, where participants note whether they believe the page should be deleted. Then an admin makes the decision. More weight is given to evidence that a topic is valid -- if there are 8 people who think it's hoax, and two people who prove with citations that the topic is valid, the page is kept. Programmers regularly ask whether they should write a voting widget, and Jimmy says no.

The wikipedia model is less common than the traditional software model, where access is restricted as much as possible, and permissions are restricted as much as possible. As wikis become more popular, some people gravitate toward the familiar pattern to manage content by keeping people out. It's inspiring to look to wikipedia's overwhelming success for lessons of the benefit of access, flexibility, and human community.

Squidoo and self-promotion

I understand Squidoo a bit better now that the fact that it's Seth Godin's company has sunk in. In the social software equation, the individual motivation is self-promotion, and Godin is hoping that others will be as entertaining in their quest for fame and fortune as he is.

Siderean: but what does it do?

I ran across while preparing for a panel on "tagging 2.0" at sxsw. They sell a faceted classification product used for information retrieval. They did Facetious, a cool del.icio.us mashup which applies facets to delicious tags.

In order to describe their hack as part of my talk on collaborative tagging, I wanted to know how it works. Does the software create the facets? Does the software suggest facets, which are then selected and edited by human administrators? Or do humans create the facets for Siderean to fill in?

I ordered collateral from the website -- needed to fill out a form for each piece of collateral, and talk to a salesman first. The collateral didn't answer my question -- it was all benefit/result marketing, with nothing about the software itself. So I emailed the salesguy. He said he could only answer the question if Socialtext was seriously interested in partnering with Siderean.

So I didn't include Siderean in the presentation. Does anyone have a clue how the software works?

SXSW 2006: RSS, it's not just for blogs anymore

At SXSW, I facilitated a session on "RSS: not just for blogs anymore", with Chris Frye of Feedburner, Scott Johnson of Ookles (formerly of Feedster), and Robyn Dupree of Bloglines.

The panelists gave many examples of the non-blog uses of RSS. The most prevalent is audio/video, which currently represents 20% of feedburner-measured content. "Structured blogging" applications like calendars and restaurant reviews are nifty and seeing experimentation, but not big takeup yet. RSS on mobile devices is used by a small number of users, but those users are very heavy users.

The most fun part of the session was the "fireside demo" format modeled after Wiki Wednesday. This being SXSW, there were plenty of people in the audience with interesting RSS applications. People lined up at the mic to give examples of RSS uses and hacks, including:

* Stuffopolis, a utility for keeping track of lending personal stuff
* Toolshed, a toolset for online music promotion
* 30Boxes (calendar) and Dodgeball plugins for Wordpress by Andy Skelton

Here's the delicious list

Speaking of invitations...

Upcoming has good attributes of both guy culture and Silicon Valley culture.

In girl culture, there are infinite nuances to invitations, non-invitations, and anti-invitations. Girls invite to pre-parties, afterparties, and other intimate moments that complement official get-togethers. When a traditional girl wants you to come, she looks you in the eye an invites *you*. When a traditional girl wants to know you're only sort of welcome, she tells you that there's an event going on. When a traditional girl wants to snub you, she tells the person standing next to you that they are invited to her event. Bonus girl points for making sure you hear, while whisking the other person away.

Guy invitations are delightfully simple, by contrast. A guy describes an event, and assumes that's an invitation. Hey, there's a tailgate party. Or hey, we're going riding.

Upcoming does the delightfully simple, guy-like version. The event is declared, with a time and a place. The attendee declaresly, openly and impersonally, if they are "watching" the event, or, "attending" the event. Here it is, come if you want to, no big deal if you don't.

Upcoming also has aspects of bay area culture. People have a facility at declaring parties. There's Mobile Monday, and Tag Tuesday, and Wiki Wednesday, and "bar camp". People pick themes or places and flock, often enough that you need some automation to keep track of it all. And the communities are big and dispersed enough that a public bulletin board is helpful; in smaller communities, it's easier and more obvious to let the subcommunity who needs to know more directly.

The one thing I wish it did was slurp events into a personal calendar. Today's task was copying and pasting sxsw sessions and parties.

Incentives to decentralization

Edgieo is a conceptually nifty decentralized listing service -- like craigslist, but it aggregates listings you put on your blog. The bit this misses is how and why an individual would put a listing on his/her own blog rather than craigs list or ebay, when those services already have a large audience and easy listing tools.

In order to get adopted, a standard needs to be:

• supported by an existing community
• supported by a widely used tool, or
• of benefit to the user him/herself, or
• a mix of these. As far as I can tell, edgeio doesn't have any of these, just a sprinkle of decentralization magic pixie dust.
  Posted by alevin at 08:20 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Antisocial software - calendars

Did some conversational noodling about why group calendar software is so bad. The trouble is, it doesn't support the social processes that people use to schedule events.

First of all, the negotiation required to schedule a meeting. Today, this is done with the brute force method of giving the meeting-ee access to your whole calendar. All free time looks equivalently free. And, exposing one's whole calendar is "too much information" unless one manages nuances of calendar entry types. It would be nicer to be able to do an automated version of the "pick the best option" drill -- you publish some candidate times and the meeting-ee chooses from among them.

Second and worse, the affordances needed to quasi-schedule and unschedule a meeting. How do you set up a request for a casual lunch sometime that a few busy people happen to be free? How do you politely defer a meeting? Scheduling software is a clumsy, second-best replacement for the refined and obsolete skills of personal secretary or traditional wife.

Delicious acquisition anxiety

Phil Edwards writes about the discontent felt by del.icio.us users when the big bad Yahoo buys out a social software web service. It's tied into a critique of web 2.0 as an exploitative phenomenon.

I suspect this pattern arises from client-server architecture and server cost, regardless of malice. Successful client-server apps like google and del and flickr wind up costing someone a truckload of money. They need to do something to pay for the servers. There's hardware and backup and patches and air conditioning and so on.

Even if you factored out venture money and outsourced r&d and the other artifacts of high-tech commercial culture, you'd still need someone to pay for the servers. Thus the classic phenomenon of a successful, idealistic web app provider doing a begathon when the server goes down.

The governance issues posed by server ownership get particularly strange when it comes to online games and communities. Eventually it could lead to political governance, where costs are paid via taxes to a democratically chosen government.

Some applications (aggregated comments) might be done decentralized. e.g. a shared bookmarking service that aggregates the bookmarks in each of our browsers, and allows browsing and querying of the virtual db, or a decentralized aggregated comment tracker.

When these apps are conceived after there's an installed base of tools, it requires painful standards work to make this sort of thing happen, and then the installed base turn adoption process can take years. Data standards are political; the user base needs to have enough power and organization to create and demand the standard; this can take a long time. In many cases it's easier to throw up a server, which gets us into the economic bind.

Sxore skepticism

Pesonal digital identity is on the wrong side of the network effect. It's a chicken and egg problem. Individuals don't pick a digital identity solution, just like they don't pick an ignition system. It's plumbing that's provided by the tool vendor. There isn't end user demand for it.

Meanwhile, social software tool vendors haven't felt enough incentive to use a third party digital id system. The path of least resistance for a tool vendor is to implement its own internal single signin system. SixApart has TypeKey. Blogger has its own login system. Yahoo just merged Flickr's login system.

Sxore is an attempt to stimulate end-user demand by providing a a solution to a real problem -- comment spam. Sxore is a cross-application comment system with capchas, moderation, whitelist and blacklist features. The idea is that if a user signs up to comment on one blog, they'll be able to comment on other blogs. Sxore will work with WordPress and MovableType, so someone who likes it can use on their own blog.

This would have been brilliant 18 months ago, before the major tool vendors and projects added anti-spam features. Today, end-users will tempted to follow the path of least resistance, which is to use the features that come with their tool. Perhaps one opening is open source projects interested in some Sxore features. But there's no evidence on the Sxore site that Sxip is offering code.

The handiest -- and maybe the creepiest -- feature is the ability to follow comments for an individual user. Sxore creates an RSS feed for each user. Presumably you can follow comments made by that user across different blogs. So, if you think someone has good ideas about blog visualizations, you get to read what they also think about President Bush.

Asterisk VOIP application links new immigrants with 2nd generation translators

Over at Worldchanging, Emily Gertz reports on a social VOIP application that lets Chinese immigrants use their mobile phone to find an available English-speaking volunteer. The Guides help new immigrants with school registration and other practical puzzles of American life. The software uses ad hoc conference calling to patch together the caller, the volunteer, and a third party such as a local business or government agency.

FlickrFrame

Imagine a flat panel wall-mounted screen with a very slowly alternating selection from Flickr. The FlickrFrame could come with a remote control that lets you fast forward, pause, and navigate through friends, interesting photos, themes.


flight of the rainbow, Originally uploaded by linny.


Traditional art selection is a commitment. Unless you are wealthy enough to rotate a collection, you get a photo framed or buy a piece of art and live with it for years. The FlickrFrame would provide visual variety without Martha Stewart's budget.

There are images that are emotional or loud, that I'd want to look at sometime, but not everyday all year long. The FlickrFrame would allow the viewing of jagged and soothing images, without being locked into states of permanent angst or tranquility.

Looking at the Flickr API docs, someone has done a little bit of this with a hack that lets you display Flickr photos on a TIVO. "You can choose to display pictures searching by tags, groups, sets, users or just the most recent photos. This is configured by a GUI on the PC, or command line options for the adventurous." It doesn't have the very-slow-rotation feature, and it requires a Tivo.

The idea of transient art is implemented in 3d by the Canvas Gallery, a cafe and gallery in San Franciso that has art for sale or rent. I haven't seen the model in other places, not sure why. If there is furniture rental, surely there should be art rental.

MiniFlickr

Thinking about different settings to surf image, it would also be cool to have a Flickr browser for a handheld or screenphone. This would want a similar interface as the FlickrFrame's remote control, allowing navigation of tags, people, and other streams with a few keypresses and good lookup. Good for meditative time on trains, in line, and other time spent otherwise waiting.

this looks like one way to do it.

Thanks to Peter Kaminski for Flickr-inspired brainstorming.

Conversation Clouds

Here's what I mean by conversation clouds:

The cloud would be a picture of a conversation surrounding a person or a topic. The picture would show the relationships between the participants in a conversation. The densest areas would represent people who frequently cross-reference each other over time.

You can start with a participant (the url of a person's weblog), or a search term (a word or tag) Nodes are clustered based on closeness, measured by number of links and reverse links over a period of time (comments, too, if you can measure them).

If the picture starts with a link, then that link is at the center of the picture. The picture shows the links between the first node and the other nodes, and between other nodes that are connected to each other.

If the picture starts with a word, topic, or tag search, then the cloud contains a cluster of blogs that include the term or tag in the last time period. The picture shows lines between blogs that link to each other. Unlinked blogs are thrown out.

The cloud is built from a data set over a time period; the user should be able to scale the time (conversation over a week, a month, six months) The conversation cloud would need to provide ways to navigate through conversation space. If you click on a blog, perhaps you re-center around that blog's conversations. If you click on a tag or topic, you search based on that. You'd need to experiment with several ways of allowing browsing out from the first cloud.

This type of picture would not measure rank. Instead, it would illustrate the connections within subcommunities.

Cloud-browsing represents a pattern of blogsurfing. A reader might start with Mary Hodder's post on blog metrics, and then traverse to Dina Mehta, danah boyd, Stowe Boyd, Ross Mayfield.

The cloud would show in graphical form what a Technorati or Blogpulse search would -- who linked to the post. And it would also illustrate the repeated links and cross-links as people reply. If you zoomed out the time horizon, you'd see some relationships become more obviously dense, with repeated patterns of links and counterlinks.

I think this sort of presentation would get more of what we're looking for -- a picture of the relationships in a community that reveals participants, both loud and quiet. The ability to browse the conversation.

The results would be more interesting than a diagram of an email thread -- where participants already know who's talking to whom. It woudn't be particularly rankist, since webwide popularity isn't relevant to the picture. It would let you browse to related people, or related ideas that the same people are talking about.

The next step is to test this idea, maybe with a manually drawn picture, and then with a dataset and a toolkit like TouchGraph. This seems like a good experiment to me. It could be somebody's done this already. Or somebody's tried this and proved that it doesn't work. Please share if you know.

p.s. Zawodny talks about the need for content discovery. I don't know about you, but a lot of the content that I discover comes from browsing through a conversation and finding voices that I want to keep hearing.

Unlocking the value of topic blogs

Carson of Buzzmetrics talks about the financial value currently hidden in the midlist. A blogger in the so-called midlist might be highly influential in their subcommunity.

One thing which I think might be interesting to add to the discourse, would be something around topicality. i.e. "influential on what?" Because BuzzMetrics is typically answering questions of influence within a commercial setting, we are rarely looking for "top bloggers." We are looking for "top influencers amongst wireless application developers who happen to be positively inclined towards the Linux platform."

Exactly. Many bloggers are not general celebrities but are influential in some domain. Compared to traditional research, blog search is a very low cost way of finding those networks of influence.

Technorati's broken for the midlist

Lately, I've found that Technorati searches to find who's responded to my posts have become unbearably slow. Often it takes a few searches in a row for results to show up.

A Technorati employee explained that they've got a problem in the queue to fix that affects only midlist blogs. Currently, searches are more efficient for blogs with a great many links, and those with only one or two links. Searches are painfully slow in the middle.

This makes Technorati less useful for conversation discovery, particularly for the people who desire it most. Will Wheaton is a celebrity with high link rank from adoring fans. He probably isn't interested in talking back to all the fans who write about him, except in a selective "fan letter quote" manner. He's probably most concerned with the size of the audience, because that helps drive the audience and word of mounth for his books and television shows.

Midlist bloggers probably care most about conversation discovery -- they are blogging in order to participate in a conversation, and each cogent reference is valuable.

Whether the segment is valuable to Technorati depends on their business model. Niche blogs with subcommunity connections ought to have value -- more value than can be unlocked yet. The question is whether Technorati's customers are marketers and advertisers to whom they simply sell metrics -- in which case it doesnt' matter if the system performs poorly for the midlist. Or whether there's value with those users directly, by showing ads to them or providing paid services.

Conversation, not rank

In Mary Hodder's roundup of comments on the discussion of community metrics, I agree wholeheardedly with Dina Mehta. Dina says that the value of Technorati to her is conversation discovery.

For instance, I have no interest in what my ranking on Technorati is, but I do visit it daily to see who is linking to me and how they might have progressed a thought. Yet, I'm not so happy when these get transformed into lists, ratings and rankings. Are you merely well-known, or well-read?

Yes, exactly. I use Technorati to see who responded to what I wrote, to discover distributed comments. I also use Technorati to find out who's written about something I'm interested in at the moment. Then (if I have something to say), I'll comment on their blog or link to them. Technorati is for discovering and continuing conversation.

Link rank is a not-so-interesting byproduct.

Purple pro and con: the insight and the argument

Chris Dent writesin praise of purple numbers. These paragraph-level identifiers enable re-use of content. Chunks of good ideas are locked inside larger units, within documents and discussion threads.

The benefit of purple numbers is that they unlock insights, increasing the liquidity and flow of ideas. The drawback is that they break apart arguments. Insights may be captured in paragraphs. But arguments are conveyed across multiple paragraphs. You need more than one paragraph to provide context, to set up a contrast, or to draw a causal connection.

Sometimes, picking apart the individual points is what's needed to find the holes and strengthen understanding. Sometimes, picking at individual points is a sign of a flamewar -- people are searching for points of disagreement. Picking at points can increase the quality of thought, or reduce the quality of thought by reducing the incentive to build toward a larger theme.

In general, the wiki form is conducive to concensus, by bringing people literally on the same page. It will be interesting to see how wiki+purple affects the quality of thought and level of agreement.

Avoid rankism with clouds

In response to Mary Hodder's concern about "rankism"... I wonder whether rank is the wrong presentation, and clouds are right.

A cloud presentation would primarily show the communities that a blogger is in. It may show secondarily the influence strength within that community, but that should be secondary in the presentation.

A cloud presentation might enable navigation along topic axis. For my blog, you'd be able to traverse to social software and austin clouds.

Influence would be calculated within the cloud. So, Jon Lebkowsky would have separately-calculated influence level within Austin and environmental blog communities.

Perhaps the presentation would allow the browser to traverse communities. One could find "blogher", and traverse to the "sepia mutiny" south asia community.

Time would be an interesting factor. Perhaps one could view the cloud by week, month, or year. See how participation ebbs and flows over time. A longer time frame would be interesting -- I wonder whether other bloggers are "bursty" in their topics of interest. A long time frame would catch people who come and go.

In sum, a cloud presentation would avoid the worst of rankism, because it would focus on the community more than the individual, and allow a browser to traverse communities.

Mary Hodder on Blog Community Discovering

In a thoughtful essay, Mary Hodder explores what it will take for blog search to go beyond the "top 100 syndrome" to discover the interesting patterns of influence and community.

...this is about going beyond lists and links, to understand that the social relationships of expression between and across blogs is really about searching for a "metric for identity" or "metric for affiliation", "metric for community", or "metric for influence".

Mary is ambivalent about creating new forms of "rankism".

I have to say, I've resisted this for the past year, even though many people have asked me to work on something like this, because I hate rankism. I think scoring, even a more sophisticated version of it, akin to page-rank, is problematic and takes what is delightful about the blogosphere away, namely the fun of discovering a new writer or media creator on their terms, not others.

The algorithm would weight links in posts higher than blogroll links, and new blogroll links higher than old ones. It might include new terms like time read, comments, and topic score.

Hopefully, the tradeoff for more rank-ism is better discovery. This weekend, I spent some time exploring Sepia Mutiny - a group blog for South Asian writers - and its cousins, after meeting one of the authors at BlogHer. This form of indirect discovery is delightful. A tool that helps with such serendipity would hopefully be more like the joys of a used book search database, and less like "sororitization", the turning of social groups into popularity contests.

I wonder whether rank is the wrong presentation, and clouds are right. Clouds would primarily show the communities that a blogger is in -- and may show secondarily the influence strength of that community?

Blog search: Tell me something I don't know

I got an email about a new blog search engine called Blogniscient, so I clicked through to try it.

On the home page, it tells me that the top 10 political bloggers are:

#1 Michelle Malkin
#2 Captains Quarter Blog
#3 Eschaton
#4 Powerline
#5 Crooks and Liars
#6 Austin Bay
#7 Think Progress
#8 TPM Caf�
#9 The Anchoress
#10 Daily Kos

You can drill down and find the top liberal and conservative blogs. Two clicks later, I find that the top liberal bloggers are (the list goes to 20):

Liberal Politics
#1 Crooks and Liars
#2 The Left Coaster
#3 Eschaton
#4 Think Progress
#5 Daily Kos
#6 TPM Caf�
#7 Talking Points Memo
#8 Political Animal
#9 The Huffington Post
#10 America Blog

So please, Mr. Search Engine. Tell me something I don't know. I knew that Daily Kos and Atrios/Exchaton were very popular. I had no idea that Atrios was two places ahead of Kos, and... I don't care. It's not like baseball heading up to the playoffs, where there's going to be a single winner.

Where are the good centrist blogs, like The Moderate Voice and Ambivablog? They don't fit into the impoverished taxonomy, let alone sites like Booker Rising, a site focused on moderate-to-conservative African-Americans.

Here's the problem. The top 40 blog list is boring. It's stable. We know who they are. The job of a search engine is to tell the user something they don't already know.

Splitting up the top 100 into big themes is somewhat more interesting than the general-purpose Technorati 100. It's more meaningful to look at top political blogs, sci/tech blogs, entertainment blogs. But it's still stable, and doesn't convey much new information.

The top news stories is a bit more interesting, since that churns daily. That's an interesting zeitgeist check, and may be worth checking back.

The bulk of the site misses the glory of the web. With a vast amount of human knowledge there for the mining, please tell me something I didn't know already

The algorithm of network power

danah boyd just made a striking point at Blogher.

The link algorithms that drive "Top 100" lists at Technorati and other services are based on a broad and shallow pattern of linking. This is characteristic of male patterns of networking. By contrast, characteristically female patterns of networking are smaller and denser.

The "Top 100" pattern recaps the hit-based attention and financial economics of the mass media. It just doesn't measure the sub-communities that should be visible out of the "Long Tail."

Mary Hodder says that she is assembling an algorithm that will highlight the subnetworks and the long tails, using critera like comments and interlinks.

This is needed. Today's algorithms are missing communities of interest. And frankly, it's missing opportunities for power and money.

Technorati and the discovery of community

Thanks, Chris Anderson for the kind words. I'll have to repay them by explaining where he is wrong again.

Chris writes:

Technorati is a blog aggregator without a community

This is true when you use Technorati as a pure zeitgeist-check, to find what the blogosphere is dithering about today (Karl Rove and Windows Vista).

But it is false for one of the most interesting and valuable applications of Technorati -- conversation discovery. Bloggers use Technorati to find which other blogs are responding to their posts, so they can continue the conversation.

In an era of comment spam, Technorati has become a primary method of knitting together cross-blog conversation. Technorati helps make conversations and subcommunities visible. The "community" of Technorati is not a feature of the service itself. But Technorati is a key, and hidden component of the blogosphere's long-tail communities.

The "long tail" is social

Chris Anderson writes a refreshing rant about the misuse of the Long Tail. But he's partly wrong.

Anderson writes:

There are many distortions of the term, but the most common one is to use it as a newly-positive synonym for "fringe". Invoking the Long Tail is not a magic wand to explain away the apparent lack of demand for what you've got. The Long Tail is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for poor-selling product. Or weak sectors. Or bad ideas.

Anderson goes on to say that business models that focus only on fringe content are doomed to fail. Effective "long tail business models", like Amazon, combine popular content with niche content, and use the popular content to draw people in.

Anderson's right -- Indy-only online music services draw much less business than providers like Amazon that can use popular content as a draw. A customer might check out a Britney Spears album, and then use the recommendation engine to traverse to related and much less well-known music.

But Anderson is partly wrong. LiveJournal and Flickr disprove his theory. LiveJournal is an online journal community that has historically had a large population of young people. They congregate in social groups, often starting with people who are friends offline. The software gives users tools to control the level of privacy. A user can define which friends can see private content, what content to share with intimate friends, and what to share with the wider world. Similarly, Flicker is an online photo sharing community, where users can share photos with their friends and the world.

Cultural preferences are social. When people like strange music, unusual fashions, or minority religious practices, they most often do so with a subculture of like-minded folk.

This is hard to see in the mainstream commercial economy because of the history of technology. Until now, mainstream marketing has had two main kinds of choices.
* Mass media is used to reach wide audiences. Coarse-grained targeting is used to reach market segments -- viewers of the Cooking Channel, or readers of Parenting Magazine. The audiences for these niches is still quite large, many thousands of people.
* Direct marketing is used to reach individuals. Direct postal mail, telemarketing, and legitimate targeted email is used to reach individuals who are selected by personal history (e.g. bought the product before), or by membership in a targeted demographic group.

Until now, the smaller social networks in which people share culture have been largely private and noncommercial, with a small number of exceptions, like Tupperware parties and Amway.

What's worse, the content industry has done its best to make sure that social content-sharing is illegal. Rather than seeing opportunities in tools that let people share content, the industry sees all sharing as piracy, and tries to stamp it out.

So, the successful examples of social content-sharing are based on non-commercial content, like LiveJournal and Flickr. There are also grassroots networks of cross-linked music blogs where people review and recommend music. And there are networks of cross-linked knitting blogs where people review and recommend patterns. Classic long-tail stuff.

So, Chris Anderson is right that catalog retailers like Netflix and Amazon need to have hits, which help draw users to the niche. Their recommendation engines serve as an automated proxy for the natural social recommendations that people make every day.

But that's true only when you start with the content. When you start with groups of people, then opportunities for "long tail" are abundant, and don't depend quite so much on mainstream content.

Search vs. RSS?

Kevin Hale writes that RSS is becoming more important than search.

I think that gets something not-quite-right. It's true that when you find a superb resource, RSS lets you subscribe to the stream, rather than having to go back and find it again. RSS processors like the clever new Feedshake let you be even more picky about your subscription reading.

But the universe is always going to have more good information than a person can read every day. By an awful lot.

That means that when you're looking for new information, you'll go out and search for it. Sometimes you'll want to subscribe to the good sources you find. Sometimes you'll want to subscribe to the search. And sometimes you're looking for a one-time goodie.

So RSS sources, as a superset of blogs, are important to a search algorithm, because they are well-structured, and selected to be timely. And RSS is a good way to subscribe to a search. Search and RSS are complementary in these ways.

But RSS doesn't displace search. That makes no mathematical sense.

This wants to be an infographic... there's a medium number of resources you want to consume most of regularly, and a vast number of resources you want to tap into occasionally, using really good search.

The Hale article via Jeff Jarvis

Wiki titles vs. blog titles

Blog titles are headlines. They're supposed to be catchy and attention-getting. You're not supposed to need to remember them.

Wiki titles are subjects. They are best as unadorned nouns and noun phrases that are easy to remember and stimulate collisions.

Take the last post, for example. The title is a blog-style headline -- Oishii, a smarter zeitgeist check. If this were a wiki-blog, I'd be tempted to give it a dull, basic title -- just "[Oiishi]". Then I'd link it to a page called "[Zeitgeist]", which would cross-link the various zeitgeist checking services, like Daypop and Blogdex, and the New York Times most-emailed pages.

This way, anytime someone tries to link to [Oishii], they'll find the entry and add their new thoughts and information.

One of the bits of damage done to the wiki paradigm by the addition of the blog feature in Socialtext and the blog nature of our shared intranet wiki is the use of catchy, blog-style headlines that will never generate a link happy accident in a million years.

One healing practice is to create "index pages" that link together the various catchily-phrased pages. When the newsworthiness is gone, the content can be refactored into a page with a duller topic.

The obverse danger can be seen Bill Seitz' blog-wiki, http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/FrontPage. Not to pick on Bill, but to show the opposite risk. Bill writes regular, interesting updates, but they often have boring subjects like Jabber and Paul Allen.

The wiki-blog has a valuable pattern, where people have incentive to post and share new content, which can be annealed into longer-term knowledge. But there are also gaps that need to be cleverly bridged in order to get the best of both genres.

Oishii - a smarter zeitgeist check

Oishii "polls the del.icio.us front page every 5 minutes, and returns all sites bookmarked by at least 30 people."

This is cleverer than the typical "highschool popularity" algorithm. The traditional zeitgeist checks, like Daypop and Blogdex, only show the "most popular" stories. Oiishi shows "all sites bookmarked by at least 30 people" -- so it captures a more diverse range of shared content.

Feedshake - easy aggregate feeds

Feedshake lets you create a feed out of several combined feeds, filtered by a keyword.

This is an early beta. You can filter by only one keyword, with no wildcards. And it supports only RSS 2.0 feeds right now. It will be better when it supports more feed variants so you can make combined feeds out of more of the available data.

In the meantime, FeedShake works nicely with Esme Vos' MuniWireless.com site, Glenn Fleischman's , Broadband Reports municipal section, and Free Press broadband section. The feedshake pulls all feeds that contain the word "municipal".

Google maps crossed with event database

EVMapper lets you search for an event (like an Elvis Costello concert) and see where it's happening around the world.

Very nifty! The next step is to add an Evite/Meetup type feature so you can invite your friends to the concert / tournament / speaking gig.

Object-centered sociality

In simpler language, people get together to share stuff and do stuff.

The point's right, the big words are extra.

LinkedIn Spam

Is anyone else seeing an increase in Orkut-like spam contact requests on LinkedIn? In the last few weeks I've gotten a number of requests from people I don't know.

If I don't know the person, and there isn't a personal note, I'm ignoring them.

Social protocols for instant messaging

One of the keynote panels on at the Collaborative Technologies Conference focused on the battle for instant messaging technology in corporations.

And yet the long question and answer session focused on the emerging social customs around the use of instant messaging in the workplace -- the relationship between IM and productivity, and then tension between usage patterns and traditional IT protocols.

One audience member asked about the distraction factor -- how email and instant message harm knowledge worker productivity. The panel responded that the answer is social protocols for the use of the technology.

Anoop Gupta: Just because you have a colleague's cellphone number, doesn't mean that you call colleagues continually over the weekend.

Melanie Turek: "Remember when everybody did used to work in the same location? There were colleagues who would stop by to chitchat, office birthday cakes, and other in person distraction. This is just a different way of getting interrupted.

Gordon Quinn: It's good to use the practice of a "quiet period", and manage "away messages" to communicate when you're available.

Another series of questions focused on IM blurring the lines between the organization and the outside world, and between parts of the organization.

People use consumer IT tools in the workpace in part because they want presense available outside the enterprise.

Anoop Gupta of Microsoft believes that the policies are going to be set by IT. Just as IT controls the company directory, and defines standard group mailing lists according to the organization chart, so IT will control who is visible to whom using instant messaging.

Gupta also talked about "whitelist" and "blacklist" controls that enable individuals to manage their own experience. Hopefully this means that individuals will be able to create their own presense groups in the organization.

In my experience, valuable people in an organization are the ones who are able to bridge functional groups and organizational boundaries in order to get things done, regardless of the org chart. A functional role can help define repeatable processes and support mentoring, but actually getting things done entails finding resources and making connections across an extended network.

Using yesterday's technology, these people always know who to call. Using today's technology, these people have key contacts on IM, too. The connectors will find a way to route around barriers.

Purple question

Chris Dent adds purple numbers and paragraphs to Jason Kottke's list of little things that are getting permanent addresses on the web. I think that's right in some very interesting ways that are waiting for experiments and experience to show.

I have one big question about the usefulness of purple numbers that perhaps people who have worked with them can answer.

When I am editing, paragraphs are among the most malleable of units. Groups of a few sentences are combined to form larger paragraphs. Large paragraphs are split into smaller paragraphs. A few sentences from one paragraph are cut and moved to a different paragraph.

Therefore:
* purple references to an early draft will be very different from their referents in a later draft.
* the sequence will be garbled
* some references will be missing

So, perhaps purple numbers are only useful for final drafts -- like a reviewed and published scientific paper.

But then, what about writing in wiki. When a wiki is used as a canonical writing tool, the content is malleable all the time. How confident can linkers be about the stability of a referent?

By contrast, a wiki page or a blog post is pretty stable. The content might change a lot (by the conventions and affordances of wiki) or a little (by the conventions and affordances of blog). But the topic is probably the same.

A del.icio.us link entry or a Flickr photograph is stable, although the description and tags may change.

In practice, are purple numbers stable enough to be useful? Or are there certain cases where they are more useful than others?

Good news from Socialtext

Series B venture round

Net Talk and Net Action

I've read and participated in various discussions contrasting the top-down, direct-mail, action-oriented approach to polical action, and the blog-and-forum , bottom-up, decentralized, discussion-oriented approach.

This classic by Alex Steffen at Worldchanging predicts a "move from centralized, mass-market NGOs to advocacy networks driven by members."

This month's Personal Democracy Forumessay praises efforts at TrueMajority and Common Cause to open the traditionally centralized advocacy culture to solicit member input.

I don't think the approaches are as far apart as they seem, and we're just wanting a few new tools and models to get "best of both worlds" power to swarm and act.

Today, self-organized groups can easily and cheaply publish and discuss with blogs and mailing lists.

Where the pros have the advantage in the member database behind the mailing list and action alerts. Yahoo groups and similar tool lets an administrator see who's a member and set moderation policies. But they don't have features to track how many people have responded to an action alert. Also, they don't have a good way to manage overlapping memberships.

The world needs hosted and open source tools that give this power to bottom up groups. I think we'll start seeing this in larger of blog activist communities, starting with groups like Kos and maybe TalkingPoints Memo (to pick a couple of left-of-center examples). In those communities, sub-groups will start creating and managing action alerts as segments of the core group.

Today, this approach seems unthinkable for today's centralized groups, which manage their mailing list like Fort Knox. But when you look closer, the fortress has a few doors. Today, it's possible for a grassroots group to traverse the social network to get an action posted in a major group. But it takes old-fashioned social networking.

The fortresses are not going to become public squares any time soon. But there will be acknowledged ways for building trust. Volunteers will be able to progress from clicking through on an action, to writing blog posts and co-ordinating other volunteers, to managing sub-campaigns.

It doesn't seem that hard to me to bridge the "action gap" -- the tools are well-known, and just need to get cheaper and more accessible. The value is really obvious -- letters and dollars.

Alex Stephen also foretells the rise of bottom-up social networking.

advocacy networks encourage relationships. Advocacy networks want their members to connect to each other. Advocacy networks are a form of social software, like Friendster, Tribe.net or the Omidyar Network. That means, at the most basic level, that your working relationships are not subject to the control of any third-party organization.

This approach seems further away to me, because the basic tools don't quite exist yet. The Friendster/Tribe/O.Net systems that exist today are too centralized and tightly coupled. We need the equivalent of a permalink, subscription format, and hosted service for linkable mini-nets.
LiveJournal but more extroverted.

The non-corporate solutions I've seen in the space have been targeted at different problems -- easing the single sign-on inconvenience (IDCommons, SXIP), declaring one's relationships (XFN) -- rather than easily snapping one's profile into a new group.

Probably the fastest way for this to happen is for one of the existing, popular services to create profile permalinks and a published data model.

In the areas of action, fundraising, and networking, the pyramid can get a lot flatter. New organizations will grow up pioneering these methods, and older organizations will adapt.

The hidden purpose of online petitions

Online organizing sites of all political stripes often include petitions to sign.

What's bizarre is that these petitions are sometimes posted at the same time that there is a live bill making its way through the legislature.

If that's the case, why would a constituent want to sign a petition, instead of contacting their representative directly?

The reason is that the organizing organization is primarily interested in capturing your email address to re-use. In some cases, the organization includes a privacy policy, telling you that you've just signed up for a mailing list. In other cases, such as the online appraisal petition, there is no privacy policy posted.

Since the early days of internet commerce, many consumers have gotten justifiably wary of contests, coupons, and other excuses to get signed up for an endless flow of spam.

Online organizing is in an earlier stage, and citizens are probably more trusting of the intentions of groups who are helping them take action.

The message for citizens is to be skeptical of petitions that don't have privacy policies, and to contact your representative directly, instead of signing a petition.

The message to advocacy organizations is to be honest. If you're giving citizens the opportunity to stay informed by joining a mailing list, say so upfront.

Activist technology and tactics

The technology brainstorming by the Politology blog has some interesting implications for connections between political tactics and social software. The next few posts explore the connections.

Web politics and org structure

The Politology post suggested that political activists adopt the tools typically used by open source projects to manage large projects with decentralized contributions.

The article suggests:

A public issue-tracking system: These have existed for software developers for a while - bugzilla; mantis - but they're so obtuse that only geeks get into them. Plus, they tend to only be for actual bugfixing of existing issues. There needs to be a new system where a community can

1. Identify an objective
2. Start working to publicly create tasks supporting that objective
3. Assign those tasks to willing community members
4. Track progress and make reports It's similar to bugtracking, but instead for public use and activism.

This suggestion raises questions about the organizational processes for using these tools effectively. Open source projects use various different organizational structures for managing releases and maintaining quality.

A bugtracking tool alone doesn't drive an open source project, and an action tool alone won't drive a campaign. The tools enable large-scale, effective collaboration, but they don't cause the collaboration -- leadership and organizational processes do.

Similarly, the politology article calls for:

A better "volunteer tracking" system. A marketplace for matching up projects with specialized needs, with people that have specialized skills. Someone who needs a thirty-second music soundtrack for their political ad, or a large tab-delimited text file of precinct data put into a mysql database, should be able to define those needs somewhere for someone else to snap up. I can do either of those things, but no one would know it without that service.

There have been a number of these volunteer markets already -- does anyone know how effective they are? Do any of them have critical mass in a domain area? Any metrics about successful matches made?

Since people engage in political action as part of broader motivations for affiliation and purpose, one might think that a "volunteer market" might be most effective in the context of a broader social network -- either centralized by an organization like MoveOn, or decentralized like a network of blogs. Or perhaps, as part of overall flea market like Craig's List, where you can find volunteer opportunities along with apartments, jobs and lovers.

Yochai Benkler's classic "Coase's Penguin" theorizes that "peer production" will arise where there is a vast supply of decentralized skills, low transaction costs, and low communication costs. It stands to reason that these dynamics will come into play with political action as well.

The "issue tracking" and "volunteer tracking" tools described in the article are part of the toolset used to co-ordinate large peer-production projects.

And yet. The "invisible hand" of Adam Smith's capitalist free market allocates resources effectively in complex societies. Despite the "invisible hand" there are many business schools that teach people how to set up and succeed at a capitalist enterprise.

Similarly, the "peer organizing" enabled by cheap coordination requires its own set of learnable organizing practices. Web-based organizing tools have promise, but they require human organizing to make them effective, just like any other domain.

Remix politics

The weblog and syndication model enables a "remix culture" -- information is readily available, freely discoverable, and easily recombined.

Two of the politology suggestions for activist technology imply this model, and can be extended further along these lines.

Politology suggests:

A congress tracking system: There should be a system where any bill can be readable as text, annotated by the public, with discussion underneath. It should be hooked up to a congressperson-tracking system so we can track how they have been contacted by the public, what they think of the bill, and how they are likely to vote. It should be easy to look up a congressperson's complete vote history.

Yes and... this suggestion doesn't go quite far enough. It would be even more valuable for bills to have "permalinks", and to create RSS feeds with bill updates.

For readers who aren't steeped in weblog tech: blog entries each have "permalinks" -- stable web addresses that enable the post to be referred to, commented on from another site, and discoverable later on with search engines. Weblogs typically provide RSS feeds that enable readers to subscribe to a blog. Smarter use of syndication/aggregation technology enables items to be discovered and recombined with finer-grained control

So, in addition to a central discussion, weblog remix tools would enable any number of decentralized discussions, that could in turn be aggregated and connected.

The politology post goes further in this direction with its suggestion for an "action aggregator.

Right now we're being bombarded with tasks to call about this or that, and it's like they are competing with each other. It's nonsense - a service could be created to let people subscribe to daily missives for all the causes they care about.

This isn't hard at all, and could be done easily with today's technology. Organizations providing action alerts, like Consumers Union and EFF (to mention a few I work with), could create an action alert feed. Then, individual activists could subscribe to the specific feeds, instead of being inundated with action email.

These models fit nicely with patterns of networked action -- people learn and are influenced in groups that are geographically or topically close to them, and then band together to have a greater and more far-reaching impact.

Tools for advanced net activism

Politology has a great post brainstorming about activist tools that should exist but don't yet.

• A congress tracking system: Thomas sucks. There should be a system where any bill can be readable as text, annotated by the public, with discussion underneath. It should be hooked up to a congressperson-tracking system so we can track how they have been contacted by the public, what they think of the bill, and how they are likely to vote. It should be easy to look up a congressperson's complete vote history.
• A public issue-tracking system: These have existed for software developers for a while - bugzilla; mantis - but they're so obtuse that only geeks get into them. Plus, they tend to only be for actual bugfixing of existing issues. There needs to be a new system where a community can
  1. Identify an objective
  2. Start working to publicly create tasks supporting that objective
  3. Assign those tasks to willing community members
  4. Track progress and make reports It's similar to bugtracking, but instead for public use and activism.
• A better "volunteer tracking" system. A marketplace for matching up projects with specialized needs, with people that have specialized skills. Someone who needs a thirty-second music soundtrack for their political ad, or a large tab-delimited text file of precinct data put into a mysql database, should be able to define those needs somewhere for someone else to snap up. I can do either of those things, but no one would know it without that service.
• An action aggregator: Right now we're being bombarded with tasks to call about this or that, and it's like they are competing with each other. It's nonsense - a service could be created to let people subscribe to daily missives for all the causes they care about.

Tools for basic net activism

The SaveMuniWireless.org project has three main pieces:

* a public blog (SaveMuniWireless.org) - for reporting news, posting action alerts, posting municipal network profiles, and linking to reports. The blog becomes the source of news and background research.
* an action mailing list - for busy people to get action updates
* a coordinator mailing list -- a high traffic list for people coordinating nuts and bolts like photocopies of information packets
* a private wiki, for planners coordinating fact sheets, gathering information about projects around the state, building materials for the press.

I also use the Technorati blog search engine to find out who's linking to us and discover the extended conversation.

This basic set of tools is used again and again in different projects. Today, there are three separate pieces. We're using Movable Type for the blog, Mailman for the mailing list, and Socialtext for the wiki.

It would be great to have a packaged toolset, so people who were less tech-savvy than Chip and me could set things up.

And would be great to have closer integration between the tools
* publish content from the wiki to the blog
* single signin among the private tools
* single search among the public tools

SXSW: distributed social networks

The SXSW panel was called "decentralized social networks". The title was a bit of a misnomer -- I wish there had been a panel on distributed social networks.

The presentations by danah boyd and Jonas Luster covered the well-known flaws of centralized social networks such as Friendster and Orkut -- their awkwardness, explicitness, and lack of privacy.

These networks were the rage last year, but time has already proven what we guessed -- without a business purpose like LinkedIn, or creative purpose like Flickr, social networks are a fad.

Tantek Celik discussed XFN, a relationship notation that really is decentralized, but bears the drawbacks of explicitness and lack of tool support.

Joyce Park had a hypothesis that the explicit definition of relationships is more appealing to men than women. Joyce speculates that women are more reliant on "little white lies", and more hesitant to explicitly categorize their friendships. (this hypothesis doesn't fit set of men and women I know, including men who tell white lies and women who manage social networks like collectibles).

Rather than beating up on Orkut, Friendster, and males for for being overly explicit, I'd rather see a discussion of really distributed social networks, where relationships are assembled incrementally and often implicitly.

* the patterns of conversation and interaction that are revealed by the social network analysis of collaboration through blog links, blog comments, wiki authorship, and other public trails
* comparing these patterns to the patterns in other discussion media such as mailing lists and usenet
* patterns of affiliation in creative networks such as Flickr and LastFM, where connections are draw with a combination of explicit invitation and implicite taste-sharing

Since mandatory explicitness is clearly a mismatch to realworld relationships, it would also be fascinating to:
* discuss of the social uses and time-series changes of subtler intimacy gradients in social networks like LiveJournal
* fast-forward a few years, and see whether and how the correlation of identity provided by IDCommons or a cousin has had any impact on cross-network social integration.

I must admit that I didn't stay all the way through the panel. I was impatient for the next-generation panel -- maybe next year.

Trust in online communities: people and machines

Two presentations at SXSW on trust and online communities could not have been more different.

At the panel Mary Hodder facilitated, on Social Software and Shades of Trust,, Ka-Ping Yee at Berkeley and Alex Russel of Informatica and described the perpetual alphabet soup of digital trust standards and projects, from the late lamented p3p, through Liberty, IDCommons, and others.

Trust was seen as a feature and a subsystem -- an engineering problem that could be overcome, someday, with the right combination of usability design, standards, and architectural decomposition. There wasn't a strong explanation for why the same technical conversation had been going on for a decade, with few signs of successful implementation in the real world.

The canonical examples of trust involved formal programs and features -- Ebay's reputation system, the formal privacy statements on web sites, the desire for single signon between community websites.

At the panel facilitated by Molly Steenson on How to Grow Online Community, Craig Newmark of Craig's list and Matt Haughey of Metafilter both talked about trust as a social issue. Craig talked about the Craig's list assumption that people are generally good, and about the processes they use when people stop being good, from unintentional misbehavior to criminal fraud and spam.

Matt talked about the social difficulties of introducing moderation for some discussions, and the challenge of determining the right lightness of touch. Both Craig and Matt noted that when a poster misbehaves, the first step is to speak with that person directly; reasoning solves the problem about half of the time.

Where the previous panel looked to Ebay's formal reputation system as the trust model, Craig used the metaphor of a flea market, which is a combination of transaction marketplace and place to socialize.

Both Craig and Matt apologized about the lightweight, uncomplicated, "first-generation" nature of their systems, lacking the sophisticated design and features of later-developed social software. Yet Craig's list is one of the most successful online ventures in the world, and MetaFilter has been a longstanding and highly successful online community, fostering 3d communities in different cities, friendships and marriages.

I can't help thinking that the social-first approach to online community is the right primary approach.

Who buys Skype and when

The Skype crew are innovating and popularizing digital voice applications.

This is an area where innovation has been waiting to happen for a long time. I hope they have a good runway before they get bought, so they have some time to keep innovating, before somebody pulls them into 18 month product cycles and the good developers leave.

Whoever buys Skype will have a large influence on the pace of innovation in the area. I hope that it's a company that has a vision for open, diverse voice communication apps, rather than a walled garden with incremental, closed services.

A forum is not a conversation

This morning I stopped by this online forum about terrorism and democracy, organized by conference that David Weinberger and Joi Ito are attending.

In the forum, a set of people with diverse nationalities (US, Europe, Middle East, Asia), talk to each other at an abstract level about big topics like "terrorism" and "democracy".

Individuals express their own philosophical background and favorite arguments in their own rhetorical language (socialist, anti-american, liberal, non-violent, pro-violent resistence, etc). There is some interesting comparision between tactics of violence and tacticts of non-violence. Yet, there is no moderation that I can see, and little social pressure to bring people talk to each other rather than past each other.

The people are not part of any organizational structure, and are not trying to create any action. There is no shared objective, so people can talk forever without reaching understanding, agreement or resolution.

It is exciting that the forum attracted such a geographically and philosophically diverse group. But without facilitation and the creation of shared purpose, this exercise in sustained mutual incomprehensive is quite frustrating.

Just like a room and a table don't create a meeting, a discussion forum does not create deliberative democracy. There may be methods that work to make this type of conversation productive. They weren't used in that forum.

wireless social software

Muni Wireless reports on about Neigbornode, an bulletin board application managed by a group of NYU students and alumni, and publicized by New York City Wireless that allows neighbors to post for-sale items and gossip.

The guy behind the software is John Geraci a grad student at NYU who also did the Grafedia project, which connects 3d graffiti with online images. It doesn't do the technically cool thing of associating the online graffiti with spacial coordinates. Instead, it uses a hobo code to mark the graffiti, and fellow cyberhoboes can find the link and associated images on the net.

Personalization vs. Socialization

Ross Mayfield offers an insightful critique of the limits of personalization, which has long been seen as the premier way to make content more valuable. This is a very good point -- the flaw with the "daily me" is that it restricts my information flow to things I know aready.

I think they go together nicely. Social filtering lets you branch out, experiment, grow, and learn from the tastes and interests of your friends and colleagues.

Personalization is still needed to manage focus amid vast quantities information, even considering the collaborative input of friends and colleagues. I value Ross's links on social software and business trends, and Rick's political tales, but would less interested in socially filtered feed of sports scores. (Sorry guys!).

I think about it with a spacial metaphor. You want a familiar starting point, and a set of directions to explore, where the interests of your social network represent roads out.

Links are more telling than words

A paper by UT professor Miles Efron shows that links do a better job at differentiating between left and right wing blogs than words do.

US left and right wing blogs might both mention "social security" or "iraq" but they would express different opinions. But those blogs would be likely to cite different sources.

This has interesting implications for persuasion. Lakoff would argue that to persuade a conservative of a more traditionally liberal position, one would appeal to that conservative's nurturant side.

Efron's results suggest that it's not enough to invoke compassion -- it might help more to cite the Heritage Foundation.

Thanks Prentiss.

Attention managent for the highly connected

Come to think of it, I think there are two main functions needed for managing large numbers of online connections.

The first is the butler, for managing incoming requests.

The second is the reminder service for monitoring the news and recurring events for online acquaintances, and providing reminders for occasional events like birthdays, job changes, and more frequent events like blog posts and wiki updates.

The interface for this would be a more subtle version of an aggregator notification service. This upgraded notifier would provide visibly stronger notification for dramatic events and for those closer in the circle, and weaker signals for ordinary events and those further away.

The notifier would aggregate signals from multiple sources, enabling one to monitor more people and more sources in a shorter amount of time.

The 21st century butler

One tactic that comes to mind for managing online connections is the automated equivalent of an 18th/19th century butler, who mediated social interaction for the wealthy at a time when the intrusive, in-person visit was a primary method for making social contact.

The butler has broad and nuanced knowledged of the circumstances in which the Lady is to be acknowledged to be IN.

Today's online presence indicators are flat; they tell everyone the same message; that one is working, or eating ice cream in front of the television, or AWAY.

A butler would understand whether one is working or not, and would put through different connections at different hours.

A butler would understand the understand the nuances of one's social circle, and admit some people automatically, allowing others to wait, and requiring still others to leave a message.

We also need the 18th/19th century interface to the Butler, the calling card, which conveys by its printed message and accompanying whether the caller is a longlost relative whom the butler may not remember; a recommendation from a reputable source; a specific message about the urgency of the visit.

Along with butlers and calling cards would come social norms for interpreting the signals -- when a calling card is a polite formality; when to interpret the declining of a visit as a crippling snub and when as scheduling circumstance. Even with a butler, there will be mistimings and misunderstandings, yielding to new materials for comedy and drama.

Emily Post in the online global village

Chris Allen writes about a contemporary dilemma: how to manage hundreds of connections in online social networks. It's today's version of a problem that's as old as the first city; how to live in groups much larger than the families and tribes we're wired to understand.

Chris Allen wrestles with the dilemma of how to manage a social network with hundreds of acquaintances:

As someone who now has over 171 professional "connections" in my LinkedIn Profile, 198 "friends" on Orkut, many more non-intersecting friends and acquaintances on Tribe.Net, LiveJournal, and other social networking services, as well as a plethora of correspondents that I only interact with via email, I am trying reconcile a mismatch between my connections and my own Dunbar Number.

Joi Ito has complained of the opposite problem -- running into maximum number of allowable friends on Orkut and AIM, and also of the same problem: "I need to forget someone every time I meet someone I want to remember because I'm having a buffer overflow on my people recognition memory."

Like physical cities, online networks bring people into contact with numerous casual acquaintances.

Entire genres of writing evolved to explore the opportunities, risks, and emerging norms of urban social life. Ben Franklin pioneered techniques of self-organization and civic organization for the new world of capitalist opportunity and democratic obligation; his advice manuals and autobiography spread the gospel.

The 19th century novel (think Great Expectations and Sister Carrie) deal with themes of a stranger coming to the city, establishing bonds of trust or being lured by con games. Dale Carnegie, writing in 1937, wrote a self-help manual for urban aspirants eager to learn the lucrative art of networking.

danah boyd often critiques the awkwardnessful interfaces of online social network tools, which automate plaintive requests for friendship and guilt-inducing demands for favors.

Chris suggests tools that will help people manage attention to a social network:

Could simple categorization help improve expectations for attention levels that various associates receive from you? Are there ways that social networking services, acting as an intermediary, could better manage disappointment-inducing events, such as a decision to spend less attention on an associate?

Tools will surely be helpful. Databases have long helped salespeople remember the names of the children and pets of their customers. Tools can surely be improved. The Linked In form for passing on a reference request is a social horror -- it turns the pleasant, virtuous, social capital-building experience of recommending a friend into a guilt-inducing, bureacratic obligation.

Chris Allen also rightly points out that the problem isn't just in the interfaces, it's in the social situation created by online network exposure to hundreds of acquaintances; far more than the human capacity for close connection.

We'll also need novels, advice columns, tutorials -- as much or more than tool features -- to handle the social and ethical dilemmas of life in the virtual city.

David Weinberger writes about how we're becoming differently social, redefining friendship with online connections that are based on subject rather than physical proximity.

There are novels and memoir genre writing about dilemmas of real and phony intimacy online. Pamela Ribon's novel, Why Girls are Weird was about the varieties of truth and deception, false intimacy and real intimacy that come with keeping an online journal. Justin Hall has a breakdown online, over the fear that online exhibitionism might be incompatible with real connection.

To address Chris' dilemma directly, I think part of the problem is being a post-freudian modern; intimacy is the ultimate goal of relationship and a source of secular transcendence. We need to go back to a more 18th century concept of public identity to describe the pleasures and rewards of broad acquaintance.

Another part of the answer is a recalibrated bullshit detector for online social interaction -- learning to detect and navigate the nuances of sincerity and phoniness: annoying people on the make who "friend" everybody they meet; the cheerful grass-roots self-promotion of folks who give out business cards with their blog address; and the ongoing, global parties hosted by maestros like Jon Lebkowsky and Joi Ito.

A third part of the answer is a recalibrated set of social signals for strength of connection, where (for example) an online social network "friend" request is a light signal, a blog comment is a slightly stronger signal; individual conversation by IM/IRC is stronger than that, followed by email; meeting in 3d is a strong signal of potential friendship and periodic online followup is its confirmation; and repeated, unreciprocated comments, pings, or emails are signs of stalking.

It's a good, rich set of questions. Thanks, Chris!

Tablet PC as media gizmo

There's discussion about using the Mac mini as a media center: "the central brain of our system; the glue that holds all the devices together. It can serve the role of scheduler, controller, audio/video recorder, audio/video playback, audio/video download, and it even makes a decent audio/video production unit, as well." The cute li'l box has processing, storage and network to serve, slurp, and schedule.

But what I'm missing isn't just processing power -- it's interface focus.

Right now, my laptop is a fine media machine if I want to focus on watching video or listening to music. But it's useless for background tasks. Any media - related task steals 100% of focus and processing power.

What I really want is a good-sized, networked, tablet that I can use for social software like Last.fm for simultaneous playing and browsing. An iPod UI is fine for selection, but it's just too small for the social and topical browsing that's key to my media experience. I want it to be portable, not tied to a desktop display. The storage doesn't need to be tied to the display -- a networked storage gizmo would be ideal.

The mini combines the storage, networking, and processing, and leaves off the display. I want the display and processing, which can be decoupled from the storage.

This is all possible today with a good-sized budget. A table is $1600, a network storage gizmo is $800. In order to make a tablet practical, vendors would need to cost-optimize for a configuration that splits display from storage.

Note to more advanced home media hackers -- what do you think?

categories and meaning

In a technology and politics mailing list, there was some enthousiastic discussion about developing common taxonomy in order to build political agreement.

I think this view misunderstands the role of categories in shared understanding.

At fine-grained, concrete level, a shared schema for voter and constituent data is extremely powerful.

At the larger level, though, labels don't get you that far toward shared understanding and shared effective action.

Meaning isn't in the nouns. Meaning is in the stories we tell. Meaning is in the actions we take. Meaning is annealed out of conversation. Meaning is in a strategy and supporting tactics.

Folksonomy might make the software challenge easier -- the disparate political blogs and websites could just pick their own categories, and aggregation tools like Technorati tags could reveal the implicit concensus about labels.

But folksonomy won't get us that far toward shared meaning and action, either. Del.icio.us tells us that the most popular tags are blog, programming, web, music, software, design, news, and linux. The tag popularity metric shows what topics are popular, and lets the reader browse through the popular content under the tag.

It still requires an act of synthesis to describe what people really care about, when they bookmark "music", "software", and "design".

It still requires acts of human organization and communication to build shared understanding, agreement, and effective action.

"Just Comments"

It's been brought to my attention that the nofollow tag is supposed to pertain only to comments.

This is small comfort to those of use who experience weblogs as conversation. Some of the best comments refer to resources, citations, counter-examples. Links that are especially valuable to page-rank, because they are selected in context.

Google etc are trying to remove the reward from spam, but in the process they're removing the reward for conversation.

Killing weblogs in order to save them

Google has proposed a method to fight weblog comment spam that would dramatically decrease the influence of blogs. Comment spam is a nasty plague, but this cure is worse than the disease. I don't understand why SixApart is racing to adopt this suicidal approach.

The proposal will prevent Google's search engine from following links found in weblogs, by putting a rel="nofollow" link attribute on web links. Blog tool vendors including SixApart raced to support the new proposal (via Joi Ito

Blogs rank highly in Google's search results because weblogs are link-rich media, and Google's search algorithms put heavy weight on links. Blog influence is a good thing -- items that are rated highly by millions of distributed, independent actions deserve to be brought to the surface.

As described by Sunir Shah and fellow Meatball wikizens, the proposal will destroy the influence of weblogs by not counting the links.

The brilliance of Google, Technorati, del.icio.us, Flickr, blogs, and other social software is that the actions of millions of individual users, done to benefit themselves and their small communities, have combined, emergent benefits at a larger scale.

Links give us the ability to combine all of our whispers into a roar. If you dampen the signal amplification, we're just friends talking to each other. Social software stops being a source of emergent intelligence.

More ideas for book social software

danah boyd wants to like Books We Like, an online service for collective discounts and recommendations in book purchasing.

In the comments, Brad deGraf writes about supporting the import of an existing book spreadsheet, and a future feature that will import Amazon wishlists.

Even nicer would be something that combined an Amazon purchase list, with the "I've read that" responses to Amazon's recommendations (which catch books you've read but not bought on Amazon).

For this to work, Amazon would need to componentize its records of the books its customers have purchased (from them or elswhere). Then Amazon, or somebody else, would enable the user to create a public view that could weed out gift books (Audobon Quarterly, for the birdwatching uncle), and purchases one might rather not advertise.

Or perhaps, if more purchases are done through Books We Like, their database will become the master for more of us, rather than Amazon's.

Because BWL is an infomediary, they would have more of an interest than Amazon in providing tools for individuals to manage and combine their book databases. Amazon offers APIs but has a conflict -- they have less of an interest in letting customers control their own data.

LiveJournal, Six Apart, and the future of community governance

SixApart, maker of TypePad and Movable Type weblog services and tools just bought LiveJournal, driving business praise and social angst about the role of the merger on the community.

LiveJournal is a hosted online journal community that is thriving and well-loved by its millions of active participants. danah boyd worries that SixApart will suppress freedom of expression. "My second concern is that Six Apart will not be prepared to deal with the userbase and will initiate practices that are more detrimental because of fear. [For example, what's the best way to handle an LJ community dedicated to cutters trying to outdo each other via images?"

The social implications of the merger are foretold by Clay Shirky's writings on Nomic online worlds. When online communities have commercial hosts (or non-commercial hosts who own the server and the code), some differences between the will of the citizens and the business interests of the hosts are inevitable.

Shirky's article had some interesting and prescient reflections on models for online community governance. Just as democracies evolved to reconceptualize rulers as public servants, elected at the discretion of the populace, there may eventually emerge models of community governance where the host is chosen and serves terms at the discretion of the community.

In order for this to work, content needs to be a lot more portable and platforms need to be more commoditized. And there will need to be new rules and traditions for the management and governance of community infrastructure. In the long run, fees are taxes, governance is the will of the people, and online infrastructure services are public services like roads and schools.

Meanwhile, the in physical world, there's a trend toward the privatization and corporatization of neighborhoods, controlled by developers and management companies. These corporate-sponsored neighborhoods run into the same sorts of tensions as corporate-sponsored online communities.

In the 90s, Disney Corporation's efforts to develop Celebration, a Disney-branded community with houses, schools, and community services drew lots of attention. The pristine Disney vacation image foundered in the day to day reality of school board politics, and Disney eventually sold celebration.

The commercial quality control of the management companies conflicts with free speech in the physical world. There's a bill in the Texas Legislature to permit the display of large American flags, in violation of management company enforced decorum.

Online and in 3D, there are tensions between neighborhoods and corporate hosts. Democracy has value, whether the infrastructure is bits or pixels.

43 things - we are our plans and dreams

43 things is an amusing and delightful social tool for sharing goals and resolutions like learning to cook, visiting italy, and getting through the holidays without being grumpy.

All it needs is a meetup feature, and links to blogs and wikis and it would be just perfect. Oh, and maybe a flickr import.

Why do I find this so much more cheerful than those horrid social networking sites? It's because who we are is built of our dreams and aspirations and daily projects (take more pictures, grow my own vegetables, save money, write more love letters), not just our t-shirts ("I like Neal Stephenson and Terry Gilliam").

Thanks for the invitation, Ed.

Amazon review permalinks

Who's noticed long before me that Amazon.com reviews don't have permalinks so, even if you want to, you can't refer and talk back to other readers.

This seemingly subtle choice turns a potentially interesting conversation, distributed over space and time, into a much duller series of conventional-style reviews.

A conventional review has the pundit (or pair of pundits) recapping the plot of the book or movie, describing the genre of the music, and then propounding a thumbs-up or thumbs-down recommendation.

Links wouldn't make bad writers better writers, and they wouldn't make unoriginal thinkers into insightful observers, but they would enable a conversation to deepen the understanding and appreciation -- or dislike and disparagement -- of the work at hand.

Instead of a conversation that would build on the discussion of plot, character, sight, sound, influence and emotional impact, and could even build groups of shared interest, there's a series of redundant soliloquies.

What I wish allconsuming.net did

Allconsuming is a website and web service that shows what books bloggers are reading, based on blog aggregator pings and Amazon links.

Unfortunately, Allconsuming has a "hot-or-not" model that concentrates on the books that people are reading now -- in the last hour, day, week, month.

This form doesn't take full advantage of the "long tail". The zeitgeist check is of some interest. At any given time, the "hit book" of the moment will be at the top of the list.

But over time, there's a large distribution of books read. I'd love to see the reviews of people who've read Interface over the last year, with the current election in mind.

But you can't even reconstruct the history from the AllConsuming api. GetWeblogMentionsForBook can also take an argument in the form of "days_back" but the number of days back that you get data for can't be greater than 60." (It does looks like it's possible to crawl the archive, here: http://allconsuming.net/at-this-time.cgi)

Also, when you browse Allconsuming.net, you can't tell the difference between a book mentioned in a "currently reading" sidebar, and a book review. The useful view would omit entries that are less than 10 words (say), and would print 50 word excerpts, so you could tell which entries were reviews or essays actually discussing the book.

These hacks would make it easier to expose book-related conversation, and to take advantage of "the long tail" -- with 4 million bloggers, a few people have probably written about the book you're currently reading.

Computer as door

The practice of software design is shot through with computer-as-box assumptions, while our actual behavior is closer to computer-as-door, treating the device as an entrance to a social space.

This bit of tossed-off brilliance in a thought-provoking piece about flaming in mailing lists and newsgroup

I'm currently organizing user testing for social software -- the established methodologies are designed for individual users. A team of observers watches an individual user, and notes their "success", "failure", and "comprehension".

Of course, social software has attributes for individual users -- if an individual user is thorougly baffled, the software won't get used.

There are also attributes that apply to the social interaction. How easy is it to invite, and how welcoming does an invitation feel? Are the early stages of usage conducive to talking, working, or playing with others? How are the norms of the community expressed?

Clay's examples are mostly about how to dampen flamewars, but there are other positive social affordances.

References and comments welcome.

Loosely Coupled

Brian Dennis does not buy the claim that social software is loosely coupled.

For a half a minute, I'd bought into loose coupling but realized that many of the services cited (Technorati, Flickr) are even more centralized than USENET ever was.

True, Technorati and Flickr and Audioscrobbler and del.icio.us are each centralized services. But each of these services has APIs and/or XML feeds, and these are commonly used to assemble composite services -- Flickr photos posted to a 3rd party weblog, a Technorati query showing the conversation around a particular post, an Audioscrobber RSS feed showing a playlist.

The loose coupling is in the combination of tools, not each tool.

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Social Software Encyclopedia

Chris Allen has done a fine service with a history of social software, tracing the origins of today's networked communication back to the ideas of Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart, and several generations of computing platforms. The piece has been gathering additional references and suggestions: Pete Kaminski adds references to the 70s and 80s bulletin board era.

Jon Lebkowsky thinks he should write a book.

Seb Paquet's been wanting to make a wiki

Shelley Powers is building here.

A timeline on the Many to Many wiki.

This calls for a good BarnRaising.

Social Software: What's New

The question underlying Chris Allen's valuable essay on the history of social software is, why do we need a new term? Is there anything new going on, or there just a new generation of people discovering the same old thing, like each generation of teenagers discovers sex.

People who've been pioneering online collaboration say that they've seen this all before: on Plato, in MUDs, on the Well, in Usenet, in academic writing for decades.

Is there anything new about what we're doing now? Chris Allen's question prompted some reflection. The answer, I think, is yes. And the measure of the answer is the internet and the web.

These differences can be seen in three ways, which play out technically and socially.

A network of networks: multi-scale design patterns

The ubiquity of the net has dramatically expanded participation in the ideas and practices cultivated in hothouse MUDs, BBS systems, and LAN-based groupware. There are about 4 million active bloggers, according to the stats at Technorati. Wikipedia has over 350,000 articles as of this writing, and over 100,000 contributors. There are tens of millions playing multi-player role-playing games.

The novelty is not just large scale. Usenet is big -- one usenet service claims that there over 25 million users participate in Usenet newsgroups every day according to one Usenet access service.

What's new are the design patterns that build community and sense at a variety of scales at once.

* Group blogs like Austin Bloggers and the Seattle Weblog Portal aggregate individual voices into a community center.
* Wikipedia helps subcommunities maintain the entries on their favorite topics by providing notifications to the small group of people who care about each obscure topic.
* Technorati helps discover a conversational thread across multiple weblogs.
* del.icio.us helps discover who else is reading and bookmarking a web page.

Physical cities have had multi-scale design patterns for thousands of years, with courtyards and sidewalks, parks, plazas and promenades. Networked groups have started to develop these patterns recently.

Addressibility and groupforming

Social software contributions have addressible links. A wiki page has a link which is a name, helping groups build sense on a larger scale over time. Weblog posts have permalinks. Addressible links are, of course, core to the web as a whole. Social software tools make it easy to create content in little, addressible chunks, and they add semantic meaning (wikis names) and social meaning (the weblog of a person or group).

This trait makes it easy to discover and assemble conversation and meaning. All Consuming is able to find the blog posts that write about specific books; Technorati is able to assemble the blog posts that talk about a specific topic.

The conversation discovery tools are powerful socially, not just intellectually. Because weblogs and wikis enable the reader to respond, explicitly with comments and edits, or implicitly with trackbacks and links, it's easier to meet people and form groups -- with or without explicit "social networking" features.

Of course, it was possible to create systems with addressible microcontent and links in the experimental hothouses and corporate walled gardens in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. The scale, ubiquity, and discoverability in the public net versions make these concepts more valuable, and open to flexible experimentation.

Loose coupling and social boundaries

The prevalence of simple web services is making it possible to pull services together. This isn't just about techie lego joy. As danah boyd says, it's about decoration and social identity.

People use flickr to share photos with friends, and import the pictures into personal and group blogs, to communicate personal and shared esthetic and identity. Publishing a bloglines subscription list becomes a statement of one's interests and communities. People add Technorati references and del.icio.us sidebars to weblogs, making it easy to step from a front porch out the the neighborhood. People share playlists with Audioscrobbler and Last.fm broadcast their identity through music and discover others with similar tastes.

Individuals and groups use these tools to express who they are, and to assemble signs of individual and group identity around their personal and group addresses.

Loose coupling lets groups expand boundaries, as well as define boundaries. Corporate groups and local political groups can use RSS and web services aggregation to build composite feeds that bring in relevant content, conversations and data from the outside world and broad organizational scope, as context for local collaboration.

MUDs had build-your-own environments in text-based online systems starting in 1979. The current generation is more popular, public, standard, addressible, and multimedia, leading to recombinant experimental growth.

Summary

The internet and web embed powerful technical design patterns: a network of networks; addressible microcontent, loosely coupled services. These design patterns facilitate new social patterns: multi-scale social spaces, conversation discovery and groupforming, personal and social decoration and collaborative folk art.

There's a generation of innovation and experimentation that is new, that's going on around us, and that's worthy of a name. The language would be poorer if we didn't have a way to group Flickr, LiveJournal, del.icio.us, Technorati, and Audioscrobbler, or to tell these things apart from earlier generation mainframe and LAN-based hothouse systems.

p.s. I know that multi-player games are an integral part of the story, but someone else will have to work on that chapter. The things that speak to me intellectually and emotionally are those that build relationships (LiveJournal), build shared art and culture (Flickr, AudioScrobber, Wikipedia). Shoot-em-ups and D&D fantasies don't speak to me, so I don't know the communities or vocabulary.

p.p.s. This is a draft. I would love for it to be revisable as part of a larger project.

Atom Aggregator Mixmaster

Benjamin Reitzammer wrote in about another aggregator cuisinart project using Atom to gain more control of feed processing.

If you dont already know about it, you may find dbagg3 from Leslie Orchard interesting too. Right now it seems like "yet another aggregator", but from what he outlined in his early posts about dbagg3, the aggregating feature is only one of many, and easy searching/processing of Atom feeds/entries is another. You can find Leslie's latest post about dbagg3 at http://www.decafbad.com/blog/2004/09/13/dbagg3alive

The comments feature on this blog is now fixed, which is a mixed blessing. Good comments as above posted directly to the site. The morning comment despam routine.

Atom Wiki and the Writeable Web

At Foo Camp over the weekend, Ingy paired with Ben Trott to enable Atom posting from Kwiki to Movable Type. Their work complements the work of Autrijus Tang, who added Atom feeds and Atom posting to Kwiki using Ben's XML::Atom perl module.

We're following Joe Gregorio's experiments a year ago, adding Atom support to PikiPiki, a python based wiki that's the parent of MoinMoin.

For newcomers to the world of blog and wiki, Atom is both an API that lets you read from and write to websites from other websites, and a web content syndication format that's intended to be more tightly standardized than RSS, to support more aspects of web content, including images and videos.

The initial impulse to do at Atom to a wiki is to enable offline editing. It's good to be able to use desktop clients like Ecto to post to a wiki. That's helpful if you want to compose or edit when you're offline, and synch when you're back online.

The second drive is publishing collaborative work. Many people want to develop content in an an open and collaborative process, and once it's ready, to publish it to a wider audience. Atom lets you develop collaboratively in a wiki and publish out to a weblog or public website.

Things get interesting when you consider combining with other applications. Autrijus added Atom support to RT, an open source trouble ticket system. Think about posting problem log information to a wiki, to use in developing an FAQ.

Ben Hammersley brainstorms about creating a web-based proxy that will post to the community website of your choice. "I want to be able to choose multiple endpoints for a post, and publish to all of them with a single button click."

Grant Young brainstorms about using feeds to "present issue-based portals very quickly and cheaply, drawing from news sources both within the organisations themselves, but also from external sources like local, national and international newspapers, online news sites and other topical weblogs."

Things get even more intertwingled when you add Atom feeds into the mix. RSS syndication already lets you pull wiki updates into feed readers and search engines. In the workplace, this lets the collaborative work and expertise of the organization be available, in native context, to many more people without drowning people in a flood of email.

Services like Feedburner and QuantumArts have tools that parse RSS feeds and recombine them by date, author, category. Because an Atom entry is defined as standalone, and the elements are more tightly defined, it should be easier to splice and recombine feeds. Diego Doval's AtomFlow is a set of Java-based command line tools to receive, store, search and then output Atom based content (Hammersley's description, unfortunately, Diego's site is down at this posting.

It's fun doing R&D experimentation open source. No service level commitments, no paperwork, lots of people to try things with. When we find things that work, we can package, and polish, improve, service and support. Participate in the ecosystem, and serve customers.

Virtual crimewatch at Wikipedia

One of the members of the Wikipedia technical team writes about the techniques Wikipedia uses to detect vandalism and fix mistakes.

Each contributor has a personal watchlist which will inform them of changes made to articles which they have registered an interest in. On average, each article is on the watchlist of two accounts. Relatively mainstream topics usually have more watchers, obscure trivia fewer or none (a hint to those who want to try circumventing this tool...). These watchlists are often checked several times a day, most within a week or so. Since these are usually topic experts, they are likely to detect any subtle changes which the RC patrol misses.

In a physical neighborhood, people watch out for their neigbhors houses and kids. A couple of weeks ago, a burglar taking electronics from my next-door neighbor's home was foiled by a passerby, who nodded hello to a man walking down the street on the way out for breakfast tacos. On the way back, he saw the same man, leaving my neighbor's home with a duffel-bag full of rectangular objects. He called the cops. My neighbor got her home electronics back.

Wikipedia's alert system turns the 300,000+ article peer encyclopedia into a warren of virtual neighborhoods. People who have a common interest in a topic keep an eye out for problems and fix them as they happen. (The article also describes more hard-core techniques to block systematic vandalism)

Alex Halevais decided to test Wikipedia's peer editing by inserting small errors into thirteen articles. The errors were caught and fixed within hours.

More on Intimacy Gradient

Chris Allen adds to the discussion of the intimacy gradient, design patterns that support different levels of privacy and access.

Chris muses that "the need to provide for an Intimacy Gradient in social software is clear; however, the techniques for showing the transitions between the gradients are not." Chris quotes Fleming Funch about how links can't signify levels of intimacy. "As long as a certain chat room or Wiki page is accessible directly with a deep link, it is going to be very hard to make it feel more intimate than any other place I can reach with similar ease."

I suspect that the design principles for intimacy gradient are going to be different online than in 3d, and efforts to mirror 3d privacy patterns literally will be ineffective, just as interfaces mimicking 3d stores and offices don't work.

In 3d, the markers of privacy relate to
* property markers: my lawn vs. public sidewalk and street
* physical access: door and gate; bedrooms in back or upstairs
* visual and auditory access: conversation areas around a corner, with an insulating wall.

These design patterns designate ownership/membership, and different levels of physical access.

Online, there are different design patterns for signifying intimacy. Physical interference is less of a problem, while social accessibility takes some consideration.

Groupforming is a distinctive property of the online intimacy gradient. Decent software design makes it trivially easy to create a new private space - no contractors or sawdust needed.

We're evolving new conventions for showing group membership and "ownership", even in publicly accessible areas.

* in more intimate spaces, like small-group chatrooms, and livejournal comments, names and pictures are reminders of the small community.

* in shared spaces, it's good to be able to share pictures and music (which oughta be legal).

Online, we need better tools for vistas, entryways, and entrances.

For example, a technorati sidebar of related discussion shows the vista surrounding the private home or small community on blog.

The "recent changes" in a wiki provides this window for cogniscenti -- you can see what folks have been thinking about lately.

The "jibot" on the #joiito IRC channel announces visitors with a few words of background. This creates a social protocol where newcomers are expected to introduce themselves, and there's a bit of banter where the social tone is established.

Forum portals try to do this with snippets of high-volume conversations or high-rated posts. For experienced community members, portals can help reduce overload and highlight hot topics. But these busy streetscapes can be cluttered, overwhelming, and discouraging for newcomers.

More inviting, I think, is the style on PerlMonks, where the home page consists of selected questions and responses, and deeper sections include discussion, tutorials, reviews, and reference material.

What the jibot and PerlMonks conventions have in common are ways of gradually entering a conversation. Well-designed entranceways are social as much as they are architectural. They provide ways for people to meet others and introduce themselves, and get involved in more extended conversation and deeper collaboration over time.

This world, extended

In the middle of interesting article about criminal misbehavior by a participant in an online game, Clay Shirky has an intriguing insight about online interaction.

MUDs and MOOs -- text-based virtual worlds -- were common early genres of online interaction. Prophets and business people extrapolated that future online interaction would be much like these virtual worlds, but with sound and color and 3D. It wasn't that long ago. Remember the early online malls with pictures of buildings and streets?

My label for this was the Whole Worlds hypothesis — interactions would be through the lens of characters playing roles in immersive environments. Two additional assumptions made by the Whole Worlds camp were that the MUD/MUSH/MOO style of interaction would give way to more visually immersive environments, and that the interactions would move outside the realm of games and hang-out spaces, and become normal modes of business interaction.

These hypotheses seem to be right and wrong respectively — the MMO is the logical inheritor of the MUD, but MMOs have stayed game- and hang-out oriented.

Business interaction, by contrast, has remained largely text and voice-based, and has moved in the opposite direction from the Whole Worlds model, towards fragmentation and multi-tasking. Not only are we not immersed in purpose-built online spaces at work, we aren’t even immersed in the real world anymore, as the rise of continuous partial attention (tip of the hat to Linda Stone) means that our presence in reality is lessened by interrupts from phones, IM, the Treo, and so on.

So the failure of the Whole Worlds model outside games is pretty obvious, leaving game worlds as the principal site of that theory.

My question is, why is that? Is it because we in business lack creativity and imagination, and prefer to live in a duller world? Then again, game designers don't use games to design games (to the best of my incomplete knowledge) -- they use text-editors, IDEs, storyboards.

Web usability folk had explanations at the time about the failings of the early cartoon interfaces, such as Jakob Nielsen's rant. Nielsen argues, alternatively:

* that our preference is biological. "If we had been frogs with eyes sitting on the side of the head, the story might have been different, but humans have their eyes."

* that the problem is the limits of web graphics and navigation tools: ""Users need to pay attention to the navigation of the 3D view in addition to the navigation of the underlying model: the extra controls for flying, zooming, etc. get in the way of the user's primary task".... Poor screen resolution makes it impossible to render remote objects in sufficient detail to be recognizable; any text that is in the background is unreadable

* that 3d is confusing because the space being modeled has more than three dimensions. "Most abstract information spaces work poorly in 3D because they are non-physical. If anything, they have at least a hundred dimensions, so visualizing an information space in 3D means throwing away 97 dimensions instead of 98: hardly a big enough improvement to justify the added interface complexity."

But those explanations are just-so stories, providing backfill for something that we already knew -- text-heavy interfaces like Amazon and Google were more popular than "Virtual Main Street."

Is this another manifestation of Tim Bray's motto, "knowledge its a text-based application?"

I don't know. What do y'all think?

Shared Minds

In the last airplane trip (love plane rides for reading), I read Shared Minds by Michael Shrage. The 1990 book, borrowed from Chris Allen, is delightfully prescient in a number of ways.

Going on fifteen years ago, when tools to collaborate electronically were just emerging: gestating in the the research lab, Lotus Notes was just coming to market, and Tim Berners Lee was inventing the web, Shrage described some of the very familiar uses of social software:
* holding a meeting with a digital whiteboard to capture and shape ideas in a meeting, complete with backchannel
* collaborative writing, as we do now with SubEthaEdit and Wiki
* the citation and deep collaboration culture of scientific research
* the metaphor of "shared space" to describe digital tools supporting collaboration

The book also articulates an important distinction between communication and collaboration. Shrage critiques the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and advocates of business communication for focusing on one-way transmission of thoughts and feelings. Somehow, if the speaker can only "communicate" clearly and powerfully enough, the message will get through, and the recipient will follow.

Instead, Shrage describes collaboration as a shared and deeply interactive process of discovering and creating meaning together. Individualistic modern western culture wants to see discovery and achievement as the product of a lone hero, but innovation in science, art and business is a collaborative process.

Perhaps this is what Sunir means by blogging is sadness: the impression that bloggers are each in their own little world, making speeches at each other. (Although this perspective misses the distributed conversation of the blog communities.

Shrage captures the joy of collaboration -- elaborating an idea, creating something new, getting something done -- when the contributions of the participants are intertwingled.

Given the state of the art at the time, Shrage's perception of tools was skewed toward the sharing of personal artifacts (shared access to documents), and elaborate research prototypes (wall systems with voice and video). Today, we have the ubiquitous net, and a wide range of tools, build for shared use, to knit together in a situated manner.

It's really fun to work on bringing more of these ideas into common use, in a culture based on the values that Shrage describes.

Internal Corporate Weblogs

Ross Mayfield draws a useful distinction, responding to Fredrik Wack's taxonomy of enterprise weblogs

Instead of the next six types Fredrik offers, I'd suggest the simple categorization of if the blog has a single or multiple authors. Inside the enterprise group blogs are more common and oriented towards collaboration. The topic or objective of a blog can change over time, as most things do, and most individual blogs defy categorization.

Building on these points: knowledge and collaboration aren't different kinds of blogs -- they are different stages in the lifecycle of the same post.

For example, at Socialtext, we use a team weblog to collaborate on the release process, logging process steps, and keeping the team up to date. Once the release is done, the posts serve as an archive. Because Socialtext uses a wiki repository, blog posts can be linked to by name, and updated later.

A post starts as live collaboration, and turns into a knowledge base over time.

Also, today's technology is blurring the distinction between individual and group blogs in a corporate and community settings. Aggregators, portals, and metablogs pull together individual blogs into combined views of the conversation in the community.

Augmented meetings

Neural implants are a science fiction cliche -- folks in the future have the net wired into their brains.

Leave off the wetware, and the experience is here today.

In his write-up about blogon,Jerry Michalski comments on the discomfort of not having meetings augmented by Social Software:

It's a slightly spooky scenario, but I'll confess to having wished for a heads-up display that projects inside a pair of glasses who's who at a cocktail party, including who used to work with whom, who's friends with whom (hey, orkut) and who's dating whom.

At Socialtext, our meetings are augmented by voice, IRC (with a bot to post to the wiki) and Workspace. By the end of each meeting, enough artifacts are captured in a social context to enable group memory. Similar to using an Eventspace at a conference. When we meet in person we find it to be terribly inefficient. But that said, there is no such thing as virtual beer, the kind of schmooze we go to events for anyway.

Perhaps the the meaning time spent together in person has already changed without us knowing it. One of my favorite Pete Kaminski quotes -- time together in person is too important to spend working.

Technorati Bricolage

Wrote a little Technorati plugin in Kwiki, running here, and in Socialtext Will put it up on a public ST wiki in the next few days, too. All the better to keep track of the blogging of OSCON.

It's a proof of concept on the ease of moving plugins between Kwiki, a super-modular geek-friendly wiki, and Socialtext, the business-friendly workspace application build on Kwiki. The core object model and formatter are identical, so migration was easy.

Groupforming around the INDUCE Act

An impromptu discussion group gathered in Ed Felten's blog comments as the Senate Judiciary Committee discussed the INDUCE act, another bill that bans innovative technology in the guise of protecting copyright.

I picked up a link to the hearing from a blog, discussed on #joiito at the time, and found the Felten conversation yesterday, through a Technorati search.

Technology vendors and tech activists were able to swarm and organize strong, cohesive opposition to the bill, which was submitted close to a deadline.

Unlike the DMCA a decade ago, technology vendors and public interest groups like EFF and Public Knowledge are sticking together, and acting cohesively to fight threats to innovation and creativity.

It's incredibly cool for interested citizens to be able to organize an ad-hoc crowd to watch the hearings. I can't wait for the day when the senate committee will use Technorati and its cousins, and the virtual gallery will be visible to the government.

Social network reunions

The awkwardness of Social Networking systems has been discussed at length. The ease of making "friends" leads to nearly-random requests that are awkward to turn down, and to personal introductions that are less personal and less effective.

There's one situation where the friction-free medium of Social Network systems reduces awkwardness. When you see someone with whom you've been out of touch, it is easy, and less awkward, to send them a note. In recent months, I've received notes from friends and former colleagues that I haven't seen in years. The listing in a YASNS, plus the context of a blog, makes it less socially awkward to restart a conversation.

People Oriented Automation

from Loosely Coupled Blog

One of the reasons why businesses want more agile IT is that today's flatter management structures depend on giving greater autonomy to individual managers and workers. The trouble with traditional enterprise software is that it's rooted in an organizational model that assumes a large bureaucracy shuffling documents around according to preset procedures. Whereas 21st-century business is carried out by delegating decision-making responsibility as far down the reporting line as possible. This doesn't have to imply loss of management oversight, provided there's a way of tracking and monitoring what's actually happening at the end of the line (in truth, this is a far more realistic position than the command-and-control model anyway, which in spite of whatever the procedures manual actually prescribed, was always liable to subversion by individual acts of initiative, incompetence or rebellion.)

Weblog and wiki rhetoric

Weblogs and wikis are very similar in some ways. Weblogs force the reader's attention to new posts. Wiki denizens check "recent changes" addictively to see what's been added or changed.

But there's a key difference in genre. With weblogs, it's considered bad form to revise. Blog readers monitor RSS feeds, and pounce when their newsreader tells them that someone has adjusted a story after publishing it.

Wiki pages are designed to be revised. Classic wikis, like Ward's Wiki, and Meatball Wiki accrete and polish entries over time.

Weblogs foster amnesia. There's a relentless push for novelty, at the expense of thinking more deeply about old ideas. This weblog really wants to be a wikiblog, so I can post new ideas, and then go back, add content, improve writing, add references.

Doc: does RSS replace email?

Doc Searls muses about whether RSS is a good replacement for email. Doc hypothesizes that RSS is better because RSS is part of a "relationship."

This misses some key differences between good email, bad spam, RSS, and social network tools.

Spam isn't bad because it is unsolicited. Spam is bad because spammers deluge us with millions of unsolicited messages, and don't let us get away.

RSS makes it a little bit easier to subscribe and unsub, but that was easy enough with responsible mailing lists. A good RSS interface is a little bit easier to manage than a mail-reader -- because RSS content is transient -- it doesn't pile up the same way unread email does.

But signing up for an RSS subscription isn't a "relationship", any more than signing up for a magazine is a relationship. If the information flow is one-way, then it's publishing or marketing, not a "relationship"

It's possible to have "relationships" facilitated by RSS, but that only happens when the receiver talks back -- clicking through to the source to comment or hyperlink or trackback.

The problem with Spam is that it's unsolicited BULK email. The opposite of unsolicited isn't targeted "Dear Adina" -- it's really and truly personal.

I received a wonderful letter of introduction from a friend and colleague the other day. He introduced me to someone he know, who had common interests, and might be a potential customer. The letter was unsolicited, but this was a good thing -- it was serendipitous and welcome.

LinkedIn and its counterparts purport to improve the process of personal introduction. But often they make personal introductions worse, by replacing thoughtful individual notes with form letters that strip out the emotional and substantive context that makes one want to reply.

Spam is hostile. RSS and LinkedIn are merely impersonal. Subscriptions and form letters aren't relationships.

Conversations are.

Digital ID at PlaNetwork

Reading about the latest in digital id standard proposals at PlaNetWork, and afflicted with the usual skepticism, well articulated by John Beatty.

I just don't think that the big need is for universal single sign-on -- whether we're talking about corporate schemes, or touchier-feelier, better-intended open standards proposals from IDCommons and friends.

I think that there's a big opportunity to develop design patterns for private and public spaces, supporting:

* progressive disclosure -- create things in smaller groups, and share them with more people
* intimacy gradients -- enabling groups to create more private and more public spaces
* easy group-forming, with socially congenial invitations

These design patterns are different from the more familiar:
* targeted marketing -- a corporation snags your ID and tries to sell you stuff
* access control -- how an organization restricts access to resources

I'm glad that someone is working on the standard for representing ID and enabling interoperability, and will be happy to use something standard when it exists.

I'm more interested in the design of the living room, front porch, and block party, than in coming up with a standard for front door locks.

Online self-government

Another Clay Shirky article that is fascinating, eloquent, insightful, and at heart, deeply wrong.

Clay ponders the emerging mechanisms of self-governance in online game communities, and probes the differences with 3D communities.

One difference is that in the real world, we have a mechanism for changing the rules -- it's called legislation. This takes Clay to explore Nomic games, where changing the rules can be a move in the game.

Another big difference, posits Clay, is that in the online world, somebody else owns the server. At the end of the day the server owner can always pull the plug, so governance defaults to dictatorship. Clay explores models of server co-ownership, which would remove this barrier to self-government.

In making citizenship a function of property-ownership, Clay is back with the Athenians and the US founding fathers, who found it self-evident that property-owners can self-govern, and others can't.

Take the thought experiment a few steps forward; imagine a virtual world in which one can sell one's server shares. Soon, game players down on their luck will sell server shares to refresh depleted life scores, entrepreneurs will amass oligopolistic ownership of the servers, and property control will be stronger than it is today, because the owners feel that they earned it by the divine invisible hand.

Liberty, as political thinkers concluded in the physical world, is not a property of property ownership -- it's a property of being human.

In the long run, the solution to the problem isn't collective ownership of servers -- although that suggests some interesting and fruitful models. The solution to the problem is itself political.

Denizens of virtual worlds can demand self-government, and can use the physical-world political system to get it. Think about it. A landlord doesn't have the right to kill tenants at will (not since feudal times), nor to destroy a tenant's furniture. If it is important to enough online game-players to demand tenants' rights, this will happen. Big owners have the ability to buy physical-world government, but the oligopoly isn't omnipotent -- a large enough, vocal enough voting population can win a populist issue. It seems counterintuitive now -- it might take a generation to make the point -- but it could happen.

Clay rightly points out that a second scarce commodity is software and coding skill. The programmers can choose to unilaterally change the rules of the game. This is an artifact of the social system. Law-making is also a relatively scarce technical skill, but legislators are seen to be employed by the people.

Programmers are currently employed by game companies. What if programmers were employed by game-players? Programmers would implement the rules that game-players wanted, or they'd be out of a job. Game-players will demand rules that guarantee easy wins, you might argue. It's the same argument against democracy itself -- government by the people will "naturally" result in bad laws. We use representative government to ensure some continuity, and avoid government by mob; similarly, programmers might be elected for a term, and voted out of office.

The scarcity of programmers and game platforms is an artifact of the immaturity of the games industry. Given a decade or more (think about how long it took for Linux to emerge and become popular), there may well be a set of free, open source game platforms, large populations of developers and power users, with open standards for virtual cities, virtual property, and scores. When this happens, communities or players will be able to move more easily.

The condition of a game-player today is like a medieval serf, who is bound to his land (the virtual world), and has painfully few rights. A combination of changed economic conditions (greater mobility) and changed political beliefs (government by the people), could transform the relationship between players and game hosts, just as it did between rulers and ruled.

Clay's conclusion that the solution to game world tyranny is only fractionally right, and misses deep principles about the nature of self-government. But, as usual, his articulate framing of the issues invites broader discourse, and thoughtful disagreement. Thanks as usual, Clay.

Why Friendster isn't Social Capital

Talking to Jonas Luster a couple of weeks ago about the popularization of Social Capital and other social science concepts.

Jonas is frustracted that people confuse numbers of Orkut and Friendster connections with social capital itself. The problem, says Jonas, is that people mistake Friendster and other social networking sites for social capital. "We can not see Social Capital -- we can only see its effects."

Social capital is a measure of the strength of relationships and communities. It's measured using factors including cohesion (would I lend you money or offer you my guest room if you were travelling), proximity (degree of separation) and density (do my friends know your friends).

But the Orkut/Friendster/weblog/wiki fans aren't that far wrong, I don't think.

Social network tools and structures are potential energy, and cohesion is kinetic energy.

New means of meeting and staying in touch -- YASNS, email, weblogs, wikis, and meetups -- give people more chances to create groups and build relationships.

We have a history of similar shifts. Cheap telephone connections let families stay in touch across distance. Television displaced vast quantities of social interaction, community-building, and cultural creativity with passive isolation.

Will today's new tools have no effect, destructive, or constructive results for communities and connections?

I have an opinion. I have a company and several communities that communicate online often, and meet in person occasionally. I think the new patterns will give more people opportunities to strengthen ties across distance, and make in-person connections. When we lower the cost of networking, some of the connections are shallow, like Orkut friend requests, and some of them are deep, like the open source projects that power the internet.

Time will tell. We get to watch and participate.

p.s. Jonas also explained that there are two main ways to define social capital
* Robert Putnam, of Bowling Alone fame, sees Social Capital as an aggregate entity -- a person or society can have strong or week social capital.
* Coleman sees Social Capital as being measured by the sum total of attributes -- social prestige, family connections, business reputation etc.

The definition seems important if you're doing social science research and want your numbers to add up, but they seem mathematically equivalent to me.

Intimacy gradient

Socialtext is based on wiki which, which uses a model of collaboration coming from the world of agile software development.

Within a team, there is a level of trust. People want to be able to work together quickly, with few barriers. If someone makes a mistake, others will rally and correct it. The capabilities of the team as a whole is greater than the sum of the parts, so it's great to be able to get contribution from everyone. People are working quickly, in short iterations. It's important to be able to contribute quickly, with as few steps and interruptions as possible.

The original wiki model was fully open to the public. Socialtext supports public wikis, which are fully open, and private wikis, which are open to members of the team.

Larger organizations require a more sophisticated model than "public" or "private." There are models to draw on from Christopher Alexander, an architect whose work on "pattern languages" describes the design patterns in the physical built environment, ranging in scale from rooms, to houses, to streets, to neighborhoods and cities.

Alexander writes about an "intimacy gradient". There are some areas in a house that are public -- the front porch; areas that are indoors and public -- the living room; and areas that are indoors and more private -- bedrooms and bathrooms.

The design opportunity is to create livable, workable, more-public and more-private spaces, using a "social software method" that focuses on helping people connect and collaborate with people in the least restrictive, most appropriately trusting way.

This is a different design philosophy than the traditional methods for setting levels of privacy. The underlying traditional assumption is that information should be available, and users should have privileges, on a "need to know basis." Individuals should have as little information and as few privileges as they need to do their jobs.

The goal of a tool for group work is to be able to restrict access with as much control as possible. Content and privileges should be controllable at a highly granular level. A work process should be clearly defined, to determine what users should have access to what information, and a given stage of a process.

This methods depend on a highly-structured, formal process. Analysts and administrators need to carefully define the types of information, to parcel out privileges, and to be able to monitor information access.

These processes and assumptions are right for some environments, and wrong for many others. If an organization needs a highly structured, controlled, restricted process, then Socialtext is probably not right for that need.

Many knowledge workers overuse email, because that's the only way they can get the kind of rapid, flexible communication that's appropriate for the collaborative work they're doing.

Socialtext is seeking looking to add more layers to the "intimacy gradient", without recreating the highly structured collaboration tools that exist today.

Weblog muse

There's a class of private conversation thats an alcove in a broader, more conversation.

You develop ideas in exchange with someone, and those ideas are shared by blog or wiki. The social convention is to credit the blogmuse, and the source of conversation (in person, on IM or IRC channel.

Like many social interaction, the norm is based on give and take. It would be unfair for one party to interview another and continually post the results. It is normal give and take to share ideas, credit sources, and put the ideas out in public as material for further conversation.

The traditional muse is female, the artist is male. The physical beauty of the muse inspires the artist to create. The muse is a model, not a collaborator.

The blogmuse is any gender, and the conversation is the inspiration. The ideas are created collaboratively. Who blogs is a matter of the day.

The tensions of authorship and inspiration are more relevant in weblog form, which is individually authored, than wiki form, which is group authored. Although wikis are not necessarily public domain -- some wikis have collective ownership of content, without permitting wholesale copying and repurposing elsewhere.

Savored, not gulped

I'm slow to read the wonderful posts of Sebastian Paqet and John Udell. Their stuff has so many insights and links down interesting avenues for exploration that it requires time and focus to reflect on the ideas and to meander down the paths.

Topic is a pheremone

Sebastien Paquet and Phil Pearson have written a paper about Internet Topic Exchange, a service they built that enables weblog posts to be shared among open groups in the form that we call topic channels. After nearly a year of operation, more than 200 topic channels have been created; several of them have been very active and have brought together many participants.

Now, with the discussion a while back about emergence, one might think that this was about the coalescing of knowledge; the growth of collections of text like termite mounds.

For the metaphor to hold, it implies the following about termite biology -- that the instinct that draws termites to move grains of sand into a pile are different from the patterns that cause them to build structures with passageways and rooms dedicated to various purposes. (I don't know this to be true, seems logical, references to relevent genetic ethology welcome).

Topics serve as pheremones -- people are drawn together by the "smell" of a common interest. It takes an entirely different set of skills to shape those interests into shared meanings, to weave the individuals into a group, to build those shared interest into shared artifacts and actions.

The Virtual is Real

Just took an online survey for this conference on Virtual Communities. What struck me was the assumption that virtual communities are supplementary to non-virtual communities.

Perhaps this is the old bbs/usenet model, where people gather online to explore new identities; the 20th century equivalent of leaving the small town for New York or Chicago.

But my experience these days is different.

I work with a team that's spread around the US, working with customers spread around the world. We meet a few times a year. EFF-Austin people communicate daily by email, and interact in person a few times a month. I belong to a book club that meets monthly, and plans using email and wiki.

There is no such thing as a "virtual community." There are only real communities that meet more or less frequently in person.

Social network for Deadheads

Marc Canter sent around a draft UI for a social networking service for Greatful Dead fanatics. I actively don't care, and that's what's so great about it.

Most online social networks have the life of mayflies, because they are shallow. People gather in groups, post their favorite icons, chit-chat a bit, and move on.

By contrast, the Dead service is deep. The service lets Deadheads relive their roadtrips, using the database of recorded shows on-line at the Internet archives. Members can create a personal timeline of shows, and reconnect with people they met in parking lots and muddy fields.

This timeline would be locked to the DeadBase timeline (both music and event-ology) – so folks would indicate which shows they attended and use that to find DeadHead friends. Memories, finders, mementoes, salutations, etc. could all be left on a public bulletin board. But most importantly old friends could be reunited.

Activities that really engage their participants can be deadly dull to outsiders. But that level of engagement is a sign that community is lively for insiders.

Shallow YASNS are fads. How often have you visited Orkut or Friendster lately? A deep networking service, supporting the particular interests of the community, has the potential to stay and grow.

Three flavors of wiki exchange

There's been an ongoing conversation about wiki standardization. The conversation includes proposals for three different types of wiki exchange. Standards trace the shape of a community, like iron filings on a piece of paper over a magnet. This insight helps to explain how these proposals fit together in the world.

a) standard markup syntax. The Tiki crew have an RFC for an international wiki markup standard. This would mandate things like ** for bold and '' for italic.

The wiki world isn't one big web -- it's composed of numerous creative communities, where people collaborate intensely together within the community, and have weaker ties with other communities. Therefore, attempts to impose a standard wiki markup esperanto are ambitious. They may be worth some attention, but will take a long time if ever to implement.

The fact that wiki markup is arbitrary will not make a standard easier to achieve. Setting a standard implies that some people will be able to continue with current behavior, and others will need to change behavior. There's simply not enough internal incentive to cause people to change behavior, and there isn't the external incentive of domininant market share.

b) interchange standard. These proposals don't mandate wiki markup, but provide a means to exchange formatted pages. Since wikis all export HTML, there are proposals on the table to use a subset of XHTML as a lingua franca. This method would be somewhat "lossy" -- specialized features like Purple Numbers and Twiki variables woudn't get through. But text with the basic HTML formatting and structure would come through fine.

A wiki exchange standard fits nicely with the current pattern of wiki collaboration. People collaborate in their small and mid-sized communities, and want to exchange their results with others. A wiki exchange standard will take some negotiation, but seems feasible and worth attention, and valuable when achieved.

c) metalanguage. These proposals don't mandate input or output formats --
instead, they abstract the general principles of formatting; parsing blocks and phrases, so as to be able to implement or emulate any arbitrary markup standard. WAFL is one such meta-language, recently implemented as part of Kwiki. There's another, similar proposal at Meatball

In the mean time, before all of the standards efforts take hold, we're living in a world with multiple markup flavors, and no defined output standard. In this motley world, there's a pragmatic benefit in being able to emulate multiple sorts of markup. A metalanguage enables a wiki community to build readers or translators for other dialects, while still developing specialized vocabulary for technical documents, paragraph footnotes, or other nuances important to the subcommunity.

Decorating a Social Space

The design of online spaces reflects personal identity, danah boyd said in her excellent talk on the SXSW panel on the Esthetic of Social Networks. The "Fakesters" on Friendster didn't mean that users were trying to fake out the system -- they were expressing their identity by affiliating with icons, in the same way that kids put up dormroom posters, restaurants put up signed celebrity photos, and people put family photos on their desk at work.

There are analogs in the world of games, but much less in the realm of other social software. This insight points to an opportunity in social software design, and an opportunity to push the limits of some bad laws, too.

In the 3d world, people have many ways to decorate shared spaces -- interior design in homes shared with family and guests; and exterior design of houses and gardens.

Today, flickr lets people share photos with IM buddies and others in social networking groups. This is cool as a feature, and would be even more powerful integrated with other online social spaces.

Music is a universal means of expressing shared identity. Today, there are widgets to publish a personal playlist on a weblog. There ought to be similar group tools to play music for online groups. Individuals could vote about choices, to maximize collective preferences. "Off" would be an important standard option.

This can be done legally with Creative Commons-licensed music from Magnatune and other sources of open-licensed music. And it should be legal -- there shouldn't be any difference, legally, between Joi Ito playing music for friends in his living room, and the #joiito IRC channel sharing tunes.

These features will be subject to intense negotiation, just as they are in 3D, where home decoration and neighborhood zoning are fraught with negotiation and conflict. The benefit of online spaces is that they're not constrained to four walls, one set of color choices, and one playlist. Individuals should be able subscribe to some of the group's choices, but not all. The consequence of semi-personalization could be greater tolerance and diversity, lower levels of affiliation, or some combination of both.

It will be interesting to see how danah's insight plays out in the evolution of social software to reflect more of the cultural affiliation patterns of humans in groups.

Changing the Net to combat spam

Reflecting on two changes in web architecture to combat spam.

* LOAF is a new proposal for social spam filtering.
* AOL has been quietly blocking the websites of spammers

I ought to like the first (which uses a social network) and dislike the second (which relies on a centralized power). But my reaction is the other way around.

The blocking of spammers sites makes me want to cheer. This uses an age-old technique of punishing the anti-social with ostracism. The problem with blacklisting in general is lack of accountability. In order for the system to be fair, AOL should provide a test site for users to determine if the sites are being blocked, and there should be a public appeals process where people could get their cases reviewed and decided.

On the other hand, the blocking or slowing of all emails from strangers makes me sad. One of the beauties of the internet is the ability to meet new people with common interests. The restriction of social networks to people already in one's social circle contradicts a core value of the net. This solution would take us back to the bad old world where you needed to know someone to get an introduction. The LinkedIn model becomes mandatory, not optional.

Blocking email from new people would seem to punish the innocent much more than blocking the websites of spammers. Mail from innocent new people will languish and die in the company of viagra ads. The senders will never know.

By contrast, if the spammer blacklist had diagnostic and appeals, the innocent could free themselves from the blacklist. The guilty would be ostracized, and the innocent could speak freely.

I'd love comments from sensible readers.

Rick Klau joins Socialtext

as VP of Business Development. Rick will be working on sales, sales, marketing, and what needs doing in start-up fashion.

I'm thrilled to have him on the team -- a great person to be representing Socialtext with customers and spreading the world.

Orkut lets you dissect your friendships

Orkut has a new "feature" that lets you define gradations of friendship. But who's going to keep this up to date as relationships evolve?

The Orkut friendship gamut runs as follows: haven't met; acquaintance; friend; good friend; best friend.

So, when I spend more time getting to know acquaintances at SXSW, am I going to upgrade those "aquaintances" to "friends"? After a particularly loyal action or intimate conversation, am I going to upgrade a "friend" to "good friend."

What about downgrading? What amount of distance merits downgrading a "best friend" to a "good friend."

Orkut started as a fun friend-collecting game, but this new friend-grading scheme is pretty pointless.

The joys of friendship are in the nuances, the facets of play and affection and trust that build and transform relationships over time.

Traction didn't buy a "Ross Mayfield" ad

In comments below, Jordan Frank of Traction Software says that they never took out Google ads for "SocialText" or "Ross Mayfield."

Thanks for letting us know, and I apologize for the misunderstanding; still have no idea what quirk of the Google algorithm got Traction ads on Ross' Flickr profile.

Respectfully,

- Adina

Autonomic Social Networks

An intriguing-sounding but broken idea blogged by Judith Meskill on autonomic social networks.

The post applies ideas about self-healing computer networks -- networks that automatically detect and detour around or repair damage -- to our social and knowledge networks. Meskill quotes Christopher Meyer, coauthor of It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business, "When we become adept at applying these insights to the social sphere, we'll be able to run simulations that reveal, say, the conditions under which Iraq would reconstruct itself."

A computer network goes down when a node stops routing packets. A human network is damaged when trust breaks down; when people feel hurt, afraid, and angry; and the group doesn't have the will or the skill to repair the harm. It's possible to heal human networks, but it's a lot harder than swapping out a router.

The US government replaced Richard Nixon as president when his team was caught covering up election dirty tricks, but the distrust of government lasted for a generation. The "damaged node" was replaced, but the network didn't "self-heal."

Comparing humans to network nodes sounds intriging but is misleading.

Tools for Radicals

I've been running a slow burn at the Shirky thesis that social software killed Dean. Today, I read this Washington Post article on the implosion of the Dean Campaign while working on a piece about tools for online activism.

Disgruntled campaign exes spilled the beans about the divisions between Dean's protective chief aide Kate O'Connor and Joe Trippi, the charismatic leader of the online troups; Trippi's weaknesses as an operational manager; and the campaign's inexperience with the national media.

The article re-inforces my impression that the Dean Campaign lost on basic execution. The internet took the campaign farther than it would have otherwise gone. But winning requires traditional campaign chops too.

Clay Shirky contends that Dean lost because of the internet. Deluded supporters poured out their feelings in blog comments, and had nothing left to give on election day.

Clay is thinking like an analyst, not an activist. Here's the relevant question. If Clay wanted to:

* get a candidate elected
* get legislation passed, or stopped
* have a local administrator change a policy

Would he use internet tools as part of the organizing effort, to get the word out, find like-minded people, and co-ordinate action.

If the answer is yes, then it's reasonable to conclude that internet activism was a partial success. It's part of the solution, though it's dangerous to conclude that it is the whole thing.

If Clay isn't thinking about what it takes to win an election or an issue advocacy campaign, I don't think the opinion is relevant. I love Clay's writing, and think he is devilish smart, but I think he is missing the point.

Is XFN worse than FOAF?

You might think that XFN would be even more even more decentralized and emergent than FOAF.

Both are decentralized ways for individuals to describe their social relationships, in contrast to the centralized social networking services from Friendster et al. XFN uses hyperlinks to describe the linker's relationships with the linkee, while FOAF (friend of a friend) uses a file in XML/RDF format listing all the friend relationships.

The reason that hyperlinks are generally such a nice way of showing emergent patterns is that they reflect millions of tiny choices that individuals make about what's relevant.

But the XFN site anticipates that the primary use of XFN will be in blogrolls. If that's the case then the relationship is buried in markup, in a list that doesn't change very often. This replicates one of the major problems with relationship profiles -- they are static, while relationships change slightly with every interaction.

Am I really going to update my blogroll to add a "met" attribute for Kevin Marks after meeting him in person at Etech? That kind of micro-maintenance will happen even more rarely than people clean their closets.

Kevin Marks' "vote links" are a much simpler and likelier use of expressive hyperlinks to show emergent opinion. The choices are simpler -- vote-for and vote-against. They let users express distinctions they want to express. In an article about Diebold's ghastly security holes, you can link to Diebold with a vote-against link.

By contrast, do people really want to declare a relationship as a "crush", "date", or "sweetheart"? (These are real XFN vocabulary terms). Imagine the agony of deciding when to switch from "date" to "sweetheart". Is it after the first kiss, or the third date, or flowers, or what?

Link emergence works when the links are frequent and simple. XFN won't create link emergence, because the links are static and complicated.

Traction Software Envies Ross Mayfield

Traction Software has apparently taken out a Google Ad for the words Ross Mayfield, the CEO of Socialtext. Traction is our competitor in the enterprise social software market. Ross saw the ad on his Flickr profile and other blogs quoting Ross's personal blog.

At Socialtext we respect honorable competitors but this is pretty low. If Traction wanted whuffie as opinion leaders and googlejuice as A-list bloggers, they might try to say intelligent, articulate things about the Social Software market instead.

If there's an alternate explanation for these symptoms of Ross-envy, then let us know.

Daypop != Fitness

On the other hand, Ross Mayfield alleges that the blog echo chamber gathers and amplifies the fittest memes.

* Blog-communities collect conversation, making it easy to form and find groups of people with similar interests.

* Blog amplifiers like Technorati and Daypop make popular memes audible above the noise. In political and organizational contexts, these tools and techniques will be powerful ways to get a zeitgeist check.

Popuar ideas are "fit" by the chosen evolutionary metric. But not all loud ideas are valid. Millions of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11, and that the terrorists on the planes were Iraqis. Doesn't make the ideas true.

The zeigeist amplifiers make good counsellors but bad dictators.

Political Blogs and Democracy

The blogging session at O'Reilly Edemo had one part of the point. Yes, political blogging is "about" a new generation of A-list opinion leaders, those on the panel among them. AND it's about building groups of the like-minded. AND its a tactical tool that campaigns can use to co-ordinate in public and in private.

Social software tools play a variety of roles:
* express opinions
* build community of the like-minded
* discussion among the diverse
* tactical organizing in campaigns for elections and issues

Etech was like Orkut in 3D

Getting to see people in person, whom I'd met by blog and #IRC.

Emergent relationships

Relationships are emergent, a cumulative property of many interactions that grow trust, affiliation, shared understanding.

Relationship definitions in social network services don't reflect this -- they are declarative and static. You define and categorize a relationship at a point in time.

From conversation on #joito last night.

Emergent relationships

Relationships are emergent, a cumulative property of many interactions that grow trust, affiliation, shared understanding.

Relationship definitions in social network services don't reflect this -- they are declarative and static. You define and categorize a relationship at a point in time.

From conversation on #joito last night.

Reconnections

"It is 'reconnection' that is the most powerful feature of these social network services, not new connections." - Chris Allen, on the long, rich analysis of social networking services that I haven't finished reading yet.

Patterns of Enterprise Social Software

As Socialtext deployments grow within organizations, here are some reflections on enterprise social software deployment patterns, based on observation of usage patterns of weblogs and wikis at scale on the public internet.

There are three main tiers of social networks in an organization, as Ross Mayfield describes. These map to different usage patterns of social software.

• Project teams are creative networks, groups that work closely together. These teams use shared workspaces to communicate and collaborate intensively, and maintain a continuous, shared understanding of project status. Schedule and presence capabilities will make it easier for these groups to co-ordinate.
  

• Communities of practice are social networks. Knowledge workers want to be able to scan, discover, and meet other in their disciplines across the organization. On the public internet, there are communities of bloggers in technology, law, teaching, and other fields using this model today. There are established wiki communities in technical areas, like Apache and non-technical areas, like, for instance, Kayaking, RSS subscriptions provide an excellent method for members of communities of practice to discover and follow relevant projects and conversations. Blog search engines, including Technorati and Blogstreet, that are used to discover network relationships among blog communities.
• The enterprise as a whole is a political network. Weblogs can be used by executives to communicate in an individual voice across the organization. On the public internet, the relevant model is popular bloggers such as Joi Ito in Japan and Doc Searls in the US. The link structure enables the discovery and tracking of popular ideas, with blog search engines such as Daypop and Blogdex.

• Each creative network creates its own core of strong ties among users who can act upon information.
  
• Social networks provide a source of new ideas.
  
• Political networks assure the rapid distribution of fit memes that benefit from social filtering.
  

As on the public internet, there are valuable emergent properties of the social software network that are greater than the sum of the parts.

• Within and across creative and social networks, managers gain visibility into multiple projects and disciplines
  
• Users can more efficiently manage attention by choosing their own subscriptions and notification frequency, instead of being flooded by email.
  
• Once critical information flows are made visible with a rich link structure, the organization can analyze and improve the information flow by monitoring social dynamics, identifying key hubs and structural gaps.

The adoption of social software starts by benefiting the workgroup with tools for rapid and convenient collaboration, fostering participation. Over time, the aggregation of content, and the emergence of link structures and social network patterns provides value to the organization overall.

Fuzziness

David Weinberger wants the notion of friendship to remain imprecise, instead of clearly delineated with false precision.

I don't mind if the definition is precise, so long as it is so precise as to be unique and hard to compare.

David's picture is fuzzy to start. My picture has lots of little spikes and looks fuzzy at life-scale.

Infinite names

More reflection on why I find the Don Park diagram horrifying. Meeting new people teaches you distinctive new things to appreciate. Getting to know another person well is a glimpse of the infinite.

The dimensions of the chart ramify infinitely, the more people you know, and the closer you know some of them.

What poverty of expression, to try to constrain the infinite into a 5-scale in 4 categories.

Pete, of course, suggests a Friendship Wiki.

That Which Should Remain Nameless

Don Park has a draft of a user interface to diagram the level of closeness of one's friends. I hope this is intended as satire!

A Friendship Circle is basically a nested rings of people (represented by icons with miniture photo and name) around a person. To use the Friendship Circle, the user drag and drops icons from a palette of friends to the circle. Note that this can be done using DHTML+CSS.

Does one spend time with this graph every morning, and move one friend-counter closer, after he has been helpful in a difficult situation, and move one of the mistress-counters further away because she used a unappealing perfume?

Very clever and amusing if satire. Repellent if sincere. It might have a certain appeal among playboy geeks and junior high-school girls.