Category: Blogging

Jon Udell writes about the value of overlapping scopes in networks of people, and the particular value of individuals who are able to bridge scopes.

If I am seeking or sharing information, why do I need to be able to address a group of 3 (my team), or 300 (my company), or 300,000 (my company’s customers), or 300 million (the Usenet)? At each level I encounter a group that is larger and more diffuse. Moving up the ladder I trade off tight affinity with the concerns of my department, or my company, for access to larger hive-minds. But there doesn’t really have to be a tradeoff, because these realms aren’t mutually exclusive. You can, and often should, operate at many levels. [Practical Internet Groupware]

This suggests another layer in Ross Mayfield’s network valuation.
The value of a network isn’t just in its size, and the number of potential groups.
The value of a network is also in the connections among the different groups.
I wonder if there are optimal values?
* Too tightly coupled, and there is groupthink, with little diversity and innovation.
* Too loosely coupled, and it is more difficult or impossible for the group to behave in an emergent fashion –to reach agreement, to co-ordinate action, to swarm around a big idea,
The cool thing is, with networked media like weblogs and wikis, it should be possible to experiment and measure.

Blogshares is a fantasy market where you bet on shares of bloggers, and the value of your shares is multipled by the number of links to the blog.
I totally don’t get this game.
It takes political-network blogging, and makes the rich get even richer by betting on top players. It’s the power-law squared.
There’s no way to win unless you’re Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan.
If you’re a blogger, and want to win the Blogshares game, and you’re not Andrew, then you bet against your own blog, and drive the value of your own shares down.
By contrast, if you’re “just blogging”, then you can win if you have more readers than you would reach by email. You can win if you meet people through comments that you wouldn’t have otherwise met. You can win by building relationships in the social and creative networks, even if you’re not Susannah Breslin talking about pornography.
In sports, if you’re not an Olympic athlete, you can play on a local team, or you can run for personal records and fitness.
Why play games that you can’t win, any way you look at it?

Ross Mayfield has an intriguing article about using network metrics about the number of connections in a network to value social capital.
I think there is an insight here, but I’m still puzzling over the concept.
The concept of valuation raises a few key questions:
* value to whom?
* is there any meaningful medium of exchange between levels?
A peer-to-peer file-sharing network is very valuable to end-users, but (as currently implemented), reduces value for broadcast distributors. (I think there are plenty of things that broadcast distributors could do to take advantage of p2p instead of suing customers, but that’s a whole ‘nother story)
I’m represented by two senators, shared with 18 million residents of Texas. I have a small number of close friends. Those types of relationships aren’t fungible.
In a money economy, you can say that two pairs of shoes have the same value as a single electric lawnmower.
Is there an analogous way to value different types of social relationships?

Somebody once said that putting in an ERP system is like setting your business plan in concrete.
Mitch Ratcliffe explains how technology systems should be chosen and designed in order to avoid initial-state biases.
Mitch’s insights suggest a number of design lessons for social software:
Mitch:
Participation and modality biases… define how and when users should contribute to the group

Tom Coates on the discussion to code ratio.
Alternately, Jon Lebkowsky posts to a mailing list on the subject, keep the tools simple, and think about how best to use them to get things done.

Peter Merholz is back with a new, Quaker-influenced blogging philosophy — only speak if you can improve on the silence. In honor of Peter’s new philosophy, I have launched a new blog.

More on Ross Mayfield’s analysis of new generation of web-native online community tools :

• Conversational Networks: blogs and journals
• Explicit Networks, e.g. Ryze
• Private Networks, e.g. Friendster
• Physical Networks, e.g. Meet-up

It seems to me, though that these different services don’t represent standalone categories.
They’re features. They work best together.
I find blogs much more interesting to surf than profile databases like Ryze — you get a much richer picture of a person’s interests and personality from their blog.
It would be great to be able to navigate from a blog to the person’s contact information, add that person to one’s list of contacts, and invite them to be your contact (connecting the weblog with Ryze).
In the early days of word processing software, there were popular standalone spell checkers and standalone font packages. These tools got rolled into the standard word processor package.
I’m not saying necessarily that all of the tools will inevitably be glommed together, like a bloated Office Suite. Some features will merge into integrated products and services. There will continue piece parts, connected by open interfaces.
I think that these services work better together than separately, and are part of one emerging Social Software category.

Ross Mayfield analyzes the new generation of web-native online community tools :

• blogs and journals
• public and private networking clubs, e.g. Ryze and Friendster
• real-world meeting services, e.g. Meet-up

which displace older models like bulletin board systems and usenet.
Jon Lebkowsky replies that much of the “new online community” is not so new.

We’re building new tools which are refinements of the old tools, and the social practices are clearly an extension of stuff we’ve done all along

Sam Ruby suggests using a thumb-rating system to train your blog aggregator to find more blogs you’d like.
Mark-Pilgrim-is-God has, of course already implemented this for his own site.
This could take advantage of opinion tags. Another good reason to implement opinion tags.
As long as we don’t call them thumb tags.

PC Forum is running a lively conference wiki using Socialtext’s Nice Little Wiki.
The conference also has a trackback metablog, aggregating posts from PC Forum bloggers.
Folks are also fotoblogging using Fotolog and PreClick.
Social software is the next best thing to being there.