Category: Social Software

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

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 “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 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”.

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.

In simpler language, people get together to share stuff and do stuff.
The point’s right, the big words are extra.

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.

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.

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?

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