Category: Social Software

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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