Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is giving away through Wikia, his for-profit company, everything someone needs (apps, space, network access, etc) to create and operate a community collaboration site:
"It is open-source software and open content," Wales said in a phone interview. "We will be providing the computer hosting for free, and the publisher can keep the advertising revenue."
That could prove disruptive to business models of Web sites that provide free services to customers but require a cut of any resulting revenue in return.
Wikia gives away the tools and the revenue to its users. It requires only that sites built with the company's resources link to Wikia.com, which makes money through advertising.
Wikia calls the free-hosting service "OpenServing" (http://www.openserving.com). It runs on an easy-to-use version of MediaWiki software developed by ArmchairGM.com, a sports fan community site Wikia recently acquired and plans to extend.
When they announced the acquisition [of YouTube], Google executives said they were happy with how their own service, Google Video, allowed people to upload and watch clips. But they said YouTube had become the clear leader in assembling an active community around videos, which presented a big business opportunity and gave Google more advertising inventory.
"It's a great deal for Google in that they now have the power of a network that can act promotionally, which is something they lacked," said Ian Schafer, chief executive of Deep Focus, an ad agency that has promoted movies on YouTube. "No one is able to monetize traffic like Google has."
But Li, the Forrester analyst, said Google needed to tread carefully and not try to turn the site into a moneymaker by filling it with ads. Google has always shown restraint with its highly targeted search ads, she said.
According to recent studies, teenagers generally use instant messaging and text messaging for talking friends and email for complex messages and communicating with people who can't be contacted other ways. It's likely not just the technology but also the increasing problems of irrelevant mail and spam cluttering mailboxes:
87 percent of teenagers in the US now use the Internet, and many of them prefer instant messaging to e-mail. According the report, "Teens who participated in focus groups for this study said that they view e-mail as something you use to talk to 'old people,' institutions, or to send complex instructions to large groups. When it comes to casual written conversation, particularly when talking with friends, online instant messaging is the clearly the mode of choice for today's online teens."This is a problem for institutions that use e-mail as an official communications tool, since students often miss announcements or deadlines. Unfortunately, IM isn't great for sending out reminders with lots of specifics, such as instructions for registration. What's a college to do?
For some schools, the correct answer is: set up a MySpace page. After all, there's nothing hipper for students than being "friends" with your college registrar or school principal. The intriguing thing about this method of reaching students is that it's most often not "instant" at all; students receive messages when they log in or they visit the school's MySpace pages—the equivalent of using e-mail and a Web portal.
When Viacom offered $750 million for Facebook in January, he asked for $2 billion and was rebuffed, according to a person involved in the negotiations. Now, he remains undecided about the latest offer, made in the last few weeks by Yahoo. That offer, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was confirmed Thursday by two industry executives, one briefed on the deal by Facebook and the other by Yahoo. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are continuing.
To woo Zuckerberg, Yahoo has offered about $900 million for Facebook and says it will keep the company somewhat independent, with Zuckerberg in charge. This has been its model with other acquisitions like Flickr, a photo-sharing site, and Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service that lets members share lists of their favorite Web sites.
Although, in point of fact, Zuckerberg hasn't said he's going to sell yet.
Digg's founder talks about Digg:
Speaking at the Building Blocks conference in San Jose today, Digg founder and chief architect Kevin Rose described his site as a "crazy madhouse of news flying around, 100 percent user powered." The Digg madhouse isn't yet a crazy quilt of ads aimed at increasing revenue, he noted when asked about getting to profitability.
...via Digg (of course)
Andrew Carvin's notes from Jimmy Wales' talk at Wikimania:
We're announcing that the One Laptop Per Child Project is including Wikipedia as the first element in their content repository. (ac: though they've been talking about this for at least a year.)
Wikiversity: A center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual materials, for all ages in all languages. It'll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research baed in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. Launching in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.
Wikimedia Foundation will also now have an advisory board to help improve partnerships, public relations, financing, etc. Additionally, Wikia and SocialText is launching Wikiwyg. It will make it easier for more people to get involved in wiki editing.
The technological barrier to entry keeps out really smart people who are uncomfortable with the Wikipedia interface. "Wikiwyg, in some shape or form, will be the future of the Internet," because it will allow non-techies to become Wikipedians easily.
...via Smart Mobs
An interesting Guardian article on who participates in a community and, at least peripherally, how that contributes to the critical mass of a working community:
It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.
...
Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo points out that much the same applies at Yahoo: in Yahoo Groups, the discussion lists, "1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress; 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups," he noted on his blog (www.elatable.com/blog/?p=5) in February
...via elearningpost
According to the Guardian, YouTube has overtaken MySpace as the place to be on the Internet:
The video sharing site has taken a 3.9% share of global internet visits a day compared with 3.35% for MySpace, according to internet analysis company Alexa.
YouTube's popularity has grown immensely over the first six months of the year. In May its reach outgrew that of the BBC's websites.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, YouTube's American user base grew by 297% in the first half of the year.
An article that talks about wikis as disruptive technology within organizations:
What is clear is organizations continue to spend millions of dollars on content management infrastructure solutions, rather than putting more power in the hands of their users to collaborate effectively together. The wiki paradigm is disruptive because it is a low-cost alternative that brings key editing features into the hands of users. The approach increases the collaborative productivity of an organization or its extended ecosystems.
Overall, wikis increase the socialization process, enabling collaboration to generate at warp speed. Socialization underpins the sharing of ideas, and hence innovation capacity increases from wiki infrastructure.
To date, wikis have largely been a grassroots phenomenon. Few senior executives have used a wiki or are embracing collaboration patterns at the speed required for competitive advantage. Compared with new firms embracing the architecture of participation, that puts them at a disadvantage.
A recent IBM international survey of 765 CEOS confirmed that CEOs will say they are for collaboration and for radically shaking up their business models to increase their innovation speed. However, when asked how their organizations are collaborating in different markets, the results in their ability to collaborate effectively were: in emerging markets, 73 percent; in global markets, 51 percent; and in mature markets, only 47 percent.
Russell Buckley talks about Real World Wiki, the process of annotating physical objects and accessing the information via mobile phone, and what might be its beginnings in Wikimapia.
...via Carnival of the Mobilists
A project at WikiMedia with the mission:
Wikiversity is a centre for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Its primary priorities and goals are to:
Among the things I found interesting here is a list of how people can participate in this project:
Some Ideas for Effective Initial Participation
There are definitely some ideas here that I can see for eXtension.
Interesting look at what an 'unconference' might be as compared to a conference:
Conference vs Unconference
Attendees vs Participants
Exhibitors vs Participants
Recruiting speakers vs Recruiting participants
Content planning vs Content facilitation
Direct marketing vs Word of mouth marketing
Handouts vs Wikis
12 month planning cycle vs 12 week planning cycle
Top down vs Bottom up
Wisdom of experts vs Wisdom of crowds
Magazine coverage 2 months later vs Live blogging/podcasting
Slides vs Stories
Panels vs Conversations
Best practices vs Practicing
According to a new survey social networks attract nearly half of all web users:
The number of visitors to the top 10 social-networking sites soared in April, attracting nearly half of all Web users, a market research firm says.
The top 10 sites collectively grew 47 percent in the United States from the same month a year ago to 68.8 million unique visitors, Nielsen/NetRatings said. The sites reached 45 percent of active Web users.
The top five sites are MySpace, Blogger, Classmates Online, YouTube, and MSN Spaces.
This post ( How University Administrators Should Approach the Facebook: Ten Rules) has been around awhile, but it has some pretty good discussion of what Facebook is, why students use it and why in one form or another it will always be around:
1. The Facebook isn't going away. While Facebook.com may not last forever, a service like the Facebook will always be present and useful on a college campus. The logic to this is quite simple: students are forced to renegotiate their social networks every semester. The Facebook supports and answers the student's information needs. Put simply, our students are curious; they want to know anything and everything about the students around them. If you had the Facebook when you were an undergrad, wouldn't you have wanted the same?
...
3. Students are not being cautious regarding their private information in the Facebook. I found that less than 5% of UNC Freshmen on the Facebook protect their accounts from strangers. In a previous study (An Evaluation.., Stutzman, 2005), I asked students their opinions on privacy in Social Networking Communities (Facebook, Friendster, MySpace). I found very mixed results. Students believe they should protect their privacy, but they aren't actually doing it.
4. Students may do stupid things on the Facebook. Really stupid things. However, aren't mistakes something we all make? The critical difference I concede is that anything they say or do can be copied from the Facebook and rebroadcast elsewhere. I've had numerous conversations with reporters who tell me they do background work with the Facebook. Everyone from the campus police to the Secret Service is looking at the Facebook. The problem is twofold: students may do stupid things, but we don't want those stupid things to haunt them for the rest of their lives. Criminal records can be expunged; search engine caches may not. We need to create a mindfulness of this possibility.
Alex Bosworth talks about the collaborative process of Wikipedia and why it works. Collaborators come in different shapes and sizes, he says. Some of them work on one project that they know a great deal about, some of them love to edit, some of them drop in and contribute a little, some of them contribute a lot. That Wikipedia allows for all these different users and has ways to reward the high level contributors adds a great deal to its success:
The core mechanic for Wikipedia is both the thrill of editing a grand project collaboratively, and the more basic reward of having the power to be the expert in a subject that is near and dear. Wikipedia self-selects for people who are obsessive about various subjects or just editing in general, as in every case the person or set of people willing to hammer their edits obsessively will win power over the page, and thus the reward of participation. For controversial subjects where two groups are equally obsessive, this will work itself out in a compromise where only the most obviously provable details remain, such as seen in the common Controversy sections: "Among many, there exists a school of thought that Hitler was really just misunderstood". This compromise is otherwise known in the sometimes cryptic Wikipedia shorthand as of WP:NPOV, or Neutral Point of View.
In terms of the high level goal of Wikipedia being the sum of human knowledge, edit wars may be sub-optimal as some useful information provided by domain experts is overwritten. In optimizing for the most prolific editors, Wikipedia does not select for the most expert editor to win, or offer a reward for the most expert edit, instead the most widely acceptable edits among the mostly non-experts will win. This mechanic does however succeed in creating an environment where thousands of people are willing to make thousands of edits, creating a very wide and useful resource for many types of information, such as facts, basic details of concepts and controversial topics phrased in neutral tones.
...via Smart Mobs
A Newsweek column on continuous partial attention:
But there's a problem in the workplace when the interruptions intrude on tasks that require real concentration or quiet reflection. And there's an even bigger problem when our bubble of connectedness stretches to ensnare us no matter where we are. A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger's wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you're always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner. The anxiety is contagious: anyone who winds up talking to a person infected with CPA feels like he or she is accepting an Oscar, and at any moment the music might stop the speech.
In her talk, Stone was careful to acknowledge the benefits of perpetual contact. But her message is that the balance has tilted way too far toward distraction, creating a sense of constant crisis. "We're not ever in a place where we can make a commitment to anything," she explained to me when I called her a few days later. "Constantly being accessible makes you inaccessible." All so true. But during our conversation, some auditory clues led me to ask her one more question. "Linda," I asked, "are you taking this interview while driving your car?" She admitted that she was. But as long as she didn't have to slam the brakes or dodge a pedestrian, I had her continuous partial attention.
The Korea Times reports that courts in Korea will be experimenting with trials conducted on the Internet. The issue is not just convenience, but also education--the information will be open for anyone to view:
Although the court has not yet decided on a detailed framework, it plans to allow the parties in lawsuits to submit their list of evidence, legal documents and other data on Weblogs or Internet message boards to be operated by the court. The court decisions will also be announced online.
The court also plans to allow people to buy court documents and other requirements in preparing for their lawsuits through the Internet by credit card or mobile-phone payments.
Korea has one of the largest Internet populations in the world, with the penetration rate reaching over 70 percent.
``If the courts are able to develop a way to handle some of the court trials entirely through the Internet, we believe it will save a significant amount of time and also reduce costs in legal procedures in areas such as document deliveries,’’ said Judge Kim Sang-jun of the Seoul Administration Court.
From the Washington Post:
While growth is slowing at most top Internet sites, it is skyrocketing at sites focused on social networking, blogging and local information.
The dramatic success of those Internet categories is apparent from a recent online-traffic analysis provided by market research firm ComScore Media Metrix, which examined visitor growth rates among the 50 top Web sites over the past year.
...Smart Mobs
I also get a variation on this effect (only the top stories) by adding Slashdot to my personalized Google page.
An interesting case study on the major adoption of wiki software in a large organization (Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, an international investment bank):
One of the biggest users of Socialtext in DrKW is the Equity Delta1 equity financing team -- led by Darren Lennard, Global Co-Head -- which deals with stock loans, equity swaps, and structured equity-like financing.
The team suffered from having too much email to deal with, which made communication clumsy and difficult. They neededed a collaborative working methodology for the development of business plans and for process analysis. They also needed to have some way of storing commonly-used information that was more usable than a simple file dump.
Equity Delta1 uses the Socialtext workspace in a number of ways.
As new topics come up, such as which clients they cover or how they analyse their business, they create an open forum where anyone can post views, comments and questions on given subjects. When it matures, the discussion becomes a formal page. They also use the wiki to publish and share white papers and bulletins, coordinating sales and marketing activities, and discussing and organizing critical team tasks.
Because discussion is now happening on the wiki, email usage has dropped significantly. The Equity Delta1 team's intention is to make Socialtext their sole means of communication and indeed they are already using it daily.
However, the team are still learning how best to use Socialtext, and still see it as an equivalent to shared folders and files rather than as a more versatile collaboration tool. There has also been resistance to the openness of the wiki. The Delta1 workspace is separate to the DrKWikipedia (which is accessible to any employee of DrKW), and without this privacy, Lennard believes that his team would not have adopted it so rapidly. But once use of the Delta1 wiki matures, it will be ported over to the DrKWikipedia wiki.
...via Many-to-Many
A new Pew Internet & American Life report talks about American teenagers as content creators and consumers:
American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.
Teens are often much more enthusiastic authors and readers of blogs than their adult counterparts. Teen bloggers, led by older girls, are a major part of this tech-savvy cohort. Teen bloggers are more fervent internet users than non-bloggers and have more experience with almost every online activity in the survey.
Via the Toronto Star (registration required) a discussion of the encroachment of private spaces on public spaces and the way social networks are changing:
"The big change has been this shift from groups to networks," he says. "They're less formally structured, they're more amorphous."
Those in anyone's network don't have to be physically close, just a cell call away, and it's easier to opt in or opt out of a network than it is a group.
"People can switch around and manoeuvre around. What that does is leave them with some uncertainty in their lives but it also leaves them with some autonomy. It's a switch from public sociability to private sociability."
Your cellphone network becomes, in a sense, an extension of yourself, what some sociologists have begun calling "a third skin."
"The notion is that you should be connected at all times," says Wellman.
...via Smart Mobs
From a survey of Japanese middle school students:
...via Cognitive Daily
You can catalog the books you've read and see what everyone else is reading with LibraryThing
...via Smart Mobs
BoingBoing reports on Librivox, a project to get volunteers to create audio recordings of public domain books:
LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting? Here’s how it works (for now):
A book will be selected by LibriVox from the gutenberg project’s database of public domain books
(We hope that) a few volunteers will step up to read and record to mp3 one or more chapters from the chosen book, so that we’ll finish with a complete audio book (or audiobook).
If you have your own podcast, you could do a special LibriVox edition of your show, and let me know about it; then I’ll grab the audio and put it up on Ourmedia.org, which stores files on the internet archive
If you don’t have a podcast, let me know and we’ll find a way to get the chapters uploaded to the LibriVox Ourmedia.org site
Each new chapter will be linked from LibriVox, and podcast through feedburner.
Once all chapters from a given book are finished, a new book will be chosen and the process will begin again!
New from Google. Supposedly built on the Jabber engine:
They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world. Google Talk offers you:
Choice: Get in touch how and when you want to–over email, IM or a call
Quality: Talk through your computer but hear your friends as if they were in the same room
Convenience: Your Gmail contacts are pre-loaded into Google Talk so inviting or talking to your friends is just a click away
Google Talk is in beta and requires a Gmail username and password.
Stowe Boyd talks about something he calls Social Architecture:
Authors and readers both leave social traces behind (or "gestures"), as a result of their activities. Authors point to other blogs in their posts - either by link or by name - and create ageless links like blogrolls: these represent an implicit social network relationship between the parties, not just a topical pointer, like a search engine provides. And the actions of readers (which includes all authors) create similar gestural information: explicit, shared evidence of reading like comments and bookmarks, and implicit value indications, like the frequency of return to a specific blog, or the number of comments left.
...
Machines -- software applications, like Google or Technorati -- "read" the blogosphere, too, although not in the way that people do. These apps are plowing through the blogs, indexing the text, and, on the social side, algorithmically evaluating the value of various blogs or blog posts based on the social cues that readers and writers have left behind, as well as less social analysis, like keyword incidence.
From New Scientist:
A man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion carrying out a virtual mugging spree by using software "bots" to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II. The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash.
...via Smart Mobs
Allen Varney in an article at The Escapist talks about converting a role-playing game from paper to online with collaborative input from fans. He provides suggestions that could be useful in any cooperative development project:
1. Excited interest
Promote your idea. Convey why it's cool, why people should mess with it, and how they can improve it. If you can't get a dozen people excited about your creative property, it's probably not worth pursuing anyway.
2. Fast, frequent communication
After you build energy, synchronize effort. Use mailing lists, instant messaging, forums, blogs, and shared netspaces of all kinds. Use a Wiki! A collection of editable Web pages is probably your best resource. Note, though, Wikis select for deeply involved contributors. It takes so much time to stay current, lightly involved onlookers may soon drop out.
...via BoingBoing
At Knowledge Lab, Etienne Wenger in a video interview about communities of practice
15-year-old girls are now the world's top consumers of computer chips. So says this article from the LA Times. It has other interesting things to say about how kids use presence and networking applications.
...via Smart Mobs
An article on what constitutes a Community of Practice:
Communities of practice (CoP) have been hailed as the perfect vehicle for knowledge transfer and competence development, and the associated theory presented as a bridge between the theories of organisational learning and organisational performance (Snyder: 1997). Unlike some 'here today-gone tomorrow' solutions to corporate under-performance, such as business process reengineering or core- competency, CoP theory appears to have had a much longer period of maturation, finally coming to prominence as a result of its co-evolution with the theory and practices of knowledge management, especially the development of computer enabled and mediated networking. It has gained considerable currency in the field of corporate development because of the emphasis that is now placed on knowledge as a competitive asset. With its wider diffusion has come a proliferation of community types, such as, communities of interest, virtual communities, and distributed communities of practice, all of which, it could be argued, have diluted and even distorted the original concept. This may be due in part to the fuzziness of the original definition and the difficulty some may have of distinguishing a CoP from a team, a learning organisation, or some form of informal social group.
...via elearningpost
Georgia Tech/PARC research says that sharing music builds community and that users judge others by their playlists:
When one user decided to share his music, he recalled: “I just went through it to see if there was not like stuff that would be like, I don’t know, annoying, that I would not like people to know that I had.” Sensing that his library was “not very cool,” he added more music to create a “balanced” portrayal of himself.
Another participant was worried about what his co-workers would think of the Justin Timberlake and Michael McDonald music he had purchased for his wife and included in his library. Yet another user crafted his library around his German nationality and collection of German band music he thought others wouldn’t have. Meanwhile, other users hid their expertise because they thought their co-workers would not relate to it or find it distasteful.
...via Copyfight
Ben Brown writes about using Rendezvous and iChat to make virtual, on-the-fly connections at conferences:
Joshua and I posted a virtual message on a message board that did not exist physically, but was tied to a specific location. He responded, and was able to take advantage of his slightly better vantage point to record a notable experience. He transmitted a digital photo, first over a wire, then over the airwaves to me, where I transferred it over airwaves then wires to a server somewhere in New York. While the notable event was still occuring, two strangers collaborated to share the event with the world, and record it for posterity. It all took about three minutes.
We live in the future.
...via apophenia
In Wired, Bruce Sterling weighs in on folksonomies:
Folksonomy emerges from a combination of two inventions: (1) machines that can automate at least some of what it takes to classify information and (b) social software that makes users willing to do at least some of the work for nothing. You'll notice that 1 and b don't really go together. Folksonomy is like that. A pinch of free work and a peck of mechanical sorting will get you from 1 to b. Examples, which include the social bookmarking Web sites del.icio.us, furl.net, and jots.com, are proliferating.
The Flickr photo-sharing service harnesses the power of folksonomy to organize a mighty torrent of images flowing from the world's digital cameras, phones, and PDAs. The principle is simple: It's a drag to name or describe the zillions of private photographs you shoot each year, but that labor is a lot less onerous to people who like to surf snaps online.
Thus, Flickr breaks up the world into folksy categories that genuinely interest the online audience. In Flickrland, the world is composed of Architecture, Beaches, Cameraphones, Dogs, Europe, Friends, Graffiti, Honeymoons, and on and on. Nobody invented this scheme, and best of all, it's an ongoing, democratic process. It's a product of group interaction, like footpaths trampled across a virgin wilderness by a herd of bison.
A folksonomy is nearly useless for searching out specific, accurate information, but that's beside the point. It offers dirt-cheap, machine-assisted herd behavior; common wisdom squared; a stampede toward the water holes of semantics. There's room for scholarly smarts in this approach - for instance, you might invent a really cool term like folksonomy - but mostly, it's a new way to crowd-surf. It's as though you threw a kayak into a mosh pit and glided not just through Web pages but through labels, concepts, and ideas, too.
...via Get Real
danah boyd has an interesting post on a cultural divide in IM:--those who see it primarily as a 'presence' tool and those who see it primarily as a communications tool:
I don't spend a lot of time conversing on IM, very little in fact. I simply do not have time. But, i am 10 million times more likely to converse with someone who is always-on than someone who just pops up for conversation. The reason is simple - collective signaling of conversational possibility. As an always-on'r, when someone pokes me to talk and i don't have time, i say sorry - can't talk or some equivalent (except in the case of my phone which might appear to be on while i'm doing something but isn't really). I expect the same from my fellow always-on'rs. So, when i'm in the mood to talk to people and they're in the mood to talk to me (or we're equally procrastinating), we come to a consensus and conversation happens.
Now, let's go back to the people who come online just to talk. The problem with this group is that they're unintentionally exerting power. They are declaring their free time by logging on and they're assuming that i am signaling the same thing. But i'm not. This is simply cultural cluelessness. But when they then get upset with me, that's the exertion of power. And this is what has prompted me to change IM accounts or block people in the past. Now, i'm just rude.
Articles I've read indicate that this is an important part of the difference in how teenagers, particularly Japanese teenagers use cell phones and the way the rest of us do--they use them, not necessarily for long conversations--but to 'touch' each other. Longer conversations are negotiated.
I've had people, when I didn't respond to them immediately by instant messenger, call me on the phone--this is the demand approach to communication--I want to talk right now and I demand that you talk to me. It's a stress-added communication style rather than a style that tries to respect both sides of the conversation and it eventually leads to people hiding their presence rather than putting themselves out there where they can interact with people in ways that might work for everyone.
The Shifted Librarian talks to her kids about Yahoo turning 10:
Brent: "So Yahoo is only 10 years old? I thought it was more like 20."
Jenny: "No, it's almost as old as you are." (Brent is nine years old.)
Brent: "Wow. So there was no Yahoo before I was born?"
Jenny: "That's right. Before you were born, there wasn't really an internet or the web or email. There was a very basic form for people in the military and at universities, but there were no web sites to visit and no web games to play."
Brent: "So Runescape didn't exist?"
Jenny: "Nope. You're older than Runescape."
Brent: "So computers were worthless ten years ago?"
Lee Bryant at Headshift has a great entry on social stuff that isn't blogs:
...Looking beyond blog and wikis, many other types of tools are adopting socially connected characteristics, such as photo sharing, social bookmarking, notetaking and many other types of applications. We will need better aggregation and concept matching tools in order to pull together an increasing amount of online interaction that is becoming spread across too many places right now. Ton touches upon this in his response to Stuart Henshall's announcement that he is moving away from 'traditional blogging', Marc Canter has been talking about digital lifestyle aggregators for some time. Seb Paquet recently wrote about commentlogging, which involves using del.icio.us to create a personal trail of comments and discussions that a user takes part in, and del.icio.us backlinks to see who has bookmarked a given page. The meticulous Phil Gyford also scripted a tool recently to pull together his varied output into a composite RSS feed to make it easier to follow his tracks. Finally, of course, Technorati is doing an excellent job of tying together weblog conversations and themes, and we can expect a lot more from the sleeping giant in this space: Google.Several related techniques that rose to prominence during 2004 will become focal points for technical development during 2005 to support the requirements of more active, more sophisticated communities of people using social software to help them manage their lives and work.
One of these is folksonomies (aka social tagging or ethnoclassification). We have been using this approach for over a year in a social knowledge sharing community and it has produced some very interesting results that we will be reviewing soon to inform future development in this area. It is not without its limitations, and it should not be seen as competing exclusively with traditional metadata structures, but more than any other idea last year this one captured the imagination of those of us who strive to give people more control over the language, relationships and structure of their own information. This technique is a close relation to collaborative filtering - social bookmarking tool del.icio.us is driven by social tagging, whilst Digg is driven by user ratings - and we can probably expect new and exciting combinations of the two approaches in new social software tools.
Another is the pursuit of simplicity, adaptability and tolerance of ambiguity on the client side, whilst applying computing power on the server side to make users' lives a little easier....
...via Designing for a Civil Society
David Pollard lays out what he thinks are the ten most important ideas on blogs and the internet in 2004:
1. The Blog is a Journal, and Online Journalism is Our Game:
2. We Are Our Own Content Providers, and
3. Content Has Value Only in Use:
...
10. The Ultimate Utility of Blogging:
Last, but certainly not least, is this remarkable statement from blogger Rob Paterson on the utility of blogging: "The utility of blogging to me is that it is recreating the lost world of a humanity that is connected to itself and hence to everything."
Hossein Derakhshan reports on his blog that officials in Iran have cut access to blogging and social networking tools:
Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling.
So says Ernie The Attorney:
My view is that blogs matter because they represent a new way of communicating that is in its infancy, but one which is clearly growing at a rapid pace. Whether network TV weaves blogs into their plot lines is not significant, and the same is true for having the word 'blog' chosen as Word of the Year. Blogs matter for a lot of reasons; that's a simple fact.
Cutting Through has more lists of ten things:
Ten Cool things you can do with web feeds, including:
And, a pointer to ten things your website should be doing:
Cutting Through provides ten ways to use blogs to manageprojects:
Communicating with project stakeholders
Keeping your stakeholders up-to-date with the progress of the project is vital - but if they’re busy people with other things to worry about, how do you keep them informed between major milestone reports with bombarding them with email?
One way is to post regular intra-milestone updates to a blog. It can be updated weekly, daily or even hourly without drowning your stakeholders with emails - and if they use RSS webfeeds to keep updated, they only need to scan the webfeed summaries to know if it’s something they’ll need to respond to.
Also, four ways to use wikis for project management.
A paper by Stephen Coleman on The Network-Empowered Citizen:
The main conclusion of this research is that new sources of networked knowledgesharing have emerged and are producing a new kind of empowered citizen. Networkempowered citizens are not like liberal-individualists, insofar as they recognise the value of pooling knowledge, but neither are they like members of virtual communities, because their principal commitment is to pursuing offline interests and values. Networkempowered citizens go online to augment their store of bridging social capital, enabling them to make heterogeneous connections and acquire knowledge conveniently. Civic networks should be respected and promoted as sources of empowered citizenship. Network-empowered citizenship weakens the sustainability of vertical structures of government and calls for new forms of co-governance in which the shared common knowledge of citizens feeds directly into the making of more relevant policies and more accountable, legitimate and effective decisions.
At Many2Many, Ross Mayfield has some thoughts on citizen's media, aggregation, powerful people and the power of the people:
...While an index can be a common point of meaning (e.g. the Dow), you gain greater affinity for an organization or individual who interprets where it is going (e.g. broker). Each shock leads to new models that are opportunities for new entrants. In this market of memes, anyone can be a broker, analyst or quant with the right skills and desire — and the right moment of entry.My point is really the middle of the road. Aggregation will augment Citizen’s Media as it needs to scale. Editorial process will augment emergent practice. The long tail will wag the dog. If we will it to.
Lilia Efimova at Mathemagenic is musing on conversation overload and why it seems easier to participate in weblog conversations than mailing list conversations:
Weblog conversations are easier to "jump into" in a middle - as each weblog post have to be meaningful on itself (see also Jill on good hypertext), bloggers make more effort summarising earlier arguments or at least linking to them. In case of a mailing list without threading you have to read all messages to get into the context of conversation).Weblog conversations are "relaxed": of course, timely response may be important, but you know that nothing awful happens if you react a couple of months later. In a case of a mailing list reacting in a couple of months can easily turn your message into "off topic", as conversation moves to new areas and context is lost.
Parts of weblog conversations are easier to "wave" into your own thinking. It could be a "personal KM researcher" bias, but I could hardly do without connecting discussions I have with others with my own thinking (re: conversations with others vs. conversations with self)....
Here's a good set of resources and links on online communities of practice.
Portals Magazine writes about business blogging:
Though the potential of blogs and aggregators is tremendous, these tools don't make sense for every organization, particularly those in which central control over content is a major concern. For now, they are best suited for companies or institutions where innovation is a goal and the serendipitous discovery of information is desired. Blogs and aggregators can also work well in situations where information needs to be distributed, commented upon, searched, and made easily available for later use; email, instant messaging, and standard Web sites do not allow for this combination of capabilities.For businesses or divisions in which community building is an objective, such as developer networks, cross-functional collaboration teams, research groups, or customer user groups, blogging tools deliver ideal capabilities. By the same token, individual and group control must be acceptable, and even desired, for blogging to work in a corporate setting. In addition, the personal voice must be seen as a good thing, whether to form a more direct connection to customers or to allow for more meaningful discussions within the firewall.
David Weinberger asks why some things feel on the web like 'ours' while other things feel like 'theirs':
Put aside for the moment question of what's legally ours on the Net. Instead, consider what's ours in a less explicit and less rigorous sense. Google feels like ours (even though it legally belongs to its shareholders) while Microsoft's new search site feels like theirs. Weblogs feel like their ours while online columns do not.
Dave Morgan talks about content tails, the talk about the content that takes place on web pages and blogs, at ClickZ:
For every election news story or analysis carried by traditional media, there were probably hundreds more in the blogosphere, and hundreds of millions of page views and RSS (define) feed downloads. Lots of online media was created; much of it directly related to content produced by other media entities.
This phenomenon, called the "content tail" by some, is developing as a force to be reckoned in the media business -- just ask Dan Rather!
You've been exposed to the content tail if you read John Battelle's Searchblog, Jeff Jarvis's BuzzMachine, or Wired Magazine's October issue; heard Martin Nisenholtz of New York Times Digital speak recently about the future of online media; or downloaded the Jon Stewart/"Crossfire" clip via BitTorrent.
...via elearningpost
A presentation at PARC on drawing information from groups.
Stephen Downes, who's been a blogger for a long time, has a thoughtful article in Educause review, "Educational Blogging". The whole thing is well worth reading. Here are a few interesting excerpts:
In one sense, asking why anyone would write a weblog is like asking why anyone would write at all. But more specifically, the question is why anyone would write a weblog as opposed to, say, a book or a journal article. George Siemens, an instructor at Red River College in Winnipeg and a longtime advocate of educational blogging, offers a comprehensive list of motivating factors. In particular, he notes, weblogs break down barriers. They allow ideas to be based on merit, rather than origin, and ideas that are of quality filter across the Internet, “viral-like across the blogosphere.” Blogs allow readers to hear the day-to-day thoughts of presidential candidates, software company executives, and magazine writers, who all, in turn, hear opinions of people they would never otherwise hear....
Despite obvious appearances, blogging isn’t really about writing at all; that’s just the end point of the process, the outcome that occurs more or less naturally if everything else has been done right. Blogging is about, first, reading. But more important, it is about reading what is of interest to you: your culture, your community, your ideas. And it is about engaging with the content and with the authors of what you have read—reflecting, criticizing, questioning, reacting. If a student has nothing to blog about, it is not because he or she has nothing to write about or has a boring life. It is because the student has not yet stretched out to the larger world, has not yet learned to meaningfully engage in a community. For blogging in education to be a success, this first must be embraced and encouraged.
From time to time, we read about the potential of online learning to bring learning into life, to engender workplace learning or lifelong learning. When Jay Cross and others say that 90 percent of our learning is informal, this is the sort of thing they mean: that the lessons we might expect to find in the classroom work their way, through alternative means, into our day-to-day activities.
Blogging can and should reverse this flow. The process of reading online, engaging a community, and reflecting it online is a process of bringing life into learning. As Richardson comments, “This [the blogging process] just seems to me to be closer to the way we learn outside of school, and I don’t see those things happening anywhere in traditional education.” And he asks: “Could blogging be the needle that sews together what is now a lot of learning in isolation with no real connection among the disciplines? I mean ultimately, aren’t we trying to teach our kids how to learn, and isn’t that [what] blogging is all about?
I have to admit that I don't really get wikis. I expect this would change if I ever used one for a project. Among their big strengths, though, is that a wiki is easy to implement and easy to use. And anything that gets used is ipso facto of higher value than anything that doesn't.
In any event, here's a case study on using SocialText for product development:
Socialtext provides Stata with a shared environment to develop product specifications and work out problems as they arise. "If we have better specs up front, we have better quality software." Stata uses Socialtext to develop specifications, documentation, record agreements, solve problems.Communication is particularly important with a distributed team. The wiki lets the right people contribute, even across time zones. When the team is developing product specs, "you get halfway through and realize that another person needs to participate -- by having it on the wiki it becomes much easier to rope that person into the process and get the context quicker." Getting the right specialties involved counts.
Via Clay Shirky at Many to Many, here's a list of mobile social software from elastic space.
Back in 2002, I wrote:
One of the ways that it’s possible to decide what sites are worth visiting often, for example, what sites provide a broad, filtered range of new content and what sites provide an interpretation of content on the web based on specialized expertise, is to develop a set of trusted sources. Trusted sources may be people who share the same interests you do and who link to and recommend sites that you find generally interesting and useful. A trusted source may also be an expert in a particular field. One way to locate trusted experts is to find someone that you personally know or that you have located through a personal chain of experts, peers or colleagues.The criteria for judging trusted sources on the web are the same as those for selecting friends and trusted experts face to face. Who is this person? What do I know about them? What kind of information are they presenting? How does the information fit with other things I know? How reliable has past information been? Key factors for evaluating trusted sources include: credentials, references, usefulness of the information they filter, recommendations from others, strong, clear writing, and personal glimpses of the person behind the information. This last factor is increasingly critical.
Corporate voice helps to add to the information that’s available, but it doesn’t help us evaluate what information we should use to make decisions. We need to know the people behind the web site, we need to know who they are and how they think in order to help us evaluate the specific usefulness of the information they’re presenting us. We need particularly to hear their individual voice before we can give them trusted source status. And we need sites that are built by ‘this-expert-we-trust’ as well as sites that contain a range of published resources from a large organization.
Who do we trust online? It'd be nice if we trusted Extension because Extension has a 100 year history of providing unbiased, research based informaiton, of educating people in practical ways that make their lives better, of developing leadership and community. But every Extension agent and specialist I've ever met has said at one time or another, "Extension is the best-kept secret in our state."
We can develop trust with new audiences when they can find us (Reason one), when we're willing to interact with them (Reason two), and when we do so as individuals with our own knowledge, personal attributes, and connections to others.
Ross Mayfield talks about the increasing number of large organizations who are encouraging (or at least adopting a 'let's see what happens' attitude toward) blogging. In specific, he talks about Standard Weblog Employee Policy:
What's missing is a standardized weblog employee policy. Today, major tech companies like Microsoft and Sun are embracing external blogging and beginning to realize its benefits. Right now many companies are considering similar moves, but are held back by what they see as a legal grey area. We have been through most all of these issues before, as the web publishing, newsgroups and email are a virtual sieve. But blogs are newer every day and with all the hype its hard for people to get that they are simple tools.
He cites companies that currently have blogging policies. Check out:
Sun Policy on Public Discourse
Think About Consequences The worst thing that can happen is that a Sun sales pro is in a meeting with a hot prospect, and someone on the customer’s side pulls out a print-out of your blog and says “This person at Sun says that product sucks.”In general, “XXX sucks” is not only risky but unsubtle. Saying “Netbeans needs to have an easier learning curve for the first-time user” is fine; saying “Visual Development Environments for Java suck” is just amateurish.
Once again, it’s all about judgment: using your weblog to trash or embarrass the company, our customers, or your co-workers, is not only dangerous but stupid.
In general, the company views personal websites and weblogs positively, and it respects the right of employees to use them as a medium of self-expression.If you choose to identify yourself as a company employee or to discuss matters related to the company's technology or business on your website or weblog, please bear in mind that, although you and we view your website or weblog as a personal project and a medium of personal expression, some readers may nonetheless view you as a de facto spokesperson for the company.
The Corporate Weblogger Manifesto
1) Tell the truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth. If your competitor has a product that's better than yours, link to it. You might as well. We'll find it anyway.2) Post fast on good news or bad. Someone say something bad about your product? Link to it -- before the second or third site does -- and answer its claims as best you can. Same if something good comes out about you. It's all about building long-term trust. The trick to building trust is to show up! If people are saying things about your product and you don't answer them, that distrust builds. Plus, if people are saying good things about your product, why not help Google find those pages as well?
3) Use a human voice. Don't get corporate lawyers and PR professionals to cleanse your speech. We can tell, believe me. Plus, you'll be too slow. If you're the last one to post, the joke is on you!
...as part of an overall communications plan
As I mentioned just below, my article on 'Weblogs as a Disruptive Technology for Extension,' was published this month at the Journal of Extension.
Not only are weblogs disruptive--as in, they have the potential to change the way we do things whether we're prepared for the change or not--but they're good for Extension in a number of ways. Over the next couple of days I'm planning to talk about several reasons that weblogs are good for Extension and for what Extension is trying to do.
Probably most people who read here are familiar with the Cooperative Extension Service (or in Iowa State's case, University Extension), but if you're not, you might go here for more information.
Next: Reason one: Google loves weblogs
Stowe Boyd writes in Darwin Magazine about The State of Social Tools. Among the things he talks about is the tendency of applications to tend toward converegence (if I use this app for this, then I also want to use it for this and this and this). Boyd says that there are basically four features of social tools:
Communication: instant messaging, e-mail, Web conferencing, streaming video and voice tools, and other messaging solutionsCoordination: calendaring, task and project management, contact management, and related technologies
Collaboration: file and application sharing, discussion, wikis, blogs and other shared-space technologies
Community: social networking, swarmth (digital reputation, also called karma or whuffie), group decision and other explicit community supports.
Good article in eWeek about the disruptive nature of collaboration tools:
The most recent problems came to light when a network failure cut off e-mail and Web access throughout the company's far-flung operations.Instead of simply calling it a day, creative employees quickly implemented workarounds. One group installed a quick and dirty Wiki to enable team communications.
Another took advantage of America Online Inc.'s Instant Messenger application to route files and messages between geographically remote employees. Others used Web e-mail and wireless networking to keep the company's business flowing.
The CIO's response was predictable: He moved quickly to lock down corporate desktops and laptops to prohibit users from installing unapproved software or accessing unsupported Web services.
It's not the first time I've seen such a dramatic, knee-jerk response to user-supplied productivity tools. In fact, the rise (and attempted squashing) of new collaboration tools, social networks and wireless connectivity today has eerie parallels to early PC adoption. And despite the best intentions of corporate IT, the results will be the same.
Chad Dickerson, CTO at InfoWorld writes about using internal weblogs at Infoworld:
Our internal use of Weblogs has greatly accelerated, and we're beginning to see more tangible benefits as we've begun to reach a critical mass of internal contributors. At the end of March, my team held an off-site retreat and created a rolling six-month plan for IT initiatives at InfoWorld, which we posted to a Weblog available to all employees. For each month in the plan, we created a checklist of projects we would be working on and noted which ones would be completed in that month. We also scheduled what we call "fire drills" our internal term for the intentional failure of a specific key system to test fail-over capabilities in the event of an unexpected outage of that system. Posting this plan on a Weblog made three key things happen. First, it forced the team to strategically organize its IT initiatives into a coherent roadmap fit for broader internal consumption. Next, it created a sense of accountability for these initiatives within the IT team because we had collectively agreed on the initiatives and documented the process. Finally, posting our plan for the entire company to see helped foster a sense of accountability to our non-IT colleagues within the company.
Freedom-to-Tinker's Ed Felten intiates a discussion on end-user liability for security breaches
Some years ago, Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram introduced the idea of the 'familiar stranger.' Familiar strangers are those people that you see often but don't know--the woman who's always at your bus stop in the morning, the man who shops at the grocery store early Saturday morning when you do.
Mark Frauenfelder writes about Jabberwocky an application that uses Bluetooth to track familiar strangers.
I'm not completely sure what the application is for all this. For one thing, familiar strangers ought to be people that you see (how else do they become familiar) not so much people you don't see but who are around all the time. But it's interesting nonetheless.
Melinda McBride contributes yet another blogging article at MindJack, which takes an interesting look at the pitfalls and potentials of blogging and, in particular, some of the things that we need to remain aware of to be inclusive and to really achieve the potential that blogging promises:
As I write this, another journalist is explaining what a blog is for the first time. Quite possibly, they are describing blogging as a trend created by actor Wil Wheaton. Most likely, they're announcing how blogs have just "hit" the mainstream. Blogging authority Rebecca Blood has named this repetitive rediscovery of blogging "Blood's Law of Weblog History." According to Blood, "the year you discovered weblogs and/or started your own is 'The Year Blogs Exploded'."
David Weinberger talks about The social life of echo chambers in KM Magazine:
There is certainly evidence that Internet traffic is chunky. Work by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, for example, shows that networks, including the Internet, tend to generate clusters that get disproportionate amounts of traffic. And Clay Shirky found that traffic patterns for weblogs follow a "power law" in which a handful of sites generate a hugely disproportionate number of links. This topology isn't surprising once you think about it, although it's one of those predictions that's much easier to make afterward, if you know what I mean.Even so, that doesn't tell us that the Internet is closing minds instead of opening them. David Sifry, the creator of Technorati.com, a site that indexes and ranks 1.6 million weblogs, points out that even though there is a power curve, if you rank blogs by how many sites link to them, the 100,000th blog has five links pointing at it. Five isn't a thousand, but it still means that five people with sites think enough of that 100,000th blog to recommend it to others. Presumably, that site is important to a small cluster of people. That's a readership that didn't exist before the Net. Further, if you add together all of the blogs in the "tail" of the power curve, it's a hell of a lot of blogs and a hell of a lot of readers. So, while the head of the power curve feels familiar to us because it's essentially a bunch of online columnists, the long tail is something new and unfamiliar: a galaxy of people who are finding constellations of readers, ready for ideas and conversation.
Kinja, the weblog guide has gone live, at least in beta.
Meg Hourihan talks about Kinja:
After 15 months in the making, I'm pleased to announce that Kinja, a new weblog reading tool, has launched today. We worked really hard on it and hope you'll check it out.
Nick Denton adds more detail:
Kinja, a project we've been working on for more than a year, has just gone live. Kinja -- a guide to weblogs -- springs from a simple idea. Weblogs may be the most interesting phenomenon in media in decades, but hold the enthusiasm: they've reached only a tiny minority of the internet audience. About nine in ten US internet users have never even visited a blog. It's not for a lack of content that weblogs don't yet have a mass audience. For every interest, from baseball to sex, there are thousands of engaging sites. They're just hard to find, and then hard to remember. If weblogs are to realize their potential, they need to reach beyond the pioneering communities of technologists and amateur political pundits.
Jakob Nielsen talks about Productivity in the Service Economy:
Usability is key to increasing the service economy's productivity, because only attention to the way humans work can help them work smarter. If we adjust our focus accordingly, we won't just save billions of dollars from productivity gains -- we'll also save millions of jobs and create millions of new ones.
Everytime we develop software it's important to focus not just on what reports managers want or how this fits with some outside information source, but what people need to get their jobs done. Software developed 'right'--that's useful and enhances productivity--saves training and support costs later on because it's being used and it's doing something useful.
...via elearningpost
Fast Company has yet another blogging article, which nonetheless contains some interesting information about blogs in the corporate sector:
Dynamite, indeed. The burgeoning blog world--1.6 million keyboard tappers at last count--is making big inroads into corporate culture. From tech companies like Microsoft (which says it "respects and supports" blogs like Scoble's) and IBM to decidedly nontech outfits like Dr. Pepper, companies are starting to use blogging both as a medium to market products and monitor brands and as an internal knowledge-management tool. To meet corporate demand, both UserLand and Six Apart, makers of popular blog software programs, are coming out with enterprise-level products later this year.
However, one of the issues for corporations and other organizations is the same thing that provides weblogs' greatest strength--the voice of the weblog poster comes through. This creates trust and builds reader loyalty, but it also makes people used to promoting a shiny polished message uneasy:
But that informal transparency is precisely why many companies' embrace of blogs is at best uneasy. Internally, blogs have the potential to let employees who wouldn't otherwise be seen as authorities have a voice with a lot of impact. "[Companies] are not going to be able to stuff it back into the box," says Greg Lloyd, CEO of Traction, a business-oriented blog software company. Externally, the fears are even greater. Letting employees speak directly to customers requires a huge amount of trust. A loose cannon might reveal corporate secrets, give out the wrong message, or even open up the company to legal trouble.
...via elearningpost
Stephan VanDyke has an interesting graphic proposing how news travels on the Internet
blogkathleen reports on an article that talks about weblogs vs. email discussion. The first part of the quote below are Matt Kirschenbaum's followup comments from the article. Second paragraph are Kathleen's comments:
Couple of reasons I think: one, like all the rest of us, my students now get a lot more email than they used to. Course-related mail gets mixed in with the usual jumble of spam and whatever else. All too easy just to hit the delete key. Two, the blog allows them to see their ideas instantly published on the Web. Email is a closed world, a self-contained loop between the instructor and the other students. With the blog, the fourth wall is always open. Best, MattI think that what Matt says about "the blog allows them to see their ideas instantly published on the web" is key. One of my earlier posts talks about the role of identity building as a critical motivating factor in weblogging. Matt hits on a key difference in the motivation behind weblogging and email discussion: reputation building.
...via elearningpost
I've read a couple of things lately (don't have the references right to hand--sorry, but I'll get them up here eventually) that people don't use shared workspaces even when they're available. I'm planning to write something longer about shared workspaces and why they don't get used like we think they should or wish they would, but here are some interesting thoughts from a presentation by Sam Ruby at ETCON about working on the !Echo Wiki and mailing list and other discussion areas:
If you have a coherently aligned and focused community, a wiki can be a very powerful thing, allowing collaboration to proceed at an astounding pace.If you have a community in imperfect alignment, a wiki will accurately reflect this state. Given a group with a genuine desire to align, a wiki can provide a powerful and positive feedback loop.
But what happens when you have an unbounded community with divergent goals?
In particular, he talks about issues with mailing lists, wikis and weblogs. Each have strengths and weaknesses (and everything he mentions isn't listed here--these are just things I thought were particularly interesting):
Mailing lists seem very prone to flamebait: statements which may very much be true but are expressed in a provocative way. Some people seem to just have an inborn ability to attract flames.What's worse, is that most flamebaiters don't seem to realize what they are doing.
On a wiki, emotionally charged words tend to be quickly replaced with ones that more effectively make the point that is trying to be made without the distracting histrionics.
Mailing lists can discuss a topic without coming to a firm conclusion. Even when a conclusion is reached, it seemingly can be reopened at any time. This can be frustrating.
On a wiki, time is collapsed. By necessity, contributions have to focus on some new point of view that has not been previously expressed.
Weblogs have much of the same benefits as mailing lists, with a few additions:* Weblog authors act as filters/valves. Updates can be as seldom as a few times a week versus literally hundreds per day.
* Posts contain a dramatic increase in contextual information in the form of personal relevance and hypertext links
* It is much easier to route around flamebaiters
In the end, he suggests a mix of strategies and also notes that much of the issue (as in meatspace) is getting contributors to contribute in ways that help the process and lead to a conclusion.
Spy has an interesting article on the limits of usability as a primary design component:
Usability--and the cautious thinking it embodies--has come to dominate thinking about the design process. As Robert Brunner, a partner at in the San Francisco office of the celebrated design firm Pentagram, will argue at the HITS conference in Chicago this week: "it really doesn't matter if something is usable. What matters is that it is in fact, useful. And even better if it is desirable" [vii]. This possibility of making someone's experience of a product both successful and satisfying is more likely to be achieved in more mature areas of design, such as newspapers, where complex patterns of communication have been established with which elements that produce an overall 'quality of experience' can be incorporated. If usability becomes the focus too early in the development of a product it is likely that a more ingenious and ambitious way of solving the problem will be missed, and a less useful and desirable solution will be polished to perfection.
One of the areas where users are almost always not our best critics is when disruptive ideas emerge:
Too much user focus may be a barrier to innovation. Research with users is likely to tell us that they desire an improvement on something they already know and understand – faster calculators rather than spreadsheets. Ask them if they would use a proposed innovation and they will say No – and then adopt it when they have seen its utility demonstrated in the real world.
At O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, Joe Trippi gave a talk yesterday about the Dean campaign and the Internet. Howard Rheingold and Ross Mayfield blogged it live. Reuters' news article .
Techdirt looks at blogs versus Reuters:
The notes from the blogging attendees say Trippi called the campaign a "dot com miracle", and yet Reuters claims Trippi said the internet "hobbled" the campaign. These differing accounts of the same exact speech don't match at all - and it certainly looks like Reuters is the one doing the spinning here, taking a few quotes here and there out of context to make their point. With the bloggers' notes, you can see the context of what's being spoken about, and the Reuters report gives none of that. I'm not one who believes that bloggers are a "threat" to journalism, but the contrast here shows a perfect (if a bit scary) example of just how easy it is for the press to spin things to make their point.
Edward Felten has an interesting post on why Google isn't broken, as some people fear, but actually a demonstration of democracy in action.
I've been cleaning out files, something I do every once in a great while and I came across something I wrote at least two and a half years ago. Since I think it's still timely and useful, I thought I'd post it here:
Principles to guide us in building new visions for online communication, education, learning, and community building
'The Web is a conversation is one of the central tenets of The Cluetrain Manifesto. We characterize the Web as a source of information, but its appeal and its potential is the ease with which it makes possible connections, community, and conversation. When you look at the Web in this way a number of things become clear.
In an issue of JOHO (Journal of Hyperlinked Organization), David Weinberger says, speaking of the connections the Internet now makes possible: "We are, I believe, at an 'inflection point.' We thought we were answering email but we were instead building a world."
One of the outcomes of the web as a conversation is that it's increasingly informal. When most of our business communication is online, this informality permeates everything we do. The lines among people change and blue.
People don't come to the web for formal instruciton, for three credit hour classes, They come for conversation, for communities of practice, for interactive conversational learning, for informality and control. Organizing successful classes on the web will require stepping firmly out of semester, credit-hour, program-based education.
Other notes:
It's a truism that kids are great at new technologies and that the rest of us can only scramble helplessly, out of touch and behind. The true picture is, as with most truisms, vastly more complex. Conversations and learning communities began with FidoNet and Genie and other services even before the Internet, at least ten to fifteen years ago. The people who started those conversations, even if in their teens and twenties then (which many of them weren't) are now in their thirties and forties. And many of them enthusiastically participate in online communities to this day. Senior citizens are one of the fastest growing users of computers--becuase computers give them access to community and to learning at a time when their physical limitations may be increasing. People who are remote and isolated for whatever reason turn, even now, to the Internet for community, contact, and learning. They don't necessarily turn to universities for these things, but they're out there looking.
People will learn what interests them. People will generate energy when they're excited.
We reveal ourselves on the Web almost always in terms of our interests....David Weinberger
Tell us some good stories and capture our interest. Dn't talk to us as if you've forgotten how to speak. Don't make us feel small. Remind us to be larger. Get a little of that human touch....The Cluetrain Manifesto
...froman article by Debbie Weil at MarketingProfs.com. The definitions include:
...via Scripting News
The NY Times has a profile of Danah Boyd, a young researcher in human-computer interaction who has been studying social networks, in particular Friendster.com:
...when two people speak to each other, they assume their conversation is fleeting, but e-mail and instant messaging, by making that conversation persistent, offer a new architecture. When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other's social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how.Friendster offers a mix of architecture-changing tools and technologies: e-mail, a profile (which offers a persistent presentation of self) and a coarse representation of a social network. Friendster is an architectural change," Ms. Boyd said. "It's not a mimicry of a change; it's a total change." Once the early users of Friendster discovered these new architectures, they began to play with them. That's how Friendster evolved from a dating site into something else.
...via misbehaving.net
We're starting to look more formally at collaboration tools and discussing what we can deploy to help people collaborate in the organization. I'm pretty sure that like most technology it's more a people-issue than a technology-issue with just enough 'help-from-tools' to get people focused on what tools to buy, on how to train people to use them, and on how to support and maintain collaboration tools and rather than on the culture, the way we work, and how we form networks now.
Anyway, I'll try to note resources as I find them and ideas as they occur to me and become coherent (unfortunately for me--ideas occur to me long before they become coherent enough to express).
==
Collaboration is only partly an IT problem. As with many things that people do, while tools can help us collaborate more effectively they can’t necessarily overcome cultural, time or communication issues. In addition, collaboration tools need to be evaluated for whether they’re actually facilitating collaboration or interfering by adding process.
People do what they need to do to get their work done
--despite tools
--despite processes
--despite policies
If tools, processes, policies work with them, they’ll use them. If people refuse to learn and/or use policies, tools, or processes (even when, or especially when, there's training available), it’s a very strong indicator that those tools, processes or policies make the job more difficult or don’t help get the job done rather than that the people just don’t like change.
It’s not about ‘changing the way people work.’ It’s about making sure that the way we’re changing actually helps people get their work done.
Others say (what I would say if I were more concise and incisive):
Technology Confined Collaboration
After the CIO picked himself up off the floor, we spent the next 15 minutes talking about why so few [collaboration tools]. It wasn't culture. It wasn't anticipated reciprocity. The IT lady summed it up best when she said, "web collaboration doesn't work the way people do." Technology was confining the natural human collaborative process. This particular product was forcing these folks (all 26, 000 of them) into working with a fixed set of tools, which was the real problem. If your problem didn't fit almost exactly into the function set the tool provided, you were forced to change the way YOU work. Compound this by being forced to work within the firewall and the need to have IT set up a space and the point is made.Collaboration is about people. Collaboration needs technology frameworks that support adaptive, ad hoc interactions. Adaptive from the sense of extending functionality on the fly and securely embracing new members on the fly. Simply put, it's the swarming culture fused with adaptive technology.
It's not simple to be productive with process-oriented collaboration tools because there are technology (e.g. firewalls, network connectivity) and administrive (e.g. permission, set-up) boundaries. The lack of flexibility and end-user control over the tools creates a lot of *noise* throughout the process and precludes any sense of immediacy. Not to mention the firewall issue specifically, which implies that there are certain people that I can't collaborate with even if I need to.What is the requisite laundry list to make net-based collaboration/communication really take off? The answer isn't obvious to me, but here are a few suggestions (from the end-user perspective; surely there is a separate IT-perspective list)....
- As simple to use as email or the phone
- End-user driven
- Fast and familiar
- No network boundaries
- No administrative boundaries
- The "right" tools (messaging, file sharing, user presence, and more over time)
- Flexibility to (a) over time, add new tools to meet new modes of usage, (b) interact in public or private context, depending upon the situation, (c) add or drop people from a thread of communication on an as-needed basis
- Ubiquity of network connectivity, hardware, and software
I think this is a great list and I would add:
Ray Ozzie says that email (which along with face to face and telephones is where most collaboration goes on now) is broken and that shared space of some kind is really better for workers to collaborate. What he’s talking about works best when all the people you want to work with already work with you in the same organization. But we also need good, fast, easy ways to work with people in other organizations, individuals, folks we meet at conferences (even while we’re at conferences), and many other configurations.
So, where do we go from here? I'm still working on my ideas for this and will post more in a day or so.