December 12, 2006
Giving it Away

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.
Posted by dcoates at 11:20 AM
October 27, 2006
How to Make 1.6 Billion Dollars

Don't forget the community:

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.
Posted by dcoates at 08:56 AM
October 04, 2006
E-mail is for Old People

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.

Posted by dcoates at 01:54 PM
September 25, 2006
Who will buy Facebook?

Maybe Yahoo:

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.

Posted by dcoates at 09:17 AM
August 16, 2006
Welcome to the Madhouse

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)

Posted by dcoates at 01:22 PM
August 04, 2006
Wikiality

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

Posted by dcoates at 02:57 PM
August 03, 2006
The Lurkers support me in email...

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

Posted by dcoates at 11:23 AM
August 01, 2006
YouTube vs MySpace

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.
Posted by dcoates at 10:50 AM
June 16, 2006
Disruptive Wikis

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.
Posted by dcoates at 04:02 PM
June 05, 2006
Real World Wiki

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

Posted by dcoates at 01:26 PM
May 19, 2006
Wikiversity

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:
  • Create and host a range of free, multilingual learning resources, for all age groups in all languages
  • Host scholarly/learning projects that complement existing Wikimedia projects (eg. a project devoted to finding good sources for Wikipedia articles)
  • Host and foster research based in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other Wikimedia projects (such as Wikibooks, Wikisource etc.)
  • See more on Wikiversity/Scope and Wikiversity:Online Course. In the fulfillment of its mission, other tasks and goals may be initiated and developed by participants to support learning and the creation of new content.

Among the things I found interesting here is a list of how people can participate in this project:

Some Ideas for Effective Initial Participation
  • Add or tweak some notes at a course portal. History now seeking students![1]
  • Tweak a random text[2] for readability.
  • Create an interesting topic portal.
  • Wikiversity:Create a Random Lesson Plan
  • Assemble an initial list of links useful to others interested in the topic.
  • Add an outline bullet
  • Add a factual paragraph or bullet to an article or its associated discussion page.
  • Publish an essay question and answer or a term paper at an appropriate location.
  • Write a draft quiz at an regarding a random Wikipedia article[3] or other subject of interest and publish it at an appropriate link in a learning trail.
  • Take a quiz at Wikiversity:available quiz list. Grade yourself or others, if you dare.
  • Publish your course notes, lesson plans, topical essays, or reference works for others to review, modify or fork.
  • Come discuss how to improve Wikiversity at our current mailing list[4].

There are definitely some ideas here that I can see for eXtension.

Posted by dcoates at 12:01 PM
Unconferencing

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

Posted by dcoates at 11:39 AM
May 15, 2006
Being Social Online

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.

Posted by dcoates at 03:49 PM
April 27, 2006
FaceBook and social networks

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.
Posted by dcoates at 04:11 PM
April 21, 2006
Why Wikipedia Works

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

Posted by dcoates at 09:17 AM
April 19, 2006
Almost Paying Attention

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.
Posted by dcoates at 01:39 PM
April 11, 2006
Justice on the Internet

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.
Posted by dcoates at 09:56 AM
April 06, 2006
It's All About the Talk, Talk, Talking

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

Posted by dcoates at 02:59 PM
March 02, 2006
Afterslash

Slashdot without the noise.

I also get a variation on this effect (only the top stories) by adding Slashdot to my personalized Google page.

Posted by dcoates at 10:17 AM
November 18, 2005
Wikis in Banking

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

Posted by dcoates at 10:12 AM
November 04, 2005
Teens, Content and the Internet

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.
Posted by dcoates at 11:05 AM
October 14, 2005
Cell Phone and iPod people

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

Posted by dcoates at 11:15 AM
October 06, 2005
Kids and Phones

From a survey of Japanese middle school students:

  • Nearly half of Japanese 8th graders own cell phones
  • Significantly more girls (58.8 percent) own cell phones than boys (41.1 percent)
  • While over 85 percent of cell-phone owners say they have a large or relatively large number of friends who own cell phones, only 62 percent of non cell-phone owners can say the same thing
  • When using cell phones to talk, they generally call family members, typically only a few times a week, but when sending text messages, they usually send them to friends nearby
  • 54 percent of cell phone owners send more than 10 messages a day

...via Cognitive Daily

Posted by dcoates at 03:34 PM
LibraryThing

You can catalog the books you've read and see what everyone else is reading with LibraryThing

...via Smart Mobs

Posted by dcoates at 03:16 PM
September 12, 2005
Librivox--a public domain audio books project

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!
Posted by dcoates at 11:30 AM
August 24, 2005
Google Talk

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.
Posted by dcoates at 02:56 PM
August 19, 2005
Social Architecture

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.
Posted by dcoates at 09:36 AM
Like Living in the Real World

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

Posted by dcoates at 09:08 AM
August 03, 2005
Collaborative Development

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

Posted by dcoates at 10:17 AM
July 22, 2005
Etienne Wenger and Communities of Practice

At Knowledge Lab, Etienne Wenger in a video interview about communities of practice

Posted by dcoates at 04:50 PM
June 24, 2005
Social Presence

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

Posted by dcoates at 02:04 PM
June 23, 2005
What is a community of practice?

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

Posted by dcoates at 09:31 AM
April 15, 2005
Be the music

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

Posted by dcoates at 01:46 PM
March 31, 2005
Future So Bright...

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

Posted by dcoates at 11:28 AM
March 25, 2005
Surfing the Mosh Pit

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

Posted by dcoates at 08:16 AM
March 15, 2005
IM presence vs talk-to-me-now

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.

Posted by dcoates at 11:16 AM
March 04, 2005
Older than Yahoo

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?"
Posted by dcoates at 09:23 AM
January 18, 2005
Beyond blogs in 2005

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

Posted by dcoates at 04:03 PM
January 17, 2005
The ten most important ideas

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."
Posted by dcoates at 11:17 AM
January 07, 2005
No blogging

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.
Posted by dcoates at 11:04 AM
Blog or die

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.
Posted by dcoates at 09:45 AM
Ten Cool Things...and more

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:

  • Offering regularly updated information (blogs, CMSs, etc.)
  • Increased efficiency in news and information distribution (RSS, ATOM, etc.)
  • Alternative methods of information distribution (email newsletters, RSS, del.icio.us, etc.)
  • Enhanced notification and announcement systems (pings, email alerts, etc.)
  • A place for your site's users to offer feedback and input (blog comments, forums, etc.)
  • Improved performance and code optimization (CSS, XHTML, etc.)
  • Multiple ways to access information (multi-faceted navigation, folksonomies, etc.)
  • Intelligent system to system communication (XML, SOAP, etc.)
  • Collaborative communication and documentation (Wikis, blogs, etc.)
  • On-demand support feedback (user-driven FAQs, click-to-chat, etc.)
Posted by dcoates at 09:16 AM
January 06, 2005
10 ways to use blogs...

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.

Posted by dcoates at 11:39 AM
December 22, 2004
The Network-Empowered Citizen

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.
Posted by dcoates at 03:49 PM
The People Factor

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.

Posted by dcoates at 03:47 PM
December 09, 2004
Keeping up with the conversation

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)....

Posted by dcoates at 11:22 AM
December 03, 2004
Communities of Practice

Here's a good set of resources and links on online communities of practice.

Posted by dcoates at 09:40 AM
December 02, 2004
Blogging and Business

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.


Posted by dcoates at 11:57 AM
November 24, 2004
Yours? Theirs? Ours?

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.
Posted by dcoates at 03:43 PM
November 19, 2004
The Tail of the Content

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

Posted by dcoates at 07:58 AM
November 15, 2004
Implicit in the chatter

A presentation at PARC on drawing information from groups.

Posted by dcoates at 09:41 AM
August 30, 2004
...the most beautiful tool of the world

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?


Posted by dcoates at 04:30 PM
August 12, 2004
Wiki Case Study

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.

Posted by dcoates at 03:11 PM
July 23, 2004
Socializing on the Run

Via Clay Shirky at Many to Many, here's a list of mobile social software from elastic space.

Posted by dcoates at 03:33 PM
July 08, 2004
Reason Four: Individual Voice and Trust

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.

Posted by dcoates at 10:55 AM
July 07, 2004
When Employees Blog

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.

Groove Weblog Policy

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!


Posted by dcoates at 09:05 AM
June 29, 2004
5 Reasons Extension needs weblogs

...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

Posted by dcoates at 09:24 AM
June 14, 2004
Social Convergence

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 solutions

Coordination: 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.

Posted by dcoates at 03:56 PM
May 25, 2004
Blogs and wikis and wireless--oh my!

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.

Posted by dcoates at 11:47 AM
May 24, 2004
Weblogs and internal communication

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.
Posted by dcoates at 10:28 AM
May 18, 2004
Who Takes the Fall?

Freedom-to-Tinker's Ed Felten intiates a discussion on end-user liability for security breaches

Posted by dcoates at 02:38 PM
May 12, 2004
Familiar Strangers

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.

Posted by dcoates at 11:38 AM
April 22, 2004
Blogs and the world

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'."
Posted by dcoates at 10:32 AM
April 07, 2004
Opening the Minds of all

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.

Posted by dcoates at 03:23 PM
April 06, 2004
Weblogs and portals and information

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.
Posted by dcoates at 11:32 AM
Usability begats Productivity

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

Posted by dcoates at 11:04 AM
March 30, 2004
Blogs, blogs everywhere

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

Posted by dcoates at 10:21 AM
March 09, 2004
How News Travels

Stephan VanDyke has an interesting graphic proposing how news travels on the Internet

Posted by dcoates at 05:07 PM
February 27, 2004
Blogs vs email discussions

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, Matt

I 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

Posted by dcoates at 02:42 PM
February 17, 2004
Working together

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
  • 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.

  • Wikis
  • 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
  • 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.

    Posted by dcoates at 04:39 PM
    February 16, 2004
    What about the things we didn't know we wanted?

    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.
    Posted by dcoates at 03:27 PM
    February 10, 2004
    Bloggers and the Media

    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.
    Posted by dcoates at 03:34 PM
    February 03, 2004
    Googlocracy

    Edward Felten has an interesting post on why Google isn't broken, as some people fear, but actually a demonstration of democracy in action.

    Posted by dcoates at 12:11 PM
    December 23, 2003
    Desk Cleaning

    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 (so says The Cluetrain Manifesto)
    • Conversations flow two ways
    • Engagement will take on forms we have not yet imagined
    • If we enter this arena with enthusiasm and flexibility we will garner long-term, deep support for our services and programs
    • Our services and programs will no longer flow from the inside out
    • Web learning and community will change power structures
    • Control will flow in all directions
    • Universities will not 'control' the conversation though they can be immeasureably influential both in the conversations that take place and in the resources available for progress and decision making
    • All of us will be decision makers in the future of learning and development
    • Objectivity is a myth
    • Resources will be necessary to begin and to maintain the conversation
    • People learn quickly when their interests motivate them to do so and when there's a social aspect to the learning process
    • Online teaching and facilitating require as much or more interactive social skill as traditional teaching, however, the people who are naturally excellent at online communication may not be the same people who excel at face-to-face communication
    • Community creates learning
    • Just-in-time learning is only one piece (and is really just-in-time information)
    • We don't know what we don't know
    • If we don't know what we don't know, we won't go looking for it
    • Information is not learning
    • Knowledge doesn't put itself online
    • Energy is contagious
    • If we have to 'make' people do it then we haven't gotten it right yet

    '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
    Posted by dcoates at 11:07 AM
    December 10, 2003
    Top 20 Definitions of Blogging

    ...froman article by Debbie Weil at MarketingProfs.com. The definitions include:

    • A form of unedited, authentic self-expression
    • Amateur journalism
    • A tool to teach students how to write
    • A new form of knowledge management inside big companies
    • a way to think and write in short paragraphs instead of a long essay (which no one has time to read anyway)


    ...via Scripting News

    Posted by dcoates at 02:22 PM
    December 02, 2003
    Connections and what they mean

    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

    Posted by dcoates at 02:20 PM
    December 01, 2003
    Notes on Collaboration and Technology

    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.

    Matt Pope

    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:

    • Simple to initiate a new group
    • Synchronous and asynchronous communication
    • Both long-term and specific short-term group forming
    • Create your own brain trust
    • Everyone can build collaborative networks

    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.

    Posted by dcoates at 04:37 PM
    IM Use

    ACM Queue reports on an AT&T labs study on IM use

    We found evidence of two styles of use, only one of which is currently widely acknowledged. In the interactions we monitored involving people who either infrequently use IM or rarely communicate with each other, we discovered that messages tended to focus chiefly on scheduling and coordination matters and that the conversations were slow paced and involved little threading or multitasking. Frequent IM users, on the other hand, tended to use IM more as a tool for collaboration, with discussions covering a broad range of topics via many fast-paced interactions%u2014each with many short turns in the conversation, much threading, and a predisposition towards multitasking. Although people consistent with our "light user" profile have until now been generally regarded as typical of all IM users, our research suggests that the majority of IM traffic actually involves heavy users working collaboratively to address complex, work-specific problems.

    We've been talking in our office about ways to introduce IM to people who aren't using it now as part of our new network implementation, so this is timely useful information.

    ...via cyfernet_technology

    Posted by dcoates at 01:33 PM
    November 19, 2003
    How not to Get Fired Because of Your Blog

    Blogger offers this public service announcement:

    These days, many companies are blog-friendly because they recognize a valuable tool for communication and the sharing of ideas when they see it. However, as with any public medium, care should be exercised from time to time. Here at Blogger, we want you to keep your job and as always, ending your blog should be a last resort reserved only for woeful situations. Fret not gentle blogger, we've put together this document to help you keep those paychecks rolling in.
    Posted by dcoates at 10:56 AM
    October 29, 2003
    What I Know and What I Mean

    Viral-learning.net talks about cultural issues in developing e-learning:

    So, for whatever reasons - cost, quality, speed, reach, flexibility - the e-learning industry has taken on the challenge of producing e-learning products and services across multiple cultures. But just because technology allows us to work together doesn't necessarily mean that we will work better together. In fact increased cross-cultural contact may, at least at the outset, increase the likelihood of misunderstandings and problems. In starting to investigate this informally, and focussing specifically on relationships between Indian and UK/US organisations, I wasn%u2019t surprised to hear things that suggested that cultural issues were surfacing. For example, Indians speaking of North Americans told me that 'they are so very impatient and aggressive' and 'they could afford to be a little more polite' and North Americans speaking of Indians said 'they just seem to have so many layers of management' and 'they never seem to say quite what they mean'.
    Posted by dcoates at 11:40 AM
    October 28, 2003
    Blogging in the corporate sector: The Scobelizer at Microsoft

    Baseline has an article on Robert Scoble who is a member of the Windows marketing team and a blogger:

    The blog, which Scoble established before hiring on with Microsoft, comes off like a conversation with a smart friend. He links to other bloggers, makes recommendations about Windows-related products, talks about his own upcoming demo of the next version of Windows, known as Longhorn, and mentions the need to balance his personal and professional lives. Almost anything is fair game. "That is the first Apple marketing in a long time that makes me want to buy an Apple product," he wrote recently about an ad for the iPod music player.

    And...

    There are some barriers to adoption. Using weblogs means trusting your employees to speak honestly and openly. It means conversing with customers, not just marketing to them. It means even more flattening of your organization.
    Posted by dcoates at 03:17 PM
    Free wireless-- Part of Every good business model?

    Here's another article, this one from ComputerWorld, discussing the somewhat counter-intuitive idea that free wireless connections make more money for your business than wi-fi for pay:

    John Wooley, chairman, CEO and president of restaurant chain Schlotzsky's Inc. in Austin, isn't so shy in sharing details of what he calls the "strong ROI" from the company's free Wi-Fi service. Schlotzsky's currently offers free Wi-Fi in 30 of its 600 company-owned or franchised Schlotzsky's Delis. Wooley says he figures that the free Wi-Fi results in an additional 15,000 visits per restaurant per year by customers who spend an average of $7 per visit.

    That means Wi-Fi service brings in more than $100,000 per year per outlet in return for an investment of about $8,000 per restaurant for wireless infrastructure, Wooley says. The largest continuing cost is backhaul to the Internet over 1.54Mbit/sec. T1 circuits, Wooley says. Since the cost of a T1 circuit varies from $300 to $700, depending on what part of the country you're in, he says Schlotzsky's would average those costs to induce existing franchisees to offer the service. (New franchisees will be required to offer free Wi-Fi, Wooley notes.)

    Posted by dcoates at 12:03 PM
    October 14, 2003
    Large-Scale Organizational Change

    In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen says that values and processes are much, much harder to change than resources. You can fire people, move people, buy new computers, and make sure everyone has a plenty of pens, but getting the organization to work differently is very, very difficult.

    A recent Wired article talks about efforts to transform NASA:

    In the land of rocket science, where numbers count for everything and hunches are scorned, two men are on a mission more difficult than plugging a hole in the space shuttle.

    They're trying to make NASA's shuttle program a warmer, fuzzier place by recrafting the culture that doomed Columbia, and Challenger before that.

    Posted by dcoates at 03:46 PM
    October 13, 2003
    The Semantic Web

    The Semantic Web, today:

    The key point of the semantic web is the conversion of the current structure of the web as a data storage (interpretable only by human beings, that are able to put the data into context) into a structure of information storage.
    Posted by dcoates at 10:25 AM
    October 08, 2003
    Content and You

    Ashley Highland, Director of BBC New Media and Technology, recently gave a speech where he said, among other things:

    Against this background, new research from the BBC has revealed four new and significant social trends that show that the way in which we consume TV is changing forever. From this we have been able to start changing our programmes and content. Broadly these trends show that viewers are taking much more control of what and how they view, they're joining in with their programmes, consuming more media simultaneously, and sharing all this content with each other.

    Some of the things he proposes:

    • Developing more programs that come with meta-data so they can be hooked into and used in new ways
    • Recognizing that media can become a substitute for community
    • That people may sacrifice external quality factors for a more localized, personalized, timely service
    • Creating ambient television--television that you only have to half pay attention to.
    • Downloading and sharing video is a killer combination (and he means this in a good sense)
    • Industry becoming more active in creating legitimate content download products either as a pay model or rights-cleared-for-free.
    Posted by dcoates at 04:34 PM
    September 25, 2003
    Blogging for Dollars

    According to Wired, Jason Calacanis is starting Weblogsinc, which looks to make money with business-to-business blogs:

    Essentially, Calacanis' goal is to turn Weblogsinc into an umbrella for blogs, a for-profit center that dishes daily on as many as 300 topics and scores revenue from sources like advertising, events and classified listings. He expects the topics to fall under four main categories: media, finance, technology and life sciences.
    Posted by dcoates at 09:03 AM
    September 19, 2003
    Collaborative models

    Timothy Butler and David Coleman have a guest editorial at Collaborative Strategies called Models of Collaboration:

    • Library

    • The Library model provides reciprocal access to common content. The content is generally managed by a small group and is long-lasting (not time-dependent, for example). There is little or no feedback to content creators and there is generally a need for sophisticated indexing and retrieval.

    • Solicitation
      The Solicitation model involves requests from a small number of requestors with multiple responders--for example, soliciting review comments or conducting surveys.

    • Team
      The Team model facilitates team activities and involves most members reading and writing content, a high level of interactivity, historical information for newcomers, and document and project management features.

    • Community
      The Community model facilitates the activities of communities of practice and interest. Membership in these communities is generally large and loosely controlled, although the members share some interaction or goal in common. All can participate, but generally 10% of the members do most of the interacting with the rest content to 'listen.'

    • Process Support
      The Process Support model involves using collaboration technologies in a process or workflow and is used when the processes involve a lot of complexity or significant exceptions. Process support examples might include product development, training, and service and support.

    Posted by dcoates at 05:02 PM
    September 18, 2003
    Blogs, Work, Knowledge Sharing

    Michael Angeles has a really good presentation available at studioid on blogging in corporate America. Here's the original abstract:

    Lucent Technologies' Information Specialist, Michael Angeles, believes blogging has evolved beyond "cool" and is moving quickly into the corporate world. In this presentation, Angeles will discuss who blogs, how and why.

    He will also discuss how Lucent is supporting bloggers and at the same time keeping close watch over the resulting growth of information on the Intranet. Lucent's objective is to determine how the increased content that will result from blogging can evolve into a plan for making that information useful and usable for the enterprise."

    And his main points:

    • Weblogs are really not different as a technology, although they put control of publishing closer to users
    • Classifying weblog data can be difficult and requires human resources, but some search applications can help
    • Value diversity and above all, support users’ needs
    • Allow users to produce organizational knowledge using whatever tools they choose

    ...via elearningpost

    Posted by dcoates at 11:54 AM
    September 02, 2003
    E-Learning: Sometimes a Hammer is only a Hammer

    Guardian Unlimited has an article on Hard lessons from the big e-learning experiment:

    Many businesses invested in e-learning simply because they saw everyone else doing so, or they felt it could save them money from their train ing budget. Others were taken in by the excitement of the new technology, admits Steve Dineen, chief executive of e-learning provider, Wide Learning. Organisations frequently made the mistake of blowing most of their budget, sometimes millions of pounds, on the technology, forgetting that the quality of the courses they put up there was just as important.

    ...via elearningpost

    Posted by dcoates at 11:36 AM
    August 16, 2003
    More Blogs in Business

    Common Craft has an article on How I Would Implement Weblogs in Business:

    However, Weblogs offer an opportunity to break away from controlling the message and allow businesses to build relationships via people with real voices on a web site- voices that represent the brand and the message in new ways.

    ...via elearningpost

    Posted by dcoates at 05:22 PM
    August 07, 2003
    Routing around censorship

    Hossein Derakhshan has a recent blog post on how peer to peer news readers can help fight censorship:

    Imagine a peer-to-peer news reader that not only syndicates RSS files, but also downloads them and share them with other users. So you'll never be blocked to access any piece of information as long as you have access to this peer-to-peer software. It could even be implemented in the browser or added as a plug-in for an existing newsreader.
    Posted by dcoates at 10:38 AM
    August 01, 2003
    What's your niche?

    Marylaine Block has a good article on Creating your niche on the net. It's geared toward libraries, but has a lot to say to other service organizations, like Extension:

    Think about what we did right after September 11: we put up web pages that consolidated many different kinds of information, including some that most people wouldn't have even thought to look for. We linked in news stories (both from the US and abroad), contact information for charities, schedules of local memorials, maps, articles, and backgrounders on terrorism and Islam and the middle East.

    We could do the same for other pressing local issues for our community or company or school. Finance is a tough issue for everybody right now, and we have access to a wider variety of information and news than anybody else has, about state and federal funding, grant and training opportunities, and good ideas others in our situation have implemented. We could bring that all together on one web page, or blog or e-mail newsletter, and update it daily. If there's a major local controversy, we could post background information and links to news stories, position papers and interviews by the people involved, a discussion board where citizens could post their questions and opinions, maybe even a library-sponsored webcast. (In fact I assume at least some California libraries are already providing extensive information on their web sites to help voters make decisions about the recall petition.)

    Posted by dcoates at 02:22 PM
    July 28, 2003
    The Great Online

    The AARP has published a report that looks at how Americans aged 25-44 have helped their parents access the Internet.

    They list the following key findings:

    • Almost three quarters (71%) of those contacted who reported having a parent with a computer say they provide their parents with computer and technology assistance.
    • Eight out of 10 (78%) of respondents who are contacted by their parents for help report that they are the first place their parents or older relatives turn — with nearly 50% saying they are contacted more than twice a month.
    • Nearly nine out of 10 (87%) respondents aid their parents in finding information on the Internet.
    • Four out of 10 (43%) of the respondent's parents use instant messaging to keep in touch with theirchildren.
    • The majority (84%) of respondents believe that having two generations online has made a positive difference in their lives.
    • Older grandchildren (52% of respondents with kids 18-24 years old and 48% of respondents with kids 11-17 years old) help their grandparents with the computer or Internet
    Posted by dcoates at 10:55 AM
    Wi-Fi is more profitable when it's free

    According to an article at AlwaysOn

    Here's the irony in Wi-Fi public access pricing: retailers can be profitable by offering free Wi-Fi as a customer acquisition tool. But when they charge for Wi-Fi access, these retailers, and the WISPs serving them, almost certainly lose money. According to a market study coming out this summer, retailers are quickly learning this lesson: up to 30% of US location owners who plan to deploy commercial hotspots in 2004 intend those hotspots to be free or free-with-purchase.

    The fully loaded cost of offering free Wi-Fi access is less than $6/day. Operating a billable hotspot costs over $30/day. Half this cost comes from building or altering billing systems, plus the endless associated customer care. The millions of dollars already spent on systems to charge Wi-Fi users by the megabyte, minute, etc., will never be recuperated. Next year, authentication should become cheap enough to be part of a profitable Wi-Fi offering, but for the foreseeable future, authorization and accounting remain dangerous distractions.

    ...via BoingBoing

    Posted by dcoates at 09:07 AM
    July 25, 2003
    Talking amongst ourselves

    Interesting New York Times article on backchannel discussions during presentations.


    ...via elearningpost

    Posted by dcoates at 01:51 PM
    July 18, 2003
    Open Coursework

    Stanford University has released CourseWork: an Open Source Course Management System:

    By releasing CourseWork as Open Source software, Stanford University is providing non-proprietary, open access to a flexible, scalable course management system for teaching institutions of all kinds. CourseWork allows institutions to integrate their course web sites with their campus registrar’s database, student information system, library systems, and other campus-specific infrastructure systems. Institutions adopting CourseWork can modify its tools to better fit their teaching mission, or add new tools for different functionality. The CourseWork interface can also be freely modified to match the look of an institution’s existing web sites, unrestricted by the constraints of proprietary systems.

    Coursework includes APIs developed as part of the OKI (Open Knowledge Initiative)

    Posted by dcoates at 02:08 PM
    The Augmented Social Network

    There is currently a great deal of interest in the science of networks and self-organizing behaviors. There is general acknowledgement that we currently--in Western Society, at least--suffer from information overload--too much information, too fast. Weblogs provide some possibility for locating trusted experts and individuals with compatible interests. News aggregation and RSS make it possible to organize weblog feeds for instant delivery.

    But weblogs are not the final answer certainly, in locating trusted expertise, in generating social capital, and in bringing together like-minded individuals interested in engaging in civic society. Blogs are haphazard, disruptive, and casual. Someone who precisely fills the need for knowledge, connections, etc. of you and your group may have a blog for years and you will never find them.

    Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, and Steven Foster, members of an ad hoc group called ‘Link Tank’ have developed a report on The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the next-generation Internet.

    This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complimentary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries. 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society. 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of “online citizenship” for the Information Age.

    Online identity and building trust on the Internet are critical factors for enhancing knowledge, building community, and developing new structures for promoting civic society. In addition, as this paper proposes, persistent online identity, combined with reputation tracking, and brokered introductions might be a way to increase knowledge sharing, reduce ‘reinventing the wheel’ in unconnected groups, and broaden communities of interest and practice. In addition, it may be a way to overcome issues that arise as the web gets more crowded, that some individuals are always recognized as the ‘go-to’ person in a certain subject area (because they were in the past, or were on a closely related topic, because they’re a prolific writer, because they have lots of connections) and some people, who may also have valuable knowledge or new and essential insights, never are (because they’re new to the system, because they post infrequently, because they are not as extensively networked). A system is strengthened when it has a dynamic flow of new information, but it becomes difficult to maintain the flow when trust isn’t being built or new ideas aren’t being communicated across communities.

    The Augmented Social Network proposes to tackle some of these issues by developing a system where affinities can be discovered and trust established across communities and among strangers. Trust, we believe, is currently in decline in our society. This is likely due to many factors, among them increased stress, rapid change, broader networks, businesses and government institutions who do not honor agreements as they have been made. And yet, trust is essential for people of good will to engage in productive civic development and policy discussions. So, how can trust be established on the Internet in ways that recognize everyone’s potential participation and promotes community and progress?

    The ASN proposal includes four main elements:

    Persistent Identity
    Interoperability between online communities
    Brokered relationships
    Public interest matching technologies

    As discussed in this paper, persistent identity in this context must be something controlled by the users themselves. They must be free to decide not only what information is stored about them, but how it is revealed. For example, mandatory persistent identity that reaches across work, play, and civic environments would be a sure-fire way to guarantee that many people would either not participate, or would only participate in ‘safe’ ways. If someone has to choose between civic participation and their job, then they are not free. We can argue that it’s a ‘choice,’ participation or job, but if we truly want to live in a democracy then it is not an appropriate choice. We must have both employed workers and full participants in society--not an increasingly small group who can afford it or who have nothing to lose. Civic participation cannot belong only to the wealthy.

    The other three elements are primarily concerned with finding and making contacts with like-minded others or with people who can contribute knowledge to a project. Ways to reach across communities, brokering relationships to introduce one ‘stranger’ to another in the system while still respecting everyone’s privacy, and developing systems to match public interests across the web are all critical to civic participation and productive progress.

    Among the many issues here, (especially in judging affinities and capabilities and in matching public interests is one that plagues the Internet and its need, as a technological system, to have all things defined) and that is the essential nature of serendipity in any task of this nature. We don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t always know our own capabilities or how they apply. We find it particularly difficult, for instance, to locate people whose expertise isn’t credentialed in some identifiable, categorizable way. When you’re looking to solve an environmental problem you want people with expert knowledge, with local knowledge, and with policy knowledge and you want simple ways to bring them together. You want ways to identify people, to invite their participation, to build trust and to move ahead without too much ‘noise’ in the system.

    There are a number of things going on currently on the web that would help build the system outlined in this paper--XML, RDF, Topic Maps, reputation systems on Amazon.com and eBay.

    The paper ends with the following recommendations for proceeding:

    • Establishing an ASN coordinating body
    • Convening a board of technical advisors
    • Providing a dedicated engineer to represent the public interest at standards bodies working on persistent identity
    • Develop basic ASN functionality with select online community companies
    • A dedicated team would coordinate implementation of matching technologies for the public interest sector

    Principles of implementation are:

    • Open Standards
    • Interoperability
    • Inclusivity
    • Respect for Privacy
    • Decentralization

    The ASN could be implemented piece by piece and community by community. The system could be emergent and respond to growth and new unexpected uses that people will find to apply to the system once it’s in place.

    So, what does all this mean for Extension and, in broader terms, for the Land Grant System? ISU Extension’s mission is as follows: ISU Extension builds partnerships and provides research-based learning opportunities to improve quality of life in Iowa.

    Other extension service mission statements:

    Providing quality, relevant outreach and continuing education programs and services to the people of Texas.--Texas Cooperative Extension

    The Cornell Cooperative Extension educational system enables people to improve their lives and communities through partnerships that put experience and research knowledge to work.--Cornell Cooperative Extension

    University of Illinois Extension provides practical, research-based information and programs to help individuals, families, farms, businesses and communities in Illinois. Its mission in short, is to help you put knowledge to work.--University of Illinois Extension.

    Extension is about reaching out to people all across the state, about helping people use the information that university research produces, about taking data and information and helping people turn it into resident knowledge. Extension runs on networks. Clients, field and regional specialists, county office staff and campus specialists all work primarily through a web of loosely connected networks. For example, county office assistants communicate with their county directors, other county office assistants in the region, clients of extension, field specialists, campus specialists, local institutions and others. They provide information, seek support, offer expertise, and coordinate data, information and knowledge.

    So where could the features of ASN--persistent identity, interoperability between online communities, brokered relationships, public interest matching technologies--fit into Extension’s mission and organization? I think there are probably a number of applications that will become possible that are not possible now and that many of these applications will be invented by people pushing current boundaries as well as just trying to get their jobs done. Applications of this sort are generally disruptive and spontaneous and difficult to predict. What we can do is be prepared for disruption and encourage positive change when it happens. In addition, ASN could provide more people with the opportunity to interact with Extension experts through brokered introductions and public interest matching technologies. It could expand the Extension staff interaction on the Internet in ways that add value both for citizen participants (thanks to the information and knowledge they glean from Extension personnel) and for Extension (in enriching and deepening Extension staff’s knowledge and understanding of current developments).

    Discussion of the Augmented Social Network and its potential applications is ongoing now. And while the final application may mutate it’s very likely that some form of building identity and trust will be implemented as the Internet continues to develop. It makes sense for Extension and other public service institutions to be aware of these discussions and prepared to participate in ways that enhance the public interest and the services we provide.


    Posted by dcoates at 01:38 PM
    July 03, 2003
    Blogging about Books

    Tim Lauer, a teacher, has a PowerPoint presentation online: Bringing Literature Circles online: Blogging about Books, about students discussion online using weblogs.

    Also, check out Edweblogs, group blogging about the NECC 2003 conference

    Posted by dcoates at 11:18 AM
    June 25, 2003
    Corporate Blogging

    The New York Timestalks about the rise of the corporate blog:

    For companies and executives, blogs provide a way to talk informally to customers, vendors and employees. But the so-called blogosphere can also be a minefield. Saying the wrong thing or revealing trade secrets could come back to haunt a company. And public companies need to worry about disclosure rules.
    Posted by dcoates at 04:50 PM
    June 18, 2003
    NYU Weblog Portal

    CityCynic.com has an NYU Weblog Portal which lists present and past NYU students who have weblogs.

    ...via Scripting News

    Posted by dcoates at 02:32 PM
    June 02, 2003
    Academic blogging

    The Chronicle reports on scholarly blogging:

    In one form or another, that question inevitably arises in conversations with scholars who have taken up the habit of writing Web logs, or Some have started blogging in order to muse aloud about their research. Others want to polish their chops at opinion-writing for nonacademic audiences. Still others have more urgent and personal reasons. ("The black dogs of depression are snarling at my feet," reads the first entry of one scholar's blog.)
    Posted by dcoates at 04:45 PM
    May 19, 2003
    New News Model in South Korea

    Dan Gillmor reports on OhMyNews:

    OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century's journalism-as-lecture model, where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn't, into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic.

    The influence of OhmyNews is substantial, and expanding. It's credited with having helped elect the nation's current president, Roh Moo Hyun, who ran as a reformer. Roh granted his first post-election interview to the publication, snubbing the three major conservative newspapers that have dominated the print-journalism scene for years.

    OhMyNews publishes via website and a weekly print edition. The business has a staff of about 50 and more than 26,000 'citizen-reporters' who contribute news to the site. The 'citizen-reporters' cover politics, economy, culture, arts and science--"but they tend to focus more on personally oriented issues like education, job conditions, and the environment.

    Posted by dcoates at 02:46 PM
    Blog Clog

    Are weblogs wrecking Google?

    Here's the problem: some people have noticed that, for certain kinds of Google search the top references dug up by Google often come from weblogs. "Gah!" cry the searchers. "Those bloody weblogs are clogging up Google!" Among those who consider weblogs to be a mindless recycling of links and idle chatter by a vanishingly small number of net users, this is seen as a Bad Thing.

    One of the key issues, as expressed succintly by Dave Winer is:

    If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web. It's pretty simple.

    Most weblog entries are right out there for everyone to see. Many newspapers, put their older articles in archives (some for pay, some not) which are not available to search engines. Search engines search what they can see. And what they can see includes a lot of blogs.

    So, are weblogs wrecking Google? The better question is, when you do a search, do you find the information you need?

    ...via Scripting News

    Posted by dcoates at 02:23 PM
    May 12, 2003
    Blog Taxonomy

    A Chicago Sun-Times article on blogging gives us a field guide to blog classes:

    Linkage Blogs: The most classic-style blog, its individual blog entries are links to other sites on the %u2019net, embroidered with brief descriptions. If the person operating the blog has interests similar to yours it's a lot like having a TiVO for the Web. Someone else is sifting through the mounds and mounds of junk, and reporting back on just the links that might interest you.

    Info Blogs: Is the office print server available, or offline? Schools, companies and local businesses use blogs as a way to keep folks informed.

    Boswell Blogs: Like Boswell's London Journal or Pepys Diary, this is a street-level account of an individual life. It's the most interesting and exciting type of blog by far.

    Barbie Blogs: Like the Boswell Blog, except the blog entries are of interest only to the writer, the writer's immediate circle of friends.

    ...via The Shifted Librarian

    Posted by dcoates at 03:45 PM
    Why Blog--the continuing series

    An article about Blogging at Your Library...but this really applies to lots of other organizations as well:

    So why are blogs important to libraries? In one word%u2014communication. You can reach your patrons or staff in a whole new way. Information can be posted instantly. You can highlight an event in your community, review a book, or announce new materials. A blog gives people a reason to continually return to your site. Parts of your Web site can be blogs. Pages that change regularly can be quickly updated if they%u2019re a blog and you don%u2019t need to know HTML. Each department can update its own page. You can also communicate easily with your staff. Everyone from the director to part-time staff can post policy changes, news, or vacation schedules.
    Posted by dcoates at 03:41 PM
    April 21, 2003
    Live Online

    Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross are writing a story online using Movable Type.
    blog entries and comments to write, comment, and provide context and information for the story.

    ...via BoingBoing

    Posted by dcoates at 04:28 PM
    April 03, 2003
    SARS and SMS

    Dan Gillmor reports in his weblog:

    It wasn't newspapers or television or radio that originally spread the word about the outbreak of a serious respiratory illness, now known as SARS, in southeast China. It was SMS -- text messages on mobile phones.
    Posted by dcoates at 01:35 PM
    March 14, 2003
    Early Warning--SMS style

    jill/txt reports that in Norway they're considering using SMS messaging to warn the population of invasion or chemical attacks rather than the old air raid sirens. The original article is here but, fair warning, it's in Norwegian.

    Posted by dcoates at 11:10 AM
    March 12, 2003
    Close Contact

    The Japan Media Review has an article on A New Set of Social Rules for a Newly Wireless Society:

    Keitai [cellphone]-wired youth are in persistent but lightweight contact with a small number of intimates, with whom they are expected to be available unless they are sleeping or working. Because of this portable, virtual peer space, the city is no longer a space of urban anonymity; even when out shopping, solo youths will send photos to friends of a pair of shoes they just bought, or send fast-breaking news about a hot sale that is just opening. After meeting face-to-face, a trail of text messages continues the conversation as friends disperse in trains, buses and on foot, nimble thumbs touch-typing on numeric keypads.
    Posted by dcoates at 11:35 AM
    March 04, 2003
    Software and Community

    Joel on Software has an article on Building Communities with Software

    The article discusses some of the community software currently available and the effect these different implementations have on the community that's formed. USENET, Slashdot, and IRC each have specific issues that characterize their interactions.

    Joel's primary axiom of online communities?

    Small software implementation details result in big differences in the way the community develops, behaves, and feels.

    For example:

    IRC users organize themselves around bot warfare because the software doesn't let you reserve a channel. Usenet threads are massively redundant because the original Usenet reader, "rn," designed for 300 baud modems, never shows you old posts, only new ones, so if you want to nitpick about something someone said, you had to quote them or your nitpick won't make sense.

    He then goes on to discuss what he has found that does work, what doesn't work as well and why.

    Sometimes in communities it's not so much a matter of what works or doesn't (which Joel also mentions) but what kind of community you want and what's the best way to get it. It's often a question of matching up the community with the software and going forward from there.

    Posted by dcoates at 11:28 AM
    February 25, 2003
    Smart Mob Security

    TCS has a recent article on using Smart Mobs for homeland security:

    We learned on 9/11 about the effectiveness of individuals who were empowered by personal technology.

    ...

    The market research firm Telephia estimates that 53 percent of urban Americans now have mobile phones. However, the Homeland Security program has failed to capitalize on that private sector resource to deliver actionable information when and where people can use it, which would both lessen the demands on first responders and help people avoid panic because they feel they know what to do and have the real-time information they need.

    ...via Scripting News

    Posted by dcoates at 02:28 PM
    February 20, 2003
    Microsoft in BlogLand

    Mcrosoft Watch reports:

    It will come as a surprise to many that, with little fanfare, Microsoft officially entered the blogging-tool space last week. At the VSLive! developer conference, Microsoft unveiled five new sample applications built on top of its ASP.Net scripting environment. One of these five--the ASP.Net Community Starter Kit--is a blog builder.

    "You could use this (Kit) to build a Weblog," confirms Microsoft developer division product manager Shawn Nandi.

    The Community Starter Kit consists of application code, templates, documentation and forum-based help. According to Microsoft's own definition of the kit: "The Community Starter Kit enables you to quickly create a community Web site such as a user group site, a developer resource site, or a news site."

    ...via Scripting News

    Posted by dcoates at 02:23 PM
    February 17, 2003
    Google buys Blogger
    Web search powerhouse Google has jumped headfirst into the popular web logging (blogging) phenomena, inking a deal to acquire Silicon Valleysoftware firm Pyra Labs.
    Google's other content and content aggregation ventures include Google News and Google Groups (powered mostly be Deja.con's Usenet archive).


    Posted by dcoates at 08:47 AM
    February 14, 2003
    Medlogs

    Medscape has a list of medical weblogs at their Technology & Medicine Information Center

    To quote:

    Our editors have prepared the following collection of medical Weblogs authored by physicians or other health professionals. Weblogs, otherwise known as Blogs, are online diaries that are frequently updated with links, commentary, or personal diatribe. We think you'll find these Blogs interesting, entertaining, and definitely addictive
    Posted by dcoates at 01:18 PM
    More on Harvard Weblogs

    Holy crikey! John Palfrey's linked to me from his weblog (nobody ever links to me so this is pretty noteworthy).

    He also adds some thoughts on the Weblogs at Harvard project:

    a) that we begin with a principle that we seek to advance the use of technology in a teaching and learning environment; b) that we want to make blogging technology easily accessible to members of the Harvard community to see what they do with it; c) that we see some benefits out there in this technology for free exchange of ideas, friendship, collaboration, possibly even *democracy* (careful, yup, I know) -- could be semiotic democracy; d) and that we want to stay flexible enough to adapt as the interests of creators and readers and listeners and watchers change. And maybe even have some fun in the process.

    In addition, he has some thoughts on the current sketchiness (or 'fuzziness' for those who like that word better) of the project. One of the things I like about this project currently is that it is going forward with fuzziness attached. Things can be discussed to death. Anticipating objections can, in my experience, become like self-fulfilling prophecies and can easily suck the life out of the project and more importantly suck the energy out of the people who are enthusiastic about the project.

    I wrote up some additional thoughts yesterday after reading summaries from Donna Wentworth and others about the live blogging meeting on Tuesday. Among other things, I wrote this:

    And finally, there is a piece of the discussion that is inevitably about how to suck this back into a ‘process’ instead of a ‘thing that actually happens.’ You can see this when the talk turns to rules and principles and whether people will use it or not and what they’ll be worrying about when they do. Some of this is important (and some of it really isn’t). What I’d like to see with Weblogs at Harvard is what they appear to be doing, going forward, implementing things, letting it disrupt and adjusting as it does.

    There's also an 'About' page up now at the Weblogs at Harvard site, which says in part:

    Welcome. This is the place where we point to the developments in the developing World O'Weblogs at Harvard University. You won't find any biting commentary here, or insightful ideas, or even logical breakthoughs, our job is to help you do that, and help spread the word about your accomplishments. We're studying weblogs and evangelizing them. We're excited about how this technology might be used in all the activities of the university, for faculty, administration, students, alumni, staff.
    Posted by dcoates at 10:59 AM
    February 12, 2003
    Harvard blogs

    Dave Winer (Scripting News) and Donna Wentworth (CopyFight) are involved in a project to open up blogging at Harvard University.

    The details are still sketchy (at least to me) but the concept is exciting and looks like an attempt to jumpstart blogging on education, subject matter, and the ongoing thoughts and analysis of Harvard students, professors, and others. A meeting was held last night to discuss the project (the meeting was, of course, blogged live).

    Posted by dcoates at 11:40 AM
    February 11, 2003
    The Circle of Trust

    Steve Gillmor talks about disruptive technologies that were significant in 2003 and in particular whether the trend is toward more or less freedom.

    About the terrific upsurge in blogging, he says:

    In turn, blogs have nurtured a growing circle of trust, the mulch for building directories of digital identity based on expertise, communication skills, and critical intangibles -- sense of humor, ethical infrastructure, shared values, and contributed resources. Weblogs provide a variety of Web services for the community: a kind of protective gauze for standards warriors, viral marketing for independent developers, and a watchdog mechanism for legacy media.

    On the positive side, he identifies such disruptive technologists as Tim O'Reilly who has donated 200 book titles to the Creative Commons licensing model, Dave Winer, who has contributed the development of SOAP and ongoing analysis via Scripting News, and Bill Gates who has promoted TCP/IP, XML, and Wi-Fi.

    Posted by dcoates at 11:17 AM
    February 06, 2003
    Whuffie and online Reputations

    Cory Doctorow's new book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, introduces us to whuffie:

    It's the great conundrum of the web. Why do so many people do so much for free? What do people get out of it? Whuffie - that's what. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow for his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Whuffie embodies respect, karma, mad-props; call it what you will, the web runs on it.

    The idea of reputation systems that can help to filter information is discussed further on Howard Rheingold's blog, Smart Mobs -

    One of the critical uncertainties about the future of smart mobs is whether or not workable, transportable, trustworthy reputation systems will evolve and spread. The potential for collective action in any population cannot be realized until the trust level rises above a threshold, and reputation can multiply the number of ways people trust each other. So far, eBay's and Slashdot's reputation system , or the more geeky trust metric used by Advogato have been the exemplars of reputation management systems.
    Posted by dcoates at 03:04 PM
    January 22, 2003
    The Lazy Web

    Do you have an idea that you think others might be able to solve?

    You can make a LazyWeb request by posting the idea in your own blog, and then sending a Trackback ping to:

    http://blog.mediacooperative.com/mt-pi.cgi or by using this form.

    Posted by dcoates at 01:46 PM
    January 15, 2003
    Portals and Schools

    Web Portals and Higher Education: Technologies to Make IT Personal -- Richard N. Katz and Associates is now available in PDF format.

    Posted by dcoates at 11:22 AM
    December 12, 2002
    Blogging the Supernova

    Another conference blog. This time blogging the Supernova 2002 conference, held December 9-10, 2002 in Palo Alto, California.

    Supernova 2002 is (was):

    ...a new conference exploring the distributed future. With the bursting of the Internet bubble, businesses, end-users, investors, and technology vendors face a bewildering array of challenges. Yet a common theme runs through the fundamental questions facing software, communications, and media. That theme is decentralization.
    Posted by dcoates at 09:15 AM
    December 09, 2002
    Hiptop Blogging

    One of the new expansions of blogging is moblogging (mobile blogging). Here's someone blogging a marathon, while, you know, they're running in it.

    Posted by dcoates at 08:37 AM
    November 19, 2002
    People, people, everywhere

    The Sociable Media Group at MIT investigates issues concerning society and identity in the networked world.

    Projects include: Chat Circles, a different kind of chat space with circles to represent users, virtual movement and hearing range (conversations in the chat space can take place outside your hearing), ChitChat Cafe, a physical cafe which also allows users to be 'present' virtually, and Visual Who, a tool for visualizing the complex relationships among a large group of items.

    Posted by dcoates at 01:07 PM
    September 25, 2002
    Let's All Talk Together

    Carnegie Mellon has received a 2.1 million dollar grant from NSF to build an online forum for citizen deliberation.

    Among the objectives are to learn about how online communication affects participants and how it can contribute to the quality of their decision making. Developments could be used to develop ways to conduct effective public hearings, community organizing and problem solving.

    Posted by dcoates at 03:20 PM
    September 16, 2002
    Why, oh why?

    Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove has started a weblog. In this article, he talks about Why?

    As in why collaborate, why communicate, why web logs?

    Posted by dcoates at 03:17 PM
    September 03, 2002
    Loosely Connected to Everything

    Boxes and Arrows has a review of Dave Weinberger's book Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.

    My interest in this book is fairly high at the moment (ordered, haven't read it yet), because I'm just starting to 'get' the importance of the 'loosely joined' part. We spend a lot of time talking about developing, implementing, and managing systems on the web--content management systems, knowledge management systems, communication systems.... But excepting, possibly, Yahoo, people don't want one place to go. Or, really they want their place to go, a place that has the best of everything they want, and most important all the contacts they need to build their own social and knowledge network.

    One reason people like Google so much is because it doesn't just give them pages with random appearances of important words, it gives them important pages as determined by PageRank. And, and this is important, it doen't attempt to control the information or even how the information shows up.

    The Web, says David Weinberger, is about more than just inforamtion retrieval and e-commerce (well, yeah, this is what I was fumbling around trying to say above).

    What's really important about the Web? Words? Buying stuff? Using words to buy stuff?

    Some of Weinberger's thoughts on the subject:

    • On the Web, nearness is created by interest
    • What makes the web compelling isn't data, but the sound of our voices
    • The web is social or at least it's a social place
    • Groups are the heart of the Web
    Posted by dcoates at 02:17 PM
    August 15, 2002
    Peer-to-peer meets Academia

    The IPTPS 2002 Electronic Proceedings includes papers on such topics as:

    • Mapping the Gnutella Network: Macroscopic Properties of Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems

    • Locating Data in (Small-World?) P2P Scientific Collaborations

    • The Case for Cooperative Networking

    Posted by dcoates at 08:38 AM
    August 01, 2002
    Working Blogs

    According to a recent article at MSNBC, businesses are starting to recognize the potential of blogging for their organizations.

    Posted by dcoates at 08:34 AM
    July 23, 2002
    From here, they really do look like ants

    A recent article, Lessons from the Anthill, in the Online Community Report discusses the development of anthill communities on the Internet. Anthill communities are large groups of people who come together through online networks, each taking a small piece of responsibility for a large significant project. Open source software development is one of the first and most successful examples of an anthill community, producing Linux, Apache, and Mozilla, many people contributing small pits of code, discussing the results, and working out the bugs.

    Examples of anthill communties outside the programming community include OpenLaw and ThinkCycle.

    Posted by dcoates at 08:49 AM
    July 18, 2002
    Collaboration tools for Universities

    In a recent article, eWeek and the University of Wisconsin took a look at platforms for providing web based meetings.

    The University of Wisconsin needs collaboration/meeting applications both for traditional meetings and e-learning. After testing a number of systems, price and confusing pricing models turned out to be among the biggest factors in making a final decision.

    In addition to the general article, eWeek includes a detailed evaluation article, Striving to Make a Mark, and a one page 'scorecard' (eVal Scorecard: Virtual Meeting Collaboration)

    Posted by dcoates at 08:30 AM
    July 12, 2002
    Do You Know Who Your Friends Are?

    According to a recent article in Science News, the Internet is providing social researchers with a wealth of opportunity. But what does it all mean? Are heavy Internet users depressed and withdrawn? Or are they happy, social, and well-connected? Does Internet time cut into passive television time or family time?

    Early results of research into Internet usage and its effects can be confusing and contradictory, made more so by the speed with which the Internet grows and changes.

    Posted by dcoates at 09:35 AM
    July 05, 2002
    Tech for the People

    Cory Doctorow at Boingboing blogs Howard Rheingold's Reboot talk on the populist side of technology.

    It's not all dot-coms and venture capital. New tech can make infrastructure cheaper and a tech commons can spur innovation in ways restricted access can't.

    Posted by dcoates at 09:17 AM
    July 03, 2002
    The Academic Weblog

    According to recent article in WiredNews, UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism now has a course on blogging. Students are maintaining a blog on blogging and web issues (deep linking, copyright, online music trading).

    Other schools are also looking at incorporating blogs into their online journalism courses.

    Posted by dcoates at 10:00 AM
    June 21, 2002
    We're All In this Together

    Dan Gilmor has a recent column on collaboration tools:

    Collaboration on the web is being done in all kinds of ways--email, discussion groups, and weblogs, all the way up to high-end enterprise systems for use in international corporations.

    Many of these tools are still learning to work the way we want to work, but for specific applications and user needs even the current set of tools is being adopted with enthusiasm.

    Posted by dcoates at 08:57 AM
    June 13, 2002
    Everywhere you go

    According to yet another recent article in WiredNews, a village of Ashaninka Indians in central Peru have their own web site. It helps them tell their story, educate their people and communicate with one another.

    Other projects to help realize and maintain open Internet access for all include a community network project in a housing project in Massachusetts and other grassroots projects in nearly 20 countries.

    Discussion of these projects and others took place at a recent four-day conference in Seattle called 'Shaping the Network', sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and the National Communications Association.

    Posted by dcoates at 09:41 AM
    June 12, 2002
    Industrial Blogging

    According to a recent article in Wired News, Macromedia has encouraged the creation of web logs for each of its newly released applications. The blogs (one for each product) are run by the appropriate community manager. Their purpose is to provide a fast, concise, informal forum for the managers to discuss their products in their own voices.

    The sites were created by the community managers themselves using Radio Userland and Blogger, part of the logic being that they are not corporate sites speaking in a corporate voice.

    "Giving the community managers a platform on which they can use their own voice, that was our idea," Hale said. "Our format (on Macromedia.com) just wouldn't be as quick as a blog is. We do have a community section in there, but a blog is five sentences and 10 links. And that gets to the heart of why people trust blogs -- they like the format."

    Blogging for Macromedia are:

    Posted by dcoates at 09:27 AM
    May 31, 2002
    Collaborating with others and building community

    According to Customer.Community, the 12 principles of Collaboration are:

    1. Purpose The community should fufill a necessary and useful function for its participants
    2. Identity Members need to be able to identify each other and build relationships
    3. Reputation Members have reputations based on their own activities and others' opinions
    4. Governance Faciliators and community members agree on management and on shared principles of behavior for the group
    5. Communication Members must be able to interact, share ideas and information
    6. Groups Members can segment themselves according to specific interests and tasks
    7. Environment A synergistic environment with seamless flow from one activity to another can help members achieve their purpose
    8. Boundaries The community knows why it exists and what makes up the 'inside' and 'outside' of the community
    9. Trust Members must be able to build trust over time
    10. Exchange The community recognizes that there is an ongoing exchange of value
    11. Expression The community has a recognizable character
    12. History The community remembers what has happened and can change and grow
    13. Posted by dcoates at 01:51 PM
    May 09, 2002
    The Openness of Open Forums

    Dirty Laundry on the Web

    How do large corporations show their 'face?' How do they gain trust and demonstrate commitment to principles?

    For Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Comanies, one way is to provide open forums where critics, supporters and everyone else can speak freely, including open accusations of murder and corruption. And where employees respond in their own voices, rather than pre-approved PR releases.

    Posted by dcoates at 08:16 AM
    March 21, 2002
    Virtual meetings

    What are people doing these days with electronic collaboration tools?

    Here's a quick overview.

    Posted by dcoates at 08:41 AM
    February 15, 2002
    Dynamic WebCast Meetings

    eLearning Forum, a community of practice interested in elearning and the issues surrounding its adoption and practice, holds regular webcast meetings of its members. Most webcast vendors currently assume a one-to-many metaphor--virtual lectures--or one-to-one--virtual coaching with an emphasis on formal planned presentations. But remote meetings can take other forms, particularly a mix of both formal presenations and open discussion.

    Based on experiences with webcast meetings at eLearning Forum, the following are some strategies for making remote meetings work:

  • Don't make remote users feel like second class citizens
  • Don't overuse Powerpoint
  • Project the remote session on a central screen to remind everyone that there are remote participants
  • Have a 'remote participant advocate' in the main meeting room
  • Make archives accessible and usable (divide into chunks, label for content)
  • Don't sacrifice in-room technology
  • Make all in-room participants use a microphone when speaking
  • Voice-over-IP is good
  • Other important things:

  • Don't have one person run the meeting and the technology
  • Practice before the 'real' meeting
  • Make sure your network connection is good and reliable
  • Post a phone number for backup and support
  • Test everything

  • Posted by dcoates at 08:33 AM
    January 30, 2002
    Bowling Together: Online Public Policy Engagement

    Stephan Coleman and John Gotze have started the website: www.bowlingtogether.net.

    Their report, Bowling Together: Online Public Engagement in Policy Deliberation, includes:

    1. Representation, Engagement and Democracy
    2. Two-Way Governance
    3. Connected Citizenship
    4. Appropriate Technologies For Online Engagement
    5. Global Case Studies

    The ClueTrain Manifesto says that the web is a conversation. People don't just want to order things online, they want to communicate with the people they order things from, they want to communicate with each other and they want to communicate with and influence the institutions that imact their lives. The process of making government available through the Internet isn't just about 'pushing' information out to people in the form of publications and announcements and guidelines. It's also about finding new ways to interact that engage citizens and help provide better, more representational governance.

    Posted by dcoates at 11:41 AM
    January 24, 2002
    Online Community Concepts
    1. Reputation management
    2. Collborative filtering
    3. Mailing list management
    4. Content management systems
    5. Distributed categorization and indexing efforts

    These tools are all related in some way to the process of establishing, developing and maintaining online communities.

    Most online community sites are doing some of these things, but no one's gone ahead and incorporated everything. Is it possible? Is it desireable? What features really make for the best, most useful online community environment? How much does the purpose of the community affect the tools that are needed?
    ...from Online Community Concepts and Technologies at CamWorld

    Posted by dcoates at 09:25 AM
    January 14, 2002
    Community Building as a Core Intranet Value

    Generating value with Internet technology is still the subject of much discussion. Perhaps even more discussion than ever before as we've seen companies which seemingly lacked any plan for generating value fall into oblivion.

    At one time, the value of new software systems was calculated on the basis of full-time employees that could be eliminated. One weakness of this approach is that following a strict policy of replacing people with software overlooks the possibility that said new software/technology might just open the door to doing things different/better/beyond what's been done before.

    All too often, the bottom-line benefits of automation come at the expense of missed top-line opportunities based on new services, new partners and new markets. Innovation and differentiation are the output of a creative, empowered workforce, not commodity laborers employed because their jobs have not yet been streamlined away.

    The Web's revolutionary potential lies in its interactivity. The Web is a conversation. And a community. How can we use this in our organizations? What gains can we make? The Internet is at its best, and its potential may just be the greatest, when it's facilitating creative dialogue between individuals.

    As an organization one way to 'harness' this potential is to recognize that self-organizing, unmediated communities with at least a minimum level of activity are by definition creative and self-motivated. Your challenge is to find a way to harvest this creative energy toward the goal of making your organization's products and services compellingly unique.
    ...from Community Building as a Core Value in Intranet Journal

    Posted by dcoates at 11:46 AM
    December 20, 2001
    Eleven tools for collaboration

    In an August, 2001 article in WebReview, Steve Franklin discusses the eleven best tools for collaborating with colleagues over the web. The list includes:

    • Instant Messaging
    • Chat
    • Whiteboards
    • Email
    • Voice-over-IP
    • Teamware
    • Design tools
    • Shell accounts
    • Revision tracking
    • File comparison
    • Local environment for testing

    He suggests that work teams invest some time in analyzing their work flow. Lots of time spent organizing information rather than accomplishing tasks may indicate that there's benefit to be gained by investing in some collaboration tools.

    Posted by dcoates at 11:43 AM
    December 14, 2001
    TextWeaver

    ‘Weaving’ is the process of periodically summing up an ongoing discussion and pointing up similarities and differences in the ideas brought forth so far.

    TextWeaver is a tool that attempts to make this a more ‘automatic’ part of online discussions. It consists of a composition interface, an ‘active reading’ interface, and a filing interface.

    The composition interface includes a view of the archive, allowing the user to refer to the discussion-so-far as they type their response. The active reading interface lets the user set up keywords on the fly. The filing interface is a way to file pieces of the discussion according to user preferences.

    TextWeaver appears to require users to change the way they read and respond to discussion. Most people read for overall context and to formulate a response. Adding the role of categorizing and archiving at the same time will be a change that may obscure and slow the discussion itself. Thinking that one will go back later and archive gets away from looking at the process of technology adoption as one of finding ways people want and need to work and developing ways to help them.

    Posted by dcoates at 04:48 PM
    November 30, 2001
    Miscellaneous Comments on Online Community
    “People on the net should be thought of not only as solitary information processors but also as social beings. People are not only looking for information, they are also looking for affection, support, and affirmation.”
    --Judith Stefana Domath--Inhabiting the virtual city
    “If we are going to use the word meaningfully [community] we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure.”
    --M. Scott Peck
    “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”
    --Charles Darwin
    Posted by dcoates at 09:11 AM
    November 27, 2001
    Nine Design Strategies for Online Communities

    --from Amy Jo Kim

    • Define and articulate your purpose

    • Build flexible extensible gathering places

    • Create meaningful and evolving member profiles

    • Design for a range of roles

    • Design a strong leadership program

    • Encourage appropriate etiquette

    • Promote cyclic events

    • Integrate the rituals of community life

    • Facilitate member-run subgroups

    Posted by dcoates at 03:24 PM
    Benefits of Online Communities

    Online communities can enable an organization to:

    • Create an early warning system

    • Make sure knowledge can get to people who can act on it on time

    • Connect people and build relationships across boundaries of geography and discipline

    • Provide an ongoing context for knowledge exchange that can be far more effective than memos

    • Attune everyone in the organization to each other’s needs--more people will know who knows what and will know it faster

    • Multiply intellectual capital by the power of social capital, reducing social friction and encouraging social cohesion

    • Create an ongoing shared social space for people who are geographically dispersed

    • Amplify innovation

    • Create a community memory for group deliberation and brainstorming

    • Improve the way individuals think collectively

    • Turn training into a continuous process, not divorced from normal business practices

    • Attract and retain best employees by providing access to social capital that is only available within the organization

    Posted by dcoates at 12:22 PM