|
|
About this site
|
Social software blends tools and modes for richer online social environments and experiences. Some examples of social software are weblogs, wikis, forums, chat environments, or instant messaging, and related tools and data structures for identity, integration, interchange and analysis. For more, see Liz's primer on what we're up to.
This group weblog is authored by Elizabeth Lane Lawley,
Ross Mayfield,
Sébastien Paquet,
Jessica Hammer and
Clay Shirky.
|
|
|
|
|
MANY-TO-MANY: social software
|
|
By Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet & Jessica Hammer
|
IM robot friends
By
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
As I get older, I'm getting used to being "scooped" on new technology by my students and my kids. Today's discovery comes via one of my students' blogs (thanks, David!).
David wrote about getting a weather forecast via AIM, using SmarterChild. Since I know he, like me, uses a T-Mobile Sidekick phone, I was intrigued. AIM is much faster and less bandwidth-intensive than the web, especially on a GPRS data connection, so it seemed worth exploring.
So I went to the SmarterChild web site, where it told me I could preview the service by adding SmarterChild to my buddy list, and saying "hi." Moments, later, I was having a "chat" with the robot. It greeted me by my IM name, then asked if I'd answer a few questions. I told it "yes," and it asked me my name, whether I attended school, whether I worked (and at what), what my hobbies were, and finally my age. (Interestingly, on age it gave me three choices; over 17, 13-17, and under 13. Clearly this is a service targeted at kids, which makes sense given IM demographics.)
I was then given a menu of options--info (news, movies, weather), library (encyclopedia, thesaurus, shakespeare), fun (rate yourself, ASCII art, horoscopes, +), tools (notepad, translations, conversions), join in (polls, stats on use, "tell me about a crush" +). So far, I've used it check the local weather forecast (using zip code), and to convert 30 degrees celsius into degrees fahreheit (86). Interface seems quite straightforward, and the response time is zippy. Looks worth the $9.95/year to me, given how much I rely on my Sidekick when I'm out of the house.
Beyond the immediate utility, however, it's got me thinking about "robot companions" in virtual environments. I've been hanging out a bit on Joi Ito's IRC channel lately, where there are a growing number of robots in the mix. Aaron Swartz's datum provides reference services, Joi's own jibot notifies him of new Technorati links, and shorten creates shortened url aliases so that long urls posted to the channel can be easily accessed. Right now, these robots are pretty dumb. They speak only when spoken to, and answer only when you use "proper syntax." SmarterChild seems more flexible in terms of natural language queries, but it's still dumb, and responsive only. How long until these real-time robots start pushing the boundaries of the Turing Test, though?
|
|
Don't eat the brown acid: Reputation and Drugs
By
Clay Shirky
Interesting speculative post by Arnold Kling on the possibility of weakening the pharmaco-medical complex's control of the drug industry by using a reputation system for drugs. But is there any alternative to paternalism? Yes! Reputation systems! I could base my decision to use a drug on the reputation of the drug itself. If it's a new drug, I could base my decision on the company's reputation for research, as well as the opinions of scientists about the drug. I would want reputation systems evaluating the scientists. [...] Instead of thinking of social software as a way to mobilize street demonstrations, let's think of it as a way to make paternalistic regulations obsolete.
|
|
DOD chat use exploded in Iraq
By
Clay Shirky
There's an interesting article over at Federal Computer Week on the military's use of chat in Iraq. A Navy commander who recently returned from the Middle East said today that chat and secure telephones were the primary communications circuits Navy ships used at sea during the war.
And, in a discovery that will astonish no one whose ever seen a transcript of #hottub on irc, they came to this conclusion. However, chat quickly became overused in some situations, including one chat room at the Combined Air Operations Center that had 900 people participating at once, said Navy Cmdr. Tim Sorber [...] Such a large number of people in a chat room "is a nightmare," Sorber said.
And, of course, exclusivity intrudes:
[...] some users were communicating privately with one another, or "whispering," during chats so that they didn't clog the main conversation. This became problematic because the whisperers were brokering important deals that cut other decision-makers out of the loop. This caused the commander to quickly outlaw the practice, Sorber said.
Given that chat has now clearly become a core tool, it will be interesting to see what regulations governing its use emerge in the post-war climate.
|
|
To Kill an Avatar
By
Clay Shirky
"Written by lawyers for lawyers!" doesn't sound like much of an endorsement, but Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter have an interesting article describing their work on legal systems in online games.
If paying subscribers are constantly being slaughtered and robbed by avatar miscreants, subscriptions will surely decline, hurting the bottom line of the world's owner. In Lucasfilm's Habitat, citizens complained to the company that player-killing and corpse-looting were detrimental to the game's future. The designers' initial solution was to banish death within the city limits by coding it out of the program. Stanford Law School's Lawrence Lessig has memorably advanced the idea that code amounts to law in the technological realm of cyberspace. Nowhere is this analogy more literal than in virtual worlds, where software designers provide the law, the courts, the constitution, and the very physics of existence. Their original paper, Law in Virtual Worlds, is here.
|
|
Second Life Launches
By
Clay Shirky
Second Life, a new multiplayer online world from Linden Labs, has launched. Second Life is unusual in that it hews closer to the Habitat/LambdaMOO tradition of "social world with activities" rather than the UO tradition of "game with social features."
Most of the PR is of the "mo' better faster" variety, touting imporved versions of existing capabilities -- "infinite" customizability and so on -- but the two novel features are a new streaming codec meant to send textures in real time, in order to ensure that players can build elaborate new parts of the world and have them appear to all users easily.
The second innovation is taxation, because the power to tax is the power to destroy. They get around the LambdaMOO/object overflow problem by taxing player built structures. In the beta world, this seems to have created an event-driven social scene, where several players created an unbelievably intricate wedding palace, down to designing the decoration on the cake, and then took it down before the tax bots swept through.
(The other horse in this "social immmersion" VR world is the still-in-stealth There.com, which is more focused on creating a platform. Unlike Second Life, There forward caches objects and textures, but this allows them to experriment with importing real GPS data and images to build a world that matches the features of the real world.)
|
|
Castronova on Female Discount in Avatar Auctions
By
Clay Shirky
Edward Castronova, the man almost singlehandedly responsible for making game economics a comparative discipline, is at it again, this time with the melliflously titled The Price of 'Man' and 'Woman': A Hedonic Pricing Model of Avatar Attributes in a Synthethic World, concerning the lower price, in real world dollars, that female UO avatars fetch at auction: Female avatars tend to be concentrated in highly sexualized Human and Elven races, with very few being present among such aesthetically-challenged races as Ogres and Trolls. [...] Nonetheless, among comparable avatars, females do sell at a significant price discount. The average avatar price is 333 dollars; the price discount for females is 40 to 55 dollars, depending on methods. The discount may stem from a number of causes, including discrimination in Earth society, the maleness of the EverQuest player base, or differences in well-being related to male and female courtship roles.
|
|
Mark Carey Explains Globealive
By
Clay Shirky
I've been watching Globealive for a bit now -- its a search engine that returns links to people instead of sites. I largely discounted it because GlobeAlive on its own is one of those "It'll work if everyone does it" ideas which will never fly as a standalone site. My interest has been renewed, however, by seeing Mark Carey of Web Dawn explain how GlobeAlive should work with weblogs:
On it's own, GlobeAlive doesn't have the user- or expert-base to really get to scale that is necessary to really make the idea work. But if GlobeAlive could combine efforts with Blog community sites, it could gain the users, and broader scope required for it to take off. You could search for other bloggers based on keywords, and connect to them instantly via synchronous chat. As part of this idea, GlobeAlive might index members' blogs, using that data to compile keyword lists for search ranking. ...
|
|
Two more on Flash Crowds
By
Clay Shirky
|
|
User Innovation Networks
By
Clay Shirky
An interesting paper by Eric von Hippel of MIT on horizontal innovation networks -
by and for users[pdf], about ways the Open Source pattern of working can be extended, so that collaboration among groups of users can lead directly to innovation, without having to be filtered through a business entity:
User innovation networks can function entirely independently of manufacturers when (1) at least some users have sufficient incentive to innovate, (2) at least some users have an incentive to voluntarily reveal their innovations, and (3) diffusion of innovations by users is low cost and can compete with commercial production and distribution. When only the first two conditions hold, a pattern of user innovation and trial and improvement will occur within user networks, followed by commercial manufacture and distribution of innovations that prove to be of general interest.
|
|
Virtual Graffiti
By
Jessica Hammer
The Geonotes project isn't the only project that's trying to create digital communities in physical space, but it does a particularly nice job of using existing infrastructure to build it cheaply and simply. Their software allows people to leave virtual notes for each other at particular places in the real world, but instead of assuming that users will acquire expensive hardware or software, they exploit wi-fi access (which, it's fair to assume, people getting online in public places will already have).
Unfortunately, the project still has technical problems, most significantly that it only works with Lucent base stations, but their choice to externalize much of the work onto existing applications like the MIT Wherehoo database seems a solid foundation for focusing on the social applications of the technology.
|
|
Why I don't like Java.net
By
Clay Shirky
I am, of course, inclined to like java.net, Sun's Java developer community site. Alas, it makes the mistake of many such sites, which is to assume that community needs some sort of corporate wrapper to be fit for human consumption.
Every article on weblogs ever written has called attention to the value of a real human voice. Meanwhile, here's how Java.net greets its prospective members:
Welcome to java.net!
This is where Java[TM] technology collaboration happens. java.net is a new central meeting place for developers and Java technology enthusiasts to collaborate on projects, share ideas, and create the next "big thing."
Now doesn't that have the sound of an authentic human voice? "Welcome to java.net!" Did it get to be 1995 again and no one told me? And who decided that calling it "Java[TM]" or putting (misplaced) irony quotes around the next big thing would be useful? It must still be 1995 at Sun, as they clearly don't understand that the phrase "the next big thing" has become a laugh line.
Sun has created an incredible bit of community infrastructure and then hidden it like a crazy aunt in the attic, to be replaced by a brochureware facade. Someone over there needs to take a look at the front pages of slashdot, kuro5hin, and every weblog ever launched, and notice that the core atribute of those pages is that the majority of words on them were written by their users.
And then they need to take a deep breath, throw away absolutely everything that looks like a branding excercise for Java[TM], and instead make the home page reflect the community.
|
|
Blog -> BBS: WebDawn reverses the pattern
By
Clay Shirky
Another fusion of the patterns of weblogs and BBSes, this time in reverse. Mark Carey has created a new view of his Web Dawn weblog, reconfigured in BBS format:
Forum View provides an alternative view to the blog, giving a more accurate view of the conversations taking place. With the more recently active conversations listed on top, you can quickly get a sense of which entries have generated discussion - without scrolling to the bottom of each entry to see the number of comments. Here's the forum view itself.
|
|
Six Degrees of Sexual Frustration
By
Clay Shirky
Interesting William O'Shea article in the Village Voice on the merging of Friendster with real-world socializing: "It's interesting that now, when I go out to social gatherings, it seems as if just about everyone is on Friendster," says James Meetze, a publisher from Oakland, California. "The other night I was at an art opening when a girl approached me and said, 'I've seen you on the Internet.' I made the connection that she had recently sent me a message on Friendster about liking to eat kittens. I said, 'Oh, right, you're the kitten eater, please stay away from my kittens.' "
|
|
Business Weblogs and Social Software
By
Clay Shirky
Interesting post over at "How To Save the World", Dave Pollard's weblog, on business weblogs and social software, detailing the areas where social networking and knowledge management could (or should) intersect: Social Software Tool #4: Knowledge Traffic Management Tool
This tool would identify areas of knowledge sharing 'congestion' (people who are receiving an unmanageable number of requests for information, or not responding to requests on a timely basis), topics that are suddenly 'hot', and the adequacy of the enterprise's knowledge about those topics, people who are excessively isolated from others (few connections or exchanges), de facto experts and thought leaders who should be recognized (or, if they are outside the enterprise, perhaps hired), etc.
|
|
Wikis & Weblogs in the Java Developer Community
By
Ross Mayfield
Last week Sun launched Java.net, the first large scale developer community to incorporate wikis and weblogs (disclosure: Socialtext consulted on its design). Serving up to 3 million users, it will expose new users to these powerful communication and collaboration tools. But it is no accident that the largest business case of weblog use is a developer community, developers have been using these tools since they were invented.
The community also leverages editorial content from O'Reilly and CollabNet developer tools. Any developer, particularly open source projects, should consider taking advantage of the free resources provided. Smaller companies should consider hosting their own developer communities there as well.
Aside from the community-wide weblogs (Daniel Steinberg, James "the Java guy" Gosling) and a wiki, each wiki and weblogs falls are tools within sub-community projects. You can even view weblogs by community. One evangelist blogged JavaOne using his phone cam. This community is bring some great new voices into the fold (all RSS enabled), like Richard Gabriel who lays out the vision of Java.net:
...We think of creativity as an individual talent, but communities can be creative, too. And the sorts of things a community can build are considerably larger than those an individual can. There are many examples. Cathedrals in the Middle Ages were built by a long-lived community of builders, artisans, carpenters, sculptors, stone cutters, woodcutters, ceramics makers, glass makers, painters, and ordinary people working as laborers, based on a model created by an architect perhaps decades earlier, but inspired by a common vision of what that cathedral will be.
Programming languages have been defined by widely dispersed communities using email and similar tools. Linux -- itself a cathedral-like project -- has spawned tens of thousands of other projects, some adding well-known pieces to Linux and others stretching the imagination or bringing to Linux functionality once found only elsewhere. The software patterns community was self-created without any support whatsoever from funding agencies or corporations; similar stories are true of the Agile and eXtreme Programming communities. These are all highly influential and widespread communities now.
The vision of java.net is to build a self-creating and self-governed web place where communities can join together -- either loosely through federation or tightly by living on java.net -- to build something like a diverse city of diverse communities, individuals, and companies who are engaged in using the Java language and technology in both routine and innovative ways. The purpose is to bring people together to increase the density of triggers so that new markets and resources are created...
Now its only a week old, there are more projects than you can count, and some really active communities like Java Desktop and Java Games. The community isn't all Sun and Java, other communities are either hosted, federated or linked. By design, communities can easily cross-polinate to spark new projects.
Other open developer communities leverage wikis, like OSAF's Chandler project and the Social Software Alliance. Its a natural fit because the tools work for more than talk, but getting things done. What's different about Java.net is the corporate initiative, scale of participation and breadth tools made openly available. Sun, to its credit, provided this in an open ethic to create new opportunties for new people and stands to gain the just reward of loyalty in return.
Its a rather simple equation, give people tools to meet people, talk and code and great things happen.
|
|
Communication & Collaboration Convergence
By
Ross Mayfield
Uh oh, there's that word again. Convergence. The solution to all our problems.
Siemens has released OpenScape, which integrates phone, voice mail, e-mail, text messaging, calendaring, instant messaging, and conferencing services. Its all centered on IM to synchronize use of different modes of communication, with a SIP server (Session Initiation Protocol) for telephony integration. OpenScape 1.0, however, requires Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Server 2003 and Greenwich collaboration server. Its the latest in a long line of communication and collaboration solutions to leverage Outlook as a platform. And its estimated to cost as much as $400 per seat.
This may just be unified messaging redux, but Mike from Techdirt is right that it has potential as a productivity tool if its simple enough for people to use. People use many modes of communication. Optimize only a one or two and you may make communication in its entirety even more sub-optimal.
With the falling cost of more traditional communcations (original videoconference sessions were $100k a pop), putting users in the driver seat is not a bad thing. Problem is this approach of deep integration creates greater costs and risks.
Corporate IM is a good center for user management of complexity, but who knows if they have gotten this right. If as advertised, its designed to fit within workflow, it may be on the wrong track. Communication is not a process, its an informal practice whose patterns cannot be pre-defined.
|
|
Flash Crowds in NYC
By
Clay Shirky
Someone has taken to using email to coordinate the coalesence of sudden crowds in NYC, causing hundreds of people to suddenly appear at a particular venue, remain for 10 minutes, and then dissipate: You are invited to take part in MOB, the project that
creates an inexplicable mob of people in New York City
for ten minutes or less. Please forward this to other
people you know who might like to join.
|
|
Gold Farming in UO
By
Clay Shirky
Interesting pair of posts over at Julian Dibbell's playmoney site, devoted to the economics of Ultima Online on gold farming, the art of exploiting economic bugs to generate a surplus of gold pieces, and then auctioning them on eBay :
And as there is justice even in imaginary worlds, their hubris once again seems to have brought them down. In the last few weeks OSI has been raining hell-fire on cheaters, closing down hundreds of accounts and issuing dark warnings to the populace at large. Among the first accounts to go, apparently, were Black Snow's.
And now the crackdown seems to have caught up at last with Ingotdude. Click on his Web site, uodudes.com -- for years a busy, chatty, fixture of the UO trading world -- and all you get now is a terse note saying, basically, that the jig is up. (Related link: The NY Times story on Thedeacon, a 7-hour a day UP player, and his views on life irl and in Rubi-ka.)
|
|
HubMed Gets All Trackback 'n' shit
By
Clay Shirky
We've written before about Hubmed, the social interface to the PubMed collection of medical research documents, but somehow we missed the buzzword-compliant goodness that is the HubLink project: HubLink is a prototype of a Blosxom-powered RSS feed and CSS-based semantic weblog that uses TrackBack, autodiscovery and XML web services to form ridiculously easy groups.
Got that?
It uses the Topic Exchange model, in other words, to let users notify HubMed of their comments on a PubMed article, but unlike Topic Exchange, HubLink also fetches the full text of the PubMed article at the same time, and, just because they couldn't get all the buzzwords into the opening description "HubLink also attempts to include Dublin Core metadata alongside each article."
Semantic weblog indeed.
|
|
JournURL: More BBS/Blog Fusion
By
Clay Shirky
Another entry in the fusion of the BBS and Blog patterns, JournURL, an attempt to create a
CCMS (that'd be Community Content Management System to you and me.) The focus here is improving on the model of simple comments for supporting real discussions in weblogs: "Robust threaded and linear discussion that encourages extended conversations and debate. No simplistic comment system here, folks. No anonymous spam."
JournURL recently launched a way to use its comments system from 3rd party blogging tools: As I've said in the past, blog comment systems generally suck. They're fine for "me too" responses and the occasional one-liner, but they quickly show their limitations when put to the task of managing large, intense discussions. ... Meanwhile, here I am, sitting on what is probably the most robust, blog-friendly discussion app anywhere, and all of those people out there using Movable Type and similar apps can't take advantage of it. ... I've decided to see what I can do to make this thing more useful to people using "foreign" blogging apps. Enter ping2talk. ...
|
|
Power Law Bet: Today I would lose
By
Clay Shirky
As Liz noted, if deadline for the LinkedIn power law bet were tomorrow, I would lose.
To recap, I bet Ross on 4 conditions, based on the link distribution of a search on 'Internet':
1. The person in the #10 position will have less than 15% of the number of connections of the person in the #1 position.
2. The top 20% of the result set will account for ~80% (+/-5%) of the links.
3. The average number of connections will be at least double the median number of connections.
4. Neither the median nor mode number of connections will be in the double digits.
I lose on condition #1. Joi Ito is still #1, as he was on the day we made the bet, and now has 291 links. The person in position #10 has 51 links, just under 18% of Joi's total, so I would lose on those grounds.
I am right about the other three characteristics. There are 639 members under Internet, with a total of 3830 links. The top 20% accounts for 2874 of those links, which is 75% of the total, just under the wire.
The average number of connections is 5.99, and the median (the number of links of the 320th user) is 2, so its more than double and almost triple. (Though it wasn't part of the bet, it also means that everyone with fewer than 6 links is below average, which accounts for 77% of the total.)
The median is 2, and the mode (the commonest number of connections) is 1.
So 3 out of 4 ain't bad, but it ain't a winning hand either.
|
|
The Power of Overlap
By
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
A lot of people have asked me what I think the real value of social network mapping tools like Friendster and LinkedIn are--what use is there beyond the initial novelty? Since both of these services want to make money eventually, and thus their success depends on people being willing to pay for them over time, I've been asking myself what, exactly, I'd be willing to pay for from such a service.
Increasingly, I'm realizing that I'm always looking for overlaps. What do I mean by that? Well, if a colleague at work recommends a book, I might look at it, or I might not. The same holds true if the author of a blog I read recommends a book. But if both a colleague and a respected (by me) blogger mention it--well, it's a lot more likely to end up on the top of my Amazon wish list.
Adding new blogs to my regular reading list works the same way for me. For example, I've seen Shelley Powers mention Loren Webster's blog on numerous occasions--but, suffering from blog overload, I've not explored his site. But today, Torill Mortensen mentioned it, as well. I think of Torill and Shelley as moving in very different blog circles, so an overlap there jumps out at me. I wasn't much surprised, then, to find how much I enjoyed Loren's blog.
How is this related to the Friendster/LinkedIn issue? Well, that same process is a key part of why I prefer Friendster to LinkedIn. In Friendster, I can look at a "friend of a friend" and immediately see *all* the paths that lead from me to that person. If they all seem to go through the same general set of people--a social circle I think of as cohesive--I don't pay nearly as much attention as if there are a number of different paths through people I wouldn't necessarily group together. That tells me there are probably multiple shared interests between me and the other person, and makes me more likely to want to find out more about them--maybe personally, maybe professionally.
LinkedIn doesn't allow me to explore in this way, to browse the paths between me and someone else, to start to see emergent patterns in my own connections and the connections between people I know. In Joi Ito's wiki page on LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman says that's a deliberate design decision, and I respect his reasons for making that decision. But at the end of the day, it makes LinkedIn much less attractive to me than Friendster. LinkedIn is very task-oriented--"connect me to person X so I can ask for money/a job/information immediately." But in most cases, I'd rather take a more oblique approach to a connection.
So the answer to my question ends up being that I'd pay for the ability to browse and search my network on a regular basis, to see connections and understand them, to find out where a particular person fits into the web of my interconnections. I won't pay for introductions, particularly when they're handled in a way that's as stripped of context as LinkedIn requires them to be. It's not the outcomes I'm interested in...it's the process.
In a recent conversation I had with Stewart Butterfield (via IM, of course...), he argued that a user's interest in seeing those connections would be short term; once you'd seen it, you'd be done, and wouldn't want to pay for it on an ongoing basis. But for some of us, I don't think that's true. Some people will sit for hours in front of the Weather Channel, and others will spend money for discs with topographic maps and then navigate through the virtual space endlessly. Similarly, some of us will always be fascinated by the way we fit into social mappings of the world. Are there enough of us to support these services? That's the real question. I hope the answer is yes.
|
|
Update on the LinkedIn Bets
By
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
As a follow-up to my bet on gender distribution in LinkedIn, I browsed through the first 100 contacts in my network--which has 3081 people now--and found 9 women, most of them in the last 3 pages. None in the top 40. The first woman in my list (at position #42) has 27 connections, but most have fewer than 20.
As to Clay's power law bet, here's how the number of connections looks on the first page of my network:
- 291
- 225
- 145
- 123
- 112
- 95
- 70
- 68
- 63
- 63
As I suspected, the curve is there, but it's not quite as steep as Clay predicted. The #10 position is currently at ~22% of the #1 position, rather than 15%. Still, it's a striking distribution.
|
|
Alexander Knorr's Response to Perry
By
Clay Shirky
Because our comments section sucks, good stuff gets hidden, including, recently, Alexander Knorr's long response to Perry de Havilland's post on weblogs as a marketplace for ideas instead of a democracy. To overcome the limitations of our software, I post Knorr's response here in full -clay
To a certain degree I get Perry's idea of differentiating between 'democracy' and 'market'. But then again I take it to be hairsplitting and misleading. I guess the "fault" lies in his understanding -- or definition -- of democracy, which seems to be closely tied to the model of a 'modern state' as to be found among the 'western', industrial nations. My understanding of democracy does not go along the line "the majority rules by electing its favored representative" -- that's true on the surface. But underneath the "real advantage" of a democratic structures lies in the play between different interests. Those interests rub against another and the result of this process is some kind of consensus; at least after a certain period of time. In the long run a single interest-group can never take over the whole and completely form it according to their exclusive ideas and visions. If a particular vision is overtly 'unpopular', it can't be realized as the majority-vote never will support it. Looked upon from a vantage-point like that, what Perry calls a market has certain democratic traits.
A single individual isn't democratic, but it can live in a democratic 'system' (or society) of individuals.
A weblog written by a single person isn't democratic, but the blogosphere is. Every reader has the perfect choice which blogs he reads (as Perry mentioned in his article). If a blog becomes interesting for a majority it will be cited and linked-to more often and often. Hence the ideas of its author will gain more influence on the thinking of the blogosphere-readership (this is true for articles which are completely welcomed and for articles which are rejected, but nevertheless read because of their style, known provocative content, and the like). In this mechanism a democratic structure is hidden.
Another example for illustration's sake: Here at my institute every of my colleagues and myself practice and teach a slightly different 'style' of cultural anthropology. The students have a certain degree of influence on what topics will be represented by classes, but , quite naturally, in the end the staff-members prepare the classes ... and the students "vote with their feet" -- either they join a class, or another one.
|
|
Solipism Gradient: More blog/BBS fusion
By
Clay Shirky
Rainer Brockerhoff's weblog, Solipsism Gradient is built on top of bulletin board software (phpBB, to be exact) he was also using to build a support forum for software. He describes the process: It took me two weeks of nearly full-time work, going through at least ten iterations. I started out with nothing more than insatisfaction with my previous site, some notes from Adam Engst's critique of it at his MacHack 2002 session "Hacking the Press", and the idea to implement both a weblog and support forums.
At first I tried simply implementing some of Adam's suggestions under my old design, and using Blogger. However I found it difficult to integrate, and I didn't like depending on someone else's site being up to be able to post stuff to my own.
Anyway, after looking briefly at some available options, I decided to download and try out phpBB....
This is part of the hyperbolic curve of weblogging -- enough people did it that someone needed to describe the pattern (Rebecca Blood, as it turned out.) having described the pattern, other people could build tools to do it (blogger, LiveJournal, MT, et al.) Once those tools overlapped enough that a feature set could be described, those features can now be implemented in other ways, whether its a from-scratch re-imagining, like blosxom or the pressing into service of other kinds of tools, like Solipsism Gradient.
|
|
Uncle Roy: An online/offline game in London
By
Clay Shirky
Uncle Roy Is All Around You is a game to be played in the streets of London:
Street Players search for Uncle Roy through the back streets, the tourist traps and the leafy boulevards of Westminster with a handheld computer.
Online Players cruise through a virtual model of the same area, searching for the Street Players and looking for leads that will help them find Uncle Roy.
Using web cams, audio and text messages players must work together.
They have 60 minutes and the clock is ticking... More proof (as if any were needed) that one of the animating trends in social software is to forsake the notion of cyberspace as a separate place and layer on- and offline experiences together in real time.
|
|
Blogs Are Not Democratic
By
Clay Shirky
Interesting post by Perry de Havilland on the difference between democratic and market-based means of putting power in the hands of the people: Blogs are therefore something which empowers the individual, the blogger, regardless of the wishes, and therefore the votes, of a collective who might wish to have a say in what a blogger writes. The correct analogy is therefore the market place... a blog is a open air stall in a marketplace for ideas called the blogosphere.
|
|
Improving Permalinks
By
Clay Shirky
There's an interesting post at The Butt Ugly Weblog on what's wrong with perma-links and how to improve them, which in turn spawned a wiki page on the same topic.
One of the interesting points from the original post is that in wikis, the RecentChanges list serves as the permalink. This, I think is one of the key differences between wikis and weblogs -- the structure mirrors the content. The weblog mandate is "Only Publish." Once posted, something can be replied to, but should not be edited. The wiki mandate, by contrast, is "Only Edit." Everything can be changed always, and stable content is stable simply by virtue of the living conversation having moved elsewhere, like polyps depositing a coral reef.
The links are the same way -- weblogs have permanent content and permanent URls. Wikis, by contrast, have link structure that can be refactored at any time, in the same way the content can be.
|
|
Wikiblog, We Bliki, W[ei][kb][li]og, ...
By
Clay Shirky
The WikiLog discussion over on the Meatball Wiki has heated up, including a long section on how wikis differ from weblogs: WikiWikis are good at sifting and synthesizing knowledge from data. This is an ongoing and collaborative process, undertaken by many people, contributing to and editing the data flow in an attempt to derive meaning from it.
WebLogs are good at presenting ongoing data and encouraging Socratic-style dialogue about it.
They both qualify as CollaborativeHypermedia, but they approach the function differently. WikiWikis treat media as a shared endeavor, or a set of knowledge to be built. WebLogs treat it as a flow to be discussed and commented upon. To put it succinctly, WikiWikis manipulate the data, WebLogs comment upon it.
There's a lot here, too much and too various to summarize, but worth a read.
|
|
How Instant Messaging Augments Conversations
By
Clay Shirky
Intriguing, fragmentary post by Stewart Butterfield ragging down how instant messaging augments conversation. He agrees with Jack Schofield's contention about the importance of IM "...my bet would be that the most important social software isn't going to develop out of blogging anyway: it will come from instant messaging." Stewart goes on to say "In addition to the conventional concrete examples, "conversation" makes for an excellent conceptual abstraction of certain types of human interaction. It is also a way of thinking about interaction which lends itself to nice sets of related use cases: flexible conversation objects can support synchronous or asynchronous modes, push (invite) vs pull (browse) and flow seamlessly between one-to-one and multiuser participation."
The post isn't finished, but now that Stewart has comments enabled, you could help him finish it.
|
|
AULA "Meeting of Minds" 2003
By
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
Readers of Howard Rheingold's recent book Smart Mobs may be familiar with the Finnish group AULA.
This weekend, the group is sponsoring a "Meeting of Minds" in Helsinki on media and technology--and it looks like there will be a lot of social software topics on the agenda. Speakers include Joi Ito, Dan Gillmor, J.C. Herz, Cory Doctorow and Matt Jones, among others.
Apparently AULA plans to put out a book (entitled Exposure) based on the proceedings. Hope it's not priced too high for my academic pockets, because it sounds as though it will be quite interesting for those of us interested in social software.
|
|
The Impact of Permalinks
By
Sébastien Paquet
Tom Coates provides an interesting discussion of the emergence and importance of the innovation that came to be known as the permalink.
It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities.
[...]At the time they were a tiny paradigm shift in a tiny community of committed web-weirdos. No one thought that they might be one of the fundamental structuring principles of half a million sites.
Very well put.
|
|
Social Web
By
Ross Mayfield
Business Week has a special report on the Social Web. It rightly identifies the big change -- the web as a social fabric -- but does little aside from stiching together a few threads.
Call it the Social Web. Through the dot-com bubble and bust, one trend has never wavered. Every year, millions more people around the world are using the Internet to interact in more ways than ever before -- to date, find old classmates, check on medical ailments and cures, to read and express alternative views of the news, and even to get live sales help online. It's happening at work as well: Want to check your 401(k), pay stub, or file an expense account? Increasingly, that's all on the Web.
Alex Salkever's piece is on next generation social networking, highlighting Friendster and others:
"The late adopters want solutions. They'are the Consumer Reports people, and they want to read such and such dating site has a 70% success rate before they pay to join," claims Thompson.
"We believe there's a correlation between opportunity and optimism. Never before in the history of dating has it been so easy to get to so many eligible qualified dates and use the technology to help you do this," gushes Trish McDermott, vice-president for romance at Match.com.
In Jane Black's piece, the latest in the blogging as open source media meme, includes Nick Denton's publisher perspective, some great press for Dave Sifry and Clay gushes with this gem of deflation:
"It's a new kind of communication," says Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. To say that blogs will harm traditional media, he adds, "is like saying that instant messenger will kill e-mail."
|
|
Bass Station: Social Hardware
By
Clay Shirky
Theraputik (Mark Argo and Ahmi Wolf), have cooked up a marvelous social software/social hardware combination called Bass-Station. They took a bona fide ghetto blaster of 1981 vintage (chrome handle, woofers the size of dinner plates, like that), gutted it, put a single-board Linux computer inside, added a 180 gig drive and a Wifi card, and gave it its own SSID.
Anyone with a Wifi-enabled device and a collection of music can upload tunes to the Bass-Station, and then hit Play. It echoes the party-in-a-box pattern of the ghetto blasters of yore while turning every listener into a DJ and every laptop into the 21st century equivalent of a box of vinyl. There's a Most Popular playlist that emerges with use, you can also stream tunes from the box, and there's even an on-board BBS for discussing the music. Most interesting to me is the lack of internet connectivity -- its wireless networking for a group within earshot.
There's a Bass-Station home page, complete with 80's style 8-bit graphic stylings. Bass-Station has also been accepted as a SIGGRAPH presentation.
|
|
Jabber and Decentralization
By
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
Joi Ito has been working on a tool that blurs a number of boundaries between various social software tools. His TechnoBot is a python script that grabs his Technorati cosmos every ten minutes, and then adds new links to his blog, as well as notifying him via email, Jabber, ad IRC.
This got me thinking about Jabber. I consider myself to be a reasonably technical person--an early adopter of many technologies, and an enthusiastic user of most of the social software tools I've happened across in the past fifteen years. But I still find Jabber baffling. I understand iChat. I understand Rendezvous, and AOL, and ICQ (I even have a five-digit ICQ number). But every time I've tried to find and use a Jabber tool, I've ended up frustrated. (Is there a Jabber for Dummies site out there anywhere that faithful readers can point me to?)
The problem, I think, lies with the centralized vs decentralized approach to tools. On the one hand, centralized tools tend to be easy to use. It's clear where you register for them (AOL IM, for example), and the interfaces are consistent. On the other hand, centralized systems have built-in flaws--users are often hostage to the designers' view of the system, for example (Friendster and LinkedIn are good examples), and scaling results in eerily predictable problems (like the Fotolog controversy that Clay wrote about recently).
I'll be attending the Supernova conference in DC next month, and it looks as though some of these tensions will be discussed. In the area of social software the tension is already evident, and it will be even more important as we move towards things like digital identities.
|
|
Wikilog Hosting Service
By
Clay Shirky
Bill Seitz, (whose experiments in combining wikis and weblogs we've written about before) has launched Wikilogs.com, a hosting service for a wiki/weblog combination.
The service doesn't support the team collaboration pattern of wiki use -- it seems instead to be a page-oriented weblog ( a category Meg Hourihan would deny exists) whose virtues are the virtues of hyperlink-as-assertion-of-semantic-connnectedness:
If a wiki is a lot like a weblog, than why shouldn't I just use weblog software?
I've been writing this way since February 2002, after various other experiments and 2 years of thinking about it. The key attractors to me were (a) the potential for keeping ideas around and (b) relating them to each other. And the potential for emergence/self-organization as both the content and links can be refined over time.
Some people find that even if they want to write a simple linear narrative, developing it in a hypertext fashion lets them play with half-baked ideas and refine them a bit at a time.
And many people have broad interests, and recognize that everything is deeply intertwingled . While most weblog software supports some number of "categories", this is too "flat" a way to model thought.
|
|
The Assumptions of Email, Part I
By
Jessica Hammer
Jonah Brucker-Cohen's BumpList changes the fundamental rules of how we expect online communities to work. Instead of persistent membership, the BumpList email list has a maximum number of subscribers. When a new subscriber pushes the community size over the limit, the oldest member is bumped off and can only rejoin by resubscribing themselves. You can also only unsubscribe by getting to the front of the list and being bumped off yourself.
We take any number of features of mailing lists for granted, such as the notions of permanent subscription and voluntary unsubscription that Brucker-Cohen plays with. Assuming he's recording the data from this project (which seems likely, considering that he explicitly calls it an experiment), seeing what this community looks like might give us some insight into these universal conventions.
Of course, people being people, it's only a matter of time until someone writes a script to automatically resubscribe themselves every time they get bumped .....
|
|
Will Wright on Games Design & Communities
By
Ross Mayfield
PC Forum has provided a transcript of perhaps the best session of the conference, Will Wright's Models Come Alive, and has invited people to comment on it in their wiki. Someone dug up the main slide from his presentation:
 "But these are the three rough areas I want to cover: topologies, dynamics and paradigms. Topologies are the structure of a system: what the elements are and how they relate. The dynamics define how the structures change through time. And the paradigm glues the two together. It gives us tools for understanding the ways topologies are changed through dynamics."
Its really worth a read, mind-bending stuff. Here is an excerpt on game design and community:
Grouping is another dynamic you often see in games. It’s a way for players to aggregate a large number of objects and bring them to a higher level of abstraction so that, for instance, they can move a whole group instead of one. You can group similar or specialized things. It gets interesting when you look at specialized groupings. Specialization is promoted by communication. The neuron, for instance, enabled larger creatures to start evolving because there were communication structures between different parts, so cells could specialize in individual functions. They lowered the cost and the friction of that communication. In some sense, specialization breeds most of the networks around us. You see it a lot in games. We see networks that are explicit within the game, such as technology networks and structures. We also see it in our communities. In our Sims fan community, there’s a network of specialized participants, and casual players that are pulled up into it. This network shows the flow of content between specialists. At the highest level, the tool builders make tools that content artists use to feed the Webmasters, who in turn feed the story creators, and so on. It’s kind of like an ecosystem. There’s also a reverse flow of recognition, so the Webmaster is gives the highest recognition to the content artists, who in turn appreciate the tool builders. In some sense, what we’re really building with these games are communities. That’s our primary thing. We want to build a strong community around the game, which is kind of an excuse to build the community. And we want to have all these dynamics occurring within the community.
|
|
Community uproar at fotolog.
By
Clay Shirky
Over at Scott Heiferman's marvelous Fotolog, there's a classic community uproar going on.
Fotolog has hit a success crisis, becoming quite popular, and, because it focuses on pictures rather than words, it has attracted an enormous international community (particularly Brazilians, for some reason.) In response, the Fotolog staff has adopted the standard solution - limit the number of posts that can be made using the free service to control bandwidth and storage costs, and institute a paid Gold membership for people who want more serious usage.
And then chaos ensued. In Scott's log, he posted a user's picture of herself with her hand stuck out, on which had been written "Fuck fotolog" and then tried to address the reasons behind the change. This opened the floodgates, with a whole range of meta-discussion arising -- Two-tier systems damage the community; Most Brazilians can't pay for things on the internet with a credit card; You americans are murders, unfair and capitalists; Who do you think pays for this, the internet fairy? and so on.
And somewhere in the middle of it, the sanest post of all, a meta-meta-disucssion trying to explain to the Fotolog staff why the debate got so furious so quickly:
Recognise that in this drama, you are in the position of power (you can change things, you can take it away) and those unhappy are feeling out of control. Kudos to those putting forward valid arguments and trying to encourage discussion ... opening the doors to that discussion is vital (within limits, of course). Those spamming don`t care less (in fact, it`s quite clear they care a great deal), they feel betrayed and helpless and are lashing back. I`m not defending the behaviour, just trying to stop the tide of "what jerks" which isn`t actually helping the situation at all.
One of the things that precipitates these kind of constitutional crises is manifest evidence that the users don't control the system. They know that, of course, intellectually, but when a community forms, they feel as if they do own it, and as long as the actual owners do nothing to disturb that illusion, things can hum along, but whenever anything happens unilaterally...
|
|
Mama Muses on Social Software readings...
By
Clay Shirky
Our own Liz Lawley posts her social software reading list over at mamamusings ('cause what were you gonna read at the beach? The 30th aniversary edition of Fear of Flying?)
|
|
Trepia: Buddy Lists with Proximity
By
Clay Shirky
Trepia has launched their 2.0 chat/friend finder application, whose goal is to populate IM contact lists ranked by proximity. Their home pages says:
Trepia is a revolutionary networking application that lets you instantly meet other people in your vicinity. Other people will simply appear on your contact list automatically, allowing you to communicate with them.
The site is light on tech details, but it seems to derive physical proximity from network information. As the site puts it, Trepia searches "...for nearby people using known geographical information about the networks you use." Given the number of AOL and firewall-bound users, I'm skeptical that you can derive much proximity information from wired network information. However, they also work over WiFi, where proximity is far more related to connectivity, so this may be useful for unwired parks and other social spaces.
Like all general purpose social networking tools, the screenshots feature 19 year old bottle blondes saying things like "Looking for someone to hang out with. msg me!" YMMV. (I'm beginning to think the two-category PeopleOnPage taxonomy -- people can be classified as Dating, or World -- is the right one.)
|
|
Welcome Shelley Powers of Burningbird
By
Hylton Jolliffe
Look to the right column and you'll find our inaugural guest blogger. Welcome Shelley Powers of (or who is?) Burningbird, who says she has "...planned a series of posts about the social aspect of social software -- what happens when you throw cruddy old human behavior at shiny new social technology."
Right this way... --->
|
|
Ryze Extends Friends
By
Ross Mayfield
Ryze is incrementally adding new features to make its networks even more explicit, such as showing Friends of Friends trails:
And stats:
| Confirmed Friends: |
69 |
|
| Friends of Friends: |
1,098 |
What's interesting is how Ryze has changed its definition of what is a friend over the past few months. Initially it bifurcated friend listings from uni-directional links (who a given member lists as a friend) to confirmed ties (when two members list each other as friends). Now its Friends of Friends features are only based upon confirmed ties. This makes connections and reccomended connections more meaningful. But Friend means many things to many people.
|
|
Group Voice
By
Ross Mayfield
Lots of good blog posts these days on the differences of wikis and weblogs. Of course, since they are all blog posts a clear consensus is never reached. A good way of explaining the differences between the two tools, as wikis drive current state consensus.
Dave is right to define weblogs (there are other definitions too) as a tool that allow the unedited voice of single person to speak. He contrasts this with content management systems, where workflow drowns out individual voices. And wikis, where your contributions can be edited by others.
At Socialtext, our product combines a wiki and a weblog (some call that a wikiblog), among other things. I dont want to add fodder to the criticism of more talking than doing social software. But I will impart from our doings that we have seen clear differences of use, and how we explain them:
A weblog enables individual voice. This is important as no other tool has shown the ability to gain the participation of people in a larger, dare I say, system. Perhaps because it give so much back. The simple format of weblogs and ease of use allows wide participation. A post reflects a person's understanding on a given issue at a moment in time. Individual voices exist in a social context that urges continued participation. Post-to-post communication and feedback encourage continued use and sharing that otherwise occurs only in private. A weblog is a great source for what's new and the narrative thread that got us there -- a simply powerful tool for communication and publishing.
Wikis let the group voice emerge. Many people participate within a given wiki, each with an equal voice in a shared space that anyone can edit. Its a different act of sharing to contribute your words to a page that others can build upon. Our instinct is to at first believe this would create conflict and distrust, but it actually builds trust. Each wiki page reflects the current consensual understanding of a given concept. A page isn't a complete or perfect understanding, information and conditions change too quickly for it to be possible Instead, a little wabi-sabi and trusting others allows something powerful to emerge and stay current -- a simply powerful tool for collaboration.
We aren't the only one to think of the differences between weblogs and wikis as individual and group voices. Elwin Jenkins describes it as weblogs turn individuals into webpages while wikis turn communities into webpages.
There are lots of similarities between the two tools. Both are web native, are easy to use, are link-intensive and encourage sharing.
Both are being widely adopted, wikis less visibly because of private group use and at different paces in different areas. A customer once explained to me how he thought wikis were more popular than weblogs in Asia because group voice is valued greater than individual voice. Regardless of popularity, different cultures and organizations will have different values that is reflected in their tool selection.
Its not a choice between one or another. The temporal structure of weblogs and logical structure of wikis are a complement for lasting effects. One of the more powerful patterns in an organization is how an opportunity is published in blog, possibilities are swarmed upon in blog conversation and then driven to consensus and outcome in a wikified document. After the outcome, the knowledge and its social context remains.
Both tools together create powerful effects for publishing, communication and collaboration.
|
|
The Sopranos Meets EverQuest
By
Clay Shirky
|
Copyright 2002-2003 Corante. All rights reserved. Terms of use
|
|
|
