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About this site
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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.
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MANY-TO-MANY: social software
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By Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet & Jessica Hammer
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Castronova convinces Hacker Court of real damages
By
Clay Shirky
Ted Castranova posts a brief description of yesterday's Black Hat moot court, a trial for felonious damage of virtual property. Brief summary -- the damage of virtual goods is a real-world offense, but the jury hung on other issues.
I include the short press release here in full, because Castronova has no permalinks, and black-on-green text. (Get that man a TypePad subscription!):
In a mock trial convened before U.S. Circuit Court Judge Philip M. Pro, the Hacker Court's jury accepted the proposition that the virtual items destroyed during the hack of an online video game constituted real loss. The jury hung on the question of whether a certain 'Weasel' actually conspired with a certain 'Terron' to hack into a game server and destroy items, so no verdict was reached.
However, the value of the potential loss of the hack was not in dispute. A subsequent poll revealed that the overwhelming majority of the 200-strong audience of computer and networking specialists (drawn from the Black Hat conference of cybersecurity professionals) agreed with the jury's opinion regarding the existence of real value in the case. Defense counsel Jennifer Granick mounted a strong counter-argument, namely that we might, as a society, decide that it is just too difficult to classify game-related damages as real, just as we shy away from taking cases of lost sexual favors to court, even though there clearly are damages.
This powerful argument suggests that losses in something we agree to call a "game" should also be free from legal oversight, even though, in fact, the distinction between game and life is arbitrary. In the end, jury and audience disagreed with this cultural stratagem, preferring instead Prosecutor Richard Salgado's argument that human activity in the allegedly virtual space is not virtual at all. It is real activity and haggles real values and thus, in principle, it deserves the full attention of policy and law.
IANAL, but I am skeptical of the "loss of sexual favors" argument. In divorce cases, there is a concept of "alienation of affection," a concept that addresses this loss and has legal standing, and of course many tort cases involve assessing damage from emotional distress.
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More on Backchannel Pressure at Conferences
By
Clay Shirky
A great piece by our own Ross Mayfield on the changes being brought about by real-time interaction between speakers, panelists, and audience members at conferences, including a great story about the participants in an online chat taking apart the speaker's throwaway assertions one at a time:
As Benioff continued, the audience watched as a group of online contributors disputed fact after fact, input Benioff apparently did not see. “It was sort of like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit,” said one attendee. “As Mark spoke, we could see his nose growing longer, like Pinocchio.” This is a good roundup of lots of posts that have appeared recently on social interaction and the conference scene -- read the whole thing.
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Castronova in Hacker Court
By
Clay Shirky
The Black Hat conference in Vegas is running a Hacker Court more or less right now at Ceasar's. The case regards property rights in virtual worlds, and Ted "Virtual Economics is my middle name" Castronova is the expert witness. Castronova characterizes the issues of the trial thusly: The law connection is interesting. Richard Salgado of the US Department of Justice is organizing a mock trial at the Black Hat conference. Plaintiff: USG. Defendant: Weasel, a guy who allegedly destroyed more than $5K of some other guy's virtual gear in a MMORPG. $5K of hacking-related damage is a federal felony. They want me to do expert testimony on valuation [of property in virtual worlds]
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Marc Smith's Usenet tools to see the light of day
By
Clay Shirky
InfoWorld has a short article on sociologist Marc Smith (one of a very short list of men I'd like to marry.) Smith has a Usenet filtering and visualization tool called Netscan e's been working on at MSFT which is going to be released as the Community .NET server. (Nice to see MSFT has figured out to go for the "Foofy Bunny" product names instead of things like Hailstorm...)
Usenet has been something of a fetish object for visualization (e.g. at Judith Donath's Sociable Media Group at MIT), so it would be great if better filtering made it generally viable again. The big question, of course, is whether the patient can be revived. There is still activity on usenet, but it is dead in the way mainframes are dead, which is to say it survives, but most of the action is elsewhere, and most of the people working on social software are not treating it as a target.
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V-2 Calls for Social Networking Metadata
By
Clay Shirky
Adam Greenfield over at v-2 has some interesting observations about participation in social networking services, spurred by the appearance of Tribe.net: I've spent, maybe, six hours of my life building up a beachhead at Friendster: fleshing out a profile, writing testimonials, uploading pictures. By the time LinkedIn came along, I could hardly be bothered to do the minimum necessary to look credible. Now, with Tribe, unless it shows real signs of critical mass and robust utility, I'll doubt I'll be motivated to do much more than a pro-forma signup. And the next one won't even get that.
There needs to be an open metadata standard in this area, or none of these services is going to survive for long enough to gain momentum and reach beyond the initial membership cliques. These services need to be interoperable.
Though I sympathize with the sentiment, I doubt the conclusion. The *only* thing these services have to base a business on is lack of interoperability -- as noted here earlier, LinkedIn specifically forbids users from including contact details in requests, to prevent users from contacting one another out of band. Were LinkedIn to open up, they would lose all the leverage they have in charging for the service, since users, not LinkedIn, would control their data.
Much liklier is that this is a game of over-building and collapse. Most of the YASNS sites doomed, because network effects favor the larger over the small. Like IM, the standards are likely to be set by the commercial victors, because while everyone might benefit from an open metadata standard, the benefits would be spread so evenly as to deflect commercial investment.
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Wifi, Personal Calculators, and the Backchannel
By
Clay Shirky
Since we seem to be treating the NY Times backchannel article as a tribal fetish object, I'll drive my nail in as well.
When I was in 5th grade, an argument about personal calculators broke out in the Letters to the Editor column of my local newspaper, an argument conducted with religious fervor. One one side were those who felt that calculators were, on the whole, a good tool and that students should be taught to use them. On the other side were those who felt that calculators were a crutch, that their use would pollute the minds of impressionable youth, and that their appearance was a sure sign of The End Times.
What both optimists and pessimists believed, however, deep down, was that their opinions mattered. "Someday," each of them thought, "someone is going to ask me what we should do about these here calculators." What the adults didn't understand, but me and my 5th grade posse did, was that caluclators, having arrived, were never going away.
So it is with the backchannel. We have seen only the barest hint of the disruption ubiquitous Wifi + automated discovery is going to bring about, but already the people weighing in about whether its a good idea or a bad idea look like the people discussing calculators. It doesn't matter if the Wifi backchannel is a bad idea; it's not going away.
Furthermore, programmatic attempts to create a no-laptops environment in the hopes of stemming the use of the backchannel will work only as long as laptops are the only portable Wifi-enabled device, a period which is going to last about another 3 months. Devices like the tablet PC, the Palm mSeries Wifi PDA, and even digital cameras are going to be part of the backchannel as well. Once students start taking handwritten notes on Tablet PCs, speakers will not be able to ban them. Within 5 years, people who live in urban areas will be bathed in connectivity in any environment where they are required to sit still for longer than 15 minutes. (Some of us live in that world today.)
This will of course create negative effects. The strongest negative effect is the dissipation of group energy and attention through the cracks in the group mind caused by monitoring your email on the side. But being "for" or "against" such effects is mostly irrelevant, because most of the people bothered by the effects are not going to be in a position to ask for the backchannel to be turned off. As with calculators, the technology is a ratchet, and having moved forward, its not moving back. The trick now is to figure out the social rules accompanying its use.
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Power Laws, Political Websites, and Inequality
By
Sébastien Paquet
"Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web" (pdf, 300k), by Matthew Hindman and two co-authors from NEC labs, is an examination of the link structure of some 3 million politically-oriented websites.
The authors draw observations similar to those in the Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality piece: For each of the issues examined, most of the links are to sites in the top 20; and the median site gets a single inbound link. The power law still holds at lower resolution, when communities of discourse are split into subcommunities.
The bottom line: we should be careful not to confuse retrievability with visibility.
While I found the article a little verbose, there are interesting tidbits throughout - and a nice list of references.
(Thanks, Kushal!)
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step away from the podium
By
Elizabeth Lane Lawley
Ross blogged the NY Times article on backchannels first, it seems. But I'm not interested in quoting it...I'm more interested in talking about its implications, and the responses it seems to generate from speakers.
Two of my friends in the social software world, Stewart Butterfield and Anil Dash, are speakers who find the backchannel annoying. (Stewart says so in the article; Anil agrees in his annotated link.)
I feel their pain. For six years, I've been teaching undergraduate students in information technology, and I've become accustomed to their constant multitasking in the classroom. I don't always like it--in fact, when I'm trying to get a key point across in lecture, I'll often ask them to turn their monitors off so I can be sure their attention isn't focused on the screen. Conference speakers don't have the luxury of pedagogical power to back up those requests.
However...
Almost every study on teaching and learning has shown that lectures are among the very worst methods of delivering content. Don't buy that? Well, think about the last conference you went to. Now tell me, in detail, about what speakers at that conference said. No fair checking your notes, or your blog. What do you actually remember? Not much, I suspect.
That doesn't mean conferences aren't valuable. I had a long talk about this with my husband when I got back from Supernova. He asked whether the conference sessions/speakers had been good, and I told him that a few had been. Then he asked me what I learned from those speakers that I couldn't have gotten more easily from their online writings, or from a video of their presentation. After I grudgingly acknowledged that I hadn't heard anything particularly unique from the speakers, we started talking about why people go to conferences. Be honest. You seldom go to hear the speakers. You go because of the other people who are going to be there. That doesn't mean the speakers are irrelevant. Far from it. They provide a focal point, a context for the conversations. When I look at a conference speaker list, it tells me about what kinds of issues will be on the minds of the participants, and what kinds of ideas are likely to be tossed around.
What's happening isn't new. It's just been transformed by the new tools at our disposal. Before the wifi-enabled backchannel started to emerge, there was still a backchannel. You sat next to people you knew, and whispered to them. "Did you hear that?" "Hey, doesn't that remind you of xxx?" "What did she say?"
What in-class and in-conference backchannels do is push that process from the P2P form it has traditionally taken to a many-to-many (!) version that can only happen with the kinds of social software tools we're seeing emerge today.
As a result, you end up with a feedback loop that can either enrich the experience of listenting to a good speaker, or provide an escape hatch when listening to a poor one. At Supernova, we saw three distinctly different modes of activity on the #joiito IRC channel that many conference-goers (and non-conference-goers) participated in. The first was a near-cessation of activity when speakers like David Weinberger lit up the stage. The second was a buzz of questions and debate around the topics a speaker was discussiong--as when Joi Ito himself was speaking. The third could only be described as a free-for-all, untethered from the room entirely, when corporate speakers regaled us with tidbits like "At BigCo, our goal is to give customers what they want."
Is it ego-crushing to walk to the front of a crowded room, step up to the podium, and look out at a sea of faces all focused on the screens and keyboards rather than your carefully prepared remarks? You betcha. But as speakers (and teachers) we have to get over that. We have to learn that complete control over our audience is seldom possible. We have to accept that we can't always demand and receive the full attention of the room we're in. We have to find ways to let people--at conferences, or in classrooms--learn from each other as well as from us.
Conference organizers and speakers--and classroom teachers--would do well to think about the relevance of Dan Gillmor's discussion of how weblogs and other social software tools are transforming journalism:
Today's (and tomorrow's) communications tools are turning traditional notions of news and journalism in new directions. These tools give us the ability to take advantage, in the best sense of the word, of the fact that our collective knowledge and wisdom greatly exceeds any one person’s grasp of almost any subject. We can, and must, use that reality to our mutual advantage.
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Attention-shifting
By
Ross Mayfield
Article in the NY Times on back-channels of IM and Chat in universities, meetings and conferences.
Misses recent events.
Attention-shifting for early social software experiences will be meme for a while because its also a frame of reference shift.
Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer and blogger who has experienced this back-channeling at several international technology meetings, likens the chatter to what happens in the corridor just after people leave a conference session.
"We're just moving the corridor into the room and time-shifting it by 30 minutes," said Mr. Doctorow, who takes notes and posts them to his Weblog, or blog, during conferences, enabling people to follow the speaker and Mr. Doctorow's take on the speaker at the same time.
Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University's interactive telecommunications program, has run experiments using messaging software to supplement face-to-face meetings of 30 people. Many participants find the experience highly stimulating, he said, explaining, "The intellectual quality of a two-track meeting is extraordinarily high, if it is run right and you have smart people involved."
But many speakers at the front of room are less enamored of the practice.
"To me, it's a little irritating, frankly," said Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of Ludicorp, a company that is developing Neverending, a multiplayer online game [and happens to provide Confab, what gives Stu?]. In April, Mr. Butterfield addressed a conference on emerging technologies as listeners experimented with messaging software, including a program called Confab offered by his own company. The next week, when he spoke at a conference without any Internet access, "people were a lot more attentive," he said. (He added, however, that many of them kept opening their laptops during the speeches in the vain hope that somehow the Internet might have magically become available.)
Good account of the PC Forum 2002/Gillmor story I referenced yesterday:
Some people who have experienced the phenomenon cite a speech given last year at a computer industry conference by Joe Nacchio, former chief executive of the telecommunications company Qwest. As he gave his presentation, two bloggers - Dan Gillmor, a columnist for The San Jose Mercury News, and Doc Searls, senior editor for The Linux Journal - were posting notes about him to their Weblogs, which were simultaneously being read by many people in the audience.
Both included a link forwarded by a reader in Florida to a stock filing report indicating that Mr. Nacchio had recently made millions of dollars from selling his company's stock, although he complained in his speech about the tough economy. "No sympathy here," Mr. Gillmor wrote.
"When Dan blogged that, the tenor of the room changed," Mr. Doctorow said. Mr. Nacchio, he said, "stopped getting softball questions and he started getting hardball questions."
Clay on meetings and conferences
Some people are hoping that conferences will evolve to allow the undercurrent of conversation to be projected on a big screen in the front of the room. They say that such public disclosure will enable speakers and unconnected audience members to feel less isolated.
Mr. Shirky, the adjunct N.Y.U. professor, considers openness to be critical to productive discussions and conducts his messaging-software experiments so that all speakers can see what is being posted. At the University of Maryland, where the use of IM became a matter of a heated debate, several students said they were perturbed by the back channeling not because it seemed rude (although some argued that point, too), but because they felt left out.
The split focus of two-track meetings and back-channeled conversations have other drawbacks, not the least of which is that they can be utterly distracting. "There were times when I'd follow a thread and come back to the lecture and feel a little disoriented," Mr. Aral acknowledged.
Hecklebot
Joichi Ito, a venture capitalist and former chief executive for the Japanese branch of the Internet service provider PSINet, opened a chat room for back-channeling during Supernova, a communications conference held this month in Crystal City, Va., just outside Washington. But Mr. Ito readily acknowledges the downside. "There is definitely a lot less focus in the room," he said, "but I think we were already starting to suffer from that."
At high-tech conferences where everyone is already wired to the gills with BlackBerry pagers and cellphones and can cope easily with constant connectedness and streaming information, the concept of multitrack communication channels almost seems matter-of-course. "This is not something that is going to go away," Mr. Ito said. As many technology experts point out, if laptops were banned, people would use cellphones. If wireless Internet access were not officially available, networking gurus would find a way to create ad hoc connections.
Some observers say that the multitrack channels will simply be considered a given by a young generation that has honed multitasking to a fine art and grew up on VH1's "pop-up" videos, in which commentary about the artists pops up on the screen during the song.
Meanwhile, Mr. Ito is already creating a new riff on the concept. He said he was working with a group on designing a "hecklebot," a light-emitting diode screen that displays heckling messages that are typed during online chats at conferences. "I want to make something that I can put in a suitcase and take to conferences," he said. He describes it as a subversive device that will get people thinking about the significance of the back channel. From the chat room, he said, "you could send something like, 'Stop pontificating.' "
If the speakers were logged on, they could play the game, too. Maybe some would type, "Pay attention."
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Ethnic clustering in blogging communities
By
Sébastien Paquet
This report by Hat Nim Choi studied and compared the LiveJournal and Xanga weblog communities, both of which seem to predominantly attract teenagers. While I'm not 100% confident about the methodology, the first figure from the results section is quite striking. 
A LiveJournal user picked at random is overwhelmingly likely to be white, while a random Xangan is much more likely to be Asian or Asian-American. The author offers an explanation for this difference towards the end of the report:
Xanga's mostly Asian community could be due to how it is promoted. One of the reasons why Xanga has such a large community is because Xanga users tell their friends to create a Xanga site. They want more friends to read their web logs and get involved. Mehra, Kilduff, and Brass (1998) found that the relative rarity of a group in a social context tended to promote members' use of that group as a basis for shared identity and social interaction. Since Asians are in the minority in the U.S., it would seem that they would interact more with other Asian-Americans and therefore spread the use of Xangas among Asian-Americans. This could be one reason why Xanga users are predominantly Asian.
Interestingly, the Mehra citation directly echoes the content of Clay's earlier "Odd Associates with Odd" post.
Another interesting observation is embedded in this: teenager weblogs are often started by friends who already know one another and word of mouth is an important factor in growth in community sites such as LiveJournal. I'm not sure this is equally true of weblogging at large.
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Image censoring on Friendster
By
Clay Shirky
Good post by Danah over at Connected Selves about Friendster's censoring of user pictures, ostensibly to filter out the porn and copyrighted images, and the ways that policy slops over into aesthetic judgement calls that anger the users.
This reminds me of TerboTed's rant about Friendster (if you want to understand the magnetic hold of the place, read it), where it was the removal of his pictures that finally turned him off the site.
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Friendster T-shirts: Pop culture
By
Clay Shirky
Glossosaurus is selling t-shirts with random Friendster images on them.
Says Xeni (of BoingBoing, whose picture is on that t-shirt): "There are so many overlapping memes in that photo, the entire blogosphere could implode any minute now." 
This is why I never believe the hand-wringing about impending mono-culture -- we are awfully good at inventing shibboleths like the Friendster t-shirt to describe new tribes. Those in Friendster who see one of these shirts will recognize it at once, while everyone else will think its a fairly generic image on a t-shirt, strengthening the difference between being in the Friendster tribe and out of it.
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Odd Associates with Odd
By
Clay Shirky
At least that's the conclusion in a paper about social clustering in Club Nexus, a service for Stanford University's online population, written by Lada A. Adamic, Orkut Buyukkokten, and Eytan Adar.
Because the users of the service left such a rich metadata trail, they were able to test a number of assertions about social congres that had previously been made only as generalities. In addition to uncovering the expected gross patterns (power laws, clustering, small worlds networks, low hop-counts between people, etc), they were able to make refined observations about what sorts of affinities correlate with high clustering (the higher the listed ratio is above 1, the stronger the correlation with social clustering):
We found further that, in general, activities or interests that are shared by a smaller subset of people showed stronger association ratios than very generic activities or interests that could be enjoyed by many. For example, raving (1.64), ballroom dancing (1.61), and Latin dancing (1.49) showed stronger association in the social activity category than barbecuing (1.20), partying (1.18), or camping (1.11) [...]
In sports in particular, multi-player team or niche sports were better predictors of social contacts than sports that could be pursued individually or casually. Among water sports, synchronized swimming, diving, crew, and wake boarding were better predictors than boating, fishing, swimming or windsurfing. In the land sports category, team sports, in particular women's team sports such as lacrosse and field hockey were better predictors than soccer (often played casually as opposed to in a competitive college team), tennis, or racquetball. [...]
We observed that niche book, movie, and music genres were more predictive of friendship than generic ones. Gay and lesbian books, read by 63 users, had a ratio of 4.37, followed by professional and technical, teen, and computer books. In contrast, the general category of 'fiction & literature' had a ratio of 1.09. I {heart} Lada Adamic. I {heart} FirstMonday. Read the whole thing.
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COM 480: Ethnography of Online RPGs
By
Sébastien Paquet
Clay, you've gotta love that one. Last semester the University of Washington offered a fascinating course on multiplayer online role-playing games. From the course requirements section:
In lieu of a textbook, you are expected to purchase a copy of the Everquest Trilogy software (approximately $20 retail). You must also commit to a three-month subscription at the rate of $12.95 per month. Since the first month is free, the total expenditure for computer supplies is approximately $46.
A significant amount of class time will be spent in the virtual world, but you are also expected to conduct on-line research outside of class.
On top of that, the students used a network of LiveJournals and a community aggregator as part of their assignments. The instructor, Aaron Delwiche, has a LiveJournal of his own, which recently featured a reflection on the sad lot of Everquest widows - and what could be done about it.
(Thanks to Greg Costikyan for the link)
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Danah Boyd's Blog on the YASNS phenomenon
By
Clay Shirky
Danah Boyd has a weblog, Connected Selves, where she is tracking the YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service) phenomonon, pointing to work on the many flavors of social networking services that are launching.
I think that it's fascinating to hear people reference each other as Friendsters. "Oh, you're danah's Friendster." This shows how it is not really a listing of your friends, but some other not-entirely-defined set of people that you sorta know in some context or another.
She also points to someone selling their Friendster nework on ebay, and to an amusing list of top Friendster power games.
(Prive Memo to D. Boyd, All Others Don't Read: I love Connected Selves, but given the explosion of press interest in Friendster, it risks turning into "Friendster and friends", with Ringo, People on Page, INWYK, Craig's List et al getting short shrift. Social networking is embedded into all sorts of software in implicit ways, from mailing lists and BBSes to IRC. We need somebody to cover the big story, and you're the best candidate, so don't let the press annointing of Friendster throw you off the scent...)
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Connection Value
By
Ross Mayfield
Good article by Leander Kahney in Wired News on Social Networking. And I'm not just saying that because danah and I are in it.
Friendster has hit viral level of exponental growth which is drawing new interest into the space.
And as danah points out, people are starting to sell their networks on eBay. One measure of value to users, where connections are the virtual economy.
What we haven't seen yet, but see in virtual worlds, is exodus. As users become invested in social ties, if the software doesn't continue to evolve to meet their needs, the colony will seek a new hive. Perhaps that's because we still see the value of these social networks in ties alone, rather than the flow they support.
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Always On Conference Support System
By
Ross Mayfield
Settling in after some very intense days at the Always On Innovation Summit. It was a great experience, excellent networking and a different use of Social Software for events. Socialtext provided an integrated video/chat/wiki conference support system.
During the first day, wifi was frustratingly spotty, so the bulk of its use was from remote participants. High quality video streaming allowed people to listen, the BackChat allowed people to interact and the wiki to annotate. Unfortunately the lack of in-room connectivity led to less wiki collaboration and public blog posting right at the time when it usually engenders wider participation.
But the real dynamic took hold on the second day, wifi enabled, where it became part of the program. The Remote Posse and the people Blogging Always On really had an impact. The BackChat was particularly vibrant, with in-room and remote participants (from as far away as Tokyo and the Netherlands) exchanging commentary. A big font version of the chat program was projected on to the big screen, the feedback loop was complete:
- BackChat participants kept the discussion relatively high brow. They fact checked, posed questions, had side discussions that were pertainent and in general participate without denegrating into vulgarities or
- Moderators fielded questions from the chat, particularly with the open source panel
- Panel members interjected requests to respond to things on the chat and in general were kept in check from being to commercial, not revealing bias or ducking questions.
- One member of a panel noticed that people were paying more attention to the BackChat screen than the panel itself.
The golden moment was at the end of the show, when I had them project JoiTV. We caught Joi in his underwear and the heckler became the hecklee. Joi waved, we all waved back. Some folks told me that was when something clicked with them about how large the room really was. And many of the remote posse enjoyed a richer participation experience than they have had before.
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Marc Canter on Faces
By
Clay Shirky
Marc Canter has some interesting observations about faces as an interface tool, and points to some other sites or technologies he thinks are doing it right.
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GameSpy Piles On to Star Wars Galaxies
By
Clay Shirky
GameSpy has inaugurated a "pile on" feature, where they round up the conflicting opinions of their employees, this time on the playability of Star Wars Galaxies. Much of the discussion centers on the social effects of having a vast world and a sparse population: It's an MMOG. I know what you get when you play an MMOG: a chat room where you kill monsters and make things that other players might use to kill monsters. That's what you got with UO, EQ, AC, and every other acronym under the sun. [...]
Where SWG is compelling is in its social aspect. There are about four billion actions you can make your character do. If you can think of a verb, chances are it's been aliased to a command. The crafting skill system forces players to rely on each other, and does it well. The entertainment and artisan professions are not only useful, but integral. Social, social, social. Awesome.
Problem is, I don't particularly care for sitting around in a game and talking while I'm making tents...
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Flash Crowds Go Creepy: FlockSmart
By
Clay Shirky
From the "Anything you can do, I can do meta" department comes Flock Smart, a site trying to sign people up for ongoing participation in flash crowds.
The site is very thin on particulars, and the "Contact us" page begins with this creepy sentence: We at FlockSmart feel this should be a site run by the community, for the community.
Got that? You sign up with no advance info, "we at FlockSmart" send you Flash Crowd events, and we ask you to believe that this constitutes a site run by the community for the community, even though the way you join the site makes the top-down structure obvious.
Is anyone else remembering the moment in Snow Crash where the hackers tell the people inside the building to flee outside at once, while simultaneously telling the cops outside that they are about to be beset by berserking hordes emerging from the building?
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Howard Dean and the Threat of the Web
By
Clay Shirky
There's a very smart Chris Sullentrop article about the threat the Web poses to the Dean campaign. One sentence summary: If bottom-up campaigning allows small groups to project onto Dean views he doesn't actually hold, the campaign will disintegrate, in the literal sense of the term.
Smart, well thought out and well researched: Go read it.
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Syndication and Aggregation Spare us Ray's Silenc
By
Sébastien Paquet
Steve Gillmor illustrates one of the killer features of the syndication-aggregation combo - its anxiolytic effect.
"RSS is your friend. It is constant, considerate, always there, protecting me from the cruel silence of Ray Ozzie."
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Blog Co-Op: Blog-influenced business model
By
Clay Shirky
Mark Carey (of Web-Dawn) has launched Blog Co-op.com, and is seeking comment on an idea for a business structure that takes it cue from the weblog world, the Emergent and Liquid Democracy papers, and from Cluetrain. (As of this writing, the LiquidDemocracy link is down -- here it is in Google cache.)
The idea is that the co-operative business entity, a business owned by a cluster of cooperating members, is the logical structure for a business venture among collaborating equals, exemplars of which are found in the weblog world. Blog Cooperatives are businesses jointly owned and operated by their members. BlogCoops are for-profit ventures that embrace emergent democracy as a means for governance and decision-making. Each member of the Blog Coop has an equal voice in the decisions of the organization. [...] Blog Cooperatives use online reputation systems to measure the contributions and and accomplishements of members. The distribution of profits is closely tied to the reputation system, such that members are compensated in proportion to their contributions.
He spells out 10 principles for running such a thing, from philosophical concerns about decision making to practical financial concerns, and has written short pieces within each section about possible alternatives, e.g. "Reputation-based Compensation" vs "Voting-based Compensation" as ways to distribute profits assuming unequal effort on any given job.
Carey ends by outlining his first proposed business, a Web Presence consulting co-op, and each section and, appropriately for a blog co-op paper, each sub-section of the outline has a comments system attached, to get a conversation going.
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Star Wars Galaxies Goes Extra-Social
By
Clay Shirky
Like clockwork, the Star Wars multiplayer game is starting to exhibit social effects outside the game-world itself.
Exhibit A: Game Girl Advance is reporting on the eBay auctions of SWG items, and speculating on a possible crackdown by Sony on such auctions. Because SWG has named servers, it should be possible to see not just the dollar value of 1,000 SWG credits, ranging from ~$1 to ~$2.50, but the difference in the dollar value between Starsider and Bria. (Paging Dr. Castronova. Please call your office...)
Exhibit B: The folks at Star Wars galaxies decided to make the 4th of July an in-game holiday, calling it Unification Day and setting off fireworks every hour to make the celebration of the end of the Unification Wars. And what did they get for their efforts? A lot of tsuris -- the most popular message board thread about Unification Day starts with a complaint about pro-Americanism being offensive to Canadian players, and takes off from there. And of course the most reliable social effect of someone complaining is a pile on of others, whose investment in the game is threatened by criticism, complaining about the complainer. As usual, early on in the thread all the possible points of view have been articulated, but the thread goes on and on, because although everything has been said, not everyone has yet had a chance to say it.
Exhibit C: SWG has been added to PK-HQ, a site for player killers. This one is especially interesting to me, as it is both outside the game world of SWG (and EverQuest and Ultima etc), and yet it is about those games in a way that arguing about Americans vs Canadians isn't. PK-HQ is like alt.syntax.tactical flamewar pranks (link down - google cached version) Back in the Day, allowing a community to form that regards other communities as sites of action rather than participation. It would be interesting to see if cross-game organizations like PK-HQ create any sort of sytlistic flow from one game to the next, by demonstrating the effectiveness of certain kinds of attacks, or by consistently generating the same kinds of "social immune system" reactions in otherwise very different games.
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Dean Supporters Set up Blogging Network
By
Sébastien Paquet
Wired reports on a volunteer effort to help structure communication among the people who want to help presidential candidate Howard Dean get elected. They are building on the open-source Drupal content management system.
Dean supporters found that while meetup was useful in catalyzing group-forming in local communities, it didn't help much in structuring those meetings. The good old telephone showed its limitations, too. From the Wired article:
Rosen has attended two of the Dean Meetup meetings -- including one at Stanford University this week -- and said the groups were fairly disorganized. He hopes the open-source project will help supporters coordinate more easily.
Jerome Armstrong, an Internet activist and political consultant, also says the project could help alleviate the bottleneck of Dean supporters calling the campaign headquarters. It could give those people a new venue for getting involved with the campaign, he said.
Participant Zack Rosen writes,
We are attempting to build a meta-aware mesh-network from multitudes of deployed Drupal web communities each serving different geographic or affinity based groups of campaigners. The technical hurdles in creating this network are no doubt large, but by no means monumental. Further details about the networks design are on this page.
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Balinese Water Temples as Info-Hubs
By
Clay Shirky
Cool paper from Santa Fe, via Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs, on Balinese rice farmers, and their solution to their decentralized coordination problem -- briefly, water flows downhill, so upstream farmers have an incentive to manage water to their benefit, but pest infestation goes in cycles, meaning they have a counter-incentive to synchronize fallow periods with their downstream neighbors.
The key entity in this system are "water temples", which are, among other things, coordination points for decentralized information. Critically, the water temples are simply sites for the mutual self-interest of the rice farmers to express themselves -- the temples are not part of a larger top-down solution:
The model developed above [...] suggests that, even in the presence of a severe water externality, farmers should be willing to coordinate the simultaneous planting of crops to mitigate the potential of pest damage. Moreover, it points to the need for some type of institutional arrangement, like the water temples, to facilitate coordination. Such institutions need no formal enforcement power (such as the threat of force or ostracism), as each farmer has an incentive to seek, and follow, whatever advice is given.
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Steven Johnson on There.com and Avatars
By
Clay Shirky
Steven Johnson reviews There.com in his Discover column, picking up on the Lawley Law, 'It's the faces, stupid" and talking about emotional communication using avatars:
Avatars in There convey emotions through both facial expressions and body gestures. When your on-screen representative frowns, his shoulders sag along with the corners of his mouth. The prototype version offers more than 100 different emotional states to choose from—everything from surprise to anger—and Melcher says the plan is to release 10 new emotions per quarter.
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Nested Rules for Mailing Lists
By
Clay Shirky
Teal Sunglasses has a long musing on social rules for mailing lists: I've tried having really long, explicit, detailed lists of rules (which nobody ever read), and I've tried keeping it really informal and concise (which nobody ever read but which left so much to interpretation that even the most basic decision was argued over).
I'm currently rethinking all of this again, and I think I'm going to break stuff down into three pieces: a core "this is the rules you will follow", effectively a ten commandments summary, a secondary "these are things that make a group work better" area, basically a netiquette, and a new, third piece, which is my "underlying philosphy on how I plan to interpret part 1", which will go into some detail on the rules in part 1 that, if I put it in part 1, nobody would ever read.
Of course, nobody will read any of this anyway. The whole purpose of having a set of list rules is so when you do pull out the cattle prod and start poking at someone, you can point at the rules and say "see? you have no excuse". It is a given that the people who most need the rules to guide their behavior are least willing to read them, so it's mostly a backing document to minimize the controversy created when you do what you always intended to someone. but expect people to be pissed at you for kicking them off, no matter how nasty a troll they were...
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Is Explicit Evil or Just a Game?
By
Ross Mayfield
NOTE: DONT PUBLISH (WEBCrimson doesnt work on my Mac)
David Weinberger's The Unspoken of Groups paper, a recapitulation of his Etech speech, is worth reading over and over until your eyes bleed. David made mention of his view that Explicit is Evil in his Supernova speech, which lets me dig up the topic again.
...Friendster asks me to be binary about one of the least binary relationships around.
I’m not suggesting that Friendster made a poor design decision. I’m suggesting that there is no good design decision to be made here...
...In general, making explicit does violence to what is being made explicit. (In the modern age, Heidegger gets credit for this idea.) Making things explicit isn’t like unearthing an archaeological find that’s just been sitting there, waiting to be dug up. Making explicit often – usually – means disambiguating and reducing complexity...
David is doing us all a favor to recognize the limits of abstraction, especially in a social context. In the physical world, if nothing was subtle and there was nothing to imply, we would all have a hard time getting along. In virtual worlds and social networking services, its impossible to provide all the subtleties which ease our interaction.
However, we need to thing of these new worlds and networks not as ideal virtualization, but simply as games. Sure we loose much of what makes us human in these models. But we can do things we can't in reality. Such as be more efficient.
So long as we internalize that we are just playing games and recongnize the limits of abstraction, games and networks will provide healthy value. But I guess that's the point David is making by asserting Explicit is Evil, otherwise we would forget our limitations.
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Guild Wars: A Socially Forking RPG
By
Clay Shirky
Ever since Lessons From Lucasfilm's Habitat in the early 90s (LLH is brilliant, btw, and my vote for the most important document about social software yet written -- forget this and go read that if you haven't yet...), gamers have been aware of the "global problem/local solution" issue, where a persistent world with a large quest ends up with one or a small group of players succeeding, and everyone else losing out on the experience.
Guild Wars is taking a new approach to that problem, by having a competitive, team-based role-playing game that forks when the team sets out on an adventure: Guild Wars includes persistent gaming areas, and these areas are great places to meet people and make new friends. But once you form a party and go on a quest, you and your friends get your own unique copy of the quest, and that eliminates the things that are real problems in most persistent world games, such as waiting for monsters to spawn, having someone prey on other players by stealing the items that drop from a monster kill, standing in line to tackle the boss monster; and endless, monotonous travel. We feel that most games require that the gamer spend too much time preparing to have fun, rather than actually having fun.
It will be interesting to see if the players feel disoriented in talking about the game with one another, since many of them will have had nearly identical experiences which feel one-of-a-kind, but were really just their particular Matrix reloading. Social deja vu, anyone?
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Griefers in the Sims: The more things change...
By
Clay Shirky
CNN has an article on griefers in the Sims: "It's only a game but the people operating those little animated cartoons are real," said Holly Shevenock, a postal worker from Harrisburg, Pennsylania.
Shevenock quit playing "Sims" because she was spending too much time in it -- up to five hours a day. "If you're not careful, you begin to play this game with your real emotions."
They also quote a psychologist who deeply misses the point: Psychologists who study online behavior say in-game spats and the visceral responses to them aren't surprising. With simulations becoming more lifelike, the line between real and fake is blurred.
"The more real you try to make these online worlds, the more the problems are real-world problems," said John Suler, a Rider University professor who specializes in the psychology of cyberspace. "It's not always easy to contain this stuff in the fantasy world."
As Julian Dibbell showed us 10 years ago in A Rape In Cyberspace games are emotionally engaging, irrespective of polygon count. Not one user of the Sims would mistake the trapezoidal dolls they are playing with for the real world, but that's not the point. The immersion is social, not visual.
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ICU, You Don't See Me
By
Sébastien Paquet
Maciej Ceglowski has posted an interesting description of the asymmetry present in cross-language linking within the blogosphere. It appears that non-English weblogs are proportionally under-linked from English language blogs - which makes me feel a bit guilty for not linking more to the excellent French content that I happen upon.
Of course, language does matter, so links tend not to cross language boundaries. If you look at all the outgoing links from English language blogs, only about 1.75% point to a non-English weblog. In the reverse direction, however, the figure is much higher. A full 7% of links from non-English-language weblogs point to an English site.
[...]Take Iceland, for example. The Icelanders are avid bloggers, with about 3500 weblogs (out of an online population of about 160,000). In any given Icelandic weblog, 12% of the links will point to a site written in English. So even those Icelandic readers who don't speak any English are fairly likely to come into contact with ideas that cross over from the English-language Internet.
But in the other direction, my own chance as an English speaker of coming across a link to an Icelandic site is a whopping 0.02%.
[...] if you assumed that links were completely independent of language, you would expect about 54% of all Icelandic links to point to English sites, and 0.9% of English links to point to Icelandic ones. Predictably enough, both languages have fewer links to each other because of the language barrier, but to a very different degree. Icelandic blogs underlink to English ones by a factor of about 4.5 (54% predicted, 12% actual). But English blogs underlink Icelandic ones by a factor of 80.
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Finding Bloggers by Location
By
Sébastien Paquet
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Henry Jenkins Gets Napster Wrong
By
Clay Shirky
Henry Jenkins, whom I love, has an article in Tech Review (free subscription required) in which he demonstrates a deep misunderstanding of Napster.:
iTunes has none of the peer-to-peer features that made Napster so effective at spreading the word about unknown or forgotten artists. Napster sucked at spreading the word about any artists. Don't get me wrong, I loved Napster, and made something of a career writing about it, and I love the social aspects of software as much as the next guy (actually, a lot more), but even I am not willing to misremember Napster in this way.
Every Napster user has a story about finding another user's collection with both Frank Sinatra and Cypress Hill, but that story (or the late night chat story, or the finding cover versions by searching for a favorite song story) isn't representative. Napster's was designed for transferring music in a way that avoided legal encumbrance by not transferring infringing material directly. Its social features were an afterthought, and eulogizing them as more than that is just propaganda.
Napster was badly designed for the kind of musical exploration that Jenkins mythologizes -- in particular, the "database" you would search for a song was the one the music industry has put in your head all these years through marketing and radio play. If you could remember song title or artist, Napster would fetch them for you, but god help you if you had a genre search, or were looking in a medium where songs and artists were not the units of selection -- gamelan, opera.
Jenkins is right that music has a profoundly social dimension -- unlike other forms of online content, we had music before we had agriculture, so it's a deep pattern. He's also right that iTunes has limited the social dimension, because that's also the dimension that the music industry needed to have limited, in order to play. But he's wrong in thinking that Napster was much better.
Like many people who write about Napster, Jenkins avoids the obvious truth -- Napster was for getting music free, and all its other virtues were a distant second (has any other piece of software with such a terrible interface become so popular?) The real social software for music, if we are ever to get it, is in the future, not the past.
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OpenGroupware.org
By
Clay Shirky
OpenGroupware.org: The URL says it all. Mission: To create, as a community, the leading open source groupware server to integrate with the leading open source office suite products and all the leading groupware clients running across all major platforms, and to provide access to all functionality and data through open XML-based interfaces and APIs.
[...]
Gary Frederick, Leader of the OpenOffice.org Groupware Project: "Just to be perfectly clear, this is an MS Exchange take-out. OGo is important because it's the missing link in the open source software stack. It's the end of a decade-long effort to map all the key infrastructure and standard desktop applications [...] to free software. OGo offers users a free solution for collaboration and document management that, despite being free of charge, will far surpass the quality and level of collaboration found on Windows"
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More on merging IM and Blogging
By
Clay Shirky
IM Planet has an article on merging IM with weblogging: "Given the popularity of instant messaging, we see it as a way to bring in a lot more people to blogging," said MindSay co-founder Adam Ostrow. "Most people have a friend who blogs but might not know how to do it. We think we can really open it up to a much larger audience. People like using instant messaging, it's very convenient ... and it's in more than 40 percent of American households. We see an opportunity to bring blogging more into the mainstream."
Recent entrants in the IM+weblogging world include BloggerBot, MindSay and Tipic.
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A Tale of Two Wikis
By
Clay Shirky
After 10 years of being an indifferently talented perl hacker, I'm now learning to be an indifferently talented Python hacker, and while googling for Python resources yesterday, I came across a wiki for developing Python 2.2.2. Having spent some much time looking at the (n)Echo wiki, I was interested to see the differences in use.
And there, on the home page, was this note from Guido himself: (Guido) My take on this Wiki: we ended up barely using it, and in fact people who tried to use it ended up having their contribution ignored. :-(
Why is the F/Echo wiki working so well, while the Python 2.2.2 wiki became a backwater?
The answer seems to be "Begin as you mean to go on." For all the advantages of wikis, they are a Go To medium, instead of a Come From medium. I am guessing that Python developers are a mailing list culture (as the perl porters are), and that the switch from "read the incoming messages" to "go to the wiki" never made social sense. By inaugurating the Echo effort on the wiki, Sam made it central to the work from the beginning, to the point that participants in the standards effort volunteer social enforcement -- Mark Pilgrim posted a long critique of two versions of F/Echo formatting, and at the bottom, where the weblog comments links would usually be, he said "Got comments? Take 'em to the wiki" and provided links to the relevant pages.
We've seen wiki+weblog and wiki+bbs experiments -- I wonder when we'll see people trying to bridge the utility gap between mailing lists and wikis?
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YASNS: Ringo.com
By
Clay Shirky
Yet another social networking service, Ringo, yet another bizarre misreading of social networks: Asking your friends to join is as simple as sending an email. As your circle of friends grows to include your friend's friends, and their friends too, you will quickly find that your new, expanded circle of friends includes hundreds of people. Many circles never stop growing.
Now you are ready to find a match within your list. Are you looking for an activity partner? Somebody to go to the movies with? A friend, a lover, a soul-mate? Or perhaps simply a mechanic or a lawyer?
With Ringo you can instantly find that someone, always safe in the knowledge that they were referred to you by a friend!
In biological systems, things that don't stop growing are called tumors.
The persistent mistake in the design of these systems is to assume that human relationships have frictionless transitivity -- A trusts B, who trusts C, who trusts D, so introducing A and D is a sure bet!
A is my sister. B is me. C is my meth dealer. D is his "debt collector." My relationship wiht my sister includes her trusting me not to introduce her to known criminals. Any service that proposes to remove me from deciding which introductions to broker doesn't get my business.
The general rule in systems like this seems to be "We're going to assume that human behavior is simple and can be easily represented as transitive operations, because thats what we know how to make computers do."
This is not to say Ringo (or any of thes social network services) will fail -- it just means that success is going to have to come from some force other than illusory transitivity. Ringo seems to have taken a page from Friendster's book in subtly but pervasively emphasizing romantic possibility as the core feature, while claiming to be a general social networking service, in the same way a "theme" bar can pretend not to be a singles bar.
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Adam Curry bribes the blogosphere to ignore Echo
By
Clay Shirky
In an odd testament to the importance of the social fabric of the weblog world, Adam Curry is bribing people not to use Echo, on the grounds that he's invested in RSS.
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What will AOL do to the Blogosphere?
By
Clay Shirky
Shelley "burningbird" Powers has a post on AOL's upcoming weblog product, deepening the comparison to their decision to offer usenet access Back In The Day: Want to know what it will be like having AOL members online? The rules will change, starting with the fact that the AOLers won't know who Jeff Jarvis, Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, Anil Dash, and Clay Shirky are -- and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. This is the million-dollar question: will AOL webloggers join the environment we currently call the blogosphere, or will they inhabit what is for most purposes a parallel universe, or will we have, as Shelley hopes, total anarchy?
The usenet comparison is hard to make, because usenet had few global personalities, but the little evidence we have from the AOL influx isn't good for the "the rules will change" hypothesis. Though AOL users (and to be fair, Delphi and GEnie users and other sources of sudden sharp influxes of newbies) did swamp signal-to-noise ratios, they also made the net.famous more famous. More people, AOLers and non, knew Kibo (who searched usenet daily, in order to follow up any reference to his name) in 1995 than 1993.
Call this the Moveable Type++ future, where AOL becomes an additive presence to the existing weblog world. In this world Anil and Meg (and Shelley, of course, an A-lister herself) become more famous, because in large social systems, a rising tide lifts most of the boats a bit, and a few of the boats a lot.
A second possible future is LiveJournal++, where AOL Journal users link to one another far more frequently than they link out, aided by ease of screen name lookup, integration with their existing address books, and buddy lists. In this world, AOL becomes a collonaded garden, permeable in both directions but largely self-enclosed, and the blogosphere we have today is largely unaffected.
A third future, the wild card, is the Software that Ate Sheboygan. In this world, AOL largely replaces the existing blogsphere. Technorati now looks at ~700,000 weblogs to calculate its stats -- AOL will more than double that number if even 5% of its users set up a weblog. As LiveJournal does, AOL will have internal stars, well known to other AOL Journal users but not to the denizens of blogosphere classic. In this world, the left-hand edge of the powerlaw curve could be put in place entirely from AOL blogrolls and links, and most of the A-list, measured numerically, could be AOL Journal posters.
The one future we won't get is the one Shelley wants -- anarchy. There is a social gravity, a force which pulls groups into predictable shapes, that dooms the anarchist dream of individual action that doesn't resolve into collective pattern.
I'm betting on a combination, where most AOL users cluster; where they have have connections to a few of the current highest ranked weblogs, pushing them still further up the charts; and where they place some of their own most popular users and sites among the Top 100.
This is the same pattern we had with the web itself, where most early websites spent alot of time explaining what the web was. Later, when we'd soaked in it long enough, the web became a tool for pages about other things. Displacement but not disruption, in other words, with less popularity for the bloggers-blogging-about-blogging, and more for the InstaPundits and Talking Points of the world.
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F/Echo: Weblog from Wiki
By
Clay Shirky
Weblogs are not like wikis. Wikis are not like weblogs. Earlier this year, I thought we were seeing a fusion of the two patterns, but to my surprise, they resist any sort of trivial merging, probably because they don't just do different things, they do different things well.
Instead, we are getting a flowering of complexity as various forms of wiki+weblog combinations arise. A new one is a weblog view of work on the "The Protocol Formerly Known As Echo". The content of the weblog is derived in large part by publishing clueful summaries of the work on the wiki.
It's a view for those of us interested in a "just the high points" picture of the work, with lots of links to the wiki itself (permalink meats refactorable WikiWord -- it will be interesting to see if link rot becomes a problem), and there are even weblog posts called Recent Changes, the canonical name of a reverse chronological view in Wikis.
If the pattern works, it will be worth copying.
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Hydra and Social Invention
By
Clay Shirky
One of the moments I love best is when a group, given a piece of software, uses it in a way that is simultaneously so novel and so good that the pattern becomes worth codifying. This is now happening with Hydra, the "7 brains are smarter than one" text editor that has been likened to an IM Wiki. (Mac only, alas.)
At OSCON in Portland (at which I am not, alas), the soi-disant Semi-Unofficial OSCON Wiki is hosting a Hydra template for group note-taking, using the pattern that grew spontaneously at ETCon and was codified by Tom "The Internet is not Shit" Coates. And though the original Hydra use case was programmers collaborating remotely, the Hydra site itself now points to a similar template for the Apple WWDC, meaning that the software designers have taken note of the user innovation.
Watch for later releases of Hydra to include features designed specifically for real-time note-taking by the Wifi-tribe. I haven't talked to the Hydra designers, but I'm willing to bet that this will become an example of social innovation that gets instantiated in code.
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Blogger Bridges
By
Clay Shirky
As with Liz, my students become my eyes and ears for interesting new work. Elizabeth Goodman has just sent me a paper from Intel Research about the feasibility of using physical devices to broker introductions between bloggers, in a paper called Utilizing Online Communities to Facilitate Physical World Interactions. (Can't find the pdf on the Web, so serving from a local host -- will update the URL when it is live):
Devices must provide user interfaces that are expressive but discreet. Given two co-located people with the appropriate devices, each device needs a way to notify its owner of the presence of the other. The key requirement of the notification system is that it preserve plausible ignorability i.e. accepting or rejecting the notification should not expose the identity of the notified person. and, in a development that warms my heart, they have chosen LiveJournal (best piece of social software EVAR!!!1!) as their target environment for research:
We have identified LiveJournal as a promising community, for several reasons: (1) LiveJournal has user profiles with explicit interests, represented as keywords; (2) it supports social networks through explicit friend lists; and (3) it has reached critical mass, with hundreds of thousands of users. The questions we wish to answer include:
· Are LiveJournal users interested in meeting each other?
· Are shared interests a compelling reason to meet?
· Are shared friends a compelling reason to meet?
· What is the density of LiveJournal users in the Seattle area? At the University of Washington?
· What kinds of devices do LiveJournal users already own? Given the popularity of LiveJournal on MeetUp, we know they can answer the first question in the affirmative, making the potential answers to the other questions quite interesting. ( thanks liz)
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I'm a Wikipedia convert
By
Clay Shirky
OK, I take back my snarky comments about the Wikipedia. Writing about the Echo Wiki, I said "Most wikis that operate on a public scale don't have much impact -- the social facts of the wikipedia are far more interesting than the content itself."
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.
This morning, I referred to Bayesian networks in an email exchange, and someone said "What is that?" I knew just what I wanted -- a simple overview of Bayes and Bayesian networks that I could forward them. Unfortunately, most of the links on the first page of Google search were software for Bayesian networks, or complex descriptions that assumed you know the basics. And then there was the Wikipedia link to Thomas Bayes, which was perfect -- simple, clear, with lots of pointers to additional information.
So now I'm a convert.
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Negative Feedback Scarce on eBay?
By
Sébastien Paquet
Reputation researcher Paul Resnick has spent a day at the eBay Live convention in Orlando. He points out that negative feedback on transactions is rare enough that sellers worry about getting even a single negative comment on their record. Reporting from a forum dedicated specifically to the feedback architecture, Resnick writes,
The number one concern was “unfair” negative feedback, usually from new members who are unfamiliar with the norms of working out problems and leaving negative feedback only for unresolved problems, and from non-paying bidders who retaliate after receiving negative feedback. EBay is unwilling to make any editorial judgments about feedback, lest it be held legally responsible for all the feedback content. One of the recent changes they’ve made is to add a “think about it and confirm that you mean it” screen between submitting negative feedback and having it posted.
I think there are two problems with the official and community encouragement to resolve disputes before leaving negative feedback. First, patterns of mild dissatisfaction are not recorded, so lots of useful information is lost. Second, sellers have become overly sensitive any negative or even neutral effect because it is so rare. If negative feedback were given 5% or 10% of the time, on average, then sellers would worry about keeping their percentage down, but wouldn’t be as concerned about any particular feedback.
In the past founder Pierre Omidyar has urged the community to give more negative feedback and I agree.
This raises the general question of whether (or how much) a community should publicly air dissatisfactions and disagreements between members. As Resnick notes, this can provide very valuable information for other parties who are not directly involved; on the other hand, revealing conflicts might make the community and its members look less inviting and trustworthy to outsiders.
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Wikis make MSNBC
By
Clay Shirky
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Good phrase: Context Bottleneck
By
Clay Shirky
I had one of those "aha!" moments talking to Petri Maenpaa of Nokia the other day, when he used the phrase "context bottleneck" to describe the way social cues get stripped out of mediated interaction.
This idea seems to me to be a useful lens to view a lot of social software through. IM differs from fast email exchanges, for example, in part because one of email's (many) context bottlenecks is its lack of presence. Likewise, Liz's "Its the Faces, Stupid" design parameter is a way of reducing context bottlenecks.
Of course, some bottles need necks -- the virtues of compression and asynchrony are not to be sneezed at -- but thinking about developing or improving social software with an eye on context bottlenecks seems potentially fruitful.
My #1 context bottleneck wish is better context for mailing lists. Although they are the serial killer app of social software, there has hardly been any work done on them in the last decade. Most of the improvements in mailing list software, in fact, have been improvements in the admin interface, not the user experience. Given that all the traffic on a list goes through a central server, one could add all sorts of metadata about posters (most quoted line), threads (# of days, # of responses), or the whole list (users to lurkers ratio) before re-sending the message. Instead, the best we get is munging the Reply-to: header and adding the list name in brackets.
If ever there was a medium crying out for experimentation on reducing context bottlenecks, the humble but vital mailing list is it.
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Wired on Flash Mobs
By
Clay Shirky
Wired covers the spread of the Flash Mobs phenomenon (Cheesebikini had the earliest and best coverage.)
Of particular interest to me is the fact that neither the participants nor the organizers can articulate why it's engaging. The Wired article included two quotes, one from an NYC organizer and one from an SF organizer, which seem more about the culture of those two cities than about the Flash Mobs phenomenon itself. From SF: "There's a real desire for something like this out there," he said. "Community has always been a big buzzword in the Web space, and I think the smart mob concept helps to bring the virtual community into real space. No matter how good our devices become at allowing us to communicate, I think we're always going to need some real face time with folks."
From NYC: "There seems to be something inherently political about an inexplicable mob," he said. "People feel like there's nothing but order everywhere -- even crowds these days are forecast and managed -- and so they love to be a part of just one thing that nobody was expecting."
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Communications Decision Tree
By
Clay Shirky
Dave Pollard has an interesting Communications Decision Tree over at how to save the world, showing a set of Y/N decisions that should tell you what sort of communications to use in a business setting: "Are you communicating criticism or bad news?", "Is your message extremely time sensitive?", and so on.
Communicating an important message used to be easy: you walked to where the people you needed to communicate with were, and delivered the message. Today we have masses of tools for communicating, each of which has many 'features' that seem to have been added because they were possible rather than useful. You have to choose . So here's a guide to deciding what tool to use when. I'm skeptical of this kind of chart, because I think the choices are more often multivariate ("Is your company a phone culture or an email culture?", "How well do you handle being interrupted?"), and Pollard and I disagree about the relative importance of live video (he thinks its large and growing, I think its small and will remain relatively unimportant.)
Its worth a read, though, because whatever nits you might have, its the best attempt I've seen to gather the range of communications choices (including making f2f an explicit choice) in one place, and to describe their strengths and weaknesses.
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Live Video in Games
By
Clay Shirky
PC Magazine's "20 Technologies to Watch" includes a section on social gaming, including a bit about Sony's attempt to create Playstation2 games that use live video: This fall, the Sony EyeToy camera—the first product to emerge from this research—will ship for the PlayStation 2 along with EyeToy Play!, a collection of minigames that mix live video of players and computer graphics. "EyeToy Play! is intended as a very social, interactive experience that's especially fun at parties," says Richard Marks, manager of special projects at Sony Computer Entertainment America Research and Development. EyeToy can also draw in very young and old gamers for whom dexterity is a problem.
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Ray Ozzie on "Extreme Mobility"
By
Clay Shirky
Great essay by Ray Ozzie on Extreme Mobility, on the broad effects of Laptops/pdas/tablets, phones-as-devices, Wifi, and GPRS, and where its taking us:
If technology, molded into any of a variety of forms, can ultimately give us continuous awareness of the geo-location, activity, interruptability, and even potentially "state of mind" of those with whom we wish to "be close to", what will it do to the nature of the nuclear family unit? The local community? The collaborative work team?
If technology, molded into forms such that teams of individuals can virtually and dynamically assemble into highly productive organizational units, what will ultimately happen to the large-scale enterprise? In what industries will the mega-corporation continue to exist as a large scale employer, versus being more-or-less an aggregator and connector of highly productive smaller companies?
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More on Hydra
By
Clay Shirky
More on the use of Hydra in the "gathered together/logged in together" pattern, among conference goers at Apple's WWDC conference: However, those with a clue-- of which I got one on Wednesday-- used Hydra to take live, collaborative, notes during the various sessions. Someone in the session would start an ad-hoc Hydra network and publish a document. Anyone else interested in doing so could collaboratively edit the document.
End result; you would have up to about a half dozen or so developers asking questions about the presentation, answering each other's questions, and building upon the ideas within the session.
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AOL, Weblogs, and Community
By
Clay Shirky
Thursday, AOL invited a few people in ( Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, Anil Dash, Jeff Jarvis, and me) to critique its upcoming weblog product, AOL Journals.
Jarvis has done a good write-up, so I won't re-hash everything here. The product is what you would expect from AOL -- solid, good looking, easy to use. Its strengths and weaknesses are AOL's strengths and weaknesses -- it has photoblogging linked to their You've Got Pictures product and the ability to post directly from AIM, but it also has too much AOL branding. Rather than a discreet MT- or blosxom-like "Powered by..." icon at the bottom, it has a 50 pixel high "AOL Journals" logo that runs across the entire top of the screen, in prime blogging real estate. Hearteningly, it supports RSS out of the box, so no interop wars here. (They are aware of Echo, but everyone tacitly agreed that it was too early to know how to integrate it, should it come to fruition.)
The feature list, though, is of secondary importance, compared to AOL's ability to offer a blogging platform to tens of millions of people at once. I was there during the "AOL offers usenet access" days in the early 90s, and that was like watching someone turn the lights on at a baseball stadium.
The assembled group mostly agreed in our comments -- "Doesn't suck, should be easier to use, less intrusive branding, etc." What was most interesting to me, however, was where we didn't come to any agreement -- community vs publication.
The key question for AOL is "Is this a community tool, or a lightweight publishg platform?" Now one obvious answer is "Why pick?", but I think that answer is starting to wear a bit thin. The weblog world has, broadly speaking, three basic patterns -- tight conversation, loose conversation, and publication. These correspond to a cluster of friends using LiveJournal, any of the conversations going on around technical issues (scripting languages, CSS, Echo etc), and comment-free nanopublishing like Gawker or InstaPundit. (I described those patterns in a bit more detail at the end of Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality.)
AOL, by its nature, will affect the future of weblogging by choosing to emphasize or de-empahsize certain aspects of these patterns, and some of those choices are already made. For example, they are calling the product "Journal," as only 18% of their audience recognizes the word weblog. But the big question is integration of group experience -- like LiveJournal, AOL will be able to offer all sorts of tight connections between the journals of any two AOL users, but the question is "Do they want to?"
The advantage of such tight connection, as with the Friends feature of LiveJournal, is that it makes the experience fun for people who don't want and won't get a large audience -- it's not much fun to write for 6 random strangers, but it can be lots of fun to write for your 6 best friends. (I think this "Small clusters creating internal value" effect is what makes LiveJournal's churn rate so low relative to tools like blogger.) The disadvantage is that such tight clusters tend to be insular -- though LiveJournal claims more than double the number of active users as blogger, very few LiveJournal URLs ever make dayblogpopdex. LiveJournal is vast, active, and largely disconnected from the rest of the weblog world.
So AOL has a momentous choice before it, and it is a choice that will be played out in a thousand small ways, each choice magnified by millions of users. Does the product ship with comments enabled by default or disabled by default? Do users set comments on by blog or by post? Does Trackback get integrated? How do groups form blogs? Do groups of AOL journal users enjoy better clustering features than AOL+non-AOL groups? and so on.
Community conversation vs Lightweight publishing platform is not a zero-sum set of choices, but there is a spectrum of offerings, from LiveJournal's hyper-sociability, to blogger, which still doesn't support comments, and the choice of features has a significant effect on patterns of use. Given AOL's size, and given that they are starting with an existing audience, none of whom chose AOL for its blogging tools, they may find that they heve to segment their developement efforts, customizing one set of tools for social groups and another for personal publishing (and possibly merging the latter with other Hometown functions, or their small business offerings.)
The 1.0 isn't even in beta (starts this summer, with launch in the fall), but the product as we saw it Thursday skews to "community support" over "publishing tool" (makes sense for AOL, of course.) What happens at launch, and how the product develops over the first couple of iterations, could have a profound effect on how weblogging is used and perceived.
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We Need a Way To Organize Weblogs by Topic
By
Clay Shirky
Interesting reaction by Richard MacManus to my piece about the Echo wiki (That piece is here.) MacManus says weblogs should be organized by topic, not by author, and goes on to disagree strongly with my contention that the author-first form of organization has some strong benefits: I couldn't disagree more with that statement - organizing what we read according to who wrote it is plain elitist. I'd much rather organize what I read based on topics - then decide for myself if it has any value. This is the beauty of a system such as k-collector, which Paulo and Matt have developed as a means to track and connect peoples weblog posts by topic.
There is now a beta k-collector blogosphere-by-topic portal as well.
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David Weinberger on unspoken truths
By
Clay Shirky
David Weinberger has posted his ETech speech, on the need for unspoken truths in any effective group, and on the way constitutions have to ratify existing behaviors, not merely propose new ones:
Perhaps groups can’t write a constitution until they’ve already entangled themselves in thick, messy, ambiguous, open-ended relationships. First, without that thicket of tangles, the group doesn’t know itself well enough to write a constitution. A constitution is descriptive as well as prescriptive. For example, if a group with the disposition of Slashdot were to come up with a constitution that said "No sarcasm will be tolerated," it would fail. The constitution has to match the group’s nature, but that nature emerges from the thicket of ambiguous relationships.
Second, writing a constitution is an act of violence because it’s making explicit rules and mores that were left unstated until some problem arose that pushed the group into the constitution-writing process it had been avoiding. We all know how ugly constitutional discussions can get. In order to have such a charged conversation, the group needs a web of good will. That web takes time to develop. So groups generally dare not attempt a constitution early on.
Read the whole thing.
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A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
By
Clay Shirky
I've posted a lightly edited version of the talk I gave at the O'Reilly ETech conference earlier this year, entitled A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy:
The web has been growing for a long, long time. And so some people had web access, and then lots of people had web access, and then most people had web access. But something different is happening now. In many situations, all people have access to the network. And "all" is a different kind of amount than "most." "All" lets you start taking things for granted.
Now, the Internet isn't everywhere in the world. It isn't even everywhere in the developed world. But for some groups of people -- students, people in high-tech offices, knowledge workers -- everyone they work with is online. Everyone they're friends with is online. Everyone in their family is online.
And this pattern of ubiquity lets you start taking this for granted. Bill Joy once said "My method is to look at something that seems like a good idea and assume it's true." We're starting to see software that simply assumes that all offline groups will have an online component, no matter what.
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RSS, Echo, Wikis, and Personality Wars
By
Clay Shirky
The weblog world has taken the 4 elements of organization from mailing lists and usenet -- overall topic, time of post, post title, author -- and rearranged them in order of importance as author, time, and title, dispensing with topics altogether. (Choosing a formal topic, as Many-to-Many does, is both optional and rare.) This "author-first" organization gives the weblog world a huge boost, as the "Who said what" reputation system we all carry around in our head is a fantastic tool for organizing what we read, as well as acting as a kind of latent bozo filter.
"Author-first" has a downside, though, which is that in some areas, personality is a bad proxy for quality. Exhibit A is the standard wars over RSS, which have been driven by personality -- Mark says one thing, Dave a second, Sam a third, and the whole thing takes on the quality of the "Britney dates Justin/Britney dumps Justin" headlines at the checkout counter.
So Sam Ruby, in an effort to rescue the idea of a syndication format from this new danger, the personality-centric standards war, has rounded up The Usual Suspects and is corralling them into the design of a new standard, currently called Echo, that is "100% vendor neutral" (read: unconnected to personality.)
And the Great and the Good of the weblog syndication world are doing this work...in a wiki. There are lots of good reasons for using a wiki, of course, instead of a trackbacked weblog conversation. Though both weblogs and wikis support conversational patterns, weblogs are "conversation as published comments" while wikis are "conversation as shared editing." Weblogs tend towards polarized or divergent views, while wikis tend towards convergent ones, which is just what you want for a conversation around standards.
But there is a second reason, under the surface but possibly more important -- wikis denature personality. Echo exists not because there are things wrong with the RSS markup -- there are, but they could be easily fixed. Echo exists because there are things wrong with the RSS process. RSS is having not a technological crisis but a constitutional one, where who decides what concerning RSS is not clear, and will never be clear, because the people doing the deciding don't even see themselves as being part of a decision making body.
Ruby is attempting to cut that Gordian knot by launching the new standards work in a wiki. When the problem with the process is social, the solution should be social too: Wikis are a much more radical re-arrangement of the usenet/mailing list principles. The two key aspects of wiki organization are Page Name and Now. Page Name is someplace between a subject line and a formal topic -- it lasts longer than a subject line, but isn't permanent as it can always be re-factored. And Now is what time it is on any given wiki page -- the page itself reflects the history of changes to date, so Wiki Now is always the best approximation of consensus view.
Wikis have no strong concept of author -- people can sign their work if they like, and can sometimes register, but additions and edits don't have to be signed, nor does any particular addition enjoy special status or presumption of permanence. There is no overall topic required for a wiki, though one can be declared or emerge. Reverse chronological arrangement is a second order view, either of revisions to a given page or in the Recent Changes list. But the wiki pages themselves are organized by Page Name and Now.
By doing this, Sam seems to be saying "You can hold forth in your blog all you like, but the work is here. Everyone is welcome, no one's words matter more or less, and no one's words are sacred. Rough consensus will be reached by hammering out the ideas on the wiki pages. We will re-factor as we go, see what emerges, and work from there."
By doing this, Sam is creating a single conversation -- you have to be there to play. He is making the conversation open to participation but resistent to bloviating. And he is forgoing any editorial function of his own, pace wiki gardening, which is open to everyone else as well. Who knows if this will succeed as a pure standards effort, but as an attempt to convene a concrete conversation while avoiding personality wars, it has already generated an enormous amount of valuable input and a huge amount of good will.
Most wikis that matter don't operate on a public scale, being used for coordination of small and focussed groups. (IAwiki.net is about the largest I've seen.) Most wikis that operate on a public scale don't have much impact -- the social facts of the wikipedia are far more interesting than the content itself. (Update: I now think this view is wrong.) The Echo wiki, though, is an interesting experiment in when, why and how to use a wiki to convene a large and heterogenous group to deal with a thorny and contentious problem, as well as possibly providing an antidote to personality as an organizing principle.
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