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November 30, 2003
Posted by Clay Shirky
From TruthLaidBear, evidence of the continuing segmentation of the weblog world by traffic numbers.
The saga of the alpha bloggers goes something like this: in the weblog world, people have total freedom in who to link to. The links therefore exhibit a pattern of preferential connectivity, and resolve themselves in the by-now familiar power law distribution. A power law distribution, being a smooth curve radically weighted to one end of the distribution, has no “typical” point — the average, the median, and the mode weblogs are very different animals.
In particular, to mis-quote Faulkner, the linktraffic-rich are different than you and me. (Update: thanks to N.Z. Bear for pointing out that the suspensions were for gaming page view counters, not inbound links.) Although there is no point where a formal line can be drawn, there is a subset of people with a disproportinate amount of links, traffic, and influence who are, by tradition called the alpha bloggers.
Now, TruthLaidBear posts new evidence that this unequal distribution has become so important that it is being conciously manipulated Effective immediately, six weblogs are being put on notice that they are about to be suspended from the Ecosystem. […]
The reason for these suspensions is that it has come to my attention via the Commissar that some weblogs are posting multiple SiteMeter counters on their pages which point to other weblogs. The result is that when a visitor lands on their main page, the visit is not just counted for their own blog, but is also double-, triple-, or in some cases quadruple-counted as a visit to the other blogs.
What this means is that the SiteMeter counters for the blogs in question are flatly inaccurate: they are being inflated by visits which didn’t really happen on their pages. This also makes the Ecosystem Traffic Rankings inaccurate, defeating the whole purpose of the rankings, and is therefore intolerable. Link countsTraffic numbers have become such a powerful feed-forward* mechanism that sites are now gaming the system to get into alpha blog territory. The inequality observed in February, in the original Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality is nothing compared to what we’re seeing now.
—
* Feed-forward is the little referenced cousin of feedback. In a feed-forward system, change in one variable tends to accelerate change in the same direction. A thermostat is a feedback system — the temperature rises, and the thermostat reacts by turning off the heater until it falls again. Feed-forward, by contrast, leads to runaway reactions, as when a weblog gets more links because it has more links.
—
Update: A comment from N.Z. Bear, the author of TruthLaidBear, which I’ve copied from the comments section to here: Strictly speaking, the example you quoted represents the “last straw” in a series of behaviors I considered abusive with regards to the Ecosystem. To be precise for your readers, the quote above actually refers to a lesser-known part of the Ecosystem which provides rankings based on SiteMeter visit counts (as opposed to based on links). (That ranking can be found here: http://www.truthlaidbear.com/TrafficRanking.php)
However, the individual in question has also demonstrated a history of attempting to manipulate the traditional, link-counting part of the Ecosystem as well, so your point remains quite valid.
I continually am struggling to provide a service which both offers a simple, easy-to-understand “map of the territory” of weblogs, but at the same time is resistant to abuse. With this latest incident, I’m afraid, no elegant programming solution was available, and so I’ve had to take a more crude approach and directly limit one individual’s participation in the ranking system.
Solution unsatisfactory, indeed: but the best I can do at this point…
Best regards…
-NZB
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November 27, 2003
Posted by Seb Paquet
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Posted by Seb Paquet
danah boyd is profiled in today's edition of the New York Times. The article focuses on her work around Friendster, and highlights how, instead of being an outside observer, danah is immersed within the object of her research, which brings advantages and challenges at once.
I believe this kind of action research is generally a better approach to take in the area of social software. It's quite difficult to understand what's going on without being a participant yourself.
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November 25, 2003
Posted by Liz Lawley
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a survey this week on the "tech elite," in which they note the growing importance of social technologies for that ~31% of the population:
This elite comprises three distinct sub-groups of Americans who are the most voracious consumers of information goods and services in the United States.
* The Young Tech Elites make up one-fifth of the technology elite. The average age for this group is 22 years.
* Older Wired Baby Boomers make up the remaining one-fifth of the technology elite. The average age for these baby boomers is 52.
* Wired Generation Xers (GenXers) make up most of the technology elite (about 60%). The average age for this group is 36 years.
Technology elites in the United States have more than just a lot of technology, although they have plenty of that. For this group, the Internet, cell phone, digital videodisc player, and personal digital assistant are commonplace; many of them access the Internet wirelessly and are starting to pay for online content. What is distinctive about them is that new electronic communications technologies come first. They would rather do without their wireline telephone than their computer. For the Young Tech Elites, the cell phone is more important than the wireline phone, and email is as important as telephonic communication. For the Young Tech Elites, the Internet is a regular source for daily news and an indispensable element of their entertainment experience.
The report is based on a survey from October 2002, which means it preceded some of the recent hype on weblogs, YASNS like Friendster, and the like; it will be interesting to see how much some of these numbers have shifted over the past year.
Of particular interest to me, of course, was the discussion of gender in this space. The typical media/pop culture image of the "tech elite" is male, but in fact the [insert Richard Dawson voice here] survey says:
Substantial numbers of women in the United States are active and enthusiastic consumers of information goods and services. In fact, 46% of the tech elite are women – whether among the Young Tech Elites, Wired GenXers, or Older Wired Baby Boomers. Comparing tech elite women to their male counterparts reveals some interesting contrasts within this most tech-oriented segment of the population. In very broad terms, tech elite women seem more enthused about the information technologies that enable communication and perhaps less enthralled with the latest hardware.
Excellent fodder for my O'Reilly presentation, I think.
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November 24, 2003
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Social capital, or aggregate (connected) reputation, is a form of credit. Some formal transactions can be supported by social capital. Informal transactions are rarely underpinned by financial credit or legal agreement and instead rely entirely social capital. We all have our internal calculators keeping tacit track of who is wronging and righting, the health of the relationships and adjusting our actuarial tables according to experience.
Sometimes a service arises to make a portion of this explicit, such as Ebay's or Slashdot's reputation system. Scaled reputation systems to date are, in fact, subjective proxies – a set of localized decisions that result in a visible emergent pattern – the pattern itself being open to interpretation. But if there is enough social agreement to play the rating game, they decrease transaction risk and increase liquidity. Not just for those with better ratings, but for the network or market as a whole.
Say you are selling a couch to a neighbor at a garage sale who is going to pay for it when its delivered next weekend. The transaction could be supported by formal credit using means as varied as an IOU or contract (providing legal recourse as credit) or financial means such as a deposit, escrow or credit card. It could also be supported by social capital. The key difference is an implied agreement that default means a negative impact on the defaulting party, not from explicit penalties, but to reputation with the seller and others in the neighborhood that is a network. The overhead cost for securing a transaction with financial credit is greater.
Using social capital to underpin transactions is an iterative approach. It only works if there will be future transactions and each occurs within the context of a social network. Game theory holds the best strategy is to trust but verify with each iteration. This presents greater risk up front, but builds trust and reputation with each iteration, so over time transaction risks and costs decrease. But it should be clear that without additional legal recourse for default it only works for smaller transactions.
In absence of formal credit, social capital is the norm. Micro-markets, more traditional cultures and third world countries practically run on social capital as a result. Up until the advent of the Internet, markets and networks that run on social capital were unable to scale. The sad irony is that the markets that need scaled reputation the most still lack access to supportive technologies.
The only cap to abundant potential connections is our mental capacity to manage relationships (150 active ones at a time). New tools are giving us greater capabilities to recall and invoke latent ties, but this is a hard barrier. What’s interesting is how with the cost of group forming falling, local networks are becoming denser, membership more dynamic and new clusters of localized decisions are ripe for enabling emergent patterns.
The potential supply of social capital is abundant, only held back by search and transaction costs. Social software and social networking are rapidly driving these costs towards zero. The pace of capital formation is accelerating because of two additional factors.
In the parlance of network or systems thinking: in the absence of connections, nodes become state attractors. In other words, when the amount of connections is limited, the value of connections is high.
Economists have an applicable rule for this as well: Say’s Law, or “supply creates its own demand.” Now Say’s Law doesn’t work when there is money involved (creates an arbitrage opportunity, otherwise supply-side economics would make sense), but it does apply to barter, reputation and micro-markets. When money is involved, it provides a universal arbitrage path, causing a fight over equilibrium and discounting the impact of Say’s Law at a macro scale.
This is one reason why you can’t trade goods or cash for social capital. Or if you do, it disrupts equilibrium across markets. Now I am sure some elaborate schemes have allowed traders on eBay to assume others’ identities and some virtual world economies have crossed this boundary. But the point is you can’t monetize social capital in aggregate, because it operates at a micro-scale. You can foster social capital for the value of its emergent patterns and what it enables: the flow and production of other tangible and intangible assets. The value of social capital is local, but its impact is global.
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November 22, 2003
Posted by Ross Mayfield
A long and storied tale from the New York Times Magazine make a point on context-shifting in online dating:
...The defining fact of online dating is that it begins outside any context -- historical, temporal, physical. To compensate, dating sites offer the old-fashioned comfort of facts: income, life goals, tastes in music, attitudes toward having children -- the sorts of things you might wonder about a stranger you locked eyes with. To ask whether this lack of real-world context is ''good'' or ''bad'' is to oversimplify; online personals are a natural outcropping of our historical and technological landscape -- one more proof of the fact that time and space are ceding their primacy as organizers of our experience. Better questions might be, How do they work and how is the way they work changing the nature of courtship?
...The circularity here is intriguing: an absence of real-world community fuels a schematic, inorganic online ritual that spawns a network of online friendships that ultimately pushes back out into the real world. No context becomes, in effect, a context all its own -- an avatar, if you will, of the city itself. This is how the Internet was supposed to work, and it suggests that the deep impulse behind the success of online dating could reach well beyond dating itself...
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Shannon Appelcline has a short piece over at Skotos on social interaction in multi-player games. She identifies three large categories, Freeform Socialization, Competitive Socialization, and Cooperative Socialization, with a short note on each one. Freeform Socialization. Sadly, this is the extent of social interaction allowed for in most multiplayer games. We slap a chatline into a game. Then we spend as much time making it look nice--by allowing for colored text, by making a library of hundreds of smileys, by putting it in cute little word balloons on the screen, or by using cool fonts--as we do considering how the chat lets people interact. And, sometimes, designers don't even go that far; some chats just seems like an afterthought, grossly slapped down on top of the millions of polygons which make up the true heart of the game (for those designers).
Games that have gone beyond this level of freeform social interaction have mostly done it through social engineering: the socialization emerged a part of the culture rather than the game itself. The earliest TinyMUDs (1989) are perhaps some of the best examples, because they created societies of storytelling and human interaction pretty much out of whole cloth. In our own Castle Marrach here at Skotos we do have elements of competitive and cooperative play, but ultimately a lot of the social interaction comes down to freeform desires to tell meaningful stories together. Sims Online is an example of a more mass-market application of the same concepts.
She labels this entry Part One of a series, so more to come...
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November 21, 2003
Posted by Clay Shirky
Interesting article on Wired about Friendster problems, including an dramatization of the difference between Friendster control over user profiles, as exhibited by the Fakester genocide, and the user's control of their own profiles: "I tried to delete my profile on Friendster, but couldn't find any way to do that with their interface," says former member Kevin Gilmore. "I e-mailed their support to ask how I deleted my profile. I was told that they didn't do that (and that) if I didn't want to use the service ... I should just not log on. That was not good enough for me. So, I pushed them further. I told them I wanted my profile gone. They were rude. They were indignant. I threatened a lawsuit. My profile disappeared. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth."
The article commits the typical journalistic sin of conflating ordinary problems like churn and slow servers with people leaving for philosophical reasons, but it does provide another interesting case study in tension between a service and its users when the much of the stuff the service "owns" is user contributed.
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Posted by Seb Paquet
Selling Social Software: December 3rd in London.
All pivotal internet technologies move from being the preserve of a small, committed, technically literate subculture towards mainstream cultural acceptance and commercial exploitation. With over a million users and rising, blogs are well on their way along this road.
But can social software realistically be employed to serve commercial ends - or does it, by its very nature, resist being harnessed in this way?
Speakers include Will Davies, Lee Bryant, and Louise Ferguson.
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November 20, 2003
Posted by Clay Shirky
Though I found the Otlet article Ross posted fascinating, this passage Distinguishing Otlet's vision from the Bush-Nelson (and Berners-Lee) model is the conviction—long since fallen out of favor—in the possibility of a universal subject classification working in concert with the mutable social forces of scholarship.
Otlet's vision suggests an intellectual cosmos illuminated both by objective classification and by the direct influence of readers and writers: a system simultaneously ordered and self-organizing, and endlessly re-configurable by the individual reader or writer.
requires a response.
The failure of "universal subject classification working in concert with the mutable forces of scholarship" didn't happen because that idea fell out of fashion -- it was fashionable as recently as 1998, with people being paid fabulous sums of money to pursue it. It failed because it _does not work._
Yahoo had professional ontologists on staff (there's a business card, huh?) to do just this -- work out a highly detailed set of relations between entities that was both hierarchical _and_ web like (analogous to a directory structure with symlinks) and they tried to rank the items within those systems based on relevance, itself a result of both the contents of the file and self-reported characteristics by the creators, in things like the META keywords list.
It was, in other words, "an intellectual cosmos illuminated both by objective classification and by the direct influence of readers and writers." And it sucked. Sucked sucked sucked. We didn't even know how bad it sucked until Google came along and (its hard to remember this even five years later) saved the Web from drowning in its own waste.
And Google did it by saying what every system that scales to internet size says: fuck ontology.
Google's intuition explains why both Otlet then and the Semantic Web now are doomed: classification shemes don't scale, because at billions of documents, the width vs depth tradeoff (many top level categories vs many deep trees) stops being a tradeoff anymore because systems become both too wide _and_ too deep. They also don't scale to include alternate worldviews that use alternate classifications.
Google instead followed the Jakob Nielsen dictum: don't listen to what the users say, for they are unreliable and will game the system; instead watch what they do, and derive meaning from that. And that worked, in a way that the Mundaneum never could.
Not knocking Otlet, mind, he was working in the tenor of the time, but the idea that the rock candy mountain of a universal global ontology didn't appear because of dictates of fashion is nonsense.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
Read the whole thing: Alex Wright on Paul Otlet, the forgotten forefather of hypertext.
...While that sentiment may sound postmodernist in spirit, Otlet was no semiotician; rather, he simply believed that documents could best be understood as three-dimensional, with the third dimension being their social context: their relationship to place, time, language, other readers, writers and topics. Otlet believed in the possibility of empirical truth, or what he called "facticity"—a property that emerged over time, through the ongoing collaboration between readers and writers. In Otlet's world, each user would leave an imprint, a trail, which would then become part of the explicit history of each document.
Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson would later voice strikingly similar ideas about the notion of associative “trails” between documents. Distinguishing Otlet's vision from the Bush-Nelson (and Berners-Lee) model is the conviction—long since fallen out of favor—in the possibility of a universal subject classification working in concert with the mutable social forces of scholarship....
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
A Red Herring article on social networking by Jonathan Thaw captures the healthy skepticism of recent capital formation. What's new about it is lots of threatened incumbents claiming its a feature they can tack on to their existing offerings. Backed up by an analyst who spends her time using Portals suggesting it should be a portlet, because the only time you would use it is when you are prowling for dates.
I'm poking fun, but its called for. Its good incumbents are paying lip service, but when an established player has to claim featuredom the threat is real. But nevermind the vcs, network effects, patents or growing like gangbusters.
The problem for incumbents is market muscle isn't organic. If a portal offers a social networking service they will have a flood of profiles with minimal connection. Like a grove of saplings with little to share except resource consumption. If an enterprise player imposes a graph from the top-down, incentive conflicts arise. Food chains are more complex than mandating the five food groups. Oh, and we can all envison the ideal user experience, but disruptions don't turn out that way.
UPDATE: An anonymous coward who hasn't been paying attention wants me to delve into the detail of the last paragraph. Its all about how the graphs grow.
If an incumbent has a base of customers and a large budget for development and promotion, it doesn't necessarily give them a sustainable competitive advantage. Challengers have grown their network beginning with a single node inviting his friends. And they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on...generation by generation. By requiring people to be invited into the network you assure they are connected to the main graph and receive more immediate value. Anyway, the advantage of this organic growth is a densely connected structure throughout the life of the graph. The disadvantage is growth as measured by the number of users is hampered.
If an incumbent offers a social networking service to their existing customer base, the network begins with multiple isolated nodes that branch out. Take a browse through Tickle and you will see lots of profiles with few of them listing connections. This is akin to a searchable resume database, little in the way of social context and few opportunities to leverage the graph for services (like filtering messages by degrees of separation). You could offer mechanisms for people to meet strangers in other graphs with forums and the like, but these connections would be enabled without an intermediary friend risking their social capital to foster the relationship, resulting in less aggregate trust, decreasing the potential utility of the network. As I mentioned in my last post on merging networks, creating incentives for people to bridge networks is hard to do. Its easier if you have two graphs (e.g. via an acquisition), a little more difficult if initial generations are based on buddy lists and extremely difficult the service is made indiscriminately available -- resulting in almost as many graphs as there are nodes.
Enterprise networks face the same challenges but also have an inherent incentive conflict. If the graph is grown company by company, it means graphs contributed to help selling make you a target for selling or could be used by a competitor, which is why contribution is often made selective. This incents gaming at the company level, contribute invalid data for erstwhile competitors while using your real graph for search. Gaming can be taken into account, but the gaming game is a lot like fighting spam, both provider and users incentives grow with the value of the network alongside the complexity of tactics. Meanwhile company by company growth lessens network effects and viral growth rates will not be achieved.
The other incentive conflict is between individuals and enterprises. If an enterprise forces a salesperson to contribute their data, its something they perceive as their own asset they lease to each company the work for. If the graph is developed through hybrid contribution of enterprise and individual, providing a service for individuals as well, individuals receive less utility. Their data is being packaged as part of an enterprise sale and they cannot afford the same level of functionality as an enterprise (e.g. selective contribution of data). Without individual control over their graph or at least opt-out and with profiling of third parties without their consent raises major privacy concerns. For enterprises, the intelligence social network analysis will become a must-have and will outweigh their privacy concerns, but individuals may revolt if incentive conflicts aren't addressed.
For most readers, I believe I said all this in a single paragraph and hope the elaboration is worthwhile. Since I didn't use an illustrative metaphor for my last point on how services are competitive, I won't get into detail, have a day job to get back to. I am not a journalist, don't have an editor, but this is the beauty of the social editing process of weblogs...a conversation ensues to build understanding. Of course, its hard to have a conversation with a person that doesn't exist.
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November 19, 2003
Posted by David Weinberger
Imagine doing Friendster in person. You go up to the people you know and ask if they want to sign up as your friend. None of them say no, of course, unless you are badly deluded about who your friends are. Then you see someone who is a friend of a friend. You go up to him and strike up a conversation based on nothing except the fact that you both know the same person. You get to state what your interests are and read the other person's list. "So, you like ice skating, Victorian embroidery and the Pats." Pretty grim scenario. Social networks - both artificial ones like Friendster and real ones like the people you cc - often depend on the connective thread being vanishingly thin.
So, last night we had 15 strangers over to our house to write letters to undecided Democratic voters in Iowa explaining why we think they ought to consider supporting Dean. This is a very weird exercise, like doing Friendster not in person but via personal, handwritten letters, and without the mediation of a shared friend. The only personal relationship vaguer and more artificial than this is, perhaps, the penpal: "So, you live in Greece! I live in Boston. Do you like souvlaki? I do, but not as much as pizza. Do you eat pizza in Greece...etc." At least we had something to talk about.
It's weird (yet slightly thrilling). You're connecting without context. How old is the recipient? Political position? Socio-economic class? Favorite Beatle? You've got nothing. Sometimes you can't even tell from the person's name what sex s/he is. I wouldn't have been shocked if this campaign had been received as intrusive or offensive, yet, there's some evidence that it works: Dean's polls numbers have gone up after mailings like these. Could be a coincidence. Might not be.
So, what do we learn from this? A few things, I think:
First, it's a reminder of how weird it is to set out to build a human connection on purpose rather than have it emerge from a context rich with gestures as small as an eye glance. That's as true of Friendster as it is of penpals.
Second, the thinness of the connection permits us to take social liberties that in a real-world, embodied meeting we would not.
Third, if you want to stop spam, make the spammers write each of their damn messages in longhand. Oy, my aching digits!
Sorry to be writing about the Dean campaign again, but I've been spending more time on that than I have on social software in the past few weeks.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Good overview from Baselinemag on the use of the net by the Howard Dean campaign. Even if Dean fails to capture the Democratic nomination, he has made internetworking technology an integral factor in national campaigns for the foreseeable future. Not since the televised Nixon-Kennedy debates has there been a comparable shift in the art and science of running a campaign.
The article won't contain a lot of surprises for internet politics junkies, but if you've been wondering what all the fuss is about other than internet fund-raising, the article emphasizes the ways Dean is using communal tools to build an emergent field organization, and the ways the campaign is using the internet as a face-to-face organizing tool, or, as the campaign worker Zephyr Teachout puts it, "I can imagine the campaign without the blog, but not without Meetup."
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November 18, 2003
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Social Networking Services lurched into overdrive last week with funding announcements, patent purchases, new entries and mergers. It all boils down to companies competing at a new level, the ante is upped. I won't get into how the competition will play out, the fictional drama, or decry some of the fake announcements (ok, I will ... Evite is saying they are getting into social networking by providing boards and profiles, which I assume is a joke).
What's interesting is E-mode/Tickle's acquisition of Ringo. E-mode is undergoing a full-fledged transformation to a social networking service, although issues are pending. Social networks can be merged with the right incentives for people to fill structural holes by bridging networks. It takes time for the Kudzu to creep and enjoin the two trees, but its inevitable evolution of the ecosystem of networks.
Right now the focus in Social Networking is serving the urban tribes professionally and personally. Its relatively easy to envision how over time a network rollup could work with the right incentives for hop-skippers or community bridgers -- provided cultural barriers don't exist. But the biggest untapped opportunity is ethinc networks -- the vast diasporas of jewish, british, chinese, japanese, indian, hungarian and other global tribes. Ethnic identity provides a platform for social networks to transcend territory and hold heterarchy over hierarchy as the dominant feature of business.
As worlds collide its difficult to see these graphs merging, certainly not at the pace in which acquirees and acquiers could hope. Or in my experience forming the Blog & Blogging Tribe on Ryze. It's not for lack of internationalization and localization. Its culture, lack of hop-skippers and even network structure.
Note that wiw.hu doesn't have a power-law distribution, so quick hits of incenting the peak may not work, tantamount to bribing Instapundit in blogspace [tip of the hat to danah and Varga).
Now Ringo was a small 4-man shop with 350k users. Take a browse at Tickle and you will find lots of profiles and little in the way of connections. Will be interesting to see these networks enjoin and if they provide incentives to grow within, not just without.
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November 17, 2003
Posted by David Weinberger
So, we have what seems to be at least a relatively new social phenomenon happening: a presidential campaign that's moving ahead in part because the supporters are feeling connected not just to the candidate but to one another. And that campaign (Dean's) has been creating an infrastructure that allows groups of supporters to meet and stay in touch...a social network. This happens through the real-world contacts made at MeetUps, through the Dean online social network (DeanLinks), through the Dean real-world event organizer (GetLocal), and through the open source software they've written to make it easy for anyone to create a group and to link to other groups (DeanSpace).
Let's say Dean loses either the nomination or the election. As others have pointed out, he could become the Goldwater of the Democrats: the person who loses the election but lays the foundation for a strong recovery years later. In this case, the groundwork would include a set of social relationships instantiated on the Web.
What would happen to that infrastructure? My guess - and keep in mind that I have never been right, not even once(tm) - is that the elements with the ties to local geography are the most likely to persist. Yes, it seems quite possible that we'll see some topical mailing lists emerge, and perhaps Pilots for Dean (via DeanSpace) will stay together for a couple of decades because it's a good place to ask for advice from like-minded flyboys and flygals. But I suspect (based on almost nothing) that it's the friendships made through MeetUp and the access to local people in DeanLinks and GetLocal that will survive the longest with the richest connections. Geo-based groups are a resource for all sorts of questions that almost always have real immediacy to them. For example, if it's January 2005 and you want to organize a bus to go protest the second Bush inaugural (nooooooo!), GetLocal is sitting there waiting for you. And if you want to get some folks together to serve Christmas dinner at the local shelter, GetLocal will be a good place to look. Then, of course, there are all the uses that will emerge and surprise our asses.
Much more fun to think about: What becomes of this social network if Dean wins...
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November 16, 2003
Posted by Clay Shirky
What cities, towns, villages, hamlets, burgs, municipalities & c. are doing a good job provisioning software to support community -- not just "Pay your parking tickets online", but actually supporting or fostering communal involvement.
I'm looking for examples, if there are any, of a pattern like "Meetup for one town" or "UpMyStreetIfMyStreetIsYourStreet." (It may be that this sort of thing is better provisioned by a service of UpMyStreet's national breadth, so there my in fact not be a lot of places, other than intentional communities, doing this.)
In any case, if anyone has illustrations, exemplars, inputs, counter-factuals, specimens, case histories, & c., I'm all ears, either in the comments here or at clay@shirky.com.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
One of my colloquial definitions for social software is "stuff that gets spammed", since there has to be some sort of valid participatory channel for spam to show up. We've seen spam extend from usenet to email to IM and now comment spam, but this, I think, is a new one: a spam weblog, Jenn Theater.
The mail that shows up from Jenn, subject line Blog, reads Hi,
I saw your email on your Blog..cool stuff. [She didn't -- the spam came to my outbound mailing list address. - ed.]
I'm just surfing around trying to meet new people, so hi!.
Check out more about me at my blog
http://jenntheater.blogspot.com/
Email me soon, and say hello!
Jenn
Garden variety spam, except that someone has gone to the trouble of simulating an actual weblog at Jenn Theater, complete with backstory for "Jenn" (Impersonals and Friendster profiles, the latter perhaps intentionally mis-linked), and has cut and pasted complete wire service articles as blog entries.
The fake is pretty botched -- her blogroll is one link to Google news and two edit-me blanks -- but for spam, this took some effort, far more than simply buying ONE MILLION EMIAL ADDRESSES FOR $17.98!!!1!
So Jenn Theater seems based on the assumption that the pretense of "keepin' it real" is a useful enough strategy to merit the effort, and that simulating social engagement will raise the efficiency of some sort of advertising or PR. One possibility is that they are just using blogspot as a cheap tracking service (what percentage of email recipients will click on her link), but a more interesting possibility is that the blog itself is generating qualified sales leads for the sites "she" links to, like Impersonals.com, Chick Spirit, and the bands Mars Volta and Aalacho.
The poor execution makes the ruse unlikely to be worth the effort, but it also makes it easy to spot. One side-effect of the lowered effectiveness of garden variety spam will be more of this sort of thing. As both Sam Goldwyn and George Burns are said to have said, "The most important thing in acting is honesty. Once you've learned to fake that, you're in."
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Posted by Liz Lawley
Anne Galloway pointed me to the Berkeley Intel Research Lab's Familiar Stranger Project. The concept of the familiar stranger is described on the project site:
The Familiar Stranger is a social phenomenon first addressed by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in his 1972 essay on the subject. Familiar Strangers are individuals that we regularly observe but do not interact with. By definition a Familiar Stranger (1) must be observed, (2) repeatedly, and (3) without any interaction. The claim is that the relationship we have with these Familiar Strangers is indeed a real relationship in which both parties agree to mutually ignore each other, without any implications of hostility. A good example is a person that one sees on the subway every morning. If that person fails to appear, we notice.
Familiar Strangers form a border zone between people we know and the completely unknown strangers we encounter once and never see again. While we are bound to the people we know by a circle of social reciprocity, no such bond exists between us and complete strangers. Familiar Strangers buffer the middle ground between these two relationships. Because we encounter them regularly in familiar settings, they establish our connection to individual places.
In presentations at conferences (and to students) lately, I've been talking about the importance of technologies like zero-conf networking, particularly as evidenced in OS X Rendezvous-enabled tools like iChat, iTunes, and SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra). Until I looked at the Berkeley project site, however, I hadn't really put those tools together with the "familiar stranger" concept.
...continue reading.
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November 14, 2003
Posted by David Weinberger
I was at a day-long conversation about emergent democracy a couple of days ago and found myself arguing against talking about the (possibly) new grassroots as a form of "activism" or "participatory democracy." From my highly limited viewpoint, what's (seemingly) happening around the Dean campaign is better understood as connected democracy. It's not simply that connecting lowers the hurdle when compared with either activism or participating. More important, the rewards of connected democracy are different. Yeah, we (pretty please) throw King W out, but we also get a relationship to the others walking in the same direction. We're friends, we're buddies, we know one another by (login) name. That by itself is a powerful motivator.
Of course that sense of connection is nothing new. In fact, there's nothing older in our history than our sense of connection to others. But we haven't been trusted to organize ourselves -- i.e., to invent things to do and then go do them together -- as we have in the Dean campaign. And, more important, to talk about e-democracy only in terms of activism and participation misses that which will carry this campaign beyond Election Day, win (hooray!) or lose (deplete the Strategic Prozac reserve).
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November 10, 2003
Posted by David Weinberger
The current set of discussions swirling around Clay's latest pebble in the pond I think raises a question for social software: Where does social software fit into the Semantic Web?
Since there seems to be considerable disagreement about what the Semanatic Web (or, if you prefer, semantic web) is, this may seem like an ambiguous question. And how ironic that would be, since the Semantic Web (at least according to most accounts) begins by people coming up with taxonomies that make clear (searchable and usable) what a set of data is about.
This works great for some fielded data...more or less by definition since the fields are the metadata. So, if you're trying to get a bus schedule that will get you to a movie theater on time for the early evening showing of The Matrix Redundant, it's easy to imagine a computing application looking up bus schedules on one site and movie times at another. But social software is, arguably, a reaction against the collaborative systems that fielded too much. Instead of filling in forms and choosing from pulldown menus, social software has us writing in wikis and blogs. What could be more ambiguous than a wiki, the very definition of a document that's never done?
Of course, there's plenty of metadata around social software: author, date, revision history, category, title, mean time between posts, etc. And all of that is value just waiting to be put to use by clever applications. But the metadata about a bus schedule leads you to unambiguous and predictable data; the metadata around social software does not; it leads you to delightful surprises.
So, what's the role of social software in the Semantic Web? Does it even show up on the Semantic Web's radar? Does the Semantic Web ignore the fruit of social software as unreliable and unpredictable and unusable data? In other words, does the Semantic Web systematically route around some of the most important and human information on the Net?
...continue reading.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
One of the choices is between Trotsky, Dr Ruth and Shirky.
[via Matt via Chris via Foe]
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November 8, 2003
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Kari Dean at Wired News has the scoop on Wallop, Microsoft's consumer blogging and social networking service.
In fact, Wallop is Microsoft's venture into the red-hot social-networking arena, using the common Microsoft tack of piecing together existing technologies and packaging them for the novice user. Those technologies include Friendster-style social-networking capabilities, super-simplistic blogging tools, moblogging, wikis and RSS feeds, all based on Microsoft's Instant Messenger functionality.
"IM is more of a model for what we are doing than social networking," said Lili Cheng, research manager for Microsoft's social-computing group. "You can add Wallop to your Instant Messenger and add new pictures and content that way."
Cheng said Longhorn and knowledge-management researchers are exploring social-networking possibilities, but Wallop is its own entity.
Next month they open it for a more public beta and some guess the service will launch Q2 2004. Yesterday I posted how blog vendors will increasingly provide group forming features to enhance utility at the skinny tail of the power law distribution. You have to commend MS for an IM centric approach to enhance blogs as conversation.
But architecture is political and often results in archipelagos. IM continents are adrift.
Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, a social-networking software company, noted that while all of Wallop's features are available elsewhere, "this stitches together lots of things that others have innovated on, and the integration looks appealing as a service."
Mayfield sees the integration of IM as particularly significant, as most blogging tools -- except AOL -- don't have that feature. However, he would prefer that such a tool be developed as an open-source project rather than a proprietary service.
"You have to commend AOL and Google (for their blogging tools)," Mayfield said. "They are big companies not just providing blogging, but providing it with open standards, participating in Atom, the next-generation syndication standards after RSS.
"We anticipate (Wallop) as being very closed and proprietary, which is antithetical to the way that blogs, as technology and a culture, have developed."
Tell me if I am wrong, but it seems history is repeating itself. Some say its just vaporware, could be a trial balloon or a competitive service out to wallop uncontrolled innovation.
Mark Pincus, founder of Tribe, said he wouldn't be surprised if the work on Wallop never gets off the ground as a viable service for consumers.
"Microsoft had the last seven years to create something that makes (building networked) groups easy, but they still have nothing today," Pincus said, citing threedegrees.com as an example of Microsoft's unsuccessful foray into social networking.
The Wired article leads with the point that there has been lots of bad guessing about what Wallop is -- but this not just a result of their new rubrick of Research as Marketing, its a failure to engage the blogging community.
Regardless, as Steve Gillmor pointed out, its about time and space., independent services continue to be fostered by developers as users on top of open standards -- and in this case there is no center to be had.
update: Mary Jo Foley's Microsoft Watch Article includes screenshots.
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November 7, 2003
Posted by Clay Shirky
Via Dave Pollard, at _How to Save the World_: The November edition of Business 2.0 (only available on-line to subscribers) has selected Social Networking Applications as the Technology of the Year. Mentioned in the survey are Ryze, LinkedIn, Friendster, Zero Degrees, Tribe.net, Spoke Connect, and Visible Path. The magazine should be commended for this insightful choice, but they missed the companion technology that will provide the data essential to the functioning of future Social Networking Applications. That technology: Personal Content Management and Publishing Applications (notably Blogs and RSS). You can't have one without the other.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
The rise of social networking gives greater credence to the saying "It's not what you know, but who you know." This inherently undemocratic notion concerns some, and, indeed, the Network is the Market. Within a power-law distribution, preferential attachment implies that the rich get richer, especially as transaction costs for making connections fall. Knows is a power of diverse options -- the latent potential for search, distribution or action.
Counter to the power of knows is memes. In theory, a meme with enough fitness can overcome network deficiency. The right simple idea can spread like wildfire, a democratic power we each hold.
Memes tansmit through replication, a copy is retained by each node that propogates it. Blogs as nodes are ideal replicators. Dawkins identified three replicator characteristics: copy-fidelity (faithful copies {especially people who use integrated aggregators and publishers}), fecundity (faster rate of copying) and longevity (permalinks). When you view blogspace in its entirety as a social network, you might find that despite its power law distribution, it is inherently more democratic than the real world.
The wild card is Reed's Law of group forming. When nodes become groups the power of the network increases. To date, most blog tools are optimized for personal publishing -- the value of the network is Metcalf's law. But as they add features to facilitate group forming, not only do they increase utility within the skinny tail of the power law distribution (blogs as conversation), they enable deliberative construction of memes for distibution within an exponentially greater set of knows.
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November 6, 2003
Posted by Clay Shirky
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Posted by Clay Shirky
IBM has a tool called Socializer, designed for discovering and connecting to people and services in the same location (taking "same subnet" as a proxy for same location.) In goals, it's far more generalizable than Trepia, but less grandiose than JXTA.
From the FAQ: Socializer allows you to anonymously see the interests of other people in your location before you decide to share any personal information or begin a conversation. It enables you to store and track other people’s information through profiles for later retrieval or forwarding. It also allows you to set your own policies for forwarding your own profile(s). In addition, anyone in the open community can contribute applications to run on top of the Socializer framework.
It's open source (though currently Windows only), and looks like it might be an 80% solution, as a platform for building a number of location-based services on top of.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Funny pair of posts about the unintentional messages people send in their Friendster bios and more importantly, their Friendster photos. About every five minutes you’re on this site you’ll find yourself thinking, “Who the hell is friends with these freaks?” And that, in a nutshell, is the beauty of Friendster. Because the answer is always, “MY friends.”
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November 3, 2003
Posted by Seb Paquet
Christopher Lydon interviews Meetup founder Scott Heiferman (a 5.7 Mb mp3). The part I found the most interesting is around 19 minutes into the interview, when Heiferman explains how abstracting away from any particular issue or topic actually turned out to be beneficial in terms of the impact of his service:
I can tell you what Chris, if I cared too much about politics, we wouldn't have made such an impact on politics. We sort of stay agnostic of what this platform will be used for because if we were that smart, if we were smart enough to know exactly what the right applications of this Meetup are, or were, how it's gonna evolve, then we would have screwed the whole thing up, because it's up to the creativity of the masses to figure it out.
Score one more for stupid social software - software that doesn't presume to know what people will do with it.
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November 2, 2003
Posted by Clay Shirky
To illustrate the links between internet and real-world community, I usually point to MeetUp or UpMyStreet conversations. Now I can add LiftShare.com, a UK-based site for organizing car pools. Because this involves letting someone else into yoru car, or vice-versa, they do profiles for driver/ride matching based on characteristics that might affect your willingness to give someone a lift (e.g. gender, smoking/non-smoking), as well as offering both public and private groups, thus extending the old Echo/WELL pattern of invitation-only conferences back into the real world.
The other interesting pattern is seeing what public groups have formed (reg. required to list those groups.) Most are fairly pragmatic -- "For all residents and businesses in Barnet" -- while a few mix pragmatic and social components -- liftshares among backpackers, Arsenal fans riding to games. The growing assumption of ubiquitous access, and the subsequent overlap of online and offline groups to the point where all groups will have some online component, is fascinating to watch.
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Posted by Liz Lawley
After reading through an argument in a comments thread on Julia Lerman's site on posting behavior and aggregators, I'm reminded of the old adage "When you assume..."
In those comments, Sam Gentile says:
Comments are irrelevant. Blogging is one to many, not a usenet forum or mailing list. There are better technologies for discusssions like Wikis, Groove, mailing lists, usenet groups. People don't read web log sites. They read in the aggregator and when there is too many it overloads everything.
[...]
Of course, a blog is personal but is very well established that if you don't have a RSS feed you just don't get read. I don't what world you two are in but that is a well established fact by now. The majority of blog readers read blogs through RSS feeds in aggregators. Thats the whole point. No one has the time to go to 100 separate web sites versus one window with 100 feeds. This is so established that I am not going to even debate it. Nor am I going to debate the comments. The tiny amount of commenting that goes on in the blogging world is so small that its insignificant. Most blogs don't even have comments and if they do you see very little if ever leading to the conclusion that most people in the blogging world read feeds and "comment" by blog posts not commenting systems.
...continue reading.
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November 1, 2003
Posted by Clay Shirky
Everyone's first few days spent using email or IM brings with it the curious eroticism of communicating with someone you can't see, don't know, but are nevertheless in direct contact with.
There are many reasons for this, of course, including the distance that appends to words we write vs words we speak, the ability to project onto your conversational partner those attributes what are left to the imagination in a written medium, the tension inherent in the "so close yet so far" gap (like a strip club in this regard, though a strip club uses physical proximity and personal distance, the inverse of email conversation), and the fact that when we read what's been written by someone we don't know, we hear them in our head in our favorite voice -- our own.
A group in London is trying to take advantage of the eroticism of text through "Silent Dating", which is bascially in-room IRC with paper and pens. The idea is to link the strip club pattern (not the nakedness, but the disconnected physical proximity) with the telegraphic flirting of IM, in order to fuel libidinous communication. Now enter the world of tranquility. Where singles flirt and lose their lustful inhibitions through the art of silence.
This is the Silent Party. A modern revolution in dating.
Your tools for the evening - pen, paper and your ability to find a date without opening your mouth. This is dating for the truly discerning customer who likes to be in control. Up to 100 singles meet and pass naughty notes to the objects of their desire.
The event is hosted by the same people who set up speed dating events, and it seems to be in part a response to scale. Speed dating sets up high two-way transaction costs, which in turn creates a link-density vs time tradeoff, which in turn limits the number of participants.
With Silent Dating, the transaction costs plummet (no need to explicitly pair one man and one woman for a period of time -- just gather a group let the messages fly.) And, as a result, they've greatly increased the potential number of participants and lowered the pressure to get a 1:1 match in the group as a whole.
(As a side note, the Silent Dating events in Cleveland, Chicago and London all maintain that it was invented in NYC, and that it has taken that town "by storm." However, all the 'silent dating' links Google knows about fall in the last month, and most in the last two weeks. The internet moves ideas fast, but those ideas are still sold to people as if they are passing by cultural diffusion, both to validate that they have worked elsewhere, and to suggest that they have been ratified by an elite population.)
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Tom Coates, who has been talking on EverythingInModeration about his travails with a persistent troll on the Barbelith community and his subsequent attempts to ban that user, has elicited a response, which has now become a conversation, with a slashdot troller. This troller, posting as 20721, is arguing that any hidden moderation system helps stimulate an arms race:
i'm not saying that you shouldn't explore all the options. but "stealth moderation" is, by its nature, a secret discouragement system. it means that, in your list of rules & consequences, you must lie to your community and accept any negative consequences of this lie. i just can't seem to reconcile it with your statement that there should be a clear code of conduct.
i believe that it takes a certain amount of hubris to assume that the people you want to exclude are, by their nature, not as smart as you. you may be right about the people you're trying to exclude; i defer to your judgement, i'm not a member of the communities you are; but where i come from, the best & the brightest are the ones being cast out. they're cast out from communities by the following chain of events:
1) secretive backhanded moderation tactic by the admins is discovered
2) someone alerts the community
3) the most technically apt in the community are able to reproduce the backhanded moderation tactic and verify its existence
4) these people call foul and are labelled "trolls" for doing so, leading to the institution of more of 1) (repeat).
this is how i started down the road i'm on. i was one of the many people who discovered that the people at slashdot were secretly moderating the users' comments, and one day they moderated the same comment 800 times - and then they lied about it, and said anyone who told the truth about it was a "troll". hence i became what they called me.
There's more, much more, from Tom and 20721 and other respondants -- the comments have become a living conversation.
(A LazyWeb note about weblogs, especially for what I assume is MT: it would be nice to have dated comments and per-comment permalinks, for just this sort of situation, where the comments take on meaning and vlaue independent of the parent post, and come in over several days.)
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