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January 31, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
FusedSpace is running a contest for ideas that energize the public environment (which, confusing to American ears, they call the public domain, an intellectual property concept.)
Do you have an idea or proposal through which technology will make possible other interactions with the public domain, will shed new light on it or in any other way will bring about innovation? Then do enter the Fusedspace competition. Fusedspace is an international competition for ideas on inspiring applications for new technology in the public domain.
Fusedspace calls for innovative ideas that, by means of existing technology, can change or improve our current relationship with physical public space or that can otherwise bring about innovations in the public domain.
Fusedspace calls for submissions
- that succeed either in increasing or simplifying the accessibility of virtual public spaces.
- that (by means of hardware or software) succeed either in making use of or increasing the public potential of the new media.
- that (by means of hardware or software) develop facilities which generate or enhance 'social coherence'.
- that stimulate or define the debate on the newly formed public domain.
- that search for modifications to utilities that predominantly are used commercially, and that can broaden cultural and social perspectives in the public domain.
Accepting submissions now, due by April 2, 2004. I'd link to more information, but their site uses frames for no easily observable reason, so getting to the info is a bit of a chore.
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Posted by David Weinberger
I have problems with Orkut and other such e-friendship networks because they make binary the most analog of relationships. But I really hate testimonials. I am neurotically compliment-averse to begin with but encouraging people to write little paragraphs praising one another cannot help but spawn an Economy of Bullshit.
What makes it worse is that the couple of testimonials I've gotten (and declined) have been from actual friends who thoughtfully crafted paragraphs that meant something to them and to me. And then I slam the door on them.
I wish Orkut would make this less awkward by letting participants opt out of receiving testimonials.
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January 30, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Interesting Theresa Senft article entitled Against Reputation
Interestingly, although there have been criticisms of specific implementations of reputation management systems (i.e., the existence of plain dumb reviewers on Amazon) I have yet to see a full-on argument regarding what I see as the biggest problem with reputation itself: its reliance on a spherical mode of relationality, as in the phrase, "sphere of influence." Spheres are ways of delimiting space, and with it, people and ideas. Just as the our understanding of the public sphere turns on how we define public (and lock out those who don't fit in), to claim a sphere of influence, one must first declare in advance of the interaction "these are the people/ideas currently influencing me, and these are the ones who do not."
This is timely, with Seb's reference to LJ trying to unpack "the overloaded concept of friend", which I think is going to be a disaster. There are some places where, when technology is made _more_ flexible, it gets notably _less_ usable; we cannot ever render human relations with complete explicitness (Paging Dr. Weinberger to the white courtesy telephone...).
Taking the label 'Friend' on LiveJournal (whose primary virtue is that it is obviously inadequate, so people don't read as much into it), and turning it into something multi-variate and hard to use, and which will still be inadequate but now confusingly so, since after all shouldn't we oughta be able to say exactly what we mean? (to which the answer is of course "No", and the history of computer science's encounters with real people has largely been the history of misunderstanding that constraint), but, as I say, taking the simple term Friend and thinking it will be a good idea to sub-divide and sub-divide and sub-divide til Jason Kottke is hiring someone to manage _just_ his LiveJournal profile is like trying to open a can to get out just one worm -- it seems like a good idea right up to the moment you open the can.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Adam Greenfield, contemplating orkut, looks at what friend-of-friend messaging does in social networks with high degree nodes, and it looks a lot like spam.
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Posted by David Weinberger
Marc Canter has been banned from Orkut, possibly because he linked to 300 friends in a week.
Hmmm. I've ranked every one of my Orkut friends as maximally fan-worthy, trust-worthy, cool and sexy, except for the handful of people who've asked me to be friends who I actually have never heard of before; they only get 2 stars out of 3.
So, will I be next? One can only hope...
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Posted by Clay Shirky
apophenia goes apoplectic on the subject of orkut
#3) Explain to me why one must be a friend to be a fan of someone? The role of fan is inherently a power differential, not an equalizer. (Don't get me wrong: on Orkut, there's definitely pressure to reciprocate.) The people that i'm a fan of are not my friends; they're idols; they're people that i read on the interweb but do not know.
It is sooo weird to read which of my friends are a fan of me. Does that mean that the rest are only following social custom in linking to me? Does that mean that they don't really respect me? [Or does it mean, like it means to me, that it's too bloody weird to consider checking off that fan bit?]
And worse... i can see who is a fan of others. This means that i can check on my friends and figure out that they're using the fan feature... just not on me. Hello, socially awkward.
danah's on a tear -- read the whole thing (and if you are designing an application that relies on social networks, read the whole thing, then print it and tape it up right next to your monitor.)
Also, Judith Meskill has compiled a list of 100+ (!) YASNS services (_via McGee's Musings_), and although the number includes things out of the usual Orkut/Friendster orbit (dating sites, social bookmark managers), it makes a convincing case that this is the madness of the age. She also points to a number of people working out the blogs-as-social networks meme (including the Mehta/Efimova exchange we linked to earlier.)
Comments (2)
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Posted by Seb Paquet
Mike Percowitz writes:
According to this LJ status post, livejournal has passed 2 million users, half of which are active "in some way". they hit 1 million only 9 months ago (and for most of the intervening time, new memberships were throttled by the invite code/pay requirement). That's a lot of people.
I wouldn't be so quick to equate one journal to one person, but I have to say the number is impressive. ( More detailed stats here, and don't miss the evocative chart here) And we're not counting clone sites such as DeadJournal. The page linked in the quote above gives signs of an upcoming unbundling of the "friend-of" relationship in the system:
One of our big goals for February is to split up the overloaded concept of "friends", turning it into separate categories relating to who you read on your friends page, who you trust to read your entries, who you know in real life, etc.
(And speaking of milestones, it's worth noting that the English Wikipedia is steadily inching towards 200,000 articles, double the size it was last year.)
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
Following Clay's good thoughts on if Dean is a movement or candidate (answer still could still be both, especially with momentum), its a question that raised another quesiton for me.
Naval gazing amongst activists gathers no lint. Or for hunched over technologists spending too much time close to their belly-buttons. But Clay is right that this calls into question the connection between bottom-up and top-down. Implementation is reality.
Inevitably, the top co-opts the bottom when past the tipping point. Assume for a minute that Dean is not mainstream. Not to say Dean is a third-party candidate, but issues of war and participatory democracy were not mainstream when he raised them. Third party candidates have never won, but their issues become the issues of both parties. Kerry's podium has a URL on it, the environment and finance reform of campaigns past are at least cow-towed -- and the system of representation is better for it.
So the question is this: will the co-opted issue be war or participatory democracy? Obviously, the responders to this question will be biased in favor of the later as they have to use enabling tools to respond.
Regardless of response or campaign outcome, abandonment of identifying issues isn't or going to happen, because the point tipped.
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January 29, 2004
Posted by Seb Paquet
From USC computer science student Eric Gradman comes a paper titled " Distributed Social Software".
This is an ambitious, high-level description of how social software should really work in order to scale, preserve consistency, provide flexibility, and prevent fragmentation of the user base. The design could be summarized as "center the architecture on the individual user throughout". While I think it seriously needs fleshing out, the underlying philosophy seems right. I'm not convinced that preventing fragmentation follows directly from the scheme, though, because different open standards compete against one another and there's no guarantee that users will all embrace the same standard. Here's the abstract:
For many years email and usenet news constituted the majority of the Internet's use as a tool to facilitate communication among individuals. The last five years have given rise to a number of novel applications in this domain--which has come to be known as ``social software.'' Notable among these are instant messaging systems, weblogs, and services like Friendster and Tribe which exploit the concept of ``six-degrees of separation.''
These services generally employ centralized client-server architectures. These architectures are failing to adequately scale with the growing user-base. These services do not rely on open protocols; the user-base is fragmented among competing service providers. Users use numerous service providers to get the features they want, but have no easy way to maintain the consistency of their information on each.
This paper summarizes the ever changing state-of-the-art in social software, and presents an alternative to this ``service-centric'' view of social software. The novel user-centric distributed social software model outlined in this paper overcomes many of the limitations of the current model by drawing from ideas from the Semantic Web.
I think making things happen in this way might require many more well-coordinated, idealistic developers than are available right now. But one can always hope...
Compare: Leonard Lin's " Next-Generation Distributed Social Software Networks: Designs and Applications" presentation.
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January 28, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
There are some topics which are so hot-button that any criticism, even speculative and limited, can read as complete dismissal. So it is with my Is Social Software Bad for the Dean campaign? piece of Monday. The thing that put me over the edge was seeing that piece linked to with the phrase “the backlash against the idea of digital campaigning has begun.”
This is of course nothing like my actual position, so to set the record straight, here are four things I’d like to stipulate, as the lawyers say:
...continue reading.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Interesting post over at Reason on the various flavors of post-Iowa and NH Dean campaign analysisAnd this, perhaps, is the problem—from the perspective of politicians, anyway—with campaigning by smart mob. Politics is a top down business. The old metaphor of the "political machine" is in this sense quite apt: It evokes a vast clockwork mechanism, perhaps composed of many cogs and gears, but governed in the end by a few hands at the levers of control.
The organism—reigning metaphor for online social networks—lacks such convenient levers. Dean's network comprises not just his own site, rife with comments, but sites like DeanSpace, which were autonomous, not run by the campaign. In politics, that's a bug, not a feature.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
The first one is serious, from TeledyN: And yes, I do think [social networking services] will fail, it's inevitable. Whether by intentional design or by blind emulations, these new black-book stop-shops all share several dubious characteristics:
* they are not social networks, only flat-taxonomy directories of questionaire replies, and badly designed questionaires at that.
* because they do not interoperate, because they cannot share data or interchange or allow identity migrations, they are essentially anti social, building protectionist walls around people (called 'clubs' or 'communities' but really meaning the opposite)
* they don't work.
So why don't they work? Because they are _not_ social networks.
A social network is a network with a social cause, a social reason for being. Social networks fill a niche need for interaction. Church clubs, business clubs, square-dance clubs, these form natural, anthropologically sound social networks with the intelligent self-organization moving from the local (chapter) out to the regional and then clustering still beyond. They are also self-governing, electing their executives from grassroots, organizing on the need to expand the social network. Read the whole thing.
The second is a funny post from Jason Kottke on craigslistPermanent full-time position for a personal social coordinator for a New York-based web designer.
Your primary responsibility will be managing my accounts with various online social networking sites including, but not limited to, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark.
Specific duties include:
- approving or rejecting invitations of friendship
- managing a database of usernames and passwords for each of the social networking sites
- sending out friendship invitations [...]
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Posted by David Weinberger
I've started off my new Corante blog — on how the Net is changing our democracy and politics — with a critique of Clay's provocative Dean meme.
The new blog is called Loose Democracy, and I'm open to comments, suggestions, criticisms, unfunded mandates and recall initiatives. And please remind me of the 4,000 people I've left off my blogroll...I have problems creating lists ex nihilo.
All I can promise you is that I will never make a mistake and I will never ever be wrong.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Interesting James McGee post, from April of last year, on the relationship between thinking out loud and thinking together: My problem is this. Most of the technology tools for supporting thinking together (e.g. discussion forums, threaded discussion, wikis) depend on skills and norms that I've found to be rare in practice and challenging to promote. My intuitions tell me that there are important differences with weblogs that address at least some of these issues. [...]
One of the primary reasons that thinking together is hard is that it requires both that we think in public and that we think collaboratively. I suspect that thinking together fails at least as often because we don't know how to think in public as it does because we don't know how to do it collaboratively. Further I think that order matters. You need to learn how to think in public first. Then you can work on developing skills to think collaboratively.
He goes on to tie this to the way weblogs can make linking public and collaborative thinking easier (relevant to a panel Liz is putting together on weblogs and collaboration.)
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Posted by Clay Shirky
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Posted by David Weinberger
From Denounce:
Amazon Launches New Social Network Called "Pricekut"
Customers Can Now See and Comment
on the Contents of Other Customers' Shopping Carts
It's satire, ok? (Thanks to Brian Dear for the link.)
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January 27, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Long, thoughtful musing over at ideant on the limits of edemocracy, especially as concerns the relationship between the public, as defined in politics, and the mass, as in 'that which is reached by mass media' -We need to be aware of which aspects of the internet are characteristic of a mass medium, and which can support the creation of a community of publics. We need to figure out how best to use both.
-We need to acknowlege that tools that allow people to organize themselves are not as important as the agendas that people are supposed to pursue once they organize themselves. We need not just programmers, designers and enterpreneurs, but citizens who are politically conscious and active.
- We need to acknowlege that getting information about the world is not as important as acting upon the world. We have to move away from the idea of defining individuals as intersections of information circuits and back to the idea of individuals as ensembles of social relations, to paraphrase Lorenzo Simpson. We have to ask ourselves honestly to what extent 'social software' is not in fact an oxymoron.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Preliminary work on Solipsis, a system for building and navigating a virtual world hosted in a distributed fashion. The PDF of the protocols is a curious mix of math and poetry If an entity does not know any entity in some large sector, it will hardly know about an entity arriving from this sector. Conversely, if it moves forward a sector with no known entity, it will hardly get aware of entities it should met on its path. The Global Connectivity property aims that an entity will not “turn its back” to a portion of the world.
There's very little fleshed out here, so I can't recommend it so much as point to it, but I remember Tim Sweeney of the game Unreal talking about something like this back when years had 1's in them, so it may have percolated long enough to be the right time for it.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Fantastic post on a 17th century social network of dove breeders in FranceThe oldest club in Europe, an exclusive French society of dove breeders, used social networking tools since the late 17th century to connect its members via a handwritten newsletter, circulating from member to member, and being amended along the way. A special trust metric had been established, which allowed each breeder to rate his peers, a process in which each vote carried weight based on the casters own ratings. In addition to the mailing, which took roughly one year to travel each of the members, shortcut routes were established, usually between counties, through which smaller groups could reach other groups. To create the shortcuts, each breeder was required to name at least two “sponsors” and four breeders he sponsored. [...]
Read the whole thing.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Is it just me, or has LinkedIn use risen dramatically? Up to last week, I'd gotten 3 requests for forwarding _ever_, and I've been listed on the system since roughly Day 1, but in the last 72 hours, I've gotten another 4. Did Orkut's appearance and flameout advertise the idea of YASNSs, leaving their actual use to be filled elsewhere? Of is LinkedIn doing some kind of promotion? Or am I seeing large change on a small base, so its basically random?
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Terrific pair of posts, one by Dina Mehta on blogs and social network services
My blog is my social software. It is also my social network.
It has my profile and much more - it has my identity fleshed out, through my posts.
* A profile with history that allows you to know so much about me - i started blogging in March 2003 - and already readers people have seen me add new professional interests and take my qualitative research skills into new areas, some know i love music and Floyd, others have been with me to my cottage in the hills, read about my holiday and meetings with some wonderful bloggers on my trip, seen me change home, celebrated with me when i got a project due to my blog, and even wondered where i am when i've gone silent on my blog for a few days.
* A profile that tells you much more than any homepage i have on Ecademy or Ryze or Tribe orLinkedIn could.
* A profile that changes, grows, flows - not a cold resume or 'about me' page filled with past achievements and accolades - but is touchy-feely and one that says more about me through my thoughts, interests, preoccupations, rants, rambles and angst - that makes me more than just a consultant or a qualitative researcher - or a demographic statistic, 'female blogger from India'. [...]
When i did not blog, i found social networks far more relevant and useful. Today, my blog is my one-stop shop.
which prompted a follow-up piece from Lilia Efimova which is a more point-by-point comparison of the two models, and more supportive of the idea that SNSs have different advantages than weblogs *Slow uncovering vs. instant visibility*
Learning about someone from a weblog takes time. Personality appears in a context and through time to read many lines of weblog posts and to participate in conversations. And it's even more difficult to learn about someone's network: linking, blogrolls and RSS subscription lists tell a bit, but you never know if linking or blogrolling means regular reading and how many e-mails/IMs/calls were exchanged next to blogging.
At YASNs finding about someone's profile and network doesn't take much time (only invitation or access rights :) The degree and type of connection are still not clear, but at least you know that it was explicitly approved. Browsing through connections is easy and fun.
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January 26, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
I’m getting the same cognitive dissonance listening to political handicappers explain Dean’s dismal showing in Iowa that I used to get listening to financial analysts try to explain dot com mania with things like P/E ratios and EBITDA. A stock’s value is not set by those things; it is set by buyer and seller agreeing on price. In ordinary markets, buyers and sellers use financial details to get to that price, but sometimes, as with dot com stocks, the way prices get agreed on has nothing to do with finance.
In the same way, talking about Dean’s third-place showing in terms of ‘momentum’ and ‘character’, the P/E and EBITDA of campaigns, may miss the point. Dean did poorly because not enough people voted for him, and the usual explanations – potential voters changed their minds because of his character or whatever – seem inadequate to explain the Iowa results. What I wonder is whether Dean has accidentally created a movement (where what counts is believing) instead of a campaign (where what counts is voting.)
And (if that’s true) I wonder if his use of social software helped create that problem.
...continue reading.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Dan Gillmor notes that the Wikipedia is about to reach it's 200,000th article, and goes on to explain why it works"The only way you can write something that survives is that someone who's your diametrical opposite can agree with it," says Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia.
Urban planners and criminologists talk about the "broken window" syndrome, says Ward Cunningham, who came up with the first Wiki software in the 1990s. If a neighborhood allows broken windows to stay that way, the neighborhood will deteriorate because vandals and other unsavory people will assume no one cares.
Similarly, a Wiki draws strength from its volunteers who catch and fix every act of online vandalism. When the bad guys learn that someone will repair their damage within minutes, and therefore prevent the damage from being visible to the world, they tend to give up and move along to more vulnerable places. The "broken windows" pattern is reminiscent of what Wattenberg and Viegas found in their historyflow wiki-visualization.
Dan also talks about Socialtext, Ross's company, and, fittingly, gives the closing line to Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki: "Successful Wikis are inherently fragile, says Cunningham, but they show something important: 'People are generally good.'"
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January 25, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Before we could learn to pronounce it, it was shut down.
It's not that the servers are melting with the rapid rise to ~3 million page views or 500th most popular site in a couple of days. It's not a conspiracy of data collection or a learning curve.
orkut, which should really be named Oogle, demonstrated that a high performance explicit social networking site, well designed for digital immediate gratification (one local engineer personally even complained they had to click from map to profile to add a friend), supported by brand and with the right root can unleash latent demand. I would say this is reflective of the dearth of social capital in our society, but aside from such heady stuff, it was frictionless whuffie fun, huh? Latent demand for what is the question.
Internet researchers would die excruciating deaths in search of the last days of data. I would venture a guess that most of the digerati that was already pre-conditioned by existing services, an incomprehensible demographic that grants hypergrowth to the best, grants the best feedback, but is easily taketh away.
okurt doesn't work because it lacks constraints. Nothing holds people back. Nobody knows what a friend means. No social capital on the line. Its so fun and easy, choices and incentives are irrational.
Normally this would raise questions. Some constraints make good social compact. Some constraints on openness curb pollution (spam, security). One of the better constraints is price because it lead to profit.
However, AdSense is relatively frictionless. It adds new constraints while adding value. Same could be said for other well targeted forms of content, like blog posts...
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
Dear orkut.com users:
Wow.
The response to orkut.com has been phenomenal and I've been learning a lot about what people like and expect from a service like this. Thanks for all your feedback so far!
Based on your suggestions, I'm taking orkut.com back to the lab for some fine-tuning and improvements. It will likely take a few days to finish them. None of your data will be lost and I should have some nice surprises for you when I bring it back online. I'll email you when it's ready and running again.
Thanks again for your ideas and for bearing with me as I work my way up the learning curve.
stay beautiful,
Orkut Buyukkokten
For the record, not only is this upsetting (got 5 IMs about it at once, was Orkutfighting next to Jerry Michalski at the moment), but for the first time in any network I had 1 more friend than the honorable Joi Ito. Guess we have our real lives back now.
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Posted by Seb Paquet
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Posted by Liz Lawley
Like Clay, my mailbox has been filling up quickly with Orkut invitations and confirmations. And I've been spending a good bit of time this weekend (when I _should_ have been grading student websites) mulling over the system and its strengths and weaknesses.
On the plus side, Orkut has gotten a number of things right. They've got the warm-and-fuzzy photo aspect of Friendster (see Adam Greenfield on Friendster), and reduced the emphasis on dating as the primary social mover. The interface--thought perhaps still " dorky"--isn't nearly as offputting as what they've got over at Tribe (a site I've been entirely unable to develop an affinity for, despite my lemming-like willingness to follow friends into YASNs). But Orkut has also incorporated one of Tribe's greatest strengths--ridiculously easy group-forming, something Friendster totally rejected.
On the bad side, there are plenty of UI issues, and even more security flaws. There's been a slew of friendspam over the past 12 hours, as people have discovered the ability to send broadcast messages to everyone on the system. And over in the " Anti-Social Networks" community, a number of folks have pointed out serious security flaws in the technical implementation.
Which brings me to the ugly part. It appears that Orkut sysadmins are silently _deleting_ messages that point out flaws and problems with the system. If you're logged into Orkut, you can look at this thread, and this one for some discussion. Unless, of course, those are deleted as well...
They also appear to be starting on a Friendster-like program to delete "fakester" identities. A dubious character by the name of "Gregg Something" who tried to add me as a friend disappeared without a trace this morning. At first, I thought he'd just withdrawn his request, but a quick search revealed that he had vanished from the system without a trace.
I think there's a lot of potential here. There are a lot of discussions already starting to form around how the various inputs--number of links, karma points, etc--could create a " FriendRank" construct (again, you need to be logged into Orkut for that link to work. I think the combination of a complex, multifaceted FriendRank system with some creative visualizations (beyond the current "Network" view) could make for a really interesting tool.
Bottom line for me? I think Orkut has the makings of a really interesting environment, melding the best aspects of other YASNs, and giving it the Google brand of respectability to help it go mainstream. But the silent deletion of users, communities, and posts could be deadly. I'd hate to see the site fall on its own sword this early.
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January 24, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
So Orkut seems to be exploding -- people are joining at a rapid rate, albeit from a still-tiny base (my 40 friends link me to 6500 or so people, whereas on Friendster, 15 friends link me to 300,000+.) Their "you gotta be invited to get in" thing seems to be creating just the right sense of 'red velvet rope' to drive traffic, and the fact that it's Google-sponsored can't be bad for business.
They've also made it incredibly easy to declare a link to someone already in the system, meaning that even as more users are joining, average path length is falling. It was 4.4 a few hours ago, and its down to 3.8 now.
Another interesting detail: they let you do link-by-link path traversal, as in "Show me Liz's friends, let me select one, then show me Liz's friend's friends" and so on. I was wondering how deep they'd let me go (4, 5, or 6 degrees, basically), but they recalculate paths dynamically, so everytime I'd get a path like Clay->Liz->Sam and click on one of Sam's friends, it would recalculate to soemthing like Clay->Greg->Sam's Friend.
I finally walked off the end of a 5 link traversal, and started just seeing random people with no link calculation (which feels like a violation of the premise of FOAF networks -- "Only let me see and be seen by people who are within N degrees"), but it took some time. The nework *feels* much denser than Friendster or LinkedIn, which is to say fewer people with single digit connectivity, but I don't have a global view, so I can't yet say for sure.
There is an _incredible_ amount of activity around adding friends on the system right now; my mailbox is mostly Orkut notifications. I wonder if all social services will suffer from the difference between the dollhouse pleasures of setting things up ("ooh, and I know _this_ person and _this_ person and _this_ person...") and the rarity of actual use. I have gotten far more requests to link on LinkedIn, for example, than actual requests for use (user since launch, 54 connections, 3 total requests for actually use for the service.)
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Posted by Clay Shirky
With a title like that, I shouldn't have to do much more to get you to click, should I?
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Great Will Davies post at iWire on the difference between democracy and quasi-democracy, using the examples of internet polling gone amok from the American Family Association and the BBC.
These models are all in a sense quasi-democratic: they copy many features of Government constitutions (representation, voting rights, debating rights) but there is one crucial difference. In a democracy, these rights are handed out to a selected group (once upon a time it was white male property owners; nowadays its adults); in the case of quasi-democracy, these rights get claimed by those who can be bothered to claim them. [...]
Technologically mediated political discussion, bottom-up e-democracy and online polling are the same. They are quasi-democratic, but only quasi because they rely on people caring sufficiently to get involved. The absence of the silent majority is not felt in any way. They are (a new term here!) auto-representative. Their voice speaks only for itself; in a democratic society, voices come together and become something else entirely, which is the nature of genuine reresentation. Any true democracy has to be, in a fundamental sense, representative not simply vocal.
Davies nails somethign something that has always bothered me about the swirling conversation around e-democracy -- we're stretching the word democracy to mean "emergent effects from group participation." This is, I think, a huge mistake, because it makes democracy seem easy.
Voting alone is not enough for democracy -- the legitimacy of the vote rests on the idea that the people voting and the people affected by the vote are the same group, a situation distinctly missing from either the AFA or BBC polls.
I think Davies is working out something important about the intersection of social software and present political practice -- read the whole thing.
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January 23, 2004
Posted by David Weinberger
As Ross has noted, there's a new social network on the block: Orkut. from Google.
I think I see where this is going: I'm going to have a different social network for every friend. Then a protocol for networking the social networks will arise. The protocol will be TCP/IP (The Commutative Pal Is Pestered) and the network of social networks will be called the Intersocialnet.
But, unlike the Internet, the value of the network of social networks won't go up as the number of nodes increases for the same reason that my real social network doesn't expand every time someone is born. In fact, when I reach my breaking point (which is scheduled to occur about 4 hours from now) and start autoresponding to those upbeat emails with a curt "No, you are NOT my friend!", the Intersocialnet will turn me into a pariah wandering the digital earth friendsterless and friendless all my days.
Thanks a lot, Orkut!
According to the Butt Ugly Weblog, "orkut" is a slang term for "orgasm" in Finnish. Unfortunately, the site is named after its creator, Orkut Buyukkokten, whose parents were either cruel or not Finnish.
On the other hand, what isn't a slang term for "orgasm"? I mean, even "Finnish" is, as in: "Didn't you Finnish yet?"
(Thanks to Janne Jalkanen for pointing out the dirty Scandinavian parts.)
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Posted by Clay Shirky
A while ago, I posted about what happened when the BBC's Radio 4 tricked a Member of Parliment into proxying his legislative capabilities to an anonymous group of internet voters. ( Hilarity ensued.) Adam Greenfield added a comment pointing to the America Family Association's Gay Marriage poll, plainly designed to deliver a resounding reaffirmation of the special triune bond between fag-hating straights, the US Government, and The Lord.
And then, as Adam noted then and Wired is reporting now, Things Did Not Go As Expected. It turns out that when you put something on the internet, other people can get to it, people who might not agree with you.
We're very concerned that the traditional state of marriage is under threat in our country by homosexual activists," said AFA representative Buddy Smith. "It just so happens that homosexual activist groups around the country got a hold of the poll -- it was forwarded to them -- and they decided to have a little fun, and turn their organizations around the country (onto) the poll to try to cause it to represent something other than what we wanted it to. And so far, they succeeded with that.
We asked for user feedback, and _the users caused it to represent something other than what we wanted it to_. That is hard to beat as a direct statement of the glory of this medium.
I am reminded of Eastern Europe once the Communist governments collapsed -- country after country suffered from pyramid schemes because the citizens had no idea how market economies worked. Similarly, organizations like the American Family Association and Radio 4, so completely accustomed to dictating the terms of a conversation, suffer from a delusion that the internet offers them a way to reach only the people who agree with them. Organizations like this assume users will happily provide the fig leaf of popular engagement, without any of that messy unpredictability that comes from offering actual people actual choices.
We can only be thankful that their failures have been as dramatic as these, though we have to be on the lookout for attempts to make the net more predictable, rather than making the AFA's and Radio 4's of the world more accountable. As Mr. Pound, the British MP, said when the results of his poll came in "We will have to re-evaluate the listeners of Radio 4," as if the people should answer to the pollsters, and not vice versa.
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Posted by Seb Paquet
Thomas Thurman has developed Joule, a nice application that tracks "friend-of" relationships over time on LiveJournal and displays a user's friendships over time in either tabular or graph format. Note that LiveJournal features an integrated aggregator; friendship there is roughly equivalent to subscription in the weblog world.
Update, Jan 27: also found LiveJournal Connect, a service that will find a path between you and another user.
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January 22, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Google is working on a social networking service, Orkut. Here's an article, another, and the site.
Social yogurt anyone?
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Posted by Seb Paquet
There will be a "Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics" at the WWW2004 conference in New York, mid-May.
The "Weblogging Ecosystem" workshop will provide a forum for presentation and discussion of research into the dynamics, sociology, and mining of the blogsphere.
Topics of interest to the workshop include:
* Mapping and visualization of the blogsphere
* Weblog taxonomies: automatic and/or manual construction
* Automatic classification of weblog entries
* Weblog search engines
* Aggregate measures over the blogsphere
* Weblog mining and applications
* Dynamics of information flow across the blogsphere
* Methods for weblog census
* Weblog lifecycle
* Influence of blogsphere on the information landscape
* Alternative blog forms (radioblogs, photoblogs, etc.)
* Sociological studies of blogging
* Knowledge sharing applications of weblogs
A secondary goal of the workshop is to discuss the sharing of weblog datasets for use in research studies.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
I wrote about Social Search last year, blogspace has had it for a while in a form of searching what your friends have found (e.g. my.feedster). John Battelle, who is blogging the expanding space of search covered it a month ago. Eurekster launched its social network constrained search service today.
That said, its is pretty cool. Sometimes sharing what you are looking for can help you find it and more. The search itself leaves a little to be desired, as its no Google and doesn't benefit from micro-content structure.
Browsing the search terms of your friends ( like this) is similar to looking at them in your referral log. Get ready for a different kind of social spam as people can ping you if they browsed in the same direction as you. It begs the is it a feature question, but anyway, the beta is out, tinker away.
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January 21, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
In the comments of Mistakes in the Moral Mathematic of Blogging, I suggested that "[a]s weblogs become less personal expression and more lightweight publishing tool, a number of blogs get a significant amount of traffic from outside the blogosphere (e.g. Gizmodo, which is low on the link chart but very high on traffic.)"
Seb points out an example of that in William Blaze's analysis of the transmission of the spread of the Linton Freeman’s excellent Visualizing Social Networks paper. Seeing that Freeman's article was posted here on the 15th, Blaze concludes "Several hours later the link was duplicated on an even more popular (381 inbound blogs) site Many 2 Many, presumably because they saw the link via Blackbelt Jones, or perhaps on one of several other smaller sites that also picked up the link via that site."
This is a telling intuition -- Blaze's assumption is that, once discovered, pointers to Freeman's piece simply passed from weblog to weblog. In our case, though, it came to be posted to Many-to-Many because I saw it on del.icio.us, a 'social bookmark manager.'
The design pattern of del.icio.us is radically different from that of a weblog. In particular, del.icio.us is designed to be useful to the individual first and foremost, as an easy way to collect and categorize links; its secondary function is to provide an aggregate view of links others find interesting.
Many of us though, possibly a majority of delicious users, find the main page to be as valuable as the bookmark saving service. In this case, I saw the link appear on del.icio.us on the 15th, and after reading the paper, posted it immediately.
So Blaze is right that context was stripped, but wrong in thinking it was stripped in passing from weblog to weblog. It was stripped when an individual user saved the link for him or herself, in a forum where that behavior is public, and where I happened to be watching the link flow.
So although link credit was stripped, it's not clear that this was because of any negative action. The delicious user who first posted the link can hardly be expected to record contextual data for what is a personal record of interesting material, and webloggers surely shouldn't refrain from posting interesting links simply because they discover them in a low-context environment.
Blaze's core assumption, in other words, is leaky. He starts from the idea that when a link shows up on two weblogs in short succession, it must be that it progressed from one to the other. In this case though, and, I believe in a growing number of cases, the comingling of the weblog world with other forms of both link management and social tools means that even if there were a code of conduct among people who are self-conciously blogging, this would not be enough to produce the effect he wants. As weblogs become increasingly important as general purpose publishing tools, the internal consistency of communal understanding or shared prupose will necessarily shrink.
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Posted by Seb Paquet
William Blaze has a post up on Abstract Dynamics titled
Amplification and Stratification, tracing the linkflow in blog space in which he analyzes how a link to Linton Freeman's article, "Visualizing Social Networks" in the Journal of Social Structure, was passed from weblog to weblog until it had reached quite a few eyeballs.
He cites it as an example of blog-enabled amplification but points out that some things were lost in the process. As a result, credit to the original publisher of the article, to the source of the link, and to the blogger who originally dug it up didn't propagate widely along with the link itself. ( Go read the post.)
I agree with Blaze that this is an instance of a general problem, and this connects to recent discussions of fairness in weblogs. For instance, as he points out, within the " political economy of linking" there can be incentives not to point to one's sources. While there's a general norm of bloggers linking to sources, the practice is not universal and few chains of credit go all the way, with the unfortunate consequence that promising sources can remain obscure for longer than they would otherwise.
Unlike chains of oral gossip, however, blogs are on the public record, and this is another area where blog crawlers can perhaps help a little bit. For instance, the Technorati page for the link in question enables us to trace it back to William's post (but unfortunately no further).
A few questions spring out from this. It is generally accepted that giving credit for creation is important; is it the same for "link discovery credit?" Will (should) the practice of linking to sources of links come to be taken very seriously by bloggers, out of a shared concern to keep things fair and transparent, in a similar manner to standards of citation in academia? Should one link to the immediate source or make an effort to trace links back to the original source? (Is it always clear which is "the" original source?)
[Addendum, by Clay: It's worth noting that the Freeman link appeared on many-to-many after I found it on del.icio.us, not on a blog as Blaze surmises. More on this here.]
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
RSS Winterfest, a free webcast on Internet syndication augmented by an Eventspace (wikiblog in this case) starts at 8:30 PST today.
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January 20, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
The Open Collaboration Services Initiative is having a meeting on Feb 4 to discuss, among other things 1) an "architecture blueprint for collaborative business" that
enterprises can reference to enable collaborative business internally
and with their partners and customers; this blueprint will be suitable
to guide enterprises' collaboration-related investments from a
technology perspective;
2) an integrated set of protocols ("universal collaboration connector")
that enables "plug-and-play" collaboration across vendor and
organizational boundaries
More at OCSI (warning: their home page isn't very user friendly)
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Posted by Seb Paquet
In the course of my ongoing foray into LiveJournal (making friends and all :-), I keep discovering journals I really should have known about for a while. This hadn't happened mainly due to the fact that I have so far very rarely come across links into (or backlinks out of) LiveJournal (look up Ross's informal survey from last year on this phenomenon).
But it turns out there are social software tinkerers and thinkers in there as well. Exhibit 1 is the recently founded LiveJournal research community, and exhibit 2 is the Sociology of Online Journals community, both of which aggregate posts from a number of individual journal authors and seem to be host to fairly active conversations. I haven't dug deep into them yet, but wanted to highlight the finds.
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January 19, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Marko has posted a long and fascinating addition to the conversation on blogging, inequality, and justice. I have only read it once, too cursory a viewing of such careful work to reply, but I wanted to flag its appearance immediately. The first mistake – lets call it the “Natural Social Institutions” view – is the simplistic but widely held view that the patterns resulting from the operation of freely forming networks are acceptable because the rules of operation of these networks are in some sense natural. “Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality,” Clay writes. “In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome…[I]t arises naturally.”
Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, yes, but how much inequality comes out in the wash is determined by a complex mix of institutional arrangements – including informational feedback mechanisms – as well as other factors influencing individual linking behavior. Clay has acknowledged as much by pointing to David Sifry’s Technorati Interesting Newcomers List and later by sketching several possible strategies in modifying the power law distribution. But Clay avoids the mistake only part of the way. He still gives the “natural power law” a kind of moral priority in his picture. The reason this is a mistake is that there is no way in which we can meaningfully say that “the blogging world without the Technorati Interesting Newcomers List” is in any way natural, or the baseline from the point of view of justice, in comparison to “the blogging world with the Technorati Interesting Newcomers List.” Neither has a special claim to be the baseline of moral analysis. It’s not as if there is one distribution and then we tinker with it. In order to answer the question of justice we need to agree on some further point of view from which to judge the justice of the rules and the resulting distributions.
Read the whole thing. Really.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Liz has a post over at mamamusings about defining the word 'blog' for research purposes. There are a couple of issues to be thought about here.
First, figuring out—for the purposes of any other sort of research—what a blog really is. At the AoIR conference last fall, I noticed that most of the people talking about blogs (myself included) either didn’t define blogs, or used a potentially problematic definition.
Second, determining whether what we want/need to focus on for meaningful results are the blogs, or the bloggers. I maintain four different blogs, for example—not including the blogs for each of my classes. Choosing to focus on the object produced yields different results from focusing on the producer.
Third, deciding how (or whether) to categorize blogs. Reading through the bloggies award page for 2004 (while you’re there, vote for misbehaving for best group blog!), I was struck by many of the categories, and by the assumptions inherent in those categories.
I described my view on the definitional question while following up to Dave PollardThere was a halycon period (between, say, the launch of Blogger and the launch of Gawker) when the definition of a weblog, weblog technology, and the actual interconnected mass of weblogs were all of a piece. When someone asked “What’s a weblog?”, you could point to Instapundit or Talking Points Memo or the recently updated list on blogger and say “There, that’s it, that’s a weblog”, without having to specify whether you meant the technology driving it, or the actual blog itself, or the abstract notion derived from the two.
Those days are over. Weblogs (the technology) have become the premier lightweight publishing platform, and make no requirements that the users of that platform respect or even know about weblogs (the communal practice). The only thing in common among Jeremy Hylton, Dave Barry, Howard Dean's campaign, the US Navy's procurement officers and the_d00shbag over at LiveJournal, who just quit his job at KFC, is that they all use weblog software.
This is a hard question, of course, so hard, from my point of view that it is unsolvable in anything other than local declaration, as in "In this paper, we use the word 'blog' to mean X." I don't think there will ever be a definition common enough to take for granted in research contexts.
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January 16, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
I just got off a conference call where some of the participants had to gather together in a room and use a speaker phone. Because the way it had been set up in advance, we were limited to 5 lines on the call. This is not at all surprising, of course -- its how most conference calls are. I was however struck anew by the brokenated horrorfulment that is the conference call because this one was hosted by the Library of Congress.
A Government agency, needing some outside counsel, could not schedule a conference call without specifying in advance how many people would be in attendance. Think what that would feel like in this medium:
"Thank you for choosing to host your mailing list with Yahoo Groups. What is the maximum number of subscribers that will be on this list?"
"Creating #python on irc... How many users will be on this channel?"
"Welcome to the Atom Wiki. You will only be able to see this wiki in read-only mode, as the creator set the participant cap at 100."
Every now and again, obvious things strike me anew: We have a huge mismatch between the potential of voice and the fact of the phone system because the phone system is almost literally anti-social. Having a party? Great -- just make sure you cap attendance in advance, and distribute lots of hard-to-remember login information beforehand.
The current regulatory argument for treating voice over the internet (VoIP) like the traditional phone system is the old canard "If it walks like a duck..." The problem with this view is that VoIP _doesn't_ walk like a duck -- when broad use of voice over the internet finally arrives, it won't make people specify in advance how many people should be on a conference call, or require some central facility to set it up.
The press often focusses on the ways VoIP is cheaper than regular telephony, but that doesn't hold a candle to the ways the internet is better than the phone system. We've barely even imagined ways of integrating voice into social software, because the one model we have for handling voice at scale has trained us to tolerate ridiculously hard group-forming.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Over at "Designing for Civil Society" they have an interesting list of 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism, taken from the Democracy Online Newswire. A lot of it is social software, including pointers to mailing list managers, wikis, weblogs and discussion forums, and it includes this nifty chart arranging the tools on two axes -- formal to informal, and centralized to distributed:
(I loves me some two-axis charts...)
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January 15, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Great overview of visual analysis of social networks over the years, from the hand drawn
 (Friendship choices among 4th graders)
to the computer generated
 (Social support network of a homeless woman.)
to the interactive
 (Women's attendance at social events)
Computers have been used to do the actual drawing for a number of years. But, more recently, the network research community has shown a tendency to construct and share screen-based images instead of relying entirely on the production and distribution of printed pages. This new approach facilitates the use of color and animation. Currently it offers enough flexibility to allow viewers to begin to interact with the images they receive.
[...]
Future developments will undoubtedly extend current trends. Network analysts already have made considerable progress in developing programs for computation (Freeman, 1988). And, as I have shown in this paper, we have made progress in developing programs for visualization. We can look forward to similar progress in developing database programs designed to facilitate the storage and retrieval of social network data. But the real breakthrough will occur when we develop a single program that can integrate these three kinds of tools into a single program. Only then will we be able to access network data sets and both compute and visualize their structural properties quickly and easily.
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January 14, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Ben Hyde follows up on my Inequality post with observations of his own about mechanisms for working with power law distributions. He touches on the issue of volitility. This is a two edged sword; you want stablity - since network participants pay a cost to reshuffle the network - and you want moblity/oportunity. I believe, but I don't have enough data or a reasonable model, that the distribution of volitility in most of these networks is similar to that found in the distribution of firm sizes from year to year. Small firms change size a _lot_ more than large firms - it's a double expodential. If that's the right distribution for the volitility then the design problem is to manage the constants in that distribution.
and
That in turn brings me to the information issue. I wish Clay had mentioned that one way to reduce the slope of the curve is to improve the information available to the network members. That encourages members to link to things that are more diverse. I.e. the habit of linking to the "more popular blogs" is less egalitarian than the habit of linking to the "most popular blogs that discuss my interests." You can't do the latter if you don't have good information.
This echoes Seb's note, in the comments of Inequality, about avoiding "linking up" (i.e the blogroll habit of adding popular weblogs as a shout-out.)
Ben has been thinking about power law distributions, and about what kind of active steps we can take in shaping them, for a long time. Read the whole thing.
(Postscript: Reading Ben's stuff, I was reminded about the excellent power law overview at http://backspaces.net/PLaw/)
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
The first study of the World Internet Project, among other things, refutes the stereotype of the loner geek:
"Use of the Internet is reducing television viewing around the world while having little impact on positive aspects of social life," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, the California university that organized the project.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Joshua Schachter (inventor of del.icio.us) sent me this nice addition to the literature of "Well, we didn't expect the community to do X!", this time from the euology of Kvetch.com (via the Wayback Machine -- all hail Brewster.)
Kvetch was meant to be a write-only complaints board -- you could go and kvetch about whatever was on your mind. You would also see other people's kvetching served up randomly, and of course your kvetching would be added to the random pool for others to see.
There was no identity, and no search. And yet a community (kvommunity?) of sorts grew up. The eulogy is short but scattered -- I quote the relevant portions here: *People try to connect even in the harshest climates*. I never expected this site to actually connect people. After all, the posting was random, and there were thousands of posts. And yet, people tried. They posted responses to other posts, and posted them dozens of times to increase their likelihood of getting seen. Stupid, but valiant.
*Wherever there are people, there's the potential for love*. I know that Kvetch was responsible for at least one marriage. A union born of kvetching. Amazing.
*Every collaborative project eventually outgrows its owner*. You start a project like this because you have a certain way of looking at the world. But when you open it up for group participation, it always changes. In this case, the amount of hostility the site attracted was sometimes shocking. For me, a kvetch is supposed to be a clever observation of one of life's funny little annoyances. But for others, it was an excuse to really let out their deep dark angry side. And there's nothing wrong with that, I suppose. It's just not what I wanted to cultivate.
*Identity is important, even in ephemera like this*. Posters created specific identities and protected them vigorously, even though there were no memberships so anyone could post under any name. It lead to some very passionate turf wars over names that anyone could claim.
I love that last one -- it reminds me of Old Man Murray (now archived), a brilliant gaming site whose bulletin boards were nothing but puerile filth, lovingly written.
On OMM, there was no 'identity management' whatsoever -- you just signed yourself in under a particular nickname, but anyone else could post under your name, and you could post under anyone else's as well. And yet there was not only identity, it was so strong that when one poster posted under another's handle, not only could the community usually tell it was a fake, we could often guess who faked it.
Our identity systems, and often our reputation systems, try to reduce identity to a question of globally unique IDs (GUIDs), but a GUID is not an identity, and an identity is not a GUID. If people could invent and defend identity on kvetch, which had not only no identity management but _no login_, then we're missing something in our current approaches to digital identity, which are often both unsubtle and overengineered. "Identity is important, even in ephemera like this."
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Interesting Anil Dash post on the loss of accidental social intermediaries as communication tools switch from being place-centric to person-centric: We might not notice that those social intermediaries are gone, but I suspect when we recall in the future the anecdotes that result from them, the kids who are born today won't understand how a phone number used to belong to a family or a group of people or how, in the days before email, a message might pass under the wary gaze of a few unanticipated recipients. An "address" used to refer to a place, not a person.
Some would say this loss in accidental connectivity is more than made up for by the immediacy and efficiency of contemporary communication, and I wouldn't argue that point, for the most part. But I can't help but wonder if the delightful and frequently inspirational value that can come from a conversation that starts wtih "Hold on, I'll get him for you... By the way, who should I tell him is calling?" might be worth more than we realized, and that we might be well served by a moment's reflection when noting its passing.
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Posted by Seb Paquet
The New York Times Magazine has a good article on teenagers who keep online journals. The author observes how the uptake of journaling among teens opens up new windows enabling everyone to peer into the experience of adolescence:
A result of all this self-chronicling is that the private experience of adolescence -- a period traditionally marked by seizures of self-consciousness and personal confessions wrapped in layers and hidden in a sock drawer -- has been made public. Peer into an online journal, and you find the operatic texture of teenage life with its fits of romantic misery, quick-change moods and sardonic inside jokes. Gossip spreads like poison. Diary writers compete for attention, then fret when they get it. And everything parents fear is true. (For one thing, their children view them as stupid and insane, with terrible musical taste.) But the linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy -- a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.
Rather than forming a single, interconnected network, journals form a multitude of relatively closed worlds:
Blogging is a replication of real life: each pool of blogs is its own ecosystem, with only occasional links to other worlds. As I surfed from site to site, it became apparent that as much as journals can break stereotypes, some patterns are crushingly predictable: the cheerleaders post screen grabs of the Fox TV show ''The O.C.''; kids who identify with ''ghetto'' culture use hip-hop slang; the geeks gush over Japanese anime. And while there are exceptions, many journal writers exhibit a surprising lack of curiosity about the journals of true strangers. They're too busy writing posts to browse.
I wish I could learn more about those journal writers who are indeed curious towards strangers and the role that communities of interest play in satisfying that curiosity.
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January 13, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
I gave a half-hearted answer to Joi's Are Blogs Just post, explicitly ignoring the larger philosophical issues he raised from the "Inequality and Fairness" section of Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality.
That was a cop out. I didn't answer his question because it seems to assume some things about inequality -- that one should take a position for or against it -- that I don't actually believe.
So here's what I do believe: inequality is inevitable, and that being for or against it makes no more sense than being for or against the weather.
...continue reading.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
To all my friends who are deluged with comment spam, here's a tip: give up. Like email, the openness of blog comments is a pandora's box that cannot be closed. Fighting spam is a war created by the economics of near zero cost fo sending a message with a marginal probability of return. You can't win this war because you don't have the resources or incentives to fight it and every move you make will be matched by your invisible opponents. Blacklists don't work and create false positives. The only solution is to raise the costs for your opponent.
So here's a solution for you. First, turn off comments. Second, do what Cory did and move your discussion to a Tribe ( http://boingboing.tribe.net) [Cory notes in comments that his readers did this when they shut comments off because of spam]. This creates a social network-based whitelist for conversations. It raises the cost of commenting to registering with the service and agreeing to policies. It shifts the burden of enforcement to a third party.
Third, keep Trackback on. The cost of creating a blog is still a barrier and in some cases, again, shifts the burden to a third party. Perhaps provide a friendly link or guide to starting a blog with a free service so real people can participate in these conversations.
Don't you have better things to do than fight this war?
Related: Burningbird
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January 12, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Today's Wall Street Journal Business Solutions collumn by Michael Totty is on wikis for rapid collaboration. It highlights Socialtext and describes distributed software development and customer care use cases.
The biggest advantage of the wiki is that it reduces the team's reliance on overused e-mail, which in most offices serves as the last repository for all important information -- whether it's to organize contacts, store the daily to-do list or whatever. "E-mail is a tremendously overloaded tool," Mr. (Gary) Boone (from Accenture Labs) says. The wiki "may represent a sweet spot between nothing or just e-mail and these more elaborate systems."
Subscription required for the full article.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
So Amazon has a 1-800 number, where you can speak to a real live human-type person. It is, however, hard to find. Or rather, it was, until last week.
Kevin Kelly, who publishes the wonderful Cool Tools, listed Amazon's 800 number, saying [...] No other merchant online or offline has provided the ease and accuracy of ordering as Amazon does. Still, in my experience there are occasionally glitches that their email-bots can't deal with, usually entailing a minor billing snafu. In these rare cases you need Amazon.com's almost-secret real-person customer service telephone number. You won't find it on their website. I once got it by calling 800 directory assistance. In any case, they make it hard to find because a call costs Amazon more, so you should jot down this number for those special moments when only a human will do: 800-201-7575.
From Cool Tools, it was later posted to BoingBoing (and now, of course, here).
Kevin understands why the number is hard to find, and is trying to pass it along with the caveat that the reader should excercise some self-restraint when using it, and Xeni, who posted it to BoingBoing, passed along Kevin's . But if that worked, there would be no need to make it hard to find in the first place.
What I find interesting about this is the parallels with spam. Amazon can't afford not to have an 800 number, but they also know that if it gets in wide circulation, their customers will have much lower thresholds for calling it than Amazon wants them to have, so they try to make sure that the potential caller is willing to expend some energy to get the number. But the old social gradients that would mean slow diffusion of the number are gone, so now it's everywhere.
It will be interesting to see what Amazon does in response. Use of the number will presumably go up -- they could let the service get worse, and put the requirement that the customer expend energy to get to a live person into the phone wait time (the usual strategy), they could staff up the 800 number, and raise the funds by rasiing prices on the site, or they could even change 800 numbers periodically, the way people trying to shake off spam do.
Even sharing little tips with your friends gets conducted in a global register when the conversation takes place on the Web.
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January 11, 2004
Posted by Seb Paquet
Christopher Allen has posted a comparison of social networking services based on his experience with each. He points out that those services all present barriers to entry and suggests that the usefulness to cost ratio might not be sufficiently high, at least in his case. A followup post offers a number of worthwhile replies and pointers.
And over on Meatball, Christopher has recently begun identifying Wiki design patterns.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
George Dafermos published his Blogging the Market paper ( PDF) on weblogs as a disruptive technology for organizations. Disruptive both in the diffusion of technology, but as cultural disruption, an embodiment of online self-organising social systems, are essentially characterised by management decentralisation and ultimately threaten to destabilise current organisational structures and re-invent the scope of management.
On external blogging, he cluefully describes how letting go of control will make marketing departments gonzo, but when they do they will rediscover how to speak and listen. He discredits the two market theory, arguing that the internal market of employees needs to be able to participate in marketing.
On internal blogging:
The transition will be as silent as email, mobile telephony and instant messaging...the case for weblogs is irresistible: massive productivity gains through far more efficient communication, collaboration, and knowledge management...they are user-centred rather than IT- centric...organisational structure loses its historic role of managing power relations at a distance, and as a result the organisation becomes truly hyperlinked and power shifts to where knowledge actually resides.
The paper makes some of my favorite points on fostering Social Capital, transitioning from email and blogging as KM; arguing that prior to its management though, knowledge needs to be communicated and interviews Kevin Werbach:
Where community processes are likely to have a significant financial benefit is in the enterprise. Organizing and distributing information among workers is a critical need of every information-dependent organization. Weblog-based tools will be the foundation for a new discipline of bottom-up knowledge management, which will lead to efficiencies and productivity boosts for companies.
On internal blogging, I see it as less of a disruption to business culture. Most of the control issues have been dealt with before with email and IM, employees can already communnicate without bounaries, difference being the persistence and accessibility of conversations. And most importantly how a conversation can be given democratic credibility. Cultural disruptions end up being co-opted, as we see with managers being the greatest users of email today. In full disclosure my company seeks to provide these productivity benefits with a more graceful transition, but it also puts me in a position to work with weblogs (and other social software) in organizations.
One way of describing how weblogs don't purely subvert the hierarchy is to distinguish between institutional and proceedural authority as referenced in the Phantom Authority paper on Wikipedia:
Organizations exist to establish a certain degree of procedural and institutional authority (Steinmueller, 2002).
Procedural authority consists of incentives, social norms and power that define how decisions about practices, routines and procedures should be taken within an organization. It allows resolution of issues or disagreements among participants.
Institutional authority concerns the recruitment of members to an organization, assignment of roles, government of membership conditions and of expression.
In Wikipedia, some features that shape procedural authority are implicit of the Wiki software. The editing and undoing mechanisms, implemented by means of two push–buttons on each article page, are all that a user needs.
The above applies to virtual communities, so to put differently for businesses, weblogs have the capability to enhance the influence of business practice and heterarchy, but business process and hierarchy will be governed by the traditional means of distributing power. Practice will become a greater source for promotion and incentive, but more importantly, enable organizations to change course and activities at speed based on what the organization knows.
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January 10, 2004
Posted by Liz Lawley
Over on Daring Fireball, John Gruber has a lengthy entry on why he doesn't particularly like, or want to use, trackback. In place of trackback, he's chosen to add a list of recent referrers, which he says provides comparable information, without the barrier to entry (essentially, a trackback-enabled CMS) of trackback.
I think he's wrong.
Gruber's argument that the referrer approach is better because Trackback is too hard baffles me, as well, given the complexity he describes in his referrer tracking system. Is trackback as harder than, say, building a snowman? Sure. Is it harder than writing HTML by hand? I would say no, having spent a great deal of time during the past ten years teaching people to do just that. It's a _whole_ lot easier to point them to TypePad, or Radio, or any of a number of other Trackback-enabled tools and say "just turn on autodiscovery" than it is to teach them how to embed a dynamically-generated referrer list on their site.
But more importantly, while referrer information is similar to trackback, there are some extremely significant differences between the two. Right now, for example, the referrer list for the entry of his that I linked to above has 477 entries, and the only information provided about any of those sites is their URL.
Immediately, you can see the problems. First of all, the "right now" that I had to preface the last line with. If you check the page a month from now, the list will be very different. It's showing "recent referrers," not all referrers, and the information is therefore ephemeral. Second, the information provided is much too sketchy to really be useful to me as a reader; I don't know the author, the title, or the content of the referring page. And perhaps most importantly, I have no idea if the "referring page" really has _any_ relevance at all to the original site or post, or even contains a link to it.
The beauty of trackback, and the reason that many have embraced it, is the way that it creates what Shelley Powers has called " sticky strands" among sites. In her discussion of why she uses Trackback rather than culling her referrer logs, she wrote:
Rather than using Trackback, I could scan my referrer logs and pull referrers, but I've never been happy about this approach. I wanted to incorporate into my Threadneedle strategy a deliberate interest in being part of a conversation, and this occurs with Trackback -- you have to enable it, ping me, or at least turn on Trackback auto-Discovery. No accidental tourists here.
The point of Trackback isn't really to help me, the author of a post. As John points out, there are lots of tools out there for that. I can check my referrer logs, I can check my Technorati Cosmos, etc. The point of Trackback is to help my _readers_ to see new directions that conversations on my blog have taken. I think a referrer list is a poor tool for that purpose.
(BTW, I found John's entry because Clay linked to it in his del.icio.us bookmarks. I continue to be mightily impressed by that site's versatility.)
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Emily Nussbaum has a piece in the NY Times Magazine, My So-called Blog on weblogs among teenagers, and she gets it about the importance of blogs in the interconnected LiveJournal pattern, not just in the public disourse pattern most journalists cover (because that pattern looks familiar to them...) In the news media, the blog explosion has been portrayed as a transformation of the industry, a thousand minipundits blooming. But the vast majority of bloggers are teens and young adults. Ninety percent of those with blogs are between 13 and 29 years old; a full 51 percent are between 13 and 19, according to Perseus. Many teen blogs are short-lived experiments. But for a significant number, they become a way of life, a daily record of a community's private thoughts -- a kind of invisible high school that floats above the daily life of teenagers.
Many of my students, already old old old at 25+, expect anyone they meet their age to have a Friendster page -- 15 years olds are soaking in it.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Tom Coates is thinking about the relationship between wikis, CMSs (shudder) and planned navigation: Here's an example of how you could create heirarchy and utilise different templates at the level of the individual page. First, imagine a templating interface that allowed you to create an outline heirarchy of the various sections of a site (just like you'd produce in the outline view of Word or using something like OmniOutliner). Now, each section of that site-map could have a distinct template attached to it, or inherit a template from the section above. Then all you'd need on the Wiki-page (as content-management interface) would be a drop-down box on the right that allowed you to choose which section the page you'd created would sit under.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Cass Sunstein piece on NASA's culture and the stifling of dissent, which may have ramifications for the weblog world.
My research shows that on a three-judge panel, a Republican-appointed judge is often far more likely to vote conservatively when sitting with two other Republican appointees than when sitting with at least one Democratic appointee. The same is true for Democratic judges, whose liberal tendencies are dramatically amplified when they sit on all-Democratic panels.
Without knowing it, the Columbia investigators were identifying a pervasive social problem, one that unites these examples and that leads to many failures in the public and private sectors. In military circles, this process is called "incestuous amplification." Among psychologists, it is known as "group polarization."
In a nutshell: Like-minded people, talking only with one another, usually end up believing a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
So I posted yesterday about SocialGrid, the proposed "Hey, I know! Lets make everyone's demographics completely explicit!" peer-to-peer Google-reliant online dating service.
What I didn't see is that it's part of a larger effort to "solve dating", in the author's felicitous phrase.
The Solve Dating manifesto runs thusly:
1. Modern Soulmate Theory is based on math and probability calculations.
2. It has nothing to do with reincarnation, astrology, or magic.
3. Soulmates are not destined to be with each other.
4. God may have made a soulmate or a few soulmates for you. God may help you find your soulmate or He may not. Evil forces or your own free will may influence you to choose the wrong person.
5. You may have one or millions of soulmates depending on how different you are from the population mean.
6. Statistically, there is at least one person in this world that will bring you true love, a love that will last a lifetime.
7. People spend a lot of time, money, and energy in their search for soulmates.
8. The odds of finding a soulmate are very slim. Only a few people are lucky enough to find their soulmates.
9. Current dating services are inefficient and flawed.
10. People are "forced" to settle for incompatible mates resulting in break ups and divorces.
11. Human and social capital decrease because of relationship problems.
12. One day in the near future, because of technological advances, people will find their soulmate or soulmates very easily.
You may also want to try the SoulMate Calculator, which looks like FOAF gone mad, and don't miss the notes on Love Economics.
There really is a very particular mental illness associated with presuming that human dealings can be perfected through reduction to discrete variables. (I wonder if DSM IV has a name for it?) This site obviously veers far into net.kook territory, but the scary thing is the number of proposed services that suffer from a mild case of the same disease.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Will Davies over at iSociety gets exasperated at us in comments in the Granovetter thread:
This is socio-economics. Its an analysis of the social character of capitalism. Can we please, please not pretend that business networking is some enlightened, libertarian project, or that competitiveness is synonomous with “social progress”. It isn’t; its about $$$$.
He continues the thought over at iSociety, including this:
I've been reading various bits of Stephen Graham recently, and he stresses the material and economic conditions of the information society. Money, effort, hardware and politics are all involved in technology networks, and the way money is made is through reducing inter-operability, not through increasing it [...]
This is a good characterization of the fight around social networking tools. Customers matter to any business, and getting them to contribute value to each other, as with Amazon book reviews, say, is a great strategy. The social networking sites, however, take that logic to an extreme, providing a very thin possible layer of brokering on top of raw material that is almost all the individual members.
So one idea is "Provide the bit necessary to overcome collective inertia around social contacts, own that, and grow rich." Another idea is "It's our relationships Friendster is raising money on, and the connection layer is so conceptually simple and thin, we could build this for ourselves."
I don't think social software is a outside the realm of economics as Davies does, nor that it as resistant to market forces as he, but I do think "fragmentation as a market tool" is one of the core issues in the development of social network tools.
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January 9, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Interesting article over at First Monday: Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment, and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia, including this nice bit of economic analysis on the ways wikis (or at least the wikipedia) works: Any transaction involves costs (Coase, 1937; Williamson, 1985). These range from the costs of writing a contract, to the costs of negotiating how to deal with unexpected contingences, from the costs of coordination to the costs of motivation (or commitment). Such costs are determined either by human characteristics (bounded rationality and opportunism), or by the type of transaction (frequency, uncertainty, asset specificity).
Teece (1988) claims that high transaction costs represent one of the main limits to the division of labour in the production and use of knowledge.
Wiki technology in a way literally cancels transaction costs for editing and changing information. Hence, this reduction in transaction costs acts as a catalyst for the development of the community. In turn, these reduced transaction costs means that there is full exploitation of massive collaboration economies. Hence, in the case of horizontal information assemblages, we might argue that any incentive that allows more authors to freely join in a given task, the larger the assemblage of information that is eventually produced (or in the case of Wikipedia, a larger number of articles is possible).
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Posted by Clay Shirky
SocialGrid: "A Free Dating Service Using Google, Grid Computing, P2P ( Peer-to-Peer ), and a File Sharing Program." What's not to love?
The Goal
We hope to provide a free dating service that is cost-effective and universally appealing. This service, besides being used to find soulmates, could also be used to find lost classmates, roommates, and job listings, including internships. In addition, the technology powering this service will be able to scale up to handle hundreds of millions of members cheaply.
The Solution
Our patent pending Identification Coding System™ defines a person by tagging a distinct code for each member's demographic information and traits onto his/her blog, social network, or personal web page. The final result will be a revolutionary way to search for people using Google and other Internet search engines.
There is a particular kind of madness that imagines that by making everything explicit and universally available, human social patterns can be dramatically improved. I wonder how long it will take until people realize that spam and its conceptual neighbors are not accidental but inevitable uses of social systems, and that a search engine that helps people write queries like, say, "Find all 17 year old girls in a 10 mile radius" is a bad idea.
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January 8, 2004
Posted by Seb Paquet
...continue reading.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
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January 7, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Over at How to Save the World, Dave Pollard looks back on the most important ideas in the weblog world in 2003. He touches on the big debates -- abandonment rates, power law distributions -- and the big technology splashes -- social networking, RSS.
The only item of his 10 that I take issue with is #8: "The culture of blogging is evolving faster than the technology."
Dave says
The frustration of bloggers with the tools available to them is palpable. That's not the tool designers' fault: They operate on a shoestring and their 'customers' all want something different. They'll eventually build tools that are both simple and flexible, as both the technology, and the understanding of its use, mature. In the meantime, impatient bloggers are working around the impediments, learning about HTML and CSS themselves. This is World of Ends innovation at work, producing a proliferation of new blog 'products' and hybrids. [...]
What's happening isn't a simple case of the technology being behind the practice -- the two are diverging more radically than that.
There was a halycon period (between, say, the launch of blogger and the launch of Gawker) when the definition of a weblog, weblog technology, and the actual interconnected mass of weblogs were all of a piece. When someone asked "What's a weblog?", you could point to Instapundit or Talking Points Memo or the recently updated list on blogger and say "There, that's it, that's a weblog", without having to specify whether you meant the technology driving it, or the actual blog itself, or the abstract notion derived from the two.
Those days are over. Weblogs (the technology) have become the premier lightweight publishing platform, and make no requirements that the users of that platform respect or even know about weblogs (the communal practice). The only thing in common among Jeremy Hylton, Dave Barry, Howard Dean's campaign, the US Navy's procurement officers and the_d00shbag over at LiveJournal who just quit his job at KFC, is that they all use weblog software.
Weblogging used to mean, roughly, "daily personal publishing, with an emphasis on conversational annotation of links", and the software was originally designed to match that pattern. Now weblogging means "stuff people do with weblog software", and those uses are far more various than the pattern Jorn Barger named and Rebecca Blood described. It's not just that the tools are not catching up to practice, though that's happening. It's also that past practice no longer defines the uses the tools are being put to or the features that are being added, a split that's going to accelerate in 2004.
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January 6, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
danah boyd (love child of e.e. cummings and archie), Marko Ahtisaari and Stewart Butterfiled take apart my rationale for claims of fairness in the weblog world, taken from the powerlaws paper, and find two flaws I have to cop to.
danah takes on my assertion that the threshold for having a weblog is only slightly higher than the threshold for getting online. She says: I wish that this was true. This is where issues of social pressure, time, literacy, confidence, etc. come into play. Consumption and production are fundamentally different and there are different forms of pressure when engaging with either. There is no way that one can possibly say that the threshold for consumption is equivalent to the threshold for production.
danah is right, I was wrong.
I am so immersed in the idea of the internet as an enabling technology that I forget that for many people consumption is a mode they are so habituated to that the offer of production does not, by itself, reverse that pattern. Writing takes more time and energy than reading. Writing exposes the writer to critique, where reading does not. Writing is a skill less practised by most people than reading.
In the future, I'll restate this as equality of technological opportunity, but one heavily dependent on other, external factors.
Marko then does a better job than I did of taking apart my four reasons for claiming, last year, that the inequality in the weblog world was basically fair. (I label this 'last year' because I am in the process, with Tom Coates, or revisiting that work, using a new data set, which may lead to some more re-thinking.)
The fourth part of my 4-part rationale was "There is no real A-list, because there is no discontinuity" in the power law curve. Of this assertion, Marko notes: Shirky lists a fourth point in favour of his claim that the weblog world is mostly fair but strictly speaking this is not really a feature of the blogging world at all but rather a claim about descriptions of it.
Stewart makes Marko's critique even more explicit in the comments: "Since there exists no unarbitrary way of drawing the line that separates the A-list from the B-list ..." This is bad reasoning, IMO. There is no non-arbitrary way or demarcating living things from non-living things (even if you think there is a clear distinction between simple single-celled organisms, viruses, various crystals, autocatalytic sets, etc., there are many vague states between, say, a living fish and a dead fish, as some particular fish is dying. But there are clearly moments when *that* is a dead fish and when it is a living fish.
This is also right -- the last item on the list is the one that didn't belong, for the reasons both Marko and Stewart note. What I should have said, and just said on Marko's blog (a year late): Fair cop on reason #4. I should have separated it from the others, as Marko has done, because it is a critique of descriptions of the weblog world, rather than a description of that world itself.
If I had to re-state that idea, I would say "The idea of an A-list suffers from great vagueness, because power law distributions are self-similar. No matter who you are, _everyone_ to the left of you gets more traffic or links (whichever you are ranking) than you do." (This holds true even in the Glenn Reynolds edge-case, as no one is to his left.)
In other words, in a power law distribution, the sense that a lot of people are getting more X than you is always true, even if you are getting a lot more X than most people (Glenn fails this restated test). Thus locating anything like an A list suffers not from the kind of "living/non-living" edge case Stewart notes, but from an inability to find any locus of the two categories at all other than the 1st and Nth positions. Not only are the edge cases blurry, the "center" doesn't exist at all.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
As if on cue for the debate Joi has started, Cameron Marlow of blogdex is teaching a month-long class at the Media Lab on powerlaws. Week 3 of 5 reads: Class 3: Social networks
The third session will be devoted to a discussion of the implications of scaling in social networks covering issues of equality, politics, information diffusion and engineering for social systems.
Will bug Cameron for a post of the lecture afterwards.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Next door at Get Real, Stowe Boyd has a post on Eurekster, a search engine designed to filter results through the interests of your friends as well, setting a social context for the results.
Stowe is interested but skeptical: [...] I really need to be able to partition the network into discrete subnetworks: what are my social software buddies looking at today? What about my personal friends? What about people in the 20194 area? Until social networks attack this angle, we will be dealing with a very coarse-grained approximation for what is actually going on in social interactions.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Joi Ito has a provocative post in which he asks Are Blogs Just?. My wife handles the political philosophy in the family, that being her area of expertise, so I'm not the guy to field the Aristotelian question Joi asks, but I do want to weigh in on the position Joi suggests I have.
Joi says Aeons ago, Clay asserted that power-laws existed in blogs and that it was in-equal but fair. Maybe he is basically being a deontologist ["rules tell us what is right and wrong"] with a bit of legal moralism ["if it's legal, it's ethical"] thrown in. The rules are fair so it's OK.
I hold an opinion something like this, with caveats (and I love that last February counts as aeons ago -- its all so 'internet time'.)
The original quote Joi is referring to, from Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, is Given the ubiquity of power law distributions, asking whether there is inequality in the weblog world (or indeed almost any social system) is the wrong question, since the answer will always be yes. The question to ask is "Is the inequality fair?" Four things suggest that the current inequality is mostly fair. [...]
Note that I say nothing about justness, a word Joi conflates with fairness but I do not. The Chicago Cubs lost the National League pennant last October to the Florida Marlins. This outcome was fair, but not just. I am a Yankees fan, and even I understand that justice called for a Cubs/Red Sox World Series.
This is how life often is -- we go to the movies to see the recovering alcoholic face the challenge of his life, and then, though he's hopelessly outgunned, he puts his heart into it and wins the (boxing match/shootout/motorcycle race/dance competition) and the love of a good woman. We need the movies for that, because it so rarely happens in real life.
So put me down as a deontologist (though not a legal moralist - you can't have written as much as I have about file sharing as civil disobedience and still confuse legality with ethics.)
Put me down also as someone who thinks that the question of justice is in many ways a question of control. Let's assume that the weblog world is not just -- this seems a fair assumption, given that good but recent weblogs often get less attention than poor but older ones, who were here when the A-list slope was less forbidding. What does that mean?
To a number of people (including Joi?) evidence of injustice, even in fair systems, calls for some sort of remedy. I can't imagine a system that would right the obvious but hard to quantify injustice of the weblog world that wouldn't also destroy its dynamism.
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January 5, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Maybe its me, but isn't RSS a Pull technology, not a Push?
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Posted by David Weinberger
I like Skype. It lets me make phone calls for free to the other 4M people who have signed up for the service. The calls go through my computer and they work real good.
But I've just gotten my second random phone call from some well-intentioned stranger who wants to know if I want to chat. Actually, I don't. If you call my Skype number randomly, the odds are just about perfect that you're going to be interrupting something that I'd rather be doing than speaking with a stranger. And here's how you know that: If I wanted to be speaking with a stranger now, I'd be on the Skype phone calling one. If you can get through to me on my Skype line it's because I don't want to be speaking with a stranger now.
Thank you for your attention.
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January 4, 2004
Posted by David Weinberger
There's some back-and-forth at StartUpSkills.com on whether social software will amount to much. Jeremy Zawodny says: "Start thinking about how adding a social networking component to existing systems could improve them." StartUpSkills replies that people don't have enough incentive to give away the social network that is their competitive advantage.
Personally, I agree with Jeremy that networks such as LinkedIn will only survive if an external application figures out a use for them. Without that, we're left with people you don't know asking you to hook them up with other people you don't know.
Om Malik doesn't understand why people would share their Rolodexes with commercial entities. My problem, though, isn't that my Rolodex is too valuable to share (hah!), but that social software of the Friendster/LinkedIn sort necessarily get social relationships wrong:
First, social relationships aren't transitive: If A knows B who knows C who knows D, there is no sense in which A knows C much less D. We do, however, have a social convention for first degree relationships: A is entitled to ask B for an introduction to C. But not to D.
Second, social relationships aren't formal (in the logical sense). In logic, if A > B and B > C, then A > C. But -- and here's why people generally don't name their kids A, B and C -- A doesn't have to ask B's permission to be greater than C, and C doesn't get annoyed at B for pestering her with requests from strangers to be greater than C. Every time I introduce someone to my pal C, I am altering my relationship with C just a little bit.
Third, real social networks are always implicit. The ones constructed explicitly are always -- yes, always -- infected with a heavy dose of social bullshit. It's like thinking that the invitiation list for your wedding actually reflects your circle of friends and relatives. No, you had to invite Barry-the-Boozer because he's your cousin and you couldn't invite Marsha because then you'd have to invite her husband Larry-the-Ass-Grabber and her daughter Erin-the-Snot-Flinger. Explicitly constructed social networks not only lack the differentiation that makes relationships real, they are falsehoods built to reinforce spectral relationships and to avoid ending shaky ones.
There may be uses for the links created within these artificial social networks, for while the relationships aren't transitive, some of their properties -- interests, tastes, prejudices -- are: if A and C both know B, they are statistically more likely to share B's tastes in music than two randomly selected people are. That may turn out to be useful to some other application.
But if you want to get at the real social networks, you're going to have to figure them out from the paths that actual feet have worn into the actual social carpet.
(See Ross on FOAF and Plink and Clay on Om...)
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January 3, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
We now know the answer to that eternal question "When will they ever learn?" The answer is "Never. They will never learn."
Lo, and behold, BBC Radio 4 decided to poll their users (stop me if you've heard this story before) about new legislation they would like to see enacted, with (wait for it) a guarantee that that the proposed legislation with the highest number of votes would be submitted to Parliment.
And then (can you believe it!) the users _didn't do what the BBC expected them to do!_ (One for the history books, surely.)
Instead, the "Listener's Legislation" proposed allowing homeowers "to use any means to defend their home from intruders." Here is a choice quote from Stephen Pound, the Member of Parliment (MP) now charged with introducing this legislation into Parliment: "The people have spoken," the Labour MP replied to the programme, "... the bastards."
Having recovered his composure, Mr Pound told The Independent: "We are going to have to re-evaluate the listenership of Radio 4. I would have expected this result if there had been a poll in The Sun. Do we really want a law that says you can slaughter anyone who climbs in your window?"
The answer to Mr Pound's question depends on who "we" is, of course. Several thousand people obviously do want such a law. Whether more people _don't_ want such a law, or even whether its a good idea, were not part of the poll, but the plain meaning of the result seems to have evaded Mr Pound.
Note too the sense of betrayal on the part of a democratically elected politician at the outcome of a poll. Radio 4 was clearly shopping for a certain kind of outcome -- elsewhere in the article, they speculate that the vote was 'hijacked', as if it wasn't an open process. They and Mr Pound also clearly felt they had the right to expect that outcome, despite the rhetoric of freedom.
And the users' freedom turned out to trump the BBC's expectations. Furthermore (can it be that no one at Radio 4 actually uses the web?) this is the normal answer, at least for high-profile sites. Once a media outlet accustomed to broadcasting creates an obviously phony plea for 'interactivity', users will insist on real interactivity the only way they can, by refusing to behave as is expected of them. This is how Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf came to dominate People magazine's first "Most Beautuful Person" poll, and how Kemal Attaturk was catapulted to the top spot in every category of Time's "Person of the Century" poll.
Dear BBC: Your users will not react well to evidence that you are treating them as contemptible drones whose sole goal is to burnish your own reputation.
_sigh_ When will they ever learn...
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Posted by Clay Shirky
There's a fascinating post at WhizSpark noting a simple way to use referer logs to spam blogdex and other listing and search engines. I noticed a few days ago, a site on the blogdex index, called picturesplace and visited it. It doesn't have anything special and is a typical porn site with a link to pay to access the paris hilton video, among other content. I was wondering why it was popular on the index and visited the referrer sites. I also found a link to the tracking page for the tracking page of picturesplace.com on blogdex in the popularity index. These two pages on blogdex show links to the pages that link to these two pages. All of these sites had a listing of referrer sites on their blogs...links to sites where their latest visitors came from.
Cameron Marlowe of blogdex weighs in: The downside of a completely transparent system is its manipulability, but this is of course also what makes it trustworthy. Sans comment spam (which is largely a product of a weblog software exploit, not Blogdex), there hasn't really been a loophole which has continually affected the index. Blogdex is your sandbox... play around and figure it out. Break it and I'll fix it... then I'll study you and get a Ph.D. ;)
Open systems grow faster than closed ones, and better allow for innovation. This creates value for their users. This value creates incentive for capturing that value, but the incentive is orthagonal to the value -- spammers don't care that their behavior damages the system that created the value to begin with.
I remember the early spam on usenet -- Global Alert for All and the Green Card spam et al. Two things are different now. First, everything that launches launches at scale, at least potentially. It took email more than a decade to get to a million users. Now even moderately interesting software can get a hundred thousand users in months, and million-user software is still "niche", in the sense of sub-1% use compared to the population as a whole.
Second, we've learned the lesson of standards and automation, so we have better hooks into our interfaces, for automatic manipulation, but this means better automation for people gaming the system as well. (I remember, a decade or so ago, someone asking on a newsgroup "How do I post to all the soc. groups at once? soc.* doesn't seem to work -- surely I don't have to enter all the group names in _by hand_!") The arms race is the same, but the speed with which value is created and the ease with which the manipulation can be automated now favor the spammers.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
I've never been a long-term futurist -- the error rate on projections 50 years out is usually so high as to make the excercise worse than useless. (The important technologies from "The Space Age" or "The Atomic Age" turned out to be transistors and birth control pills, not rockets and reactors.)
Two moments interest me -- when something becomes possible -- the Web in 93, VoIP in 96 -- and the moment it becomes practical, which is to say when the threshold of cost and hassle drops to the point where a teenager can do it (the Web in 95, VoIP in 2003.)
ExtremeTech has a short article up making the argument that 2004 is the year the webcam is going to go practical, not as the one-way source of camgirl broadcast, but as a routine part of two-way communications: Webcams are now cheap and reliable enough and produce high enough quality to make them more than just worth the effort – they're practically a necessity for any home computer. Heck, they're affordable enough that you could buy one for a friend or family member, so they can't say, "Nobody I talk to has one yet." If you've been ignoring the webcam boom or just too shy to show your face, you have no idea what you've been missing.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
The similarities between social networking and blogging have just been made very explicit. Throughout last year we have talked about how the two sectors of social software are going to converge. A year ago this week, we graphed the overlap of blogspace and a Social Networking Service.
Now we have format offering applications, finally, with Typepad generating FOAF files from Friends Lists. Half the barrier has been generating FOAF files with an incentive to maintain them, and all active bloggers have incentives to maintain their blogs.
But the other half has been when you have a FOAF file, what the heck do you do with it? Along comes Plink (People Link), that uses FOAF files to create an explicit Social Networking Service that lets you browse and search blogging networks. What's perhaps different is connections are made elsewhere, through conversations on blogs, and then made globally (Googly) explicit. But since FOAFs are most easily generated off of OPML files, there will also be many relationships with media instead of people.
Social Networking Service that contains a form of blogging Ecademy also generates a FOAF files, but Typepad also shares its Typepad profiles with Plink. Expect fast growth of this service within the explicit crowd, but not everyone wants to be so explicit, the absence of constraints and bad data will hamper its utility.
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Posted by Liz Lawley
If my 9-year-old son had to choose between email and IM, there's no question that he'd opt for the latter. I'm guessing he'd choose IM over a browser, if it came down to it. Increasingly, it's his communication tool of choice. It's not unusual for him to IM me on a regular basis. And not just when I'm at the office...even when I'm downstairs. "Hi Mom! What are you doing?" (Stick-in-the-mud that I am, I've told him I will not respond to messages written in IM-speak; he has to use standard written English if he wants me to participate.) At the same time, I've been teaching _my_ mother how to use IM, and using it not just when we're apart, but also to enable private conversations when we're in the same house.
According to the New York Times, we're part of a trend. There's an article today by John Schwartz entitled " That Parent-Child Conversation Is Becoming Instant, and Online."
And now, as families own more than one computer, the machines spread beyond the den and home networks relying on wireless connections become increasingly popular, instant messaging is taking root within the home itself.
Although it might seem lazy or silly to send electronic messages instead of getting out of a chair and walking into the next room, some psychologists say that the role of the technology within families can be remarkably positive. In many cases, they say, the messages are helping to break down the interpersonal barriers that often prevent open communication.
Both of those paragraphs raise interesting issues. The first is the effect of changing in-home technology--more wireless, more mobile, more personal--on uses of social software. My son's--and my mother's--growing use of in-house IM has been fueled by their acquisition of wireless-enabled laptop computers. The second is the way computer-mediated commmunication can _enhance_ communication rather than inhibiting it, something that's often not addressed in the " real versus virtual" debates.
These are topics worth thinking about in other social software contexts. If you can make tools that are attractive for up-close-and-personal use, there's a much larger market there for you to tap into.
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January 2, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Over at Richard Gayle's Corante Blog, Living Code is a new study suggests that treating epidemics could do better than with than random immunuization. Take a random sample and ask them to list their friends, then immunize the friends:
"Friends just aren't normal," agrees Mark Newman, a networks specialist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. "Friends are, by definition, friendly people, and your circle will be a biased sample of the population because of it."
Makes you think about the good or evil potential of the Friendster database in scale-free situations.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Furrygoat posts a graphic map of "...10 blogs, with 154 total entries[.] It also shows the size of the entries and details on how recent the posts are."
The tool uses Ben Schneiderman's TreeMap idea (which also powers Smart Money's Market Map.)
I'm not sure that this is the ideal tool for weblog browsing -- headlines in RSS seem easier to scan -- it does demonstrate one of the big themes emerging now: the tools for visualizing large social spaces are now easy enough to use that they can be implemented by a individuals. Next to corporate work in this domain like Microsoft's NetScan and IBM's historyflow, weare now starting to see personal work like Ben Discoe's Friendster map and now an RSS treemap. More such visualizations to come doubtless, many more, in 2004.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
The closest to the “broker intros only/connections live with the user” app Clay is talking about and Om wants is WiredReach, a P2P social networking app with search, contact management and IM.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
EWeek has a writeup on social software for the enterprise, covering Visible Path, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, and LinkedIn. It's an end of the year thing, so more wrapup than coverage, but it's another sign that the field continues to heat up.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
OM goes off on commercial social networking ventures: The question I have is: why the F**K should I share my network of contacts with these commercial entities. They are like BlogSpot that does nothing for my brand equity and in many ways chews me out after making the network connections. Thus what I want is a “MoveableType” of social networking. Blogs took off because it was about one person - me. My social networks should be of my making for me. Lets figure out a way to cut out the middlemen.
The answer to his original question is, of course, is "the logic of collective action." Everyone building their Rolodex on their own is both redundant and deflecting of growth. Cleint/server architectures offer a way for information to be entered once and only once (as with those distributed address book things.) The companies building server-based socuial networking sites are doing so in part because doing it on a server is efficient, and in part because it is also a good way to capture value, for (they hope) later rent extraction.
The trick Om wants to pull off, and its the trick of all decentralized applications, is to reconstruct the logic of collective action so that users can create value for themselves, without having their data held hostage. Napster did it by brokering connections while holding none of the user's actual music (though they never got to the "Now how do we make money?" stage) -- I wonder if a "broker intros only/connections live with the user" app could take off?
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