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August 31, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Joyce Park claims she got shitcanned from Friendster for blogging.
Apparently because she blogged about Friendster moving to PHP for scalability over JSP, which got picked up by Jon Udell in a great piece that shitcans the Myth that IT Doesn’t Scale (it can start small too) and Slashdotted. Anyway, they are making their money through soap operas.
A social networking company firing a blogger a common ingredient of success?
Jeremy Zawodny has already found out how easy it is to unsubscribe (credit due for having the feature).
She happens to have written a book on PHP , contributes to open source, and shares some good research on semi-permeable blogging. Who knows, she might have been hired by blogging in the first place.
But I’ll hold opinion until the other side has its say.
There are so many threads in this to be explored. Employee blogging policy, education, leadership, PR, setting market expectations, architecture, supporting advocacy, supporting research, supporting open source, competitive strategy and social network relations.
But, wait, the other side isn’t going to have its say. Any company that comments on the details of the termination of an employee opens themselves up to lawsuits.
It’s a good time for a standard employee blogging policy that bloggers can bring to their companies to set expectations and a way of doing things right.
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August 29, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
The core issue of collaborative editing, that of accuracy and trust, has reached a point in debate where research is needed to advance the practice of content use and development. Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globle offered a Wikipedia criticism in July, calling it One great source — if you can trust it:
For it lacks one vital feature of the traditional encyclopedia: accountability. Old-school reference books hire expert scholars to write their articles, and employ skilled editors to check and double-check their work. Wikipedia’s articles are written by anyone who fancies himself an expert…
“I think it’s exactly the right price,” said Michael Ross, senior vice president of corporate development at Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. in Chicago. Major articles in Britannica are signed by the author; all articles are vetted by an experienced team of editors and scholars. The libraries that pay $1,500 for a set of bound volumes or the family that pays $60 a year for an Internet subscription are buying confidence as well as information. … Ross admits to reading and enjoying Wikipedia, and has even gotten ideas there for future Britannica articles. But the absence of traditional editorial controls makes Wikipedia unsuited to serious research. “How do they know it’s accurate?” Ross asks. “People can put down anything.”.. In 2002, Wikipedia was criticized because it couldn’t scale and have in-depth articles. Turns out that more was put down than expected, surpassing the Britannica.
Hiawatha raised a key issue, that of quality and reputation, and his piece highlighted Wikipedia’s ambition to publish a first print version. Coupling emergent content development and formal editorial process is a very competitive business model for print. But if the public learns to use and trust the content that emerges in Wikipedia as an authority, it is even more disruptive.
This week Al Fasoldt, a Post-Standard Columnist in Syracuse NY claimed Wikipedia is untrustworthy, based upon an interview with a high school librarian:
“As a high school librarian, part of my job is to help my students develop critical thinking skills,” Stagnitta wrote. “One of these skills is to evaluate the authority of any information source. The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. It even states this in their disclaimer on their Web site.”
Wikipedia, she explains, takes the idea of open source one step too far for most of us. Mike from Techdirt takes the columnist to task for misunderstanding Wikipedia:
What’s most amusing about this fear mongering piece concerning Wikipedia is that the librarian in question claims that she uses Wikipedia as an example of an “untrustworthy” site in trying to teach students to develop critical thinking skills. If that’s true, she’s doing a dreadful job. If they really wanted critical thinking skills, shouldn’t they do more than trust this uninformed librarian, but do a little research about Wikipedia itself, how it works, and how the power of Wikipedia is the fact that it is edited — but by anyone else using Wikipedia? There’s just something that seems to freak people out about Wikipedia, when they can’t fathom the idea that “the masses” could produce something of value by simply being able to correct each other, allowing them to build something much more beneficial and much more useful than an expensive encyclopedia edited by just a few people.
Mike took another step of contacting the reporter, and the exchange led him to ask, whom do you trust, the wiki or the reporter?
The quality of Wikipedia Articles, at the very least, at a moment in time are better than they were before and will improve over time. Mike offered a Techdirt Challenge: I pointed to the Wikipedia page on Syracuse, NY where he apparently lives, and suggested he change something on the page, to make it provably, factually incorrect — and see how long it lasted. Alex Halavais, for one, is taking the Challenge. While the results of the challenge (update: 13/13)will provide some valuable insight, it lacks an untampered collection methodology and introduces unfair costs to the system itself.
Joi Ito rightly condemns Mr. Fasoldt’s assertion and views this issue as traditional vs. collective authority:
In fact, on very heated topics, you can see the back and forth negotiation of wordings by people with different views on a topic until, in many cases, a neutral and mutually agreeable wording is put in place and all parties are satisfied. Traditional authority is gained through a combination of talent, hard work and politics. Wikipedia and many open source projects gain their authority through the collective scrutiny of thousands of people. Although it depends a bit on the field, the question is whether something is more likely to be true coming from a source whose resume sounds authoritative or a source that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (with the ability to comment) and has survived.
Shelley Powers delves into the issue of truth and authority:
The reason, according to those with more modern views, is though the authors could be considered ‘authorities’ on the topic, they don’t have the ‘truth’ because the truth, in this instance, is held by those who have new, and fresh insight into the existing material–they have reached an epiphany the others, weighed down by the mass of research material and outdated ideas, can’t hope to achieve.
According to these blessed with such insight, they have truth without authority, while the historians have authority, but can’t possibly understand the truth. Who you trust then, depends less on authority or even truth than it does on who you want to believe–literally whose interpretation rings your bell the most. The Manifesto for the Reputation Society describes Wikipedia as reputation for the community as a whole by helping to create a public good where there is more flexibility as reputation and other motivations substitute for direct reciprocity. As the Manifesto hints, Wikipedia is considering codification:
An item of debate within the Wikipedia community is the degree to which contributors should acquire some form of reputation, which might then be used to make their contributions to the encyclopedia harder to modify. Letting reputation of contributors emerge in a transparent manner will reward higher–quality contributions, and may provide a partial answer to coordination problems if those who make good contributions receive some proportionate ability to decide conflicts. However, the contrary point of view argues that it is the very openness of Wikipedia that made it a success. One suggestion that balances both points of view is to keep the full Wikipedia open, but to use a reputation system to highlight entries that will be periodically copied into an unmodifiable backup; more ideas can be found in the online discussion of a Wikipedia approval mechanism ( WikiApproval, 2004). Which brings me to an lingering thought — that explicitly codifying reputation introduces a cost which can constrain commons-based peer production. Wikipedia was never supposed to work, somehow does because of good club theory and transaction costs, and has gained a reputation as a resource. Introducing reputation for contributors or articles is the greatest risk to the Wikipedia community. Getting a base study on factual accuracy can help inform this decision as well as educate the public on how to use and participate with this commons resource.
I’ve been quitely forming a group of journalism schools, media centers and experts to engage in the Wemedia Project, which begins with a formal Wikipedia Article fact checking excercise and publishing findings. The USC Annenberg Center has already announced their support and next month we will begin the collaborative research process within a Socialtext Workspace. Without getting into defining truth, you can separate issue of fact, value or policy. The approach is to apply a formal fact checking process to a sample of articles to gain a baseline measure of factual accuracy and explore issues of reputation.
More to come, suggestions appreciated.
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August 28, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Social Networking Services are, at the least, decreasing the search and transaction cost for individual ties to organizations. But as early adopter tools they have yet to provide benefits to a mainstream and diverse user base and some tools discriminate by design.
In fact, in a recent working paper, Professor Arrow and Mr. Borzekowski conclude that a worker’s net worth can have a lot to do with the worker’s network. In their model - and it is just a model, not based on empirical data - a person with one corporate connection would be expected to earn $19,570. By contrast, a person with links to five companies would be expected to earn $30,410. Ultimately, they conclude, “the difference in the number of ties can induce substantial inequality and can explain 15-20 percent of the unexplained variation in wages.”
...continue reading.
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August 26, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
John Battelle builds upon Cost Per Influence with his expertise in publishing to account for a Sell Side Advertising model: a very interesting idea that flips current advertising models upside down. In essence, this new model for online ads reverses the relationship between publishers and advertisers. Read the whole thing.
But one issue, the initial origination of ads. In Sell Side Advertising the ads are cast out, perhaps through del.icio.us like directories and ad networks like BlogAds or from advertiser sites themselves. But is this first source influential? Are they in a position to set the initial price?
It may mess up the elegance of how John’s description, but it may need a Buy Side component, at least to help set clearing prices. Much like what BlogAds does, blogs could list a rate for hosting an Ad. Advertisers could offer an Ad, if its approved or sponsored and posted, then the chain begins.
If you combine both, the Ad network could function as a Market Maker — standing ready to offer a price on both the buy and sell side to enhance liquidity. But again, starting simple is very good.
John also pointed out a key attribute of this concept to me over the phone — putting publishers back in the decision making process also serves to encourage socially responsible advertising.
In related news LinkedIn is serving User-Sponsored Links and Blogger is offering a revenue sharing program with Bloggers.
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Posted by David Weinberger
Just a brief note to acknowledge the profound effect Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who died yesterday, had on our “social networks.” Her “five stages of dying” gave us a way to incorporate dying people into our social world, rather than putting them behind literal and figurative closed doors. In a sense EKR made it ok to die.
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August 25, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Folksonomy, a new term for socially created, typically flat name-spaces of the del.icio.us ilk, coined by Thomas Vander Wal.
In commentary on Atomiq, Gene Smith, who generally likes the idea, lists some disadvantages of folksonomies:
On the other hand, I can see a few reasons why a folksonomy would be less than ideal in a lot of cases:
* None of the current implementations have synonym control (e.g. “selfportrait” and “me” are distinct Flickr tags, as are “mac” and “macintosh” on Del.icio.us).
* Also, there’s a certain lack of precision involved in using simple one-word tags—like which Lance are we talking about? (Though this is great for discovery, e.g. hot or Edmonton)
* And, of course, there’s no heirarchy and the content types (bookmarks, photos) are fairly simple.
A lot of this parallels the discussion around the continuing development and use of del.icio.us. I am in the “Wenn ich Ontology höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning” camp, so I think Smith’s points are not so much absolute disadvantages as choices.
Synonym control is not as wonderful as is often supposed, because synonyms often aren’t. Even closely related terms like movies, films, flicks, and cinema cannot be trivally collapsed into a single word without loss of meaning, and of social context. (You’d rather have a Drain-O® colonic than spend an evening with people who care about cinema.) So the question of controlled vocabularies has a lot to do with the value gained vs. lost in such a collapse. I am predicting that, as with the earlier arc of knowledge management, the question of meaningful markup is going to move away from canonical and a priori to contextual and a posteriori value.
Lack of precision is a problem, though a function of user behavior, not the tags themselves. del.icio.us allows both heirarchical tags, of the weapon/lance form, as well as compounds, as with SocialSoftware. So the issue isn’t one of software but of user behavior. As David pointed out, users are becoming savvier about 2+ word searches, and I expect folksonomies to begin using tags as container categories or compounds with increasing frequency.
No heirarchy I have a hard time as seeing as inherently problematic — heirarchy is good for creating non-overlapping but all-inclusive buckets. In a file-system world-view, both of those are desirable characteristics, but in a web world-view, where objects have handles rather than containment paths, neither characteristic is necessary. Thus multiple tags “skateboarding tricks movie” allows for much of the subtlety but few of the restrictions of heirarchy. If heirarchy was a good way to organize links, Yahoo would be king of the hill and Google an also-ran service.
There is a loss in folksonomies, of course, but also gain, so the question is one of relative value. Given the surprising feedback loop — community creates folksonomy, which helps the community spot its own concerns, which leads them to invest more in folksonomies — I expect the value of communal categorization to continue to grow.
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Posted by Liz Lawley
Jon Udell's got an excellent Infoworld column on social software. Closing paragraph makes a killer point:
Armed with such powerful tools, people can collectively enrich shared data. But will they? The success of Flickr and del.icio.us won't necessarily translate to the intranet. You can import the global-hive mind, but you can't export the local-hive mind. That asymmetry defines the challenge we face as enterprise knowledge gardeners.
Read the whole thing, for a good analysis of what makes both Flickr and del.icio.us powerful tools. Udell is one of the few technology pundits I know who has a true inner librarian (that's a _good_ thing, btw).
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August 24, 2004
Posted by David Weinberger
Here’s the formal relationship: My wife’s cousin knows the mother of Micah Garen, the American journalist who was being held hostage in Iraq until yesterday.
That sentence is true. But here’s the truth:
You know how it can be with cousins: they are the closest relatives you’re allowed to dislike, but they can also be a friend so close that you share DNA. My wife and her cousin are friends like that. And Micah’s mother and my wife’s cousin are both members of a small craft group that is a central part of my cousin’s life.
So, although I am three or four degrees away from Micah Garen, I feel directly connected to him through two people I love, a close collegial relationship, and the love of a mother.
Some degrees are closer than others.
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August 22, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Tim Wu asks, who cares about innovation? We hold creating the new as something we worship, but how valuable is it compared to other missions? He concludes with some great thoughts for developers of Social Software (especially those creating social costs right now):
Consider a question that professor Brett Fischman asks his class about the internet, the central monument for innovationists: “What actually makes the Internet valuable to society?”
This question stopped me for awhile. Measured in social value, surely some of the oldest applications, like email, relatively untouched by innovation, produce most of the network’s present social value. Sure, I think VoIP over powerlines would be pretty cool (thanks Adam Thierer). But compared to finding old friends, staying in touch, and everything else that email does, there is no serious comparison. Logic like this suggests that faith in innovation is a faith out of touch with human ends. Perhaps making what is obviously useful – like email – reach more people is more important than constantly reinventing, redestroying, or finally writing the perfect debugger.
I do think the criticisms can be rebutted. Email, after all, was an invention, and required the right environment for it to come about. Innovationists don’t always think about nothing else. But those who share a faith in the importance of innovation should be sure that what we fight hardest for is not just the abstract beauty of new technologies, but ideals that actually have some connection to human ends. And Social Software is just a means itself.
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August 21, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Stowe, reading my earlier Multiply rant, responds saying Multiply isn’t spam, and says that we need a statement of purpose for social networks to adhere to.
I’m more pessimistic than he; I believe that Multiply join messages are spam. Now spam has the “I know it when I see it” problem, so to talk carefully about it requires a specified definition. Here’s mine — spam is unsolicited mail, sent without regard to the particular identity of the recipient, and outside the context of an existing relationship.
Anyone sending me mail because I am on a list I haven’t asked to be on; without having a reason to think that I, in particular, would want this mail; and without us already knowing one another, is spamming me. In particular, ads sent to me as a member of a category, no matter how targeted, count, in this definition, as spam. You could be advertising a new brand of gin specially brewed for Brooklyn-dwelling Python hackers who like bagpipe music and that mail would still be spam.
If you adopt this definition, even just for the sake of argument, it’s pretty clear that Multiply fails the first and second tests. I did not ask for mail from them, and they are not sending me mail because they know me — they simply have my address on a list furnished by my friends. (IAQH.*) I think where Stowe and I may disagree is in point #3: do I have an existing relationship with the sender of the mail?
...continue reading.
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August 20, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
I’ll go David’s complaint about Multiply one better. Multiply are spammers, and should be treated as such, as should every other service that uses their tactics.
Imagine that you were offered pills that promised to expand the length and diameter of your fingers, and you wanted some. (Maybe you’re a concert pianist or something — I actually don’t want to know the sordid details…) Now imagine that you could get the first month’s pills for free, if you just uploaded your entire address book and gave the pill manufacturer permission to make the same offer to everyone listed there, in email sent out under your name. Would you do it? Because that is what you are doing if you use Multiply.
Here is what is happening: anyone launching a new YASNS has to work much harder to get users than in the old days, because the concept is so well established now. Furthermore, the existence of a social profile elsewhere means nothing to Multiply. Therefore they have every incentive to spam non-users mercilessly, because if they can wear them down until they join, great, and if they never join, who cares?
But Multiply are not ordinary spammers, since they have the email addresses of your friends, and permission to use them. When Jenna NoLastname writes me saying “Want to meet you!”, my spam filter handles it, but when mail from my friend Schmendrick J. Subramanian shows up, my spam filter lets it through, because I’ve known Schmend since Back In The Day.
...continue reading.
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August 19, 2004
Posted by David Weinberger
The feature I’d most like to see in any new social network: Import from some other social network. Get me out of the middle of re-re-re-re-confirming that I am so-and-so’s dear friend.
These social networks in my experience continue to be all maintenance and no value.
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August 17, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
I pointed to The Great Scam [new cached link] over the weekend, a first-person narrative of a scam perpetrated by Nightfreeze in the online game EVE. (Before I go into what caught my eye about it, I want to rectify an omission in my earlier post. The Great Scam contains derogatory references to women and minorities. I should have put a warning in the original pointer; my apologies.)
The piece is most interesting not as a story but as an artifact — the author does not set out to explain to much as describe the events in question, and in doing so, ends up documenting several areas of behavior that may be of interest to M2M readers:
- The use of out-of-band communications tools
- Issues of identity and presentation
- Questions of constitutional legitimacy
...continue reading.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
Psychologist Patrick Laughlin from the University of Illinois has a new study that shows that groups outperform even the best individuals in decision making. Always good to rethink groupthink, but I’m not digging up the echo chamber meme.
A cooperating unit benefits from diversity and parallel processing. Without cooperation, errors such as captainitis (when a team defers to the expertise of others) and when a leader possesses so much expertise they isolate themselves. The article suggests a common lesson of invoking collaboration even when its not immeadiately necessary.
With our little company, it helps that we work openly as possible and I try to involve as many people as feasible in a decision. We also borrow the extreme programming practice of pairing to get tasks done. Even Watson and Crick cracked the code through pairing:
At first, Watson ticked off a set of contributory factors that were unsurprising: He and Crick had identified the problem as the most important one to attack. They were passionate about it, devoting themselves single-mindedly to the task. They were willing to try approaches that came from outside their areas of familiarity.
Then he added a stunning reason for their success: he and Crick had cracked the elusive code of DNA because they weren’t the most intelligent of the scientists pursuing the answer. According to Watson, the smartest of the lot was Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant British scientist who was working in Paris at the time.
The only thing more dangerous than someone making decisions in isolation is hoarding the information others need to make decisions.
Related: Best practice does not equal best strategy (process-based strategic decision making fails); more on the wisdom of crowds.
[via Jeff Nolan]
Update: Valids Krebs points out the Captainitis of the new Intelligence Czar, which increases the distance from the President to sources of information. Social network analysis aside, in today’s administration, this could be a good or a bad thing.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
i-Neighbors, a service to generalize local social networks.
Form the About page:
I-neighbors was created by a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). These services were designed to encourage neighborhood participation and to help people form local social ties. We believe that the Internet can help people connect to their local communities and to create neighborhoods that are safer, better informed, more trusting, and better equipped to deal with local issues. I-neighbors helps communities build “neighborhood social capital” by providing a place for neighbors to find each other, share information and work together to solve local problems.
The proposed transformation here is similar to the change from one-off hosting of mailing lists to Yahoo Groups — instead of a set of one-off services, a neighborhood can use an existing template to start a whole related set of services — netowrking, photos, local reviews — all at once.
The core intuition is that ‘neighborhood’ is a concept that maps well to such services. Current services that have strong geographic components include Meetup, UrbanBaby and Craigslist — the first two rely on strong affiliational ties, with geography as a filter, rather than vice-versa, and Craigs assumes that cities are units, and that people have different ranges for different functions — I’ll travel all the way across town to interview for a job, but not to go to a garage sale. It will be interesting to see what the ‘neighborhood first/ then other filters’ model produces.
The lessons from UpMyStreet, a similar service in the UK that launched several years ago, are a bit mixed: the UK Postcode system is far more granular than that of the US, allowing them much more refined geo-location, but the place has also become a dumping grounds for racist and anit-immigrant feeling. Bob Putnam (he of Bolwing Alone) is doing some work on neighborhood social capital, and finds that high social capital correlates strongly with ethnic homogeneity — it will also be interesting to see, if i-Neighbors gets enough use, how that dynamic plays out here.
UPDATE: danah posted about i-Neighbors as well, with interesting questions about the relations between race and neighborhood.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
The madness of the age — making human relations explicit — continues in the form of XFN’s relationship profiles. Here, as a sample, is the entire range of possible romantic categories:
- muse - Someone who brings you inspiration. No inverse.
- crush - Someone you have a crush on. No inverse.
- date - Someone you are dating. Symmetric. Not transitive.
- sweetheart - Someone with whom you are intimate and at least somewhat committed, typically exclusively. Symmetric. Not transitive.
Muse, crush, date, sweetheart. The whole of romantic or sexual feeling in not just four words but those four?
The odd thing about about efforts like this is not merely the lack of completeness. Attempting to get to completeness would be admitting defeat, since the goal is simplification. The odd thing is that even the few proposals there are are obviously wrong.
“Date” is not the word for someone you are dating, and everyone knows it except the authors of this list. You can be my date to the prom without it ever being an ongoing thing; meanwhile, someone you are dating is never referred to as your date, but as your boyfriend of girlfriend. Ditto ‘sweetheart’, where the assumption is definite on intimacy and lukewarm on committment, when usage would indicate the opposite balance. And so on.
The best part, though, is the rationale:
There were a whole pile of love, romance, and sexually oriented terms we considered and discarded. Some were rejected on the grounds they were unnecessary—for example, polyamorous individuals can indicate their other partners using values already defined (having two links marked sweetheart or spouse, for example). Others were left out because they did not fit with the desire to keep XFN simple. The current set seems to us to accurately capture a sufficiently detailed range of romantic feelings without becoming overwhelming.
You really can’t make this stuff up. “We left a bunch of stuff out because when you try to model all the ways people really talk about attraction and intimacy and attachment, it just seems messy.” The thought that maybe the domain they are trying to model is messy seems never to have crossed their minds.
And:
A special note is merited for the omission of a term to describe a person to whom one is engaged. The terms “fiancé” and “fianceé” are gender-specific, which was a problem. We also decided that describing engagement should be left out since it is intended as a transitional state of affairs, as a prelude to marriage (and thus the value spouse, which is a less intentionally temporary relationship).
Earth to XFN: Most romantic relations are temporary. Fiance is a more formal state of affairs than sweetheart. Despite the fact that it doesn’t fit with your model, it is treated as a real category by actual people. Throwing out real-world behavior because it doesn’t fit your model is supposed to make you question your model, no?
It’s as if the creation of a list is meant to seem complete, because lists are discrete, and domains to be modelled are also supposed to be discrete…
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August 16, 2004
Posted by danah boyd
At Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) this year, i will be teaming up with two of my favorite colleagues (Michele Chang and Liz Goodman) to organize a workshop called “Representations of Digital Identity.”. We want to bring together interesting people working on how people represent and manage identity in a digital environment. We are looking for designers, technologists, theorists and other invested individuals.
A workshop of this type is where people working on the same problems come together to brainstorm and tackle confounding issues. For this workshop, we are asking people to submit sketches representing digital identity and discuss those in the context of the issues that interest them the most.
If you’re interested:
- Read the Call for Participation
- Check out the Proposal we submitted
- Ask questions or send submissions to cscw04-identity AT googlegroups DOT com by September 20
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Ronald Burt, who created the ‘social holes’ network measure (find out where the connections between groups aren’t, and look for value in bridging, roughly), wrote a paper last year on the Social Origin of Good Ideas (PDF):
A theme in the above work is that information, beliefs and behaviors are more homogenous within than between groups. People focus on activities inside their own group, which creates holes in the information flow of information across structural holes. People with contacts in separate groups broker the flow of information across structural holes. Brokerage is social capital in that brokers have a competitive advantage in creating value with projects that integrate otherwise separate ways of thinking or behaving.
Much of the paper is focused on sturcutral holes in business settings, arguing that brokers create much fo the value we associate with innovation.
On a related note, here’s a presentation danah co-wrote on social holes in email. The animation of the visualization, referenced in the presentation, is here
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August 15, 2004
Posted by danah boyd
Keith Hampton, a dear friend and colleague, just put together a site called i-neighbors. Keith is a sociologist interested in neighborhood communities (and their online equivalent) and this site is dedicated to supporting physical neighborhoods in the States and Canada.
Signing up for the site made me contemplate what it means to be in a neighborhood. I live near Folsom and 24th in San Francisco. I firmly identify as living in the Mission. My version of the Mission is quite a bit different than the one inhabited by my friends who live at Guerrero and Liberty, but we both identify as Mission residents. There are gangs in my neighborhood. The cut-off appears to be 21st. Do the two different gangs both identify as living in the same neighborhood? What about my Mexican neighbors - do they identify with the shi-shi folks on Liberty? My neighbors are obsessed with our block and keeping the meth addicts, homeless drunks and gun shots far away.
What constitutes a neighborhood in a city? How does class, race, religion and ethnicity play a part? Do i really live in a neighborhood bounded by zipcode or is my neighborhood also bounded by education level and transience? Of course, i’m guessing that this is exactly the boundary that Keith wants to tear down.
[Conversation on said topic already occurring at apophenia]
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Terrific account of scamming other players in EVE, a massively multiplayer game set in space. It’s got everything — innocent fun, bitter disillusionment, vows of revenge, close calls, a dastardly plan, a network of mostly invented collaborators, and an ending that make the whole thing more astonishing still.
This is one of the great first-person narratives of game participation, and touches on several themes we care about here. I’ll write about it later, but for now, I won’t bother commenting, or even quoting from it. It’s long, but it deserves to be read in full.
It’s at http://www.pq5.com/Nightfreeze/, but may still be slashdotted, so check http://freecache.org/http://www.pq5.com/Nightfreeze/ as well. If anyone knows of an alternate and more persistant URL, lemme know.
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August 13, 2004
Posted by brendyn
The Economist has a review of Paul Seabright’s The Company of Strangers, concerning the surprise of human collaboration along non-genetic lines (unlike our ape cousins, where family groups largely sets the dynamics of collaboration.)
. Co-operation of a sort among different animal species is also quite common, though not very surprising, since members of different species are not generally competing with each other for food, still less for sexual partners. Elaborate co-operation outside the family, but within the same species, is confined to humans.
Neither of these tendencies [rational thought and a willingness to punish defection] could support co-operation without the other, and the balance between the two is delicate. Calculation without reciprocity often favours cheating: this undermines trust, so co-operation either cannot get started or quickly breaks down. On the other hand, reciprocity without calculation exposes people to exploitation by others. Again, fear of exploitation inhibits co-operation. For specialisation and division of labour to get going, one needs both instincts, each pushing against the other, so that cheating and free-riding are both kept in check.
To sit on the shelf between Wisdom of Crowds and Logic of Collective Action.
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August 12, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Socialtext posted a new case study on the use of wikis in business by Stata Labs. Its a good account of how Social Software is being applied across a medium-sized business for customer care, research & development, marketing, working with partners and project communication. It also describes how they used an intimacy gradient to design spaces:
- The broadest tier is a guest space, available to all.
- The second tier is a knowledgebase, accessible to all employees and contractors.
- The third tier is product development, for employees and contractors bound by a confidentiality agreement
- The fourth tier is for the core management team to share confidential financial and HR information.
Yesterday I participated in a day long training session for a division of a F500 organization to kick off their use of an appliance. The primary use case is project communication to replace group email. What’s interesting is how the four departments initially share a common space. Because its also a shared namespace, this put a focus on defining common language up front and requires groups to work more openly than they had before. Two of the groups quickly agreed to share resources (project blog, project page) on a common project, eliminating redundancy, but also reducing coordination risks. Of course, their usage pattern can and should change, but beginning use without barriers helps determine what barriers to create.
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Posted by Ross Mayfield
BusinessWeek interviews Howard Rheingold on his Cooperation Project. He describes what’s happening as the creation of a new economic system, the reaction of record and movie companies ( Never before in history have we been able to see incumbent businesses protect business models based on old technology against creative destruction by new technologies.) and also offers a different model for exploring innovation:
…If I was a Nokia or a Hewlett-Packard, I would take a fraction of what I’m spending on those buildings full of expensive people and give out a whole bunch of prototypes to a whole bunch of 15-year-olds and have contracts with them where you can observe their behavior in an ethical way and enable them to suggest innovations, and give them some reasonable small reward for that. And once in a while, you’re going to make a billion dollars off it.
Q: A focus group on steroids.
A: This would be more like ethnography, where you let them loose and watch what they do. If you want to think out of the box about innovation, let’s not put all of our bets on 50-year-old PhDs in laboratories. We now have dispersed the means of individual and collective innovation throughout the world…
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Great Duncan Watts piece on the dangers of centralized intelligence, his argument being that while centrally controlled organizations can respond well to situations they’ve forseen, only decentralized but coordinated groups can respond to unexpected catastrophe. (Duncan is the guy who worked out the Small Worlds pattern, providing intellectual backstop to Milgram’s Six Degrees work, so he knows whereof he speaks on the subject of decentralized networks.)
He covers the Japanese auto industry’s recovery after an earthquake, which he also describes in his Six Degrees book, but adds this more recent example:
Perhaps the most striking example of informal knowledge helping to solve what would appear to be a purely technical problem occurred in a particular company that lost all its personnel associated with maintaining its data storage systems. The data itself had been preserved in remote backup servers but could not be retrieved because not one person who knew the passwords had survived. The solution to this potentially devastating (and completely unforeseeable) combination of circumstances was astonishing, not because it required any technical wizardry or imposing leadership, but because it did not. To access the database, a group of the remaining employees gathered together, and in what must have been an unbearably wrenching session, recalled everything they knew about their colleagues: the names of their children; where they went on holidays; what foods they liked; even their personal idiosyncrasies. And they managed to guess the passwords.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Reminiscent of the Zerodegrees spamming incident, I’m getting spammed by requests to join Multiply. Is this happening to anyone else?
As for the service itself, so far, it looks like a standard YASNS, with an emphasis on broadcast messages, in the manner of Orkut in the bad old days:
Multiply can also be used to compose and send messages, similar to e-mail but much more powerful. With e-mail your audience is limited to the specific people in your address book. Multiply messages - or multi-messages, as we call them - can reach the entire network of people you are connected to through mutual friends.
Channeling danah, note the rhetoric of ‘powerful’ messaging here. Power exists in differentials, and here the power being advertised is clearly the power to force your messages onto people who don’t even know you.
This is reflected in their list of selling points, which are mostly ego-centric rather than communitarian — ‘broadcast to’ rather than ‘join with’. Their idea of compelling use cases are me reviewing a restaurant, and then making sure all my friends and their friends see it (so what if they live in Jakarta — the new Chumley’s on Flatbush just rocks!), and making sure that your weblog has a built-in (did someone say captive?) audience.
But of the 100+ YASNSes out there, what is making Multiply the new choice of social spammers? Enquiring minds want to know. Meantime, put me on the Social Networking post-mortem bus…
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August 11, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Sadly, the search for a browser that works as a writing environment continues, mostly unrequited. I have switched to Firefox, which supports Undo and Find in the textarea, used a local .css file to open the textarea window to something you can imagine writing more than 50 words in, and written my own version of a CopyURL+ format, so I can grab title, link, and div-bracketed text selection in one click. All good, so good, in fact, that it’s worth switching off Safari.
However, after spending several hours playing with various customizations, Firefox is like a cute puppy that chews your shoes — it does a lot of things I find delightful, and one thing that is so wrong: I still can’t auto-save textarea.
(Update: Don’t miss Ray Ozzie’s great post in the comments. Very smart, albeit depressing.)
...continue reading.
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August 9, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Adam surveys the state of social networking, and finds that things are Not Good:
And the invitations! Invitations to hip-hop fashion shows (“now with extra bling!”), invitations to parties six time zones away. Though unintentionally, the YASNS’ messaging functionality offers nothing but an extra spam channel - when the rare meaningful message does get sent, it’s hard to discern from among the noise, at more danger of being batch-deleted as a false negative than anything in my Inbox.
(What this indicates to me, incidentally, is something wonderful: that people are so manifold and multiple that the mere fact of friendship with someone is a remarkably poor predictor of affinity for that person’s own friends. At least the people I seem to know. Walt Whitman would be delighted.)
He sweetly points to us as experts on the YASNS penomenon, but of course the best stuff here is us pointing to writing like this…
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Posted by Nancy White
I’m excited to share that Jenny Ambrozek and Joe Cothrel’s report on the Online Communities in Business survey is now on the web. I was thrilled to be able to spend time with them in June to talk about the report and really anxious to share it out to my network. The full pdf report is here. Jenny and Joe are also hosting a wiki for reader feedback and to gather more insights and information. I encourage you to chime in. There are instructions on the report website on how to request access to the wiki.
Here is the intro:
It has been 25 years since online community found its humble beginnings via the first computer bulletin board. Since then, much attention has focused on the impact on society. But how have online communities affected business?
From February to May 2004, we conducted an online survey of people involved in, or deeply knowledgeable about, online community efforts in large organizations around the world. This survey was conducted in concert with the 7th International Conference on Virtual Communities, the largest and oldest annual gathering of its kind. I have had some time to chew on the initial data and am now savoring the full report. It had both many things I expected as a practitioner, and a few surprises. The optimism of the value of online interaction (I tend to use the word community a little more sparingly!) is validated in what I see in my practice, and the familiar problems are VERY familiar: challenges with effectively measuring ROI and still a limited or non-existant understanding of online groups and communities.
I’ll post a fuller review tomorrow (work calls!) but I really wanted to get the news out and spreading - so I’m blogging to do my part! However, there is one piece I want to dangle out front.
The challenge the report delivers me is around the final issue noted by Joe and Jenny on page 4: “The discipline of creating and managing communities is poorly defined.” That is something I, and WE can do something about. How can we contribute?
(Also posted on Full Circle Blog)
Edited on August 10th to fix typo.
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August 6, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
An app to take your del.icio.us tags and turn them into a mindmap:
You can see the mind map of my recent links here: delicious_mind/ (note: loads Java applet and takes a little while). The online version lets you fold and unfold categories; click on or near the little red arrow to follow the named link; click on the node to fold and unfold it. Using the Freemind application, you can add icons (I’ve tweaked the mind map file with a single icon, called the “neato” icon, on the python category), color and resize nodes and edges, do all kinds of things to organize , link, and accentuate the various items in your mind map.
It’s not social software yet, as it does tags-by-user, but not yet users-by-tag or tags-by-user-group, but its more informative than the for-decoration-only extisp.icio.us, and the group-oriented updates seem both obvious and easy. Slowly, slowly we’re getting the visual tools needed to characterize groups…
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Posted by Clay Shirky
A young woman best described as livejournal user manque started using the free journal service over at perl.org to ruminate out loud about her life. On LJ, she would have enjoyed the privacy of the mall, but on perl.org, she stuck out so dramatically that the perl hackers accused her of being a bot. (As a friend of mine said, the goal of any true programmer is to fail the Turing test…)
Some of the denizens of perl.org suggested she should stay and learn perl, but some kind soul pointed her to LJ, to which she decamped.
im sorry for the inmconvenience i had no idea what this site was about and merely used it as a journal to write my thoughts down. im deeply sorry if i scared anyone and you odnt have to worry im leaving this site for good and ill never bother you again. once again i did not do this on purpose forgive me. im now on livejournal im sorry! i had no idea i just thought this was a site for writing a journal. sorry
I call this the hermit crab pattern, where the occupant of a social space is a differnet kind of creature than the one the space was designed for. I first came across this when there was a group of middle-aged women using the ultra-hip word.com bulletin boards as a kind of online kaffeeklatsch. (Prodigy users manque.)
This pattern is at least part of the answer to tech-determinism — the software doesn’t actually program what goes on in it; context and contrast are such strong human forces, they overwhelm the simple technical affordances and limitations. use.perl.org runs slashcode, which also runs slashdot — not only is the perl community quite different than the slashdot community, but our friend the livejournal user to be was different from the perl community as well.
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Posted by Nancy White
After seeing so many social network analysis tidbits, resources and news fly by his eyes, Andy Swarrick generously took the plunge to start a SNA resource website. (Caveat: now that I’m back from vacation and work travel, I’m in massive catch up mode and have not read into the site too far).
I did enjoy reading the first bit, The 5 Ages of a Networker. I’m “Net Aware” and interested in moving forward. (The 5 are: Network Newbie, Net Aware, Net Enthusiast, Net Head, Network Guru).
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August 5, 2004
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Franz Dill posts on Printing, Uniformity, Optimism at the IFTF blog, extracts a fascinating passage on Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation on the influence of the emergence of printing during that time:
…Printing, which produced multiple identical copies of a text, encouraged a familiarity with uniformity, very different from the individuality of a manuscript. That in turn was able to produce a sense of how significant it was when differences occurred: Uniformity, paradoxically put a premium on individuality. A culture based on manuscripts is conscious of the fragility of knowledge, and the need to preserve it. A priority must be to keep it secure simply to avoid the physical destruction of a single precious source, and that fosters an attitude that guards rather than spreads knowledge…. a manuscript culture is going to believe very readily in decay … because copying knowledge from one manuscript to another is a very literal source of corruption. This is much less obvious in the print medium: Optimism may be the mood rather than pessimism … (p. 71)
Printing influencing the form of ideas? How might the ability to cross link on the web, to blog and comment, to transfer memes readily have on our modes of thought?
When information is abundant, copying common but maliable, and with varying sources at any point on the planet — it may be that pessimissm similar to the manuscript era rules the day. The pace of change having quickened also reduces our trust in information.
But what may be different from the manuscript or printing eras is our involvement in the media itself. If information is corrupted, links correct. If its outdated, we edit. I’d suggest, perhaps blinded by my own participation and use, that the form of our media and how we script it gives cause for optimism.
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August 3, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Great tip in the comments — making Safari read a .css file with textarea { width: 400px; height: 500px } in it force-resizes it to something you can imagine writing in. I like both MT and Wordpress better already.
Lots of other good user recommendations.
...continue reading.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Great post from Peter Merholz, by way of Ross, on the way pedestrians in the aggregate work out where the paths should be on the grounds of UC Berkeley. This “they built the quad but didn’t lay the sidewalks” story has been an urban legend for years, its great to see someone documenting it, and making such an important point about the aggregate intelligence of your users in the process:
For some reason, Berkeley would rather spend it’s money reinforcing it’s poor landscape architecture with barriers and re-sodding, then recognizing that the paths suggest a valuable will of the people.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Jason Calacanis discovers that Fark has been selling story placement on their front page and calls them on it, getting a priceless quote from Fark management in the process:
I don’t think that either Drew or I are willing to engage in a discussion regarding the business ethics of our decision
However, if you look at any news source, they are influenced by PR agencies, wine & dine’s and similar events. Take a look at the Graydon Carter as example #1. I challenge you to find a pure editorial voice in news today.
I assume what the Fark rep means is “Everyone who takes money to publish sells their independence”, itself an arguable assertion, but even if that were true, you’d think anyone publishing on the Web would have noticed the arrival of, oh, 4 or 5 million non-commercial sites in the last few years, no?
Worse, they talk a good game about the inevitability of money-for-links, but they sure never bothered to let their readers in on it.
On a related note (cluelessness among people trying to manipulate social media being our grand theme here), I got mail from someone asking if I would be interested in talking to company X, who makes a revolutionary firewall and dessert topping? Normally I delete stupid PR mail like that the minute I see it, but I’d gotten mail from this source a couple of times recently, so I hit reply to ask to be taken off his list, and his email address was PayPerClipPR.com.
I really couldn’t believe it — here was a PR person writing to ask me to do a story on his company (which I have never done in ten years of writing about the net), and his email address announced that his compensation was directly tied to the number of clips he could get run on behalf of his client. The unstable stance of asking a favor while broadcasting contempt left me a little disoriented.
If three is the official number to declare a trend, I say Fark, PayPerClipPR.com and Change This (bonus meme accelerator: Friendster sells character placement from the movie Anchorman) mean that the Game Social Media for Extractive Value pattern, already bad with comment spam, is going to get much worse.
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August 2, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
Mimi Ito wrote an interesting introduction to the ways mobile devices change urban gatherings, including two themes especially near and dear to my heart. First, the ways coordination replaces planning:
Mobile phones have revolutionized the experience of arranging meetings in urban space. In the past, landmarks and pre-arranged times were the points that coordinated action and convergence in urban space. People would decide on a particular place and time to meet, and converge at that time and place. I recall hours spent at landmarks such as Hachiko Square in Shibuya or Roppongi crossing, making occasional forays to a payphone to check for messages at home or at a friend’s home. Now teens and twenty-somethings generally do not set a fixed time and place for a meeting. Rather, they initially agree on a general time and place (Shibuya, Saturday late afternoon), and exchange approximately 5 to 15 messages that progressively narrow in on a precise time and place, two or more points eventually converging in a coordinated dance through the urban jungle. As the meeting time nears, contact via messaging and voice becomes more concentrated, eventually culminating in face-to-face contact.
and then the way that mediated and unmediated conversations can now take place among a group at the same time:
In other cases, mobile messages are used to contact a recipient just out of visual range or unavailable for voice contact. Messaging during class or lectures gets around the limitations on private voice contact. “Hey, look. The teacher buttoned his shirt wrong.” “This class sucks.” Another example from one of our informants was when she was standing in a long line for a bus and saw her friend near the front of the line. She sent her a message to look behind her so that she could see her and wave. In other cases, students have described how they will message their friends upon entering a large lecture hall to ask where they are sitting.
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August 1, 2004
Posted by Clay Shirky
There’s a new weblog on the subject of networked performance, covering among other things, the Big Games pattern of Uncle Roy and Pacmanhattan.
I love this pattern of work, of course, but can’t wholeheartedly recommend this weblog as an addition to your RSS feed, because of the high risk of pretentious claptrap. (One current post notes that the performers “intervene” in an online game, without even trying to describe what that intervention might be.) The art world has a love-hate relationship with game designers, because the game people have a far greater social reach, but infuriate the art world by caring more about whether things are fun than whether they are illustrative of theory — expect to see that played out here.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Off-topic Lazyweb-ish rant: Why, with the rise of the writeable web, are browsers still stuck in this “Go to a page, get what you want, go to the next page” mentality? Tabbed browsing means I have 3-4 windows and between 15 and 20 tabs open, with some individual tabs open for days at a time. Partly as cause and partly as effect of tabs, the amount of writing and annotating I do in browser-mediated environments — weblogs, wikis, bulletin boards, even tagging del.icio.us links — already high, is rising still further.
So why, when my browser crashes or I re-start, do I not just get every URL that was open at the time of the crash? Why, when I accidently reload or close a window with a form in it, do I lose the content of the form? And why can’t I undo edits in the form field? Can it really be 2004 and there is an app with an installed base in the hundreds of millions that doesn’t support Undo?
...continue reading.
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Posted by Clay Shirky
Joey deVilla is speculating that breaking up by email, usually on the part of the guy (is that redundant? I wonder if anyone has even collected the stats?) is the result of exposure to office-mediated communications, and especially Powerpoint.
He goes on to detail the next obvious move:
As a counter-note, though, some months ago there was a piece on breaking up by SMS, suggesting that the rise of mediated breakups in relationships may be an effect of the rist of mediated communication in relationships generally.
(Tangent: After years of relationships conducted in part through emotionally laden email, chat, and even coded posts in public fora, when I began dating my wife, I made a conscious decision to put nothing in mail more fraught than places and times to meet. The fact that we are now married and have two kids means that this method is sure-fire, based on a sample size of 1.)
(Tangent 2: Was talking to Matt Jones, who sends his fiance messages through his choice of del.icio.us links, as she knows she’s subscribed to him. More proof, as if any were needed, that the human condition affects everything it touches.)
(Tangent 3: The Group Hug site for online confessions specifically tries to filter out posts that attempt to set up user-to-user communication, showing how hard people will try to respond to one another, even in a site designed solely for one-way, one-time use. Curious that they call it Group Hug, since they are intentionally disabling any mediated analog to a real group hug…)
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