I’m completely fascinated by Twitter right now—in much the same way I was by blogging four years ago, and by ICQ years before that.

If you haven’t tried it yet, Twitter is a site that allows you to post one-line messages about what you’re currently doing—via the web interface, IM, or SMS. You can limit who sees the messages to people you’ve explicitly added to your friends list, or you can make the messages public. (My Twitter posts are private, but my friend Joi’s are public.)

What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage—personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages—into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

The big “P” word in technology these days is “participatory.” But I’m increasingly convinced that a more important “P” word is “presence.” In a world where we’re seldom able to spend significant amounts of time with the people we care about (due not only to geographic dispersion, but also the realities of daily work and school commitments), having a mobile, lightweight method for both keeping people updated on what you’re doing and staying aware of what others are doing is powerful.

I’ve experimented a bit with a visual form of this lightweight presence indication, through cameraphone photos taken while traveling. A photo of a boarding gate sign, or of a hotel entrance, conveys where I am and what I’m doing quickly and easily. But that only works if people are near a computer and are watching my Flickr photo feed, and that’s a lot to ask.

I also use IM status messages to broadcast what I’m doing. My iChat has a stack of custom messages that I’ve saved for re-use, from “packing” and “at the airpot” to “breaking up sibling squabbles” and “grading…the horror! the horror!” But status messages have no permanence to them, and require some degree of synchronicity—people have to be logged into IM, and looking at status messages, while I’m there. Because Twitter archives your messages on the web (and can send them as SMS that you can check at any time), that requirement for synchronous connections goes away.

Blogs allow this kind of archived update, of course—but they’re not lightweight. Where one might easily post a Twitter message along the lines of “on my way to work”, a blog post like that wouldn’t be worth the effort and overhead.

I’ve heard two kinds of criticisms of Twitter already.

The first criticizes the triviality of the content. But asking “who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day” misses the whole point of presence. This isn’t about conveying complex theory—it’s about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you’re doing. And we crave this, I think. When I travel, the first thing I ask the kids on the phone when I call home is “what are you doing?” Not because I really care that much about the show on TV, or the homework they’re working on, but because I care about the rhythms and activities of their days. No, most people don’t care that I’m sitting in the airport at DCA, or watching a TV show with my husband. But the people who miss being able to share in day-to-day activity with me—family and close friends—do care.

The second type of criticism is that the last thing we need is more interruptions in our already discontinuous and partially attentive connected worlds. What’s interesting to me about Twitter, though, is that it actually reduces my craving to surf the web, ping people via IM, and cruise Facebook. I can keep a Twitter IM window open in the background, and check it occasionally just to see what people are up to. There’s no obligation to respond, which I typically feel when updates come from individuals via IM or email. Or I can just check my text messages or the web site when I feel like getting a big picture of what my friends are up to.

Which then leads to one of the aspects of Twitter that I find most fascinating—exploring clusters of loosely related people by looking at the updates from their friends. There are stories told in between updates. Who’s at a conference, and do they know each other? Who’s on the road, and who’s at home. Narratives that wind around and between the updates and the people, that show connections. Updates that echo each other, or even directly respond to another Twitter post.

There’s more to it than that, but I’m still sorting it all out in my head. Just wanted to post an early-warning signal that I see something important happening here, something worth paying (more than partial) attention to.

(cross-posted from mamamusings; since comments have been unreliable here, any comments can be posted there)

Is this a reasonable statement to make?

• Tagging is the process of adding descriptive terms to an item, without the constraint of a controlled vocabulary
• Folksonomy is the aggregation of tags from one or more users

Yes? No?

(Full disclosure: You’re helping me prepare for a tutorial on folksonomies that I’m presenting at the CSCW conference in Banff this weekend.)

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Update: Over on mamamusings, one commenter raised the issue of whether a folksonomy requires multiple items to be tagged.

Can a folksonomy exist around a single item (e.g. a del.icio.us bookmark)?

My assumption has always been that a folksonomy involved tags for multiple items…but perhaps it’s a set of tags describing multiple items, ora set of tags from multiple users, or both.

While preparing for a panel on “Blogs, Wikis, MMORPGs, and YASNS: Shaking Up Traditional Education” at the Milken Institute Global Conference, I stumbled across Fred Stutzman’s post “How University Administrators Should Approach the Facebook: Ten Rules.” Great stuff. I particularly liked #9:

Since you can’t make Facebook go away, and even if you tried to, you couldn’t, you might as well accept it and deal with it. The fact of the matter is that students need to understand the long view, and they need to understand the importance of the written record. They’ve spent their entire lives online, and they are completely comfortable posting information about themselves online. Now that they’re 18, economic motivations step in, and it is our obligation and duty to protect them. Telling them not to say anything controversial, or forcing them to use privacy settings just won’t cut it - remember, the students who are on the Facebook want to be found and listened to. What they need to understand is the context. They have to understand the need to act now on behalf of the person they’ll be in 4 or 5 or 6 years. Give them that context. Explain to them the value of maintaining a self-image they can be proud of down the road. Work with them on this, not against them - it may be your only chance.

That advice should be going to parents and teachers, as well—not just administrators. Thinking about the “long view” of these media—blogs, wiki editing history, social network site profiles—is a skill that we need to be teaching kids.

[Editorial Note: The following letter, which is also being posted on the Terra Nova weblog, is not intended to be seen as an “official stance” of either TerraNova or Many-to-Many. It is simply an open letter authored by a group of authors and scholars who also have affiliations with one or the other of these weblgogs.]

Open Letter to Blizzard Entertainment—Speech Policy for GLBT guilds in World of Warcraft

Recently, Sara Andrews, a player in Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (WoW) recruited for a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transexual (GLBT) Friendly guild in the general chat channel on the Shadowmoon server. She was reported to a Game Master by another player, and subsequently sanctioned for “Harassment – Sexual Orientation”. Under the Terms of Use of WoW, it is forbidden to transmit offensive material, including abusive or sexually explicit material.

Ms Andrews was given a warning not to undertake this again. She assumed this was a mistake, but Blizzard confirmed that the sanction and the punishment would stand. An official from Blizzard responded:

“To promote a positive game environment for everyone and help prevent such harassment from taking place as best we can, we prohibit mention of topics related to sensitive real-world subjects in open chat within the game, and we do our best to take action whenever we see such topics being broadcast. This includes openly advertising a guild friendly to players based on a particular political, sexual, or religious preference, to list a few examples. For guilds that wish to use such topics as part of their recruiting efforts, our Guild Recruitment forum, located at our community Web site, serves as one open avenue for doing so.”

As a result of public comments about this issue, Blizzard has reversed its decision and has privately communicated to Ms Andrews that no punishment will stem from this incident. It also has privately indicated that it is reviewing its sexual harassment policy. It has issued no public statement about the issue.

We write this letter as educators, journalists, writers and players interested in the development of virtual worlds like World of Warcraft. We congratulate Blizzard on the courage to rescind its initial decision, and urge it to make a formal announcement that they were wrong to make it. The decision to sanction and punish Ms Andrews was wrong as a narrow matter of interpretation, and as a general principle of policy for WoW and other virtual worlds.

Ted Castranova has a fascinating post up on Terra Nova entitled “The Horde is Evil,” in which he argues that the Horde races on World of Warcraft are “on the whole evil,” and that this has moral implications for avatar choices:

I’ve advanced two controversial positions: that avatar choice is not a neutral thing from the standpoint of personal integrity, and that the Horde, in World of Warcraft, is evil. Nobody agrees, but it’s been suggested that the community could chew on this a bit.

So here’s my view: When a real person chooses an evil avatar, he or she should be conscious of the evil inherent in the role. There are good reasons for playing evil characters - to give others an opportunity to be good, to help tell a story, to explore the nature of evil. But when the avatar is a considered an expression of self, in a social environment, then deliberately choosing a wicked character is itself a (modestly) wicked act.

I don’t agree with Castranova (my horde character is a Tauren, a peaceful bison-like creature that lives in a Native American-inspired cultural context), nor do many of the commenters—but the issues he brings up are powerful and interesting, and the lengthy discussion in the comments is well worth reading.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between “real life” and “game life,” since I have personal and/or professional relationships with most of the people in my World of Warcraft guild, including both of my children. Castranova’s argument, in which he bolsters his argument by citing his 3-year-old’s reaction to his undead character, relates directly to those boundary-crossing issues.

When I was playing online on Monday, Joi Ito said that he thought World of Warcraft was becoming the “new golf” for the technology set. I think there’s some truth in that, but it brings with it all kinds of additional social pressures and complexities, of which avatar racial choices are only the beginning. I think there’s some fertile ground for research in that boundary area, the crossover between the real and game worlds, and the extent to which they influence each other.

(cross-posted from mamamusings)

In the grand tradition of bar camp, web 2.01, and other creative, self-organizing tech events comes Seattle’s first Mind Camp. It will be held from noon on Saturday, November 5th through noon the following day.

Take a look at the sidebar to see the people already committed to being there—Chris Pirillo & Ponzi Indharasophang, Julie & Ted Leung, Beth Goza & Phil Torrone, Nancy White, Shelly Farnham…

(did you notice all the cool women on that list? w00t!)

Registration is open (and free), but the event is capped at 150—so act fast if you’re planning to attend.

See you there, I hope!

I’ve been planning to post an announcement here about an upcoming event in Seattle, but kept forgetting. (Well, that, and I tend to be reluctant to self-promote, but the organizers kept asking…) As a result, this is rather short notice.

This Wednesday night, I’ll be one of the panelists at an MIT Enterprise Forum dinner event titled “Two Degrees of Separation - How Social Network Technology is Connecting Us for Money, Jobs, and Love. It will take place at the Bellevue Hyatt. Doors open at 5:30, and there will be dinner and a chance to network with other attendees before the panel itself.

I’ll be joined on the podium by Konstantin Guericke, co-founder of LinkedIn, Bill Bryant, CEO of Mobile Operandi, and our moderator Mike Flynn, publisher of the Puget Sound Business Journal.

You can register online or at the door—the $40 price includes dinner, of course.

If you’re in the area, it would be lovely to see you there. Be sure to come say “hi”—it’s always nice to meet people who actually read the blog. :)

I was very disappointed not to be attending BlogHer, but I’m delighted to see the level of discourse that it has been generating online. That’s an excellent sign of a good conference, and was one of the stated goals of the organizers.

Among the post-conference posts that caught my eye was Mary Hodder’s discussion of creating a community-based algorithm to address some of the problems and frustration surrounding current blog “ranking” mechanisms (like the Technorati 100):

After 45 minutes of intense anger and frustration from many audience speakers in the room toward Technorati link counts and top 100, I suggested we create a community based algorithm, based on more complex social relationships than links. It’s something I’ve been working on for few months, trying to frame, about what this problem is and how we might solve it. But it’s a complex issue and I’m also busy. So it’s taken a while. However, my blog post is almost done, and I do plan to put it up in the next day or so.

I loved Halley Suitt’s comment about the Q&A sessions at the conference:

During Q&A — and this will shock you too — the people asking questions aren’t standing up to hog the mike and show off for the most part. The people at Blogher who asked questions actually wanted answers, wanted to be educated and were happy to be educated by anyone in the room who could educate them. The speakers deferred to others in the audience who could answer questions better than they could.

It reminded me of someone once telling me about an academic conference where an unoffical award was regularly given for “best statement phrased in the form of a question.” Anyone who goes to tech conferences (or academic conferences) is well aware of this phenomenon, where someone who believes they know more than the presenters steps up to “ask a question” but instead uses the microphone as their personal soapbox.

For a visual assessment of how Blogher was different, take a look at TW’s “Blogher Vs Gnomedex:

There was one thing I really wanted to comment on. Look at the pictures on Flickr tagged Gnomedex vs those tagged for Blogher. These are totally different sorts of pictures. Pictures of PowerPoint projections at Gnomedex. Pictures of women, their FACES at BlogHer. (as opposed to the backs of heads at Gnomedex. It speaks to what women value.

Particularly gratifying to me is the fact that it’s not just the women who are talking about the conference and its participants. I loved this post from Christopher Carfi, who attended the conference. Here’s an excerpt:

This problem has deep roots, and a number of them. How did it come to pass that “number of links” became a surrogate for “quality?” It’s a result of a number of factors that lie in the technical underpinnings of how we currently “discover” new things online, namely PageRank and related algorithms. If a lot of people link to something it must be good, right? Well…sort of. The concept of “a link is a vote” is a blunt instrument.

Read the whole post. It’s good stuff.

And finally, Evelyn Rodriguez has a great roundup of quotes and highlights from the conference, including this great observation:

Although Marc’s heart is in the right place, his suggestion that BlogHers create our own list, our own companies and tell the guys to fuck off…is ultimately simply playing the game by the same old (tired, not wired) rules. (Guys aren’t the real issue; it’s the metaphors we unconsciously live by, the worldviews embedded in the games.) Marc’s Implicit Assumption much like August issue of Wired: You only change the world when you are on a list. You only change the world when you are heading a company. Bigger is better. Louder is more impactful. Celebrity matters.

Go forth and read the posts I’ve linked to, and the posts they link to, and the posts that link to them. Scan the blogher tag in del.icio.us. Don’t just dip your toes into the stream of conversation. Plunge in, and learn. There’s a lot being said that’s worth listening to.

Gotta love a setup like this. Korby Parnell frames his recent discussions with me about the backchannel this way:

Liz Lawley me on my indignant, gut-level reaction to back, back channels: those secret cabals where the “popular kids” congregate in virtual space to bitch and bemoan the sophomoric inadequacies of everyone else. Liz, I’m holding my ground: social software should enable, but not by default, the creation of back, back channels. IMO, the back, back channel is as anti-social as it is social. This issue is very relevant to a project I’m working on… When you and your family make the move to Redmond ;-), we should meet at Victor’s Coffee or on campus to debate this issue in greater detail. Congratulations on your new job! JFYI, as a member of the Redmond Planning Commission I will be happy to provide as much information as you’d like in deciding whether to locate here, especially with regards to neighborhoods, parks, schools, natural features, and planned development, both now and 20 years into the future.

My response: Huh?! The “popular kids” in whose book? (If you’re talking about last year’s MS symposium, some the people in that back-back-channel were among the least well-known of the participants.) By whose account did you determine that the people in the backchannel “bitch and bemoan the sophomoric inadequacies” of their colleagues? (Probably not anyone who’s actually participated in one.) Gol-lee, I wouldn’t like a place like that either, Korby. (And you know that!)

You’re setting up a straw man here. You’re assuming that private is necessarily elitist, and that anything people don’t want made public is necessarily mean-spirited. At the symposium, I asked you why you saw IRC as different from other contexts where people can break off into smaller, private groups. Are private, friends-only LiveJournals (which are as easily enabled in LJ as “back-back-channels” are in IRC) something you find as distasteful? Are a group of friends sitting together at a dinner elitist? Should we assume that if two people walk out into the hallway to talk that they’re bitching and moaning about the sophomoric inadequacies of those they left behind?

Of course people can use IRC to say mean things about each other. They can also use IM, email, hand-written notes, and whispers to do the same. So, why does this particular technology evoke such a strong reaction? (Not just in Korby, but in many people I’ve spoken to.) That in and of itself is something worth understanding.

(An up-front disclaimer: Korby is smart and funny and delightful to spend time with, and I’m not trying to pick a fight here any more than I was at the symposium!)

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5/4 Update: Let me clarify that what Korby is talking about is not the public, open backchannel that’s increasingly becoming available at conferences and symposia. He’s talking about side conversations that break off from the main group, and that aren’t publicized. He feels that the software should “announce” private meetings that form in that way, and I disagreed. There’s value in allowing people to meet and talk privately, I think, and “calling them out” by default strikes me as invasive. I’m also troubled by the underlying assumption that private is more likely to be negative or “anti-social” than public.

I spoke last month at the National Voluntary Health Associations Innovations Conference on social network media, a conference organized by Randal Moss of the American Cancer Society. Randal did a great job, and I really enjoyed participating.

Once I returned home, however, I discovered that I had suddenly been added to the “KM Cluster” mailing list. The reason? John Maloney from Colabria (hmmm…I’m starting to like the nofollow thing already…), another of the speakers at the conference, had added my email address to mailing lists used to advertise books and upcoming workshops. In fact, my name was added twice three times; once with the address on my card, once with the address provided to attendees as part of the participant list, and once with the form of my address that often appears in my return address.

This isn’t the first time someone has done this—taken my contact information from a conference attendee list and put me on a mailing list without my permission. And it drives me totally nuts. To me, that’s a serious breach of conference etiquette, one that will drive people to stop providing their contact information to new acquaintances.

When I complained, politely, to John, he informed me that I could simply follow “common practice” and click the “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of the messages. But as many of you know, that’s often a tool used by spammers to determine whether the email addresses they’re using are legitimate. It’s not, and shouldn’t be, “common practice” to have to opt out of a mailing list that you never chose to be added to.

I’ve also received a spate of messages from Plaxo recently, asking me to update my information so that the person using the system—typically someone I don’t even remember meeting—doesn’t have to go to any personal trouble to ask for my current contact details.

Feh.

I’m sick of acquaintance spam. It’s not that I’m not willing to be contacted by people I don’t already know. It’s just that I think it should be a personal contact. Don’t add me to a mailing list without asking me. Don’t set up an automated system to harass me for contact info. (Plaxo even sends a “I noticed you didn’t respond to my earlier request” message if you try to ignore it!) This strikes me as such a basic rule of etiquette, whether the contact is personal or professional. Relationships begin with and are maintained through personal interactions. Don’t screw them up by trusting them to software.

Update: John Maloney has responded via email to this post. He feels I’ve misrepresented him, and wants me to “correct” the post. Read on for his take on this….

This year, two tech conferences directly related to social computing—SXSW and Etech—were scheduled so close together that many of us with an interest in these topics had to choose between the two. Clay and David and Ross are at ETech. danah and I were at SXSW.

Why did I choose SXSW? The biggest factor for me was the gender balance. Increasingly, I’m finding that I want to be in places where there are women I respect and enjoy to spend time with. It changes the nature of the conference experience for me. I feel more at ease, more relaxed, more like I belong.

This year’s Etech is perhaps the least diverse yet. Of the twenty featured speakers on the main page, one is a woman, and none are people of color.

At SXSW, in contrast, strong and wonderful women were everywhere. I don’t recall seeing a single all-male panel. When I hung out in the hotel bar, my companions were mostly women. When I went to the evening parties, everywhere I looked there were other women.

Three of my co-authors here on misbehaving—Gina Trapani, danah boyd, and Caterina Fake—were there. Fabulous women like Molly Steenson and Molly Holzschlag and MJ Kim and Cecily Walker Kidd and Adina Levin and Mary Hodder were there. Not all the faces were male. Not all of them were caucasian. The voices were rich and varied. The vibe was open and warm. There were more conversations than there were pontifications. (SXSW doesn’t call panel participants “speakers,” either, which I like. We’re panelists. A subtle distinction, but one that makes a difference.)

Many of the topics being covered at ETech are things I’m interested in. Ideally, I would have gone to both. But O’Reilly made a decision to move ETech up this year and place it in competition with SXSW—splitting the audience and forcing too many of us to have to make a choice. For me, conferences are far less about the presentations and far more about the people and the connections. And I chose SXSW because it offers me a far richer environment for those connections than ETech.

I’m reminded of a quote from Tom Melcher, formerly of there.com, that I use often in presentations: “If you build a place that women love, the men will follow. The reverse is not true.” Perhaps more conference organizers need to take that line to heart.

(Update: David Weinberger posted about why he’s at ETech, and an interesting dicussion about the gender balance there is brewing in the comments of his post.)

(Update 2: Trolls will be disemvowelled. Keep it civil, please.)

Daniel Pink starts out this session by saying that he’s giving the whole audience a copy of his new book A Whole New Mind. The publisher won’t let him sell copies ‘til next week, but he can give them away…and he wants the buzz that SXSW attendees can generate. Very smart!

Says that brevity, levity, and repetition are key to good talks. (And my snap judgment here? He’s an entertaining and interesting speaker.)

His key thesis is that the future no longer belongs to analytical professionals—the linear, logical knowledge people (the “SAT people,” he calls them, pointing to his article in today’s USA Today on the SATs). It belongs instead to creators and empathizers.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a metaphor can be worth a thousand pictures. Talks about the hemispheres of the brain—left vs right hemisphere. The future belongs to the right hemisphere—wholistic, empathic, big picture.

This is the talk I’ve been looking forward to for months, but I’m a bit worried. How could the talk live up to the book(s)? That’s quite a challenge.

Gladwell opens with a story from his latest book, Blink, about a woman auditioning for the Munich philharmonic, not realizing that the director really only wants men. She auditions from behind a screen, and thinks she’s done terribly. She’s despondent, begins to leave for Italy. Audition is a classic example of a snap judgement—the maestro has already decided that she is the new first trombonist of his orchestra. When she’s introduced to him, he’s astonished to find that she’s a woman.

(Turns out that Gladwell is as wonderful a storyteller in person as he is in his book. Maybe better. This talk is worth the trip to Austin.)

Unfortunately, two of the original three speakers for this panel—Stewart Butterfield and Peter Merholz —couldn’t make it today. Jeff Veen is moderating, and Tantek Çelik, Don Turnbull, and Thomas VanDerWal are the participants.

Jeff Veen starts by framing the context, since the title is…well…somewhat oblique. He points out that tools that help us manage information are becoming more socially aware. del.icio.us, for example, which allows you to discover people as well as information, and to discover information based on people rather than simply topics. Last year social networks were all the rage; but he felt that tools like Friendster were like yearbooks—fun and useful for showing off who you know, but that’s a short term activity that doesn’t sustain long term interest. It gains ongoing attraction once you add in the kind of value-added media that tools like Flickr (and, I’d add, last.fm) provide.

He makes an important observation—what’s most interesting here is the blending of public and private. That needs more elaboration, I think it’s a key concept. He also talks about the need for more interoperability between these systems. Can travelocity, for example, know where he is and share that information in useful ways with other systems I’m on (like flickr, for instance).

Thomas VanDerWal is up first, and discusses personal views of information. Too much online information is ephemeral—so we end up emailing things to ourselves, copy and pasting into new documents and losing context. We need a way to get back to information we’ve seen. (Reminds me of Microsoft Research’s “stuff I’ve seen” approach to searching.)

He says that we “get lost early” in the information around us, and ask how we can get to “findability” in our own information spaces? del.icio.us, for example, allows us to name things in ways that make sense to us. But how do you tie different personalities together? How do we jump between disciplinary vocabulary boundaries?

Our current tools don’t support us well. (His slide is titled “that synching feeling”) Synchronization frequently makes mistakes and overwrites inappropriately. We need a “mothership of information” to tie together our various devices and collections of information.

How do we build a “personal infocloud”? Many requirements. It has to be portable (or ubiquitous), the access appropriate to the context, organized in a way that makes sense to the user in the context they’re in.

External storage and management is important. We need smarter aggregation, attention.xml for everything on your own hard drive as well as the online sources we’re following. What’s important? What should I be focused on? Need standard formats for being able to pull information in and organize it. Aggregation only works when information is in a recognizable format.

(“Unbolding” as a constant activity; great term.)

The next speaker is Don Turnbull from UT Austin’s School of Information. He opens with a great line: “I’m from the university, and I’m here to help.” Launches into an interesting discussion of tagging and folksonomy issues.

Turnbull poses some key questions related to folksonomies:

• How do you get people to cooperate?
• How good can the tags be? Can you find things you wouldn’t have found? but more interesting, can you browse through categories you never would have thought of (like the “me” tag, or “whatsinyourbag”)
• Is there a point where we stop tagging? where we feel we don’t need to tell the system anything else about us? (for example, he himself has tagged thousands of movies on netflix “mostly because I go to a lot of faculty meetings and we have wireless access…”; is there any point in tagging more?)
• What about changing interests? You buy a gift for someone on amazon, and your recommendations are skewed towards it for a while. How can you tell recommender systems “I’m not interested in that any more?” [my note: last.fm handles this pretty well]
• There are still lots of people not using these systems; this is a small slice of the information world

He raises some issues related to tagging, as well, such as the potential for spamming and gaming, the inherently explicit nature of tags (not always a good thing), and the value of tags being easy-to-parse and analyze plain text.

Then he moves on to social and community issues related to tagging and sharing of data:

• Who controls the sharing? And who controls those controls??
• anonymity vs community (and privacy issues related to this)
• free riders—people who never tag, just browse
• what constitutes a community? are personal relationships necessary? do they grow out of the information sharing, or define with whom you share information?

(Ack! I want his slides! I’m missing a lot!)

Talks about all the implicit metadata that could be added to explicit tags, such as “i bought this,” “i own this,” dwell time, clicks, chatter, etc.

He ends with the concept of “don’t fence me in” - we need tag mobility across systems, (flickr, email box names, amazon ratings), a common api for tags, and the ability to move between desktop and server-based views of our data.

The last speaker is Tantek Çelik from Technorati. This is a much less theoretical, much more “look at our cool Technorati tags” presentation.

He says “Anybody can be their own delicious.” — But this misses the point, I think. the value of delicious isn’t just your own bookmarks or even your own tags, it’s the collaborative filtering and discovery. He says that technorati’s approach allows you to own your own data—but the user owns his or her own data on server-based sites, too; it’s easy to import/export and backup. The value to me is in cross-user data, and new ways of thinking about things.

A questioner mentions open space technology—how can we do that virtually? How can we extend the conversation in this room beyond the borders. Panel member (can’t see who) says “that’s why I maintain a blog.”

Tantek says that things like using the technorati tag for sxsw2005 in a blog entry provides “unprecedented” aggregation, but this is exactly what trackback provides. O’Reilly did this last year by allowing people to trackback to conference session pages.

A few more questions, and I’m off to eat. I’m starved! More later from the Malcolm Gladwell keynote this afternoon.

(A meta comment about sxsw: it’s hard to get called on to ask a question; that’s where IRC really helps, but it’s surprisingly underutilized here. Too bad.)

I arrived at SXSW/Interactive last night, and am starting the conference today with Eric Meyer’s talk on “Emergent Semantics.”

He starts with a laugh line—that his talk’s title is “so buzzword-compliant it almost makes me sick.” Then goes on to say that this is a fancy way of saying ground-up, grassroots, evolutionary semantics. “Semantics” (I’m uncomfortable with this use of the noun form; I think perhaps he’s talking about semantic relationships) are created on an ad-hoc basis, and evolve over time.

He talks about microformats for solving specific problems, generally expressing a human-understandable semantic definition using xhtml markup (e.g. rel=nofollow). Then he uses the example of colleges paving well-worn walkways (“pave the cow paths”). Acknowledges that there’s an opposing view, but dismisses it as wrong. But I’m not sure that “herd mentality” always derives the best possible answer. (It’s not hard to find examples to support my concerns in current politics…) I think he should acknowledge that there’s a need for deriving patterns from trusted networks, not just global populations.

The specific examples he provides include not only nofollow, but also CC license link annotation, and XHTML Friends Network (XFN) “metrolling,” Technorati “VoteLinks,” and hCard.

I’m baffled by the lack of discussion of folksonomy in the context of emergent semantics. That’s genuinely emergent, as opposed to the examples being provided here. Most of these strike me not as emergent, but top-down, created and implemented by a relatively small group of people; the fact that they’re not coming from a standards organization doesn’t make them any less deterministic.

Why the emphasis on “met”—this strikes me as a not particularly useful thing. And it prioritizes geographic proximity and, to a large extent, wealth. If you can’t afford to travel to conferences, you become excluded from the “met” network, and marginalized if that becomes a significant factor in trust.

Ah…a brief reference to what he’s calling “free tagging,” but goes back to Technorati, saying that rel=”tag” provides a necessary definition of tagging. But why should Technorati be defining meaning in this space? Again, that’s the antithesis of emergence.

An audience member asks about how to make large collections more accessible (like library books). This is exactly where free tagging makes so much sense, but he goes back to seeing this as a format construction issue.

Seems my post on folksonomic flaws is getting a lot of reading. Now that I’ve had a chance to sleep on it, and read other people’s comments (including the del.icio.us annotations, which I often find interesting—given only a line or two to comment, what will people pull out?), I’ve had a few more thoughts on the issue.

One of the things that I’ve tried to emphasize every time I’ve talked to people involved with search engines is the growing uselessness of ranking algorithms that take the search and linking habits of the whole world into account. I don’t want to know what the average eight-year-old calls an image. I want to know what my friends and colleagues call an image. Or a link. Or a photo.

Flickr and del.icio.us work so well for me not because they aggregte the world’s tags, but because they allow me to aggregate my social network’s tags, links, and photos. I don’t want to see everybody’s links on productivity, but I do want to see Merlin Mann’s. I don’t want to see everybody’s links on blogging, but I do want to see danah’s. I don’t want to see “research” resources from a molecular biologist, but I do want to see them from a sociologist studying online social networks.

Seb alludes to this is in his response to my piece. We need multiple ways to get at content. Global tagging and aggregation is great if you’re a non-expert trying to find resources on a subject where you don’t know the jargon. But what I want are tools that let me tap into my trusted network. That’s why the del.icio.us inbox is such a beloved tool, and it’s why I suspect that far more people on Flickr look at photos from their contacts than photos from everybody.

It takes me back to voice and authority again. This is why anonymous wikis are inherently problematic for me. It matters to me who wrote something. The more specialized your information needs, the more important trust and reputation and authority become. And while I value collective authority and reputation, in most information-seeking contexts I value it more when that collective is one that I’ve chosen, or that has self-selected around a specific topic or concern.

So, if my del.icio.us inbox is any indication, the blogosphere has been abuzz lately with opinions and commentary on “folksonomy.” It’s interesting stuff, no doubt, especially for those of us who come to social computing from a library and information science background.

Unfortunately, too many of the paeans to tagging that I’ve read have completely ignored some of the key social and cultural issues associated with public and collaborative labeling of content, opting instead for a level of technology-driven optimism that I see as overly naive. I think folksonomy has incredible value—the two web sites that I use most heavily right now are Flickr and del.icio.us. And I understand that this is something that can’t be stuffed back into the bottle. Nonetheless, I don’t think that means we have to accept it with an uncritical eye, or adopt every new implementation of tagging without consideration.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a new report on blogging (PDF) yesterday, with some remarkable numbers:

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

Tony Hammond from Nature Publishing Group just sent me a pointer to an article he wrote with two colleagues entitled “The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web,” which was published in this month’s D-Lib Magazine (“a solely electronic publication with a primary focus on digital library research and development, including but not limited to new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues”).

Here’s the introduction to the paper:

RSS is one of a new breed of technologies that is contributing to the ever-expanding dominance of the Web as the pre-eminent, global information medium. It is intimately connected with—though not bound to—social environments such as blogs and wikis, annotation tools such as del.icio.us [1], Flickr [2] and Furl [3], and more recent hybrid utilities such as JotSpot [4], which are reshaping and redefining our view of the Web that has been built up and sustained over the last 10 years and more [n1]. Indeed, Tim Berners-Lee’s original conception of the Web [5] was much more of a shared collaboratory than the flat, read-only kaleidoscope that has subsequently emerged: a consumer wonderland, rather than a common cooperative workspace. Where did it all go wrong?

These new ‘disruptive’ technologies [n2] are now beginning to challenge the orthodoxy of the traditional website and its primacy in users’ minds. The bastion of online publishing is under threat as never before. RSS is the very antithesis of the website. It is not a ‘home page’ for visitors to call at, but rather it provides a synopsis, or snapshot, of the current state of a website with simple titles and links. While titles and links are the joints that articulate an RSS feed, they can be freely embellished with textual descriptions and richer metadata annotations. Thus said, RSS usually functions as a signal of change on a distant website, but it can more generally be interpreted as a kind of network connector—or glue technology—between disparate applications. Syndication and annotation are the order of the day and are beginning to herald a new immediacy in communications and information provision. This paper describes the growing uptake of RSS within science publishing as seen from Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG) [6] perspective.

It gos on to provide an excellent overview of what RSS and syndication are and how they work, as well as relevant uses and implications for publishing. Well worth a read.

I’ve been reading about last.fm and Audioscrobbler for a few months now, and was intrigued by what I’d heard. But I didn’t totally understand it, and I didn’t have time to explore it—the last thing I needed during these last couple of months was another computer-based time sink.

But now that the Lab’s gone live, and the holiday break has begun, I’m getting a chance to try it out—and I’m totally delighted with it. It’s a brilliant idea.

Here’s how it works:

1. You sign up for a free account with last.fm
2. You download a free Audioscrobbler plugin to work with your music player of choice and configure it with your last.fm login info
3. You play enough music for the system to learn about your tastes. (I put iTunes on “party shuffle” and let it play continously for a while, turning off the sound when I didn’t want to listen.)
4. You go to the last.fm site and click on the “Profile Radio” button near the top of the page. The system finds people with musical tastes similar to yours, and starts playing music from their collection. (This is all legal, btw…read the FAQ for details.) If it plays a song you love, click the “love” button and it gets ranked higher in your profile; if you don’t like it, click “skip” and it goes to the next song. Hate it? Click “ban” and you’ll never hear it again.

How cool is that? A personalized radio station that (a) learns what you like, (b) lets you skip songs you don’t want to hear, and © doesn’t play music you’ve said you don’t like.

There are other social features built in—you can add friends (people you like, who are different from “neighbors” that share your musical tastes), chat with people, participate in forums, etc. But the beauty of this for me isn’t in the explicit social behavior, it’s in the implicit recommendation and customization process.

Which got me thinking about definitions of social software and social computing. Most of the ones I’ve seen have focused on direct, intentional communication between two or more people. But what about systems where the communication is implicit, where the social component is the emergent information that comes from multiple users, rather than any direct exchange between or among those user? Food for thought as I work on the LSC wiki.

I don’t often write here about things going on at RIT, because until recently we haven’t been doing a whole lot with social software. However, that’s about to change. Our college (the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences…) has just established a new Lab for Social Computing, of which I’m the director.

This lab is my baby, and I hope to use it to start creating a degree program in our IT department that focuses on social computing applications, leveraging our relatively unique combination of strong technology development skills and knowledge of the human interface issues associated with that technology. We already have several degree programs well-suited to students interested in studying in this field—our BS and MS degrees in Information Technology, and our MS in Communication and Media Technology (all of which are described and linked from the Academics section of the LSC web site).

I’ll be working with a lot of great faculty and students here at RIT, in both the computing departments (Info Tech, Computer Science, and Software Engineering) as well as the College of Liberal Arts. We’re also exploring partnerships with other universities for research initiatives and grant funding, as well as businesses for real-world projects and financial support.

(I should point out here that if your company is looking for a way to make an end-of-year fully tax-deductible donation to the Lab, we’ll be happy to facilitate that! RIT will allow you designate a gift for a specific unit, and even for specific uses in that unit—say, to support faculty research or student employees, or to purchase equipment or software. We’re also more than open to gifts of software and/or hardware! Contact me directly for details…)

We’ve lined up an all-star industry advisory board to work with the Lab and help keep us focused on topics that are important in this increasingly important market sector. Board members include Stewart Butterfiled, Elizabeth Churchill, Joi Ito, Simon Phipps, Howard Rheingold, Linda Stone, and Mena Trott. I’m really honored that all of these people have agreed to be advisors to the LSC!

Our first major project is a new wiki on social computing and social software, which we’re hoping will serve as a clearinghouse for research, tools, and information about social computing. Right now it’s mostly just a collection of links to empty pages, but we have begun populating the lists of industry research labs and researchers in the field. We welcome your input and involvement in this new collaborative site.

(By the way, we know the site is pretty bare-bones right now in terms of visual design. Not to worry…I’ve got six teams of students in my web design class competing to give it a new look and feel by the end of winter quarter!)

A post by Scoble led me to a post by Will Davies, which in turn led me to Will’s 2003 report for iSociety entitled “You Don’t Know Me, but… Social Capital & Social Software.” After taking a quick look, I figured that one of my colleagues here at M2M must have already blogged it last year, but I can’t find any sign of it in our archives.

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter:

‘Social Software’ expands on the social capabilities of web browsing and email, but without making false promises about utopian online communities. After the hysteria that surrounded the first decade or so of the web – hysteria which included everything from ‘virtual communities’ living on a ‘cyber frontier’ to a ‘New Economy’ fuelled by ‘dot.com mania’ – the debate has now come full circle to focus in on everyday people in their everyday social lives. In short, new types of software are being developed which are much more adept at helping groups of people organise themselves in their day-to-day lives. The expression ‘Social Software’ only really entered circulation during 2002 to characterise a significant increase in group applications. But by the time of the April 2003 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, ‘Social Software’ was becoming the key concept for anyone interested in the social possibilities of the internet. A new and more level-headed optimism has emerged, the fruits of which could render some of the more pessimistic social analyses of the internet redundant.

Only the first chapter is available as HTML, alas—to read the whole thing you have to download a PDF. Which I’ve done, and it’s on my “to read” list for this week.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer seems to have suddenly become blogging’s biggest cheerleader. Here’s a quote from yesterday’s Detroit Free press:

“Blogging is huge,” [Ballmer] said. “It brings together the three biggest Internet trends: communicating, sharing and socializing. It started with e-mail and instant messaging and music sharing, and it’s getting bigger each day.”

It’s probably not coincidental that Ballmer’s enthusiastic embrace of blogging comes on the heels of this week’s release of MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s new foray into blogland. Spaces is an interesting social application space, which provides users with a free web environment that includes a blogging tool, as well as a photo album section, a music list, a link list tool, and other features I haven’t yet had time to explore.

I set up an account there today (and was required to use my Microsoft Passport, which didn’t thrill me). My first impression was generally positive. The blogs support trackbacks, a notable omission in Blogger. They also have RSS feeds, which is good, but no Atom, which is disappointing. The built-in photo album is a nice touch, though it doesn’t hold a candle to Flickr. There are a range of themes to choose from, some of which are quite lovely. However, the site warns me that without Internet Explorer (for the PC, natch), I can’t take advantage of the full range of customization options. (To their credit, the site works well in Firefox on my Mac.)

The response time on the server is pretty sluggish this evening, which is a bit of a concern. And in general, I’m always nervous about having my blog posts hosted on a central service that I don’t control—I like having my text on a server that I can back up whenever I’d like. Not to mention that I feel pretty strongly about having my blog at my own domain name, free of ties to specific hosting services or tools.

All in all, I found Spaces to be a very credible and more fully-featured alternative to Blogger for users who want to set up a blog quickly and easily, and don’t want to spend money doing so (or learn a lot of technical skills to accomplish it). From accounts I’ve been reading lately, Blogger has been increasingly slow and unreliable—not ideal qualities at any time, but particularly not when a big-time competitor has just unleashed an alternative.

Anybody else tried Spaces yet? What do you think?

Last month I had the wonderful opportunity to be on a panel at ACM CSCW on digital backchannels—danah boyd and Joe McCarthy invited me to participate, along with Elizabeth Churchill, Bill Griswold, and Melora Zaner-Godsey (who couldn’t make it due to a family illness, and was replaced most ably by Richard Hodkinson).

Others have blogged the panel already (from both sides of the podium—see Joe danah, Richard, and Jack Vinson), so I’m not going to replicate that. I do, however, want to mention one thing that I heard that’s really stuck with me.

During his presentation, Bill Griswold was talking about how he’s using chat environments in the classroom. He observed that using the backchannel to allow questions from students “materialized the question, not the questioner.” More than anything else I heard during the panel, that one line made me really stop and think about implications of the backchannel, and why it is that I find it to be so attractive a medium.

I was reminded of that moment this week while sitting in a faculty meeting, watching a faculty member impatiently hold his hand over his head while someone spoke, waiting to be recognized to speak. I can remember years ago being advised that it was rude to hold one’s hand up while someone was talking, because it indicated that you were more focused on what you were about to say than what the person speaking was saying. My experience has been that it also causes disruption for the people in the room, who are split between the attention-getting visual mechanism of hand-raising and the current speaker. And in many cases, it creates expectations (often not accurate) on the part of both the audience and the speaker as to what the questioner is about to say.

When I was at CSCW, the only way audience members could ask questions or make comments was to queue up in front a microphone in the middle aisle and wait patiently for a turn. It’s hard to describe how nerve-racking this is for someone who’s new to that community. You’re standing in the middle of a big room, with the audience and the speakers staring at you, trying to listen to what’s being said while being intensely aware of your position.

This is where a formally acknowledged/sanctioned backchannel can really shine, I think. It allows members of an audience (whether the group is as small as a faculty meeting or as large as a conference presentation) to ask a question and have the question itself—not the questioner—be the subject of focus.

I’m on my way home from the 2004 ACM CSCW (computer-supported collaborative work) conference in Chicago, where my M2M and misbehaving.net co-conspirator danah boyd invited me to participate on a panel entitled “The Use of Digital Backchannels in Shared Physical Spaces“—a topic near and dear to my heart (more on the panel, and the backchannel, in a later post). This was my first time at a CSCW conference, though I’ve read work by many of the people who are active in the organization, and remembered others from early days as a doctoral student studying communication and information studies. One of the things I noticed immediately was that many of the topics on the program had a familiar ring to them—because I’d seen similar titles and topics at my first Emerging Tech conference (ETCon) last spring.

This gave me a chance to compare and contrast the experience of a new participant at each of these conferences. In both cases I was there as a presenter, and while I’d never been to the conference before, I was aided by pre-existing strong ties to people who had been there. (I should note that in both cases, the strong ties were almost entirely a function of connections I’d made through my personal weblog mamamusings, not through traditional academic or business channels.)

Last month, I moderated a workshop on “social software in the academy” at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication. The attendees were primarily Annenberg faculty and graduate students, along with a few industry representatives and some academics from other institutions who had experience implementing social software tools (weblogs and wikis, primarily) in classroom contexts.

One of the topics that we didn’t have an opportunity to explore in as much details as I would have liked was the issue of power, control, and authority in higher education, and the destabilizing effect that social computing tools can have in these domains.

Then today, via Heather James, I found this disturbing post (and I really hope I’m not putting him at risk by drawing attention to it):

Anyway, the University I work for employs one of the two big ‘Courseware Management Systems’ as it’s central teaching and learning technology. It may surprise some people that I’m actually pretty cool with this. Over the last few weeks I’ve interviewed over 90 students and they love it, it’s great for lecture notes, talking to the lecturer / tutors and getting extra information & links.

However, there are lots of things I believe it doesn’t do so well, such as facilitate effective communication (see my paper of a bit back) . And several that it doesn’t do at all, such as allow people to collaboratively create documents, chat using IM, email etc. So, as part of my research interests, working entirely through 3rd party software & hosting providers and mostly on my own time I’ve been working with several academics investigating the uses of wikis, weblogs and other technologies in educational contexts. With this CMS as the main, focal, authenticated important area which leads to these.

Last Tuesday I received a memorandum from a manager cc’d by am exec. director instructing me to cease supporting and promoting weblogging, wikis or any other technology not officially supported by the University. The basic reason given being that I have, anecdotally, not used the CMS (this isn’t true, I always use it) and that ‘commentary’ on the issue of CMSs (quoted I think from this blog or another I set up for a course) is unacceptable. A set-up for disciplinary action should I not follow instructions.

So I’m gutted. I’m not going to go into the arguments here, I guess that’s not appropriate at the moment, but I am going to reply internally and in essence beg that as part of my academic research agenda and in the best interests of the University I be allowed to continue my work.

I’d like to say that I’m shocked, but I’m not. I am, however, surprised that we haven’t seen more stories like this.

At my institution, administration has not tried to shut down new technologies for pedagogy—in fact, we’ve just signed a site license for MovableType, and I know of several professors beginning to use wikis in the classroom. But at the same time, I had to fight my own senior colleagues last year on the issue of whether faculty should be allowed to bring their laptops to meetings—the sense was that the growing use of backchannel was “unfair” and/or “rude” and had to be stopped. (It wasn’t, but not for their lack of trying.)

We can’t pretend that these tools are neutral additions to the academic environment. Wikis, for example, have a powerfully destabilizing effect on voice and authority, two things that have traditionally been under the control of instructors in higher ed. Ubiquitous networking and portable devices provide a backchannel environment that changes discussion in the classroom in a profound way. I’m not preaching technological determinism here—simply saying that we need to be aware of the destabilizing power of the tools, and to begin to address those effects directly in our thinking and writing about educational technology.

I probably shouldn’t be writing anything at all on a day when I feel this curmudgeonly, but the unveiling this week of Technorati’s “vote links” has spurred me to finally post here again.

It was close to two years ago that I first heard this idea surfaced in a discussion related to emergent democracy. Then, as now, I agreed that Google’s approach to PageRank—in which all links are created equal, regardless of context or intent—was flawed. But I argued then, and still feel now, that using the terminology of “voting” was equally flawed. I’m deeply uncomfortable with reducing everything to a binary vote, and with tinging every link with an explicit or implicit stance.

Not everything is an election. Not everything is a “for” or “against.” Suppose, for example, I come across an extremely well-written article that I don’t agree with. Am I “for it” because I think it’s worth reading and considering? Or am I “against it” because I disagree with the content?

Yes, PageRank and its cousins are flawed. Yes, we need a better way to be able to link to something without boosting it. But no, I don’t think this is the way.

Maciej Ceglowski, who partnered with Joshua Schachter to create LOAF, has just announced a new tool for users of Joshua’s del.icio.us social bookmarking system.

Pasta allows you to create a web page using pasted-in text, and then add that newly created web page to your del.icio.us bookmarks. This allows you to use del.icio.us to quickly create public bookmarks to material that isn’t already on the web, but that you’d like to make available. (Examples Maciej provides are “a text message, some class notes, a recipe, an email.”) Brilliant.

The rules are simple:

1. 100K length limit
2. No more than 10 posts per day
3. Don’t be abusive
4. Everything is public
5. Everything is permanent
6. May go down at any time
7. Do not taunt del.icio.us pasting service

The University of Minnesota has just released a collection of essays on blog research, entitled Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. It’s edited by Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. I haven’t had a chance yet to dive into the articles, but it looks like a great collection, with articles from some excellent scholars and bloggers.

The entire collection is online, so you can get some instant gratification in terms of reading, and they’ve enabled comments and trackbacks for the articles (which are also blog entries). Color me impressed!

Elijah Wright of Indiana University contacted me earlier this week about my blog research post, and raised some interesting issues. I replied to him via email, but asked him to consider posting his comments on his blog, so that the conversation could include others.

Happily, he did exactly that. Our email conversation is now available verbatim on his blog. I would encourage those of you interested in research in this area to read the three messages in order: his first message to me, my response to him, and his follow-up.

In the interest of pulling the threads together, I’d encourage people to comment here rather than on the individual messages, since that will reduce fragmentation of the discussion. (One of the great weaknesses of blog-based conversations is the dif