The international symposium on wikis is taking place in Denmark in August this year.

The invited talk lineup is excellent: there will be talks by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Angela Beesley (“How and Why Wikipedia Works”), Doug Engelbart and Eugene Eric Kim (“The Augmented Wiki”), Mark Bernstein (“Intimate Information”) and Ward Cunningham (“Design Principles of Wikis”).

Like the first year, there’s a research paper track, panels (“Wikis in Education” and “The Future of Wikis”), and workshops. There will also be an Open Space track throughout the meeting.

Today (June 19) is the last day for early registration. The chair, Dirk Riehle, informs me that “you can register but don’t have to pay right away. So even if you are waiting for travel permission from your boss, you can already register and pay later (or cancel with no hassles).” Which I’m going to do right away, as a matter of fact. :) The registration page is here.

Michael Pazzani gave a course on Web personalization at UC Irvine this winter, and has made allsome of his slides available online. Topics covered include user profiling and collaborative filtering. Recommender systems such as Amazon and TiVo are examined. There’s a link to an interesting paper by Ali and van Stam describing the TiVo collaborative filtering system.

[via Daniel Lemire]

I’m helping to put this first international symposium on wikis together. It will be held in San Diego in October. Ward Cunningham, the inventor and host of the original WikiWikiWeb, will present the opening keynote.

Anyone who is involved in using, researching, or developing wikis is invited to participate. We are seeking submissions for research papers, practitioner reports, demonstrations, workshops, and panels.

The deadlines vary according to the type of contribution. (See the official call for submissions for more details.)

The general idea of a recommender system is that it asks for a few examples of things you like and then gives you more things it thinks you might like, based on its knowledge of other people’s preferences.

One problem you can often run into when using a recommender system is a bias towards popular items, which are not really that close to what you like but have the favor of many users because of their high visibility. For instance, based on my subscriptions, the Bloglines recommender keeps suggesting that I have a look at Slashdot, always putting it near the top of its list of suggestions. The effect of designs like this, of course, is is to reinforce the “short head” (as opposed to the “long tail”) by directing users towards the roads well traveled.

An easy way to mitigate this is to selectively decapitate the recommendation engine’s results. Last year I blogged about Andrew Grumet’s “Similar Feeds”, which implements this. I just came across a music filtering site that makes the feature more prominent and intuitive by putting a nice, fat “popularity slider” right at the top of recommendations pages. Try playing with the slider on this page to see how it works.

I like how things like this underscore the idea that “this is popular” is not the same as “you’ll like it”.

This workshop will take place during the WWW2005 conference in Chiba, Japan. The deadline for electronic submission is March 4, and the papers from the previous workshop of the same name can be found here.

Academics often use hand-rolled systems to keep track of and (less often, sadly) share literature references. I have used my personal wiki to that end for a while, but it wasn't the ideal solution.

Now, the rapidly-developing CiteULike looks quite interesting. It borrows from del.icio.us' simple interface and social software features, but it is tailor-made for academic papers that are available online. It lets you build a "personal library" (here's the one I just started), recording bibliographic information and enabling you to tag papers for future retrieval and group sharing. For instance, here is an ongoing stream of papers on blogging, collected by various individuals. Development is very much alive, as you can see from the development journal and the discussion list.

Because so much of the literature is still stuck behind subscription walls, surfing CiteULike can be frustrating if you're not on a university network, as you can very often be denied access to anything beyond the abstracts (even if you are, digital bouncers are legion and you're bound to bump into one of them sooner or later). This highlights how nice it would be for the public to have open access to the published research it has often paid for out of its own pocket. (The general web-unfriendliness of academic production is a pet peeve of mine - it hurts the impact and dissemination of research findings, and obviously deprives academia from influence on the "real world". How ironic that the Web was originally built in a research lab, to share results...)

(A similar service is Connotea, but I haven't done a thorough comparison between the two. And Alf Eaton's pioneering Biologging has been providing a similar service for biomedical researchers for a while now.)

(cross-posted to my personal weblog)

Following a suggestion I made on my personal blog, Alf Eaton has built a visual interface to the tag landscape that is collectively produced by del.icio.us users, basically feeding the “related tags” listings from del.icio.us into a TouchGraph browser. Here’s a screenshot I made, showing the current “lay of the land” around social software:
(layout hint: you can right-click the background to fiddle with the layout to get a clean capture)

Alf’s tool lets you navigate around tags, expand topics you want to explore in more depth, and access the corresponding del.icio.us and Technorati tag pages. I think this could be a quite useful tool when you’re feeling your way into a new topic area and want to benefit from the knowledge of other people who have been around there. Think “Okay, so what is this newfangled “folksonomy” thing all about? Does it relate to anything I’m already familiar with?”

Subscription mapping

And for something completely different, Paolo Massa then asked Alf for a social network map based on users’ del.icio.us subscriptions, which wasn’t too long in coming. Because users can subscribe to tag feeds (you can recognize those because they start with an asterisk), people and topics are also connected, yielding a “Who and What” map showing both types of objects in the same graph. Because tag subscriptions are uncommon, it might actually be more illuminating to connect people and topics based on tagging habits rather than subscription.

This social visualization tool works wonders in the way of revealing implicit information that is otherwise hard to see. For instance, if you start with Liz’s subscription network, and then double-click the “sebpaquet” node, you’ll immediately see that we are both tracking links from Howard Rheingold, Joi Ito, Jay Bibby, and Clay. The advanced options let you do things such as displaying only nodes that are no more than, say, two degrees away from the node you last clicked, letting you get a sense of the immediate neighborhood of a person.

(for related prior art, see also the Touchgraph LiveJournal browser, which operates on a dataset that is at least an order of magnitude larger)

No Taggle just yet, Clay, but getting closer: the Taggregator, which generates a side-by-side view of recent del.icio.us and flickr input with a given tag. Try pattern. (via Alan Levine)

With permission from Adina Levin, here’s a terrific recent post from her weblog that highlights and articulates some of the things that are new about social software. - Seb

---

The question underlying Chris Allen’s valuable essay on the history of social software is, why do we need a new term? Is there anything new going on, or is there just a new generation of people discovering the same old thing, like each generation of teenagers discovers sex?

People who’ve been pioneering online collaboration say that they’ve seen this all before: on Plato, in MUDs, on the Well, in Usenet, in academic writing for decades.

Is there anything new about what we’re doing now? Chris Allen’s question prompted some reflection. The answer, I think, is yes. And the measure of the answer is the internet and the web.

The second edition of the European conference on weblogs is underway and, as you can imagine, it’s a total social software geekfest. This blog post by Oliver Wrede provides a good entry point. This is clearly not a group tied to one technology - there’s a cocktail of blogs, wiki, TopicExchange, IRC, and even the odd collaboratively annotated map of the host city (courtesy of Mikel Maron and Johannes Gruber).

Comparing what’s happening online now to what it was like just a year ago it seems that there’s been an evolution - not so much in terms of technological innovation but rather evidenced by the degree to which the tools have been culturally assimilated. People seem to be more fluent overall, and the general idea of collaborating with strangers in public doesn’t seem to generate as much awkwardness as it used to.

As Ton Zijlstra has just remarked to me on IRC, last year’s experiments become this year’s prerequisites. It’s fun when things happen quickly like this - though it should be kept in mind that we’re looking at a self-selected group of tech enthusiasts.

The panel on weblogs took place this afternoon. Collin Brooke has a faithful write-up on his blog. Thanks Collin! The illustrated post Lilia Efimova offered yesterday on weblog networks as social ecosystems complements the picture we gave very nicely.

For a year or so the Invisible Adjunct weblog has provided a forum for academics to (mostly) discuss issues relating to campus politics and working conditions in academia. Last March the anonymous author decided to leave the profession and sign off from her weblog. The only problem is that over time a real community has gathered around that weblog, and those people clearly want to continue talking - as the 200-odd comments on the sign-off post attest. I figured some of them would rather switch boats than go down with the sinking ship, so I created an Invisible Adjunct channel on the Internet Topic Exchange to aggregate relevant posts from members of the community. Much to my pleasure the channel has been put to good use by interested parties: about a hundred posts have appeared on the channel so far. But another threat is looming on the horizon - the IA is planning to take down the site a week from now. This means all the content will vanish. The site hasn't been indexed by the Internet Archive since June of last year. (Ironically, the last post that shows on the Wayback machine is precisely about the loss of archives!) And the IA hasn't allowed mirroring. Of course many participants wish to preserve the memory, but it is unclear who's calling the shots at this point. Who wrote the site? Granted, the IA wrote all the front page material by herself, hundreds of posts. But there are also thousands of comments in there that have been contributed by readers. A commenter raises the issue in those terms:
I have no idea what's going to happen to that content, but I guess the moral here is "use caution before you invest significantly in a site that you don't control". A lot of commenters might now find themselves wishing they had commented on their own site so that their words wouldn't go down with the rest.

Long-time online community expert Nancy White has finally started her own weblog (did she hear my plea ?). The online community toolkit that she’s been building for years is chock-full of great material, which I suppose she’ll do us the pleasure of introducing bit by bit.

A recent post reports on an experiment I’d been meaning to try but had yet to find the right conditions for: having group of chat participants listen the same music while chatting - much as would happen at a party - as a means of creating a shared atmosphere and giving participants a better sense of togetherness. Apparently it turned out very well… I’ll really have to try it. Webjay could make it quite easy.

For the most part, members of online communities usually rely on one dominant communication channel - be it a mailing list, a forum, weblogs, a wiki, or IRC - even when alternate channels would be helpful for certain purposes. Communities like open source development networks and the international, never-sleeping Joi Ito posse, who use multiple modes, are the exception rather than the norm. I've been wondering about the factors that somehow work to inhibit or facilitate the use of multiple communication channels, and the interplay between those channels. Now there's a discussion underway on that topic over at the lively Community Wiki, on the page Community Tied to One Technology. Among the potential explanations that are brought up for sticking to one channel: inertia, lack of technical acumen, the fragmentation/critical mass problem, and the lack of integration between modes. My hunch is that as the "software that does less, well" pattern and the concomitant "mix and match tools" user philosophy that we've seen develop in social software become dominant, we'll see multiple modes become relatively widespread relatively quickly. (I should point out that the incredibly prolific Dave Pollard touched upon this topic a while ago.)

Gordon Gould sparks an interesting discussion on what success in blogging means or ought to mean. He basically says that it follows from the power law argument that people will blog for fame, not fortune, but fame of the fifteen-people variety.

A concise and well-articulated entry.

I just followed a link from Sunir Shah's page to John Suler's "The Bad Boys of Cyberspace", an extremely detailed look at problem behavior in online communities and the ways of dealing with it that have been developed over time. It's based on Suler's early field research on the Palace avatar chat communities, so some of it is fairly specific, but there's a metric boatload of insights in there. The whole thing basically reads like a chat wizard's handbook. Here are a few section headings from the table of contents to give you a taste of what's inside: The colourful jargon used makes it rather enjoyable, especially when read literally. This from the section on intervening with Bible Thumpers: "The Bad Boys" is actually part of Suler's vast online book, "The Psychology of Cyberspace":http://www.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html. I recommend you have a look, but be warned that once you dive in you may not emerge for quite a while...

After a few quiet months, all of a sudden I'm getting a new spurt of Orkut invitations from friends whose invitations I thought I had already declined. I was wondering why, until I found this explanation on Scott Allen's weblog: I guess Orkut is trying its best at following the trend of socially inept YASNS behavior, though I have to say it falls short of being as craptacular as "ZeroDegrees' prior art":http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/04/15/how_to_achieve_zero_degrees_of_separation.php.

Nico Macdonald has written a forward-thinking article on weblogs highlighting some of the challenges that he believes this writing environment faces at this point in time:

• It needs more journalists;
• It needs to be more externally focused (less concerned with blogs);
• It needs more people writing “second drafts”, closer to knowledge than opinion;
• It needs better tools to navigate and visualize the infoglut that its expansion is creating;
• It needs categorization and reputation management;
• It needs publishers to offer reciprocal links to at least some of the commentary it offers.

Macdonald’s considerations are interesting, but they reflect his conception of what blogs are about (journalism and serious thinking) and thus chiefly apply to those weblogs that aspire to public intellectual leadership. This space is actually large enough that the term itself is becoming highly ambiguous; I wouldn’t dream of asking LiveJournalers to write according to those standards - and nor should they strive to.

Some weblogs are in a fuzzy position, between the public and the personal, and I realize it is causing a tension. For instance, in my personal weblog I tend to use first names to refer to people with whom I have private exchanges and collaboration relationships - here for example. I count many of these people as friends even if I have yet to meet them.

In the frame of reference that Macdonald uses, this is inappropriate and may reinforce cliquishness, but at the same time the tone of my weblog is conversational and it doesn’t feel quite right to refer to these people as I would for instance in an academic publication. Lab conversation is the “real-life” context that matches best for me, and referring people by first names was the rule in the labs I’ve been in; including a link enables people who are not in the loop to determine who I’m talking about.

Journalist Julian Dibbell managed to bring in nearly $4,000 (US no less) in his last month trading nonexistent (okay, virtual) goods in the multiplayer online game Ultima Online. There's an article on the accomplishment in Wired News and the discussion is underway over at Terra Nova. The downside of this is obviously that, at the end of the day, the experience feels more like work than play. Says Dibbell:

Janet Tokerud suggests that Academic Blogging is a Must, eliciting a comment that links to a post on Household Opera about "Ideal Intellectual Communities".

Features of such a community: "people who aren't competing with each other for funds, status, recognition, or employment"; "wouldn't be limited to the traditional options of journal article and monograph"; "mixture of academics and nonacademics"; "enough room for idiosyncrasy".

Janet comments on local intellectual communities:

Can't wait for that to happen. It's already started in places like San Francisco. Use the GeoURL, Luke. (Special plea to Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournalet al.: take a cue from deviantART - make geotagging ridiculously easy and users will love you for it.)

(link via del.icio.us/mathemagenic/researcherBlog)

This week's Social Computing Symposium has brought a number of new bloggers to my attention and to help keep track I've started a wiki-enabled directory of social software research weblogs. If you're doing research on social software and your weblog is not listed, please edit the page (link's at the bottom) and add yourself. And why not throw in a picture while you're at it? It's all fun, and ridiculously easy. (For links to other research blog directories see this post on scholars who blog.)

Three posts below, Clay describes the civility problems that have grown over at the kuro5hin community as being a result of unhealthy scaling, invoking Shirky’s Law — “The advantages of anonymity grow linearly with the population; the disadvantages grow with the square of the population.”

Actually, Shirky’s law probably doesn’t explain what’s happening there. The active population at k5 has arguably declined, as traffic is down about 40% from last year.

Rusty, the site’s founder, writes, “we simply aren’t the only game in town anymore. There’s a lot more personal blogs, niche communities, and overall things like K5 than there were before.” I think this is a more convincing pathway to an explanation.

This commenter hypothesizes that a change in demographic is actually responsible for the problems, which makes sense if you assume that the more mature/experienced users will eventually gravitate towards more autonomous modes of publishing.

On the venerable nettime mailing list, Geert Lovink interviews Ken Jordan, one of the coauthors of the ambitious Augmented Social Network white paper. Jordan and collaborators have been thinking about the issue of self-representation online for a long time, and he highlights quite clearly many of the key issues in this area.

Jordan enumerates shortcomings of current social networking systems such as Friendster:

1. They are non-interoperable walled gardens.
2. Profile info is thin, not nuanced; it isn’t context sensitive (the boss and mother problem).
3. The profile information is static, not effected by your actions elsewhere.
4. You have limited control over your own profile information (“It calls for a new class of services: identity brokers”; you also want a “digital bill of rights” that enables you to exert control over access.)
5. The sites are exclusive, invitation-only clubs. [Note: I believe this is the exception rather than the norm].

I can’t help but notice how close weblogs come to fitting the bill - apart from restricting you to a single context and making it difficult to control acess, everything is in there. (See Dina Mehta and Lilia Efimova on blogs as SNSes .)

Here’s a short NYT essay by Clive Thompson that presents evidence and speculation regarding the thesis that people are actually more honest online than in person. The article makes two observations that may help explain why: first there’s the feeling of being on the record (“On the Internet […] your words often come back to haunt you.”), and second, cyberspace seems to bring about disinhibition (“There’s something about the Internet that encourages us to spill our guts, often in rather outrageous ways.”).

Thompson seems to really believe in the thesis, and towards the end of the essay foresees the emergence of a reputation society: “As more and more of our daily life moves online, we could find ourselves living in an increasingly honest world, or at least one in which lies have ever more serious consequences.”

While I’m not sure that things are quite so simple as “The internet makes you more honest”, the online world certainly makes it difficult to say contradictory things, even across contexts (assuming that you tie everything you say to a single identity, which not everyone does).

It’s a chewy question. I wonder if the “online vs. in person” aspect is essential. Couldn’t the whole issue be simply reframed as one of writing versus talking?

(link via Cynthia Typaldos )

Alex Halavais’ blog is home to an interesting discussion of the privacy / information property issues around the Orkut geomap we wrote about two weeks ago : part one, part two. It’s worth noting that Rolan (the datapimp / Orkut mapper) participates in the discussions. Jill Walker voices the clearest objection:

According to the product page, AlstraSoft's E-Friends is "an online social networking software that allows you to start your own site just like Friendster and Tribe.net." (They surely haven't tested it at that scale, though.) It sells for $280 with a year of updates, and they've got a demo up.

Todd Boyle on the reputation mailing list tips us to this revelation (not sure what the original source is [hoax warning: be sure to read this post til the end]): This of course explains Orkut's much-maligned terms of service: [Update: turns out the "original source" is Mark Schalofski's fake news site, HACT. Thanks, "Anita":http://www.anitarowland.com/ !]

Andrew Grumet has built Similar Feeds, a neat demonstration of collaborative intelligence that uses the Share your OPML development interface to reveal which feeds are also popular among readers of a given feed. The handy 'tweak results' feature lets you filter out the most popular feeds in case you're looking for something you might never have seen but that relates to a given feed. Compare the first link above with the results at level 2000. _(via Lilia Efimova: http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/14.html#a1084)

Erik Benson proposes to build upon Ludicorp's flickr services to enable - among other things - much-needed comment authentication, single commenter login, and blogs or feeds of a user's comments across participating Movable Type sites. This is reminiscent of Drupal's (2+ year-old) distributed authentication system, though I haven't looked into either long enough to make a proper comparison.

Foe Romeo, who leads identity product development at BBCi, has put the slides for her presentation at ETech online: Social software for children (pdf). I especially liked the slides about kids' motivations for, and concerns about, participation, which change significantly with age. As Liam writes in this comment, "It's refreshing to hear someone talk about social software for kids and put their online safety before tracking their habits to better market products to them."

Next Wednesday the Emergent Learning Forum will hold an event in Menlo Park on "Social Networking, Relationship Capital and Expertise Management". Speakers from Spoke Software, Tacit Knowledge Systems, and Intel have been invited. (You can attend remotely using a Flash player.)

First up is the crib of danah boyd's "Revenge of the User" presentation at the O'Reilly emerging technology conference, which offers a quick rundown of relevant sociological research then dives into an excellent illustrated tour of the issues and traps that await technologists who architect social software. It's lengthy but she doesn't waste space. Second is Stowe Boyd's notes on an event bringing together five executives of social networking system companies. Rather hard to summarize - just go read it.

A quick link to Lee Bryant who's at the Emerging Technology conference and enumerates some of the social software-powered parallel channels that are being used by participants. Many-to-many indeed. (see also Stephen Downes on online conference discussions, which mostly deals with asynchronous modes of interaction.)

Richard Tallent offers an interesting list of desirable features for second-generation social software. I want all that too!

Lee LeFever is thinking about the potential benefits of having a weblog inside (or outside) an online community of non-bloggers. This is an interesting idea. For some time I've been thinking that wiki communities might also benefit from having a journalist or two to help others make sense of what's happening globally. An RSS feed of recent changes just isn't meaningful enough. Back when Wikipedia was starting out, I recall founder Larry Sanger used to write weekly reports on what had been going on in the 'pedia and I found that useful. Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms community does have an internal volunteer group-edited newsletter called "the Brainstorms Scoop", which helps locate the interesting recent action in the huge volume of messages that the community produces. In terms of enabling outsiders to be aware of what's going on inside a community and perhaps drawing some of them in, I think a good blogger could do wonders.

via Blogalization, via (In)formação e (In)utilidade: The Politburo Diktat offers a map of The Technorati-Sphere.

Arguments in favor of rethinking social software with an eye towards decentralization and interoperability are in the air, though it is far from obvious at this point who will do the hard work of building standards and consensus. Here are two strong recent pieces that touch upon that theme. Boyd, in "The Barriers of Content and Context": Boyd follows with considerations on the tricky issue of managing one's multiple contexts - a central theme of (lowercase) boyd's research. Pollard insists on the user-centric perspective in "What's Wrong with First-Generation Social Software". He proposes a four-word mantra which I like: Simple, Personal, Decentralized, Just-in-time. He takes care to point out that, for all its faults, the current generation of social software helps us see where the grass has been worn away, making it possible to lay sidewalks with much more confidence that the effort is appropriately directed. (I should point out that all this obviously ties into recent discussions of distributed social software.)

Mike Percowitz writes: I wouldn't be so quick to equate one journal to one person, but I have to say the number is impressive. (More detailed stats here, and don't miss the evocative chart here) And we're not counting clone sites such as DeadJournal. The page linked in the quote above gives signs of an upcoming unbundling of the "friend-of" relationship in the system: (And speaking of milestones, it's worth noting that the English Wikipedia is steadily inching towards 200,000 articles, double the size it was last year.)

From USC computer science student Eric Gradman comes a paper titled "Distributed Social Software". This is an ambitious, high-level description of how social software should really work in order to scale, preserve consistency, provide flexibility, and prevent fragmentation of the user base. The design could be summarized as "center the architecture on the individual user throughout". While I think it seriously needs fleshing out, the underlying philosophy seems right. I'm not convinced that preventing fragmentation follows directly from the scheme, though, because different open standards compete against one another and there's no guarantee that users will all embrace the same standard. Here's the abstract: I think making things happen in this way might require many more well-coordinated, idealistic developers than are available right now. But one can always hope... Compare: Leonard Lin's "Next-Generation Distributed Social Software Networks: Designs and Applications" presentation.

Guess it had to happen sooner or later... yes my friends(ters), you can now buy a social networking site on eBay. (link via Charles)

Thomas Thurman has developed Joule, a nice application that tracks "friend-of" relationships over time on LiveJournal and displays a user's friendships over time in either tabular or graph format. Note that LiveJournal features an integrated aggregator; friendship there is roughly equivalent to subscription in the weblog world. Update, Jan 27: also found LiveJournal Connect, a service that will find a path between you and another user.

There will be a "Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics" at the WWW2004 conference in New York, mid-May.

William Blaze has a post up on Abstract Dynamics titled Amplification and Stratification, tracing the linkflow in blog space in which he analyzes how a link to Linton Freeman's article, "Visualizing Social Networks" in the Journal of Social Structure, was passed from weblog to weblog until it had reached quite a few eyeballs. He cites it as an example of blog-enabled amplification but points out that some things were lost in the process. As a result, credit to the original publisher of the article, to the source of the link, and to the blogger who originally dug it up didn't propagate widely along with the link itself. (Go read the post.) I agree with Blaze that this is an instance of a general problem, and this connects to recent discussions of fairness in weblogs. For instance, as he points out, within the "political economy of linking" there can be incentives not to point to one's sources. While there's a general norm of bloggers linking to sources, the practice is not universal and few chains of credit go all the way, with the unfortunate consequence that promising sources can remain obscure for longer than they would otherwise. Unlike chains of oral gossip, however, blogs are on the public record, and this is another area where blog crawlers can perhaps help a little bit. For instance, the Technorati page for the link in question enables us to trace it back to William's post (but unfortunately no further). A few questions spring out from this. It is generally accepted that giving credit for creation is important; is it the same for "link discovery credit?" Will (should) the practice of linking to sources of links come to be taken very seriously by bloggers, out of a shared concern to keep things fair and transparent, in a similar manner to standards of citation in academia? Should one link to the immediate source or make an effort to trace links back to the original source? (Is it always clear which is "the" original source?) [Addendum, by Clay: It's worth noting that the Freeman link appeared on many-to-many after I found it on del.icio.us, not on a blog as Blaze surmises. More on this here.]

In the course of my ongoing foray into LiveJournal (making friends and all :-), I keep discovering journals I really should have known about for a while. This hadn't happened mainly due to the fact that I have so far very rarely come across links into (or backlinks out of) LiveJournal (look up Ross's informal survey from last year on this phenomenon). But it turns out there are social software tinkerers and thinkers in there as well. Exhibit 1 is the recently founded LiveJournal research community, and exhibit 2 is the Sociology of Online Journals community, both of which aggregate posts from a number of individual journal authors and seem to be host to fairly active conversations. I haven't dug deep into them yet, but wanted to highlight the finds.

The New York Times Magazine has a good article on teenagers who keep online journals. The author observes how the uptake of journaling among teens opens up new windows enabling everyone to peer into the experience of adolescence: Rather than forming a single, interconnected network, journals form a multitude of relatively closed worlds: I wish I could learn more about those journal writers who are indeed curious towards strangers and the role that