wake up!

At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)

I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.

In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.

For now, here are my summit talks:

| View | Upload your own

and

| View | Upload your own

Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:

| View | Upload your own

When I get the audio, I plan to put together a slidecast to synch the slides to the talk, which should be more valuable.

Oh, and consider viewing the slides in full-screen mode. They should be a lot more legible that way. I did my best to optimize the source files.

I’m having second thoughts about Notchup. The other day I checked my mail in the morning, as is my wont, and found an invitation to Notchup from a friend who left Yahoo a while back to work with venture capitalists. I wondered if this was something he had had a hand in, but I didn’t ask. I went and signed up because it sounded interesting.

A few years ago I had some interviews at LinkedIn for a position that didn’t work out (didn’t work out for me, at least) and they asked me at the time for suggestions and ideas about additional businesses or products they could build on top of their existing platform. I was gung ho at the time about the idea of a reverse-auction style site for hiring. Just as Priceline reversed the polarity on hotel and plane bookings by having customers bid what they are willing to pay and having vendors match that, I figured that job searches could also work in reverse.

Instead of applying for a job, you could advertise the sort of work you are willing and qualified to take on and prospective employers could apply to you and try to make the case that you should “hire” them to be your new boss. The LinkedIn guys suggested that that’s what they were already doing but I thought there was still something missing from that model.

So Notchup seems to be somewhat in that same ballpark, which was why I thought I’d check it out.

Next, I saw that they had a way to import your personal info (effectively, your resume) from your LinkedIn account, if you have one. That sounded a lot better than entering all the data myself, again, so even though I had qualms about this violating LinkedIn’s terms of service, and even though it’s generally not a good idea to give your login credentials for one site to another site (even if “all it’s going to do” is scrape some data from the screeen), I went ahead and did that.

So then Notchup offered to enable me to invite my LinkedIn connections into their beta, saving those people the trouble of applying. I started that sequence and went through my list of contacts, which is long so this was tedious, unchecking the folks I figured are either definitely not looking for a job, or whom I don’t actually know that well, or whom I believed would have no interest in the latest social network thingamabob.

I assumed I would have the chance to write a personal note, something along the lines of

Hi! I’m checking out this new site called Notchup. I don’t know much about it and I don’t necessarily endorse it, but I thought you might be interest in checking it out too.

Unfortunately, before I was given an opportunity to write a note or even review the boilerplate they were going to sign my name to, I was notified that the invitations had been sent. This is not as bad as what Tagged.com and some other sites have done, tricking people into virally inviting their entire address books, but it still rubbed me the wrong way.

All that morning and the next day I got email notifications of friends joining Notchup, and a few personal notes from people asking me if this was for real - because we’ve all gotten spammy invitations in the past. When people asked I told them the gist of what I would have written in the invitation, but many people just joined, apparently trusting me. By now I wasn’t sure what the person who had invited me was thinking.

Then, the other day I saw a message from Russell Unger on the IA Institute members mailing list establishing that he had done more (that is, some) due diligence and actually read Notchup’s terms of service, and that he had uncovered some troubling clauses in the user agreement:

9. NotchUp reserves the right to offer third party services and products to You based on the preferences that You identify in your registration and at any time thereafter; such offers may be made by NotchUp or by third parties.

10. Without limiting any of the other disclaimers of warranty set forth in these Terms, NotchUp does not provide or make any representation as to the quality or nature of any of the third party products or services purchased through NotchUp.com or any other NotchUp Site, or any other representation, warranty or guaranty. Any such undertaking, representation, warranty or guaranty would be furnished solely by the provider of such third party products or services, under the terms agreed to by the provider.

As Russell pointed out, this sounds a lot like signing up for Notchup means agreeing to receive spam.

He also pointed out another pair of clauses:

18. You understand and acknowledge that you have no ownership rights in your NotchUp account (“NotchUp Account”), and that if you cancel your NotchUp Account, all your account information from NotchUp, including resumes, profiles, cover letters, network contacts, saved jobs, questionnaires and email mailing lists, will be marked as deleted in NotchUp’s databases and will be removed from any public area of the NotchUp Sites. Information may continue to be available for some period of time because of delays in propagating such deletion through NotchUp’s web servers. In addition, third parties may retain cached copies of your Information.

19. Your email and other data that you submit as part of the resume will be made available to our recruiters and employers. NotchUp.com doesn’t have any control over how that data would be used. If you don’t want any such data to be displayed your only remedy is not to post any resume.

So now I’m really concerned, particularly about seeming to vouch for a site and luring a bunch of best contacts into it. I’ll keep an eye on Notchup but so far I don’t like what I’m seeing, and to those I invited in before researching the subject further, I apologize.

I’m going to write my book, Presence of Mind (working title), on a wiki with as much input from others as possible. I’m also starting a mailing list to discuss online presence and related topics (extending from closely related matters such as identity, reputation, attention, privacy and so on, out to the full array of social web design patterns).

If you’re interested in joining this conversation, let me know and I’ll invite you when the list is set up.

I just heard today about Not Just A Number, a community journalism project coproduced by the Oakland Tribune and InsideBayArea.com.

It endeavors to tell the real human stories of Oakland homicide victims, rather than letting them become merely statistics.

The site speaks for itself, and I feel like I might be cheapening it by talking about how it works technically (there are maps that show murder sites that lead to multimedia testimonials about the victims, and so on, but how it works isn’t really the point).

It just seems like the right sort of response (among many) to one of the worst crises in my adopted home town. It’s not like it solves the problem, of course, but it feels like a way to keep the humanity in the picture. I wonder if a similar approach could be applied to other, possibly more positive, community needs?

At BarCamp Block earlier this year I led a discussion of social media design patterns. The slides I posted were really more just about patterns and how we deal with them at Yahoo! But the group exercise was to brainstorm a huge list of social media and social networking activities that could be described and documented as patterns.

These are not the patterns themselves, but at least one pattern could probably be written around each of these gestures. We found it easiest in the brainstorm to just rattle off a list of gerunds (“adding, blocking, friending,” etc.).

The list we came up is also not exhaustive or definitive. It’s one group’s idea of the various patterns that a social system could support. The initial list was posted at the BarCamp Block wiki. Then Kent Bye, one of the participants, took a stab at re-sorting it a bit and created a visualization. He also then hand-copied it into an outline format and sent me his “version two” of the list.

Since then I’ve made a few more tweaks and have produced a version 3 outline. I’ve been working on visualizing it myself, so I turned the OPML into an OmniOutliner file and then imported that into OmniGraffle. The map is so tangled that Graffle had a hard time displaying it without crossing lines, so I spent some more time dragging the various nodes and clusters around until they were each separate. The end result is that it’s huge of course, and still by no means final or exhaustive or authoritative.

In fact, it’s decidedly not the taxonomy of social media patterns we’re working on internally at Yahoo! Think of it as an open source, collaborative work in progress. The thumbnail image above links to a full-sized PDF you should feel free to grab to get a better look at the current state of play of this idea, and if you’d like the OPML file or any other format, just drop me a note and I’ll send it to you.

When I get a moment, I’ll drop by the BarCamp Block wiki and upload the file there in several formats too, at least until someone provides a better place for hosting this project.

TechPresident, a project of Personal Democracy Forum (which I used to write for), in cooperation with the New York Times and MSNBC, has launched a site called 10 Questions where anyone can suggest a question for the presidential candidates and anyone can vote the suggested questions up or down.

It’s a kind of more open version of the YouTube debate concept or the recent mashup Yahoo! did.

In round one, you ask a video question, you vote on the best questions, the top ten questions get selected.

In round two, the top ten questions are presented to the candidates, candidates post their video answers, and (here’s the beauty part) you decide if they actually answered the questions.

(via Zephyr Teachout, who’s always up to something cool.)

This is a quandary for me. I try to keep my LinkedIn network literally to people I know and have worked with or with whose work I am familiar. From what I can see, you seem like an excellent person to know, I’m flattered that you enjoy my posts on that list, and I appreciate your providing that context since so many invitations I get have robogreetings on them.

I couldn’t bring myself to click the “I don’t know Jack…” button, but since I take LinkedIn literally (I want to be able to recommend people from my own direct experience) I also don’t feel right accepting your invitation.

I hope you understand.

Just got a call from an organizer named Barbara with the local Barack Obama for President campaign, telling me they are opening a new Northern California campaign office in downtown Oakland, and inviting me to a grand opening party for the office on 4136 14th Street (near Broadway) this Sunday, September 30, from 1 to 5 pm.

I’m thinking of going. I haven’t gotten involved in a campaign yet, nor have I picked a candidate, but I do like what I’ve seen of Obama so far, even as I wish he would take a harder line on ending the war in Iraq.

They say the party will have music and they expect the media there so they’re hoping to get the word out, so consider this my first volunteer effort for the campaign, trying to get the word out about this party just a little bit more.

At BarCamp Block I first heard about plans for She’s Geeky, a tech (un)conference for women by women. Immediately, I was intrigued. It sounds like a great idea, I love the title, and the organizers are some of the coolest folk I’ve met on the geek circuit.

One of the prime movers is Kaliya Identity Woman Hamlin, a strong advocate of the OpenSpace unconference model for events.

She’s Geeky takes place October 22 and 23 in Mountain View, CA (near Palo Alto). Here’s a description In their own words:

This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self identify as geeky. Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology.

Kaliya goes into some more detail about here “motivations and hopes” on her IdentityWoman blog, and addresses any concerns folks might have about exclusivity (which is a good thing, because even in this male-dominated tech world, I sometimes get that twinge of entitlement when something is for me, about me, catering to me and my ilk, etc.), saying, “My motivation is not to create an event that is ‘exclusive’ but to help create a space for women who some times are very isolated in different niches of the tech world. One women I spoke with yesterday recently found herself being one of only 12 women at a tech conference of 600.”

I have no doubt that She’s Geeky will be a watershed event and I look forward to reading about it and studying its impact.

I’ve written about MAPlight before but from time to time I feel the need to post an update about the amazing work it’s doing. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to this nonprofit, although my direct involvement is limited.)

Since the last time I mentioned MAPlight it’s gone from just documenting donations to California politicians to covering the Federal level as well, at a new site that launched back in May, called Our Congress (“Our Congress tracks every vote and campaign contribution for all U.S. Senators and Representatives”).

That alone is a huge addition to the service it provides. If you’re interested in what Congress is up to, also check out OpenCongress, another project that has received support from the Sunlight Foundation (as has MAPlight).

Then in May, MAPlight won the NetSquared innovation award for “social impact, sustainability, and technical innovation,” taking first prize in a contest based on open voting online, and earning a $25,000 prize grant.

More recently, MAPlight announced a set of customizable widgets “that allow anyone to track presidential fundraising on their own blogs, social media sites, and personal Web sites.”

Yahoo! Mash (né Mosh) is open to non-Yahoos on an invitation-only basis.

If you want to try it out, and you know me (or at least have some connection to me that you can tell me about), leave a comment and I’ll send you an invitation.

Oh, my profile there, for people already in Mash is at mash.yahoo.com/xian21370.

Here’s my obligatory plug for my South by Southwest proposals. I’ve got two panels in contention at the cool-but-unwieldy Panel Picker, so I thought I’d provide some shortcuts here. A lot of folks feel that there are too many panels at SXSW and not enough solo presenters. I tend to agree, but I think the problem is really panels that are underprepared or have too many participants. After moderating a panel with five participants last year I’ve decided that that’s too many for a 45 or 50 minute slot. I think four (including moderator) is the max, and three or even two is probably ideal.

The first panel I’m proposing pertains to my ongoing book project (working title: Presence of Mind), on the subject of online/digital identity, reputation, attention, privacy, trust, and presence. Last year, my panel, Every Breath You Take (podcast, my slides) seemed to go over fairly well, despite the gawdawful 10 am but really 9 am because of daylight savings Sunday morning slot (you must recall that Saturday night - and, really, every other night - at SXSW involves a lot of drinking for most attendees.

I took to heart the positive and negative feedback and so the sequel this year will feature just three participants: myself, Ted Nadeau returning from last year, and Andrew Hinton, whose presentation on communities of practice at the IA Summit this year was such a huge success. We’re going to strive to go beyond the typical talking-head panel format and enage the audience in innovative ways. We’re also going to try to take the conversation past the grounwork-laying, high-level philosophizing of last year and hand the attendees some practical tools for building on what we’re tentatively calling the “human operating system.”

If this sounds appealing to you, please go vote for Online Reputation: And I Do Give a Damn about My Bad Reputation.

My second proposal draws on my experience running Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library and moderating a mailing list for pattern authors. I’ve recruited Jenifer Tidwell, the leading figure in UI patterns; Austin Govella, who can talk about implementing a pattern library in a commerical context at Comcast; and James Reffel, also now at Yahoo!, who will share what he learned getting eBay’s pattern engine off the ground.

Luke Wrobleski’s talk on patterns at SXSW last year filled a large room and generated a lot of interest and I’m hoping to serve that same constituency by sharing practical experience and advice in our panel Design Patterns: the Devil’s in the Details, which we described this way:

Patterns ground frameworks like Rails and Django drive libraries like Prototype, and enable rapid product development at companies big and small. But what happens when patterns go wrong? How do you know when a pattern is right? We’ll examine common issues facing groups who use design patterns and share our experiences at making sure patterns go right.

There are a lot of other great proposals. I kind of wish I could sort my existing votes into star order to remind myself of the ones I’ve already deemed must-sees, but here are a few I’ve been able to recall or find.

• Agile User Experience - Bigger! Better! Faster! More - Austin Govella, Leisa Reichelt, Dan Harrelson, yo!
• Roll Over Gutenberg, Tell McLuhan the News - George Kelly
• The State of Professional Front-End Engineering - Nate Koechley (yes, a Yahoo guy, but this is a must-see, trust me)
• The Future of Presence - Bryan Oberkirch
• Redrum in the Rue Morgue: Collaboration in International Communities - Ana Boa-Ventura
• Build a Site Search Widget - Kent Brewster (another Yahoo guy, but again this is not nepotism or logrolling - Kent is the real deal)
• Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting! - Annalee Newitz
• Do I have to disappear to get anything done? - Ryan Freitas
• English: Technology’s Universal Language - the always entertaining and enlightening Kevin Smockler
• Stop Emailing and Be More Productive - Tantek Çelik

Hit me up in the comments if you’d like to recommend another panel or presenter as well.

Back in February, Mark Zeman, Lecturer and Subject Director in Digital Media, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand, tipped me off to a search agent research project called Searchbots. I tagged it as something to blog about in my email and then, well, I got busy with my new job.

I’ve finally checked it out. Mark was clever enough to give me short precis of the project:

• Experimental social search engine created as a Masters in Design project.
• Build your own search robot and send it out to search on your behalf.
• Search using tags, location, color and mood, or ask a question.
• Get ongoing personalized reports and feeds.
• Talk to it and feed your Searchbot metadata to keep it alive.
• The more you interact with your Searchbot the better everyone’s results.
• Runs on top of API’s from Google, Yahoo, Digg & del.icio.us and more.
• Cross references popular Digg items with del.icio.us tags.
• Building an artificial intelligence using people’s common sense and clicks.
• 34,000+ Searchbots built.
• Interactive tag clouds & other metadata games to play with your Searchbot.
• Get your unique tag cloud plus your Searchbot printed on a tee-shirt.
• Your Searchbots finds facts and entertainment. Mix it up.
• Diligently retrieving the best of the Internet for the good of humanity.

Here are the questions (to users) the research is designed to address:

• Does personifying the search interface increase the motivation of users to contribute metadata?
• Will users become attached to their Searchbots through ongoing interaction and therefore be willing to play metadata games to keep it alive?
• Will using mythology and game theory help make searching an active give-and-take relationship? Will this sustain an open-content social search engine?
• Would you rather fill out a basic form or talk to a Searchbot? An agent that works on your behalf to wade through search results.
• How will users respond to creatively tagging the web? If I search for the color red will I find a website about tomatoes, communism or angry people?
• How would you define your ongoing “relationship” with your search engine? Does it endlessly talk in your ear or just drip-feed you good clues?

Mark said he was planning to run a survey of users so if he notices this post, he can chime in and let us know “some of the findings on how personifying the interface effects users motivation levels.”

Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto.

According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or participate in discussions about portable social networks, identity, design patterns, particularly social-media related design patterns, and the gift economy.

I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk about all of those things but when has that ever stopped me before?

Since the moment that Liz Henry and Tara Hunt tipped me off to this event, I’ve had the feeling that this was an important one not to miss. So soon after my wedding and honeymoon and with a rapidly filling-up fall conference schedule, I could have been tempted to let this one slide by, but I have a strong intuition that many of the people I consider friends, heroes, and inspirations will be there and that I’d be kicking myself if I let another Bay Area BarCamp go by without joining in on the fun.

I’ll blog from there if I can find the time between no-spectatorin’ and schmoozin’ and gettin’ things done.

Maybe everyone else in the blogosphere knows this already but I just read that Dave Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati: Technorati Weblog: A Change In Seasons

Looks like Tantek’s timing was impeccable.

I first met Dave during the dotcom bust when blogging was booming (again) on the backs of a lot of underemployed folks, myself included. I was working hard, updating Radio Free Blogistan three to seven times a day, hanging out on the #joiito channel on irc, and going to various blogger dinners and shmoozes here in the Bay Area.

I met a lot of folks with interesting startup ideas or who were looking at various ways of turning their passion for blogging and or social networking into businesses or publications or both. Dave’s idea was simple to explain and easy to understand, so I wasn’t surprised to see it get funded and take off.

I’ve got other friends working there now - some of whom I introduced to the Technorati people. I guess I consider myself a friend of the company, if that’s even a possible thing to be, and I’ve hesitated to complain or criticize too much when I’ve found the service sluggish or otherwise frustrating.

I applauded their recent redesign and I still visit the site when I am in the mood for some egosurfing (usually disappointing) or to see who’s been blogging about the Yahoo! Pattern Library recently.

It sounds like Technorati is having a tough time right now. Valleywag reported something like eight layoffs in addition to the CEO vacancy, and people don’t seem to talk about how Google or Yahoo! should buy Technorati so much anymore.

(Disclosure: I work at Yahoo but I have absolutely no knowledge regarding acquisition plans or lack of them for any startup out there.)

I’m sure the next thing Dave does will be interesting and I wish him the best.

Back when I wrote The Power of Many I blogged about blogging a book in progress and since then I’ve noticed a number of other authors blogging about the same subject. (Contrast this with William Gibson’s decision to stop his blogging when he started his next book.)

Now it looks like Forrester analyst Charlene Li and her collaborator are using a full suite of “living web” tools to write their book, Groundswell (why does that name sound familiar?): Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li’s Blog): 7 ways the Web makes writing a book better & faster:

1. Collaboration with a wiki. Charlene and I have put as much as we can into a SocialText wiki. It’s contains research interviews, title ideas, the latest table of contents, the elements of the proposal that got us here, everything. I just added a page which tracks all the chapters as they move through various writing, editing, and review stages. We don’t generally use the Wiki to write the chapters — the drafts still move back and forth by email, partly since SocialText can’t quite handle all the formatting flexibility that MS Word can — but copies of the chapters do live there. A bicoastal collaboration needs a wiki. We also share it with other interested parties including my boss, Charlene’s boss, and our editor at HBS Press.

2. This blog for testing ideas. I can’t count the ways that a blog helps. When we think we have a good idea, it goes up here. For example, the five goals of a company for social computing, which became the core of the book. We put our outline up here for your review. That post became extremely useful, because I reference it in every email I send to people I’m trying to influence or interview. People doing interesting things contact us because of the blog. And I’m not even getting to the uses of the blog for promotion, which will start after the book is written, but well before it’s published.

3. Del.icio.us for gathering research documents. Every story, vendor, YouTube video, and anything else on the Web gets tossed into the del.icio.us bucket. I rarely used to bookmark things — now I bookmark everything. These sites are even classified with our own proprietary set of tags that indicate what chapter they relate to. (We’ll share this when the book is closer to done — right now it’s proprietary.) I don’t believe we could have written this book without del.icio.us.

4. Email for everything — but highly personalized. Every single contact in this book — and there will be hundreds and hundreds — will have been made by email. I’m sure you’re not surprised that I email Charlene 10 times a day and do a few IM conversations, but I’m talking about making introductions by email. If I need to introduce myself to somebody, I send a personalized email describing the book in one sentence, linking to the blog post about the book, and telling them what I want and making it clear I have researched them and know what they are about — and I frequently get a response the same day. This email might take 15 minutes to write, but it’s worth it — it’s the opposite of mass emailings, highly personal and personalized. (I recently invited a CEO to speak at our Forum in October and got an affirmative response within two hours — astounding our events team.) Where do I get the email addresses? Forrester has a database that may or may not help. Easier is finding the PR email address on a company’s site. Often somebody I know, knows it. Sometimes I use Zoominfo’s PowerSearch. And sometimes, if I know the email address of somebody else at the company, I guess based on that format. That actually works — recently got the CEO of an Italian company to get back to me that way.
   
   At first I had big spreadsheets full of contacts I was pursuing on Google docs but I’ve found a better way. I just flag all incoming and outcoming mail that relates to contacts. The yellow flag means I’ve pinged somebody and need them to get back to me. Then I just check all those flags when I’m in followup mode. It’s not ACT, but it works for me!

5. A big monitor in a quiet office. When I am ensconced in my home office with my high-speed Internet, VOIP phone line, home network, and big flat monitor, I am highly productive. The big monitor has made a big difference — I no longer feel cramped and squeezed by my laptop screen, and I frequently have one thing up on the laptop (like a Web site, or edits I need to address, or an interview) while I write on the big monitor. When I’m not at home, my productivity goes down. My home office, while it’s in the basement, also has a window out onto my lawn, a fireplace, a hardwood floor, big whiteboards filled with the stuff I’m working on and my kids’ artwork, and quick access to the kitchen and my family when I need to decompress. Makes all the hours possible.

6. A phone line that follows me anywhere. Forrester has an Avaya phone system with a cool little feature — an Internet app I can run on my laptop that turns any phone into my office phone. At my home office, I can call Japan using Forrester’s phone system, conference people together, transfer them to other Forrester extensions — everything I can do at my desk. And if I go anywhere else, I can do this with any phone line — my mobile, Forrester’s Foster City office, or my parents’ house. People see my caller ID as if I were calling from Forrester, and my voicemail is one click away. I find this far better than giving everyone my mobile phone number.

7. Firefox and Netvibes. I use Firefox for everything possible, because the tabbed browsing and the bookmarklets make it very efficient for me. I cannot survive without tabbed browsing since I am typically browsing 4 or 8 things at once to build a chapter. (I know IE has tabbed browsing now but it’s too late, I’m happy with Firefox.) I use Netvibes to track a surprisingly small number of blogs including Micropersuasion, The Church Of The Customer, The Long Tail, Blog Maverick, and Seth Godin. I also have up TechCrunch, GigaOm, TechMeme, and TechDirt, but they post so frequently that I don’t read them unless something catches my eye.

(via allaboutgeorge)

If you missed Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Privacy, and Reputation last March at South By here’s your chance to hear me, Ted Nadeau, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and George Kelly take on these topics, very early one Sunday morning after an untimely daylight savings change and, for many people, a night of carousing and drinking free drinks sponsored by startups and web behemoths.

In an interesting rambly ‘meme of the month’ post at her famed CultureKitchen website, called Radical Fringe, Liza writes:

… Jeff Tiedrich of Smirking Chimp, confirming my theory that you’re not a true net native if you don’t know who Christian Crumlish is or if, at least, he doesn’t know who you are. If you don’t know who he is, then you have to read his book. It’s freaky how almost of the pioneers of the net have one or two degrees of separation from Xian.

But is it freaky, really, or am I just an exceptionally good stalker?

Looks like Technorati has reconfigured itself to be less blog-centric and to take a more multimedia look at what they call over there the Live Web (Technorati Weblog: Come check out the refreshed www.technorati.com!):

First, we’ve eliminated search silos on Technorati. In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag search and blog directory search in order to make use of the full power of our site. No more. Starting today, we now provide you a simplified experience. Simply indicate what’s of interest to you and we’ll assemble the freshest, hottest, most current social media from across the Live Web - Blogs, posts, photos, videos, podcasts, events, and more.

We’ve also worked really hard at making our user interface simpler, and more intuitive. We’ve been spending months doing user testing, and listening to you, our users, collecting and prioritizing what you wanted, what you liked, and what you hated about Technorati. We haven’t gotten it 100% right yet, and we’re going to keep working hard to improve, but I think we’ve made a big step forward with this launch.

…

With this launch, we also provide you with more context around more stuff like videos, music, and blogs. Over time, these pages will become richer and more comprehensive as we add more information about the thing itself, like where it was published, who links to it, what other things are similarly tagged, and more.

In reply to apophenia: Twitter questions (curiosity is killing me…):

First, the practical question. Can i quote you?
[ ] Yes, and you must use my real name.
[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information.
[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.

Hmm, those options have an excluded middle. I’d say “Yes, feel free, and you may use my real name, my online handle(s), or whatever other descriptor you find useful.” If I have to pick one I guess I’d pick the first one.

1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?

I use it to jot down my thoughts and narrate my day and to keep up with what some of my (online) friends are doing and thinking about. I like the ambient intimacy, to quote Leisa Reichelt.

2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.

I think my followers are reading them. Is that a trick question? It’s a perfectly OK audience for me, since it’s opt in. There are people, like close friend and family whom I’d like to also read them (if they were willing of course), but there is no invite feature.

3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?

I read them sometimes via twitterific, sometimes from the Twitter website, sometimes receiving them as text messages. I don’t always read all of them but I do tend to read down till I reach familiar territory, much like the way I catch up on a blog I haven’t read in a while. (Having said that, I scan - I don’t read everything carefully.)

I read people whom I’ve met and a few whom I find interesting or appealing. So I don’t know them all but I think I know (meaning have met in person) 90% of them. I don’t expect any of them to reciprocate necessarily. That is, it doesn’t bother me if they are not interested in following my thoughts.

4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?

I haven’t thought about it too much. I go by instinct. I guess some descriptions of graphic bodily functions might not necessarily feel appropriate to me, at times. Beyond that I think it’s fair game and the character limit kind of helps.

I have thought about tweeting something and then decided not to, usually because I think it’s too random or trivial, because I’ve ceased to find it amusing in the first few seconds since thinking of it, or because I’ve posted a bunch of tweets lately and don’t want to be spamming people.

5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?

My tweets are public. I like doing things in public and don’t mind people paying attention. Therefore (back to the appropriateness thing) I probably won’t be tweeting about things that are illegal or offensive or humiliating (unless I can’t resist because it’s so entertaining or revealing). I don’t mind people coming across what I write. I expect it’s all out there and people will see it and even form opinions about me based on it. It’s all good.

6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?

I can’t get the IM interface working and I would find it useful during the workday. There are many people I’d enjoy sharing with on Twitter who are not on the system but I can’t be sure they’d like it (so many people don’t) so I don’t feel comfortable evangelizing.

On the SIGIA-L discussion list people are talking about a spammy social network site called Tagged.com. I only know about it because I received an invitation from an unfamiliar sender to a never-used spam-honeypot email address of mine. I looked at the site, it seemed shady, so I ignored it. That was months ago.

Now I’m learning that the site encourages new members to submit their email usernames and passwords. It then scours the user’s address book, sending spam invitations to all of the email addresses it finds, sent as if from the new member, and follows up with reminders. (Much like WAYN and the original version of Plaxo.)

It also make the email addresses available to “marketing partners” on an opt-out basis.

It’s nearly impossible to find out who’s behind the site. (Its registration is associated with p.o. box in San Francisco.)

It doesn’t pass the smell test.

Shun. Avoid. Eschew.

Following on its adoption of tagging last year, Amazon has now added a friends feature. At least I assume this is something new. I hadn’t heard of it before. The first clue I had that such as social networking functionality had been introduced was receiving an invitation in my email from a writer friend of mine:

When social networking sites started cropping up everywhere in 2004 a lot of people wondered what they were for. Some had clear purposes. LinkedIn is for business/professional networking. Others are for dating. But many of them seemed more like a proof of concept waiting for a business model. The next logical step to look out for is to see businesses and sites with existing purposes and flows of people and data embracing social networking as a service to their communities (and, incidentally, as a way of redoubling those flows.

Amazon appears to making tentative steps to test out these possibilities.

A lot of political blogs are reporting today that White House staff and operatives evaded regulations and used outside email services, such as their RNC accounts, resulting in the deletion of reportedly five million email messages:

BREAKING: White House lost Over FIVE MILLION e-mails in two year period | Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

Thing is, email is harder to kill than Dracula. Email messages inherently hop from server to server (in packets) on their way from sender to recipient. Each of the interim hop-stops might easily have a backup copy, if the system administrator is doing a good job.

Remember how the Iranians painstakingly reconstructed shredded documents from the U.S. embassy in Tehran by literally piecing together the strips? It would be much easier to recover and reconstruct these supposedly “lost” five million email messages the White House doesn’t want us to see.

I’ve been using pobox as a mail forwarding service since 1995 (I think I read about it in Wired and I was sold on the idea of a middle layer between my correspondents and my potentially ever changing email addresses). When I started owning my own domains I simply forwarded custom (“vanity”) email addresses from them to the pobox account and had everything funneled into one place.

Today I was poking around the pobox website and had a few questions about changing my settings and getting around the site, so I used their customer service form to send in two comments. Literally within minutes I had personal replies from their customer service rep, Kate Marstin.

In both cases her replies were informative, helpful, friendly, and personal. I did not feel like I was communicating with a robot or corporation.

I think my account at pobox is paid up through 2011, but effectively they’ve got me as a customer for life. Even when their website is overwhelmed by the myriad spams they are filtering out for me and all of their other customers or when I have trouble finding the right link to change my preferences, I’ll stick around because I feel like there are real people putting their actual selves into their work and their presence and their communication with their customers; and that they consider me, one of their customers, to be a real person worthy of a human response to a simple question.

Thanks, pobox.

I was discussing yesterday with Jay Fienberg how it bothers me that some of the ostensibly supportive comments on Kathy Sierra’s blog include thoughts along the lines of “I am a big man so I am not vulnerable to these kinds of threats.” Not only does this sort of reinforce the chauvinism, as Jay pointed out, but it’s also ludicrous. I don’t care if you’re tall and male and you work out. Someone can still shoot you, jump you, drop a safe on your head, or kidnap your children. It smacks of role-playing fantasy to believe that your macho body will avert the evil eye.

Laura Lemay wrote a particularly thoughtful piece on the Sierra situation (lauralemay :: blog :: kathy sierra, or, imminent death of the net predicted) and noticed a difference in how men and women have tended to react:

Mostly as I read the comments on Kathy’s post and on other blogs I have noticed a kind of interesting but obvious breakdown. Men, in general, are shocked and horrified that this kind of harassment goes on at all. Women are of course shocked and horrified at Kathy’s situation, but they also kind of nod ruefully and say yeah, it happened to me, too.

I honestly didn’t think this was a secret, that women get disproportionally picked on in the internets. I thought it was a big fat obvious fact.

Do I get stalked and harassed and picked on on the internet? Do I get death threats? Sure. I started getting them the week I first posted to Usenet twenty years ago, and I’ve been getting them ever since. It was worse during the usenet era, and WAY worse when I was selling a lot of books. Its pretty quiet these days now that I’m mostly anonymous and I write a mostly personal journal blog. No one cares about cat posts; there are bigger targets. But it still happens.

and

But even though all I’ve had is silly email and blog comments I would be lying if I said I was immune to it, that I just blithely delete it all and move on with my life, or that the barrage of it when I was a popular author wasn’t a factor in wanting to maybe not be so popular anymore. You always wonder if its THIS particular scary nutbag who’s going to be the one to go beyond recreational typing. There’s always a small nagging fear.

Honestly until this week I thought this sort of constant harassment was so common and so obvious it wasn’t even worth mentioning. It had gone on for so long and I had gotten so used to it that it hadn’t occurred to me that this is anything other than what it means to be female on the internet. I told [my husband] about it and he asked me, aghast, why I had never mentioned that I get death threats. We’ve known each other for fifteen years. It just never came up. The shocked reactions internet-wide to Kathy’s post have made me realize that hm. maybe this isn’t normal. And maybe it shouldn’t be.

In Not looking for sympathy or anything Dave Winer deplores the mob mentality that has arisen from Kathy Sierra’s complaint and the way it tarred a range of people with varying degrees of involvement with the same brush.

He also notes a gender imbalance tilted the opposite way:

People aren’t going to like this, but it’s true — when a woman asks for a riot she gets one, and almost no one comes to the defense of a man who is attacked. Who’s more vulnerable? Well, honestly, it’s not always a woman.

and

The time to act is way before it escalates into the kind of post that Kathy Sierra posted. There should be people who are willing to provide personal support to others who are ostracized this way — and that support should be available regardless of gender, age, or other circumstances.

I won’t support anything that only offers support to women and not men. We must help unpopular people, even people who we think are mean. It’s no crime to be unpopular, and you can measure our humanity by how good we are to people we don’t like.

Nancy White, an expert on online community, weighs in with Hate, Threats and the Culture of Love, and looks for opportunities to learn from this situation. Her thoughts don’t dwell on gender divisions but more on how the we collectively (in communities, in the blogosphere, in the human race) can engage with each other constructively.

She looks at three levels at which we can try to find a way forward:

1. What I choose to take personal responsibility for - on my blog, on websites I host, garden or facilitate and WHY. How transparently I do this so people can choose to engage or not. I delete spam. I delete hate comments. Have I made that clear? Not clear enough. So I need to get my personal online house in order.
2. What I choose to negotiate with the communities and groups I participate in. This goes to the possibility of being complicit in something that goes against my beliefs, values and promises I make to and with others. For me, the issues with MeanKids etc. fall into this one and it is worth some more conversation. I accept that we will have differing views on this. But we have choice about what we support, what we ignore and what we speak out on. Free speech is essential. Hate attacks and rape fantasies should not have to be policy level decisions - or only as last resort. We as a community should not tolerate them. If you want to have hateful discussions, take it to a walled garden. If you do it in public, expect impact on your reputation. (Note: this is NOT directed at anyone. I don’t know who did what and leave that to those involved to sort out. I’m talking at the general level.)
3. What I choose to support from a policy level. Death threats should be prosecuted. Privacy should be protected. Free speech should be protected.

I gathered these links and quotations within a day or so of the panel I moderated at South by Southwest, but since then I’ve been to another conference and am generally running behind. Still, I was pleased by many of these responses (and even the less positive ones provide useful criticism) so I wanted to make a point of reflecting them here:

Jason Toney at Blog is a Mix Tape wrote:

• New etiquette rules really need to be established for online and mobile communication
• Reputation, Identity, Presence, Nameplaces - these are my kinds of buzzwords
• How does the desire for someone like me who wants a persistent online identity exist at the same time that many people (particularly young people) like the concept of disposable identity? Are their tools and applications that can make the web better for both types of folks?
• What about those who want no online identity but still wants the tools that are increasingly requiring identity creation?

The author of swirlspice wrote:

Started the day with Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation…. This could have gone on for another hour. Mostly about managing your identity and how your reputation develops and propagates (your reputation is assigned to you more than you create it).

In Wired’s “Listening Post” blog, Laura Moorhead wrote Leave No Trail Behind:

Who are you? Your Wikipedia entry or your last blog entry? What about that half-clothed avatar or raunchy kid from a few years back?

The panel “Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online” reminds us — not that we needed it — that our identity lives on and it’s mutating out of control. Friends, enemies, and crazy exes (aka Sibils) augment it, and big companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Yahoo, use and benefit from it. Where’s the user control?

Early on in the hour-long panel, Ted Nadeau, from Dot Line Inc., reminds us that though we’re all pro privacy, there really is no privacy online.

Take a look at the top handful of sites trying to offer users control over their online identity - be that one or 12 personas - and expect to be disappointed. “Reputation 1.0 isn’t working - there’s no consistency in someone’s reputation,” says Nadeau. “There’s big thinking, but no one coding yet.”

What’s the perfect reputation system? Perhaps, says Nadeau, one in which you can move your persona from one web site to another, with different data stores and key spaces (say, your copy, that of others and a shared version).

This is pretty much what panelist Kaliya Hamlin, a freelance evangelist for open standards in user-centric identity (OpenID2, i-names, XRI/XDI, SAML, icards, Higgins), backs. With OpenID2, she says, you travel the web with your identity. Essentially, you own it, and there’s no breadcrumb trail for online companies to feed off.

Mary Hodder, founder of Dabble, a social search site, goes on to ask, Why shouldn’t users own all their clicks? Hodder put this question to companies like Amazon and Google — and (amazingly) they agreed. She’s even got a tool to track a person’s online life via clicks.

This idea of leave no trail behind is big. Eliot Van Buskirk’s article about the RIAA’s latest poison pen shows us why users might want to own a copy of all their online wanderings and actions.

Another option (I think from Hodder and Hamlin): If all our info is public, but anonymous, that’s even better.

One last nugget from Hodder: We’re agreeing to things we don’t understand. Consider Google’s deal with San Francisco to set up the city with a wireless network. Taxpayers are giving up their “attention data” — their online entities — for 17 years. Hodder says that’s worth millions, far more than the cost of the wireless setup. Shouldn’t the city or someone get a cut?

Bill Humphries wrote in his blog Whump, I’m a 10th Level Link Blogger:

Liz Henry: Ted Nadeau says our non-monetary assets are: Identity, Attention, Intention, Influence, Reputation. (In addition to Str Dex Int Wis Con Cha.)”

Laura Fisher wrote in her a later date blog:

Attended a great panel, moderated by Christian Crumlish, on web identity and attention. There were some terrific things said; I took notes - it deserves a post of its own.

Laura Porto wrote in Digital Dialogs:

Identity and reputation in the digital space is one of those gigantic topics to try to tackle in an hour. This panel provided some discussion starters, but unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to go deeper.

• Mary Hodder made the suggestion that we all be transparent about what we do online so that the government can’t stigmatize certain people or certain behaviors
• Ted Nadeau made the point that while you are connected to your identity you are not in control of it
• George Kelly showed us the interactive Johari window as an example of how our reputations so not belong to us, but rather to the people who interact with us

One of the most interesting points of the panel came from an audience