Designing Social Interfaces - Rough Cut | O’Reilly Media
Originally uploaded by xian
The unedited, 500 page first draft of our book is available now in PDF format for review by anyone who can’t bear to wait till September for the first (“real”) edition to come out.
Yay!
Erin Malone and I introduced some of the fruit of our effort to carve out a pattern language for social user experience design. At the Information Architecture Summit in Memphis this past week we taught our pattern library workshop and then delivered this tandem presentation:
gee and i’ve only met barlow once
Originally uploaded by xian
was JP Barlow idly doing the comparisons today, or is this more like secret-admirer spam?
As you may know, I am writing a book with Erin Malone called Designing Social Interfaces for O’Reilly Media.
Erin is the the founder of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and hired me to be its third curator. Today she is a partner at Tangible UX, a consulting firm, and I maintain the library as a YDN design evangelist on Micah Laaker’s Yahoo! Open Strategy (YOS) team, in collaboration with Luke Wroblewski’s Front Doors and Network Services (FDNS) team.
The top of my agenda in the past year has been to identify, gather, and document a family of social design patterns: observed practices that work well in resolving common design problems in social applications. I’ve been looking for and teasing out patterns that enable social environments to thrive and sustain themselves.
Fortunately, I had a leg up or two. While there were very few documented community or social media patterns in the library, there are a wealth of specs, papers, patterns, presentations, and guidelines scattered around the intranet, and there was Matt Leacock’s first take on a social media toolkit, shepherded together on an internal Yahoo! wiki.
More importantly, I looked out across the landscape of the web and drew on my own personal experience as a user, analyst and addict of online social experiences.
At BarCamp Block last year I facilitated a session on social media patterns (at least that’s what I was calling them then) and the net takeaway was an amazing mindmap of potential patterns. Quite a few of them turn out to be social moments, social behaviors, or social objects; or scenarios that illuminate patterns without being patterns themselves. But the outline and cloud diagrams we built from that brainstorm helped get me started sorting out some possible organizing structures beyond what we had internally a Yahoo.
This mindmap went through a series of iterations and refinements. Meanwhile, I started presenting on the topic of social patterns at BayCHI, at South By, at the IA Summit, at Ignite and more recently at TechPulse and soon PLoP and Interaction09.
Taking your half-baked ideas on the road and presenting them to a demanding crowd of payng customers is a great way of figuring out which ideas have resonance and which miss the mark. Presenting ongoing work in progress is tough: you make yourself vulnerable and open to criticism. But the criticism will come eventually anyway. Why not hear it now while you can still address it and incorporate the best ideas of others into your work?
For that matter, I feel it’s essential to be clear about one thing: almost none of this work on social design patterns is original. Yes, of course I am naming patterns and writing them and perhaps throwing in a nugget of experience here and there, but for the most part I am still curating these patterns. I’ve been stealing from everybody!
We hates plagiarism so we cite sources and point back to originators where applicable. I’ve proposed that the nascent PLPL (Pattern Language Markup Language) standard include an attribution element, with a common structure for reflecting sources, reuse, derived work, and licensing matters.
Furthermore, in our book we are inviting a wide range of leading practitioners, thinkers, and bloggers to contribute essays on one or more of the pattern families we’re developing for the book. Because, yes, the book is in many ways an offshoot of this ongoing social pattern collecting effort. And in that same spirit we’re both interested (Erin and me) in experimenting iwth methods of opening up the writing process and seeking feedback, correction, criticism, and contributions before the book’s ship date.
We’ll probably post patterns in progress on a wiki and in the meantime we will both be posting thoughts about the chapters we’re working on on our blogs. I’ll also post some draft patterns here at least until we have the wiki process figured out.
My next post in this series will be about a set of fundamental social design patterns I’m pulling together in Chapter 2.
I’m going to name the robots Foo and Bar. We still haven’t announced the musical act that will be performing on this stage tonight.
So far I’ve heard Cody Simms and Neal Sample (Cody and Neal, hmmm….) give a great overview of YOS (with great visuals by Micah Laaker), and am now listening to Allen Rabinovich explain how to hack with Flash and Flex.
At 2pm I’ll be talking about patterns and stencils and how they can help coders build better interfaces.
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:
and
Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:
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.
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:
Here are the questions (to users) the research is designed to address:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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!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.
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.
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:
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:
- 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.
- 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.)
- 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 participant who asked about changing identity. We are, after all, a young industry. How will we feel about having one identity in 10 or 20 or 30 years? I for one, find it fun to Google my Usenet entries circa 95.
Another interesting point raised was how we manage the public versus private space.”
Rob Pongsajapan wrote in arrivals/departures:
One panel that was excellent, however, was the Christian Crumlish-moderated panel on identity, attention, presence and reputation. I was trading notes with Aly after the session and sent her my impression of the panel: “Mary Hodder didn’t disappoint,” I texted.
In Composite: Thoughts on Poetics Liz Henry transcribed very accurate notes and wrote, “Wow, I dig all the stuff Ted has been saying.”
In Eco-Geekery Brian Fitzgeral wrote:
This was a great panel, really well facilitated by Christian Crumlish, author The Power of the Many. He’s working on a new book, and claims “my scam was to put this panel together, take notes on what they say, and sneak it into my book.” Man, that is SO going to be a book if he does so. His online identities are. xian, mediajunkie.
Chris Hunter wrote in jugglebird:
I’m at SXSW early for a panel on reputation and identity. It started out very slow, with the moderator, Christian Crumlish, rambling on without making many definitive statements.
Ted Nadeau went next, with an admitted preface that he was new to identity and reputation. While his talk was rambling, he threw out some interesting observations about existing reputation systems (eBay, LinkedIn, Slashdot, etc…) but generally noting the lack of widespread and open reputation systems. It definitely seems like there’s an opportunity for something tied to OpenID and given the direction LoTV is headed, it’s worth paying attention to this area.”
Mary Hodder spoke next about the Attention Trust, starting with an example of how Google uses attention in the form of links and AdSense to power their businesses. She related that the Attention Trust founders actually had a much easier time than expected in getting large internet companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc…) to release this information to their users.”
The last panelist, George Kelly, spoke about the interactive johari window which allows an individual to self-select attributes and then compare them to the attributes selected by others. The inverse, a nohari window, allows the selection of negative attributes with the same kind of comparison and filtering.”
The author of worldmegan took extensive notes, including this:
This panel is called Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation. Christian Crumlish is our moderator. He seems nice, though very sleepy. Poor west coast people. Hell, I’M sleepy.
and notes on the discussion of an attention economy:
Attention: The “attention economy,” what is this thing? It’s actually incredibly consequental that Google is collecting your information - this has to do with the attention economy. A link to a site is a vote of confidence in Google’s eyes. Rank results are based on this, are based on what a person clicks when they search for something. Adsense is also based on all of this. The “attention trust” asserts that you own a copy of this information. (Attention is still bothering me, I’m not quite getting it.) Seth Goldstein and Steve Gilmore started the attention trust, Mary is explaining. They got everybody to agree that the users own a copy of their attention streams. An attention stream is all those clicks you put into your browser, all these things someone is recording. There’s also a recorder you can use to record your own stream, it sounds like… this is actually really interesting! I like Mary Hodder.”
Rex Hammond did some very thorough very thorough liveblogging.
Will Kern wrote in 15 Meanings:
The first panel I went to was Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation, which consisted of Christian Crumlish from Yahoo!, Kaliya Hamlin from Identity Woman, Mary Hodder from Dabble, George Kelly from the Contra Costa Newspapers and Ted Nadeau from Dot Line Inc. The title of the panel seemed very intriguing and I thought I could gain a lot out of it and how it applies to social networking.
There were a few things I took away, but not necessarily how they directly applied to social networking. Kaliya talked about identity and namespaces, which I thought was good. She illustrates how OpenID like services work she was pitching the Yadis protocol, which would bring the various OpenID like options into 1 single sign on.
Ted discussed reputation (which he knowingly admitted that prior to a few days ago; he did not know much about the subject matter, kinda scary). With that being said, he did make some good points on the matter. He defined what reputation is as it pertains to the web and how you are not the primary authority on your reputation as it appears differently to different people.
And Leisa Reichelt wrote in her blog disambiguity:
Every Breath You Take - an incredibly intelligent, engaging and interesting panel on identity, attention and reputation which are topics that I’m finding incredibly interesting at the moment. There are all kinds of problems and opportunities around identity at the moment and this panel, including Christian Crumlish, Ted Nadeau, Mary Hodder, Kaliya Hamlin and George Kelly took a run at some of them. I’m still thing about the idea of Identity Friction and how we need to increase identity friction in virtual spaces to better replicate how it works in the ‘real world’.
On the whole, I think we managed to spark some interesting thoughts and kick off some much needed conversations around these vital concepts for the social, living web.
Note: I’ve added Ted Nadeau’s slides to my own in an earlier post to this blog.
I’ve been following the upsetting story of how Kathy Sierra, creator of the Head First book series, author of the Creating Passionate Users weblog, and noted speaker on the web / technology circuit was frightened into cancelling her scheduled appearance at eTech by a series of escalating threats to her personal safety in the form of email messages sent directly to her by readers and posts to several community blogs, now defunct, oriented toward taking pot shots at the more famous and popular bloggers.
Bloggers, her readers, and people learning about the story from news and blog sources have generally rallied to support Sierra. The long comment thread at the end of her post announcing the cancellation and detailing the communications that terrorized her attests to that. A number of people have quibbled with her interpretation of the messages, told her “man up” and to stop being hysterical, or have accused her of manufacturing her response as a public relations / marketing ploy.
Myself, I’ve been known to be verbally mean at time, to pick on people, to be saracstic and snarky when it suits me, but the two sites (“Mean Kids” and “Bob’s Yer Uncle”), ostensibly designed to encourage freewheeling, humorous, creative criticism, puncturing the puffed up much like certain gossip blogs do for the true celebrities in our culture, somehow gave free rein to a much more virulent form of attack: unbridled misogyny edging into images of sexual violence and horror.
It’s a dirty little secret of our world that hierarchies are sometimes enforced, under the cover of darkness, by sexualized threats of violence and domineering acts of humiliation. It’s more visible in lockerrooms, prisons, and other sealed male enclaves, but it may stem from primate behaviors that predate our humanity and it carries on to this day inside families and, at least in symbolic form, in public communication.
What struck me about this situation is how the worst attacks - revenge fantasies described in cartoonish pornographic terms, tend to have come from people writing under the cloak of anonymity, or deniability (for example, it’s still not clear if the posts associated with Alan “Head Lemur” Herrel cited in Sierra’s blog entry are actually by the man who goes by the nickname).
On Slashdot, no haven of civilized discourse, a poster who refuses to register and adopt a consistent persona is given the default name “Anonymous Coward.” Throughout the generally supportive comments flooding into Sierra’s blog post are peppered juvenile hit-and-run posts attacking her or making random racist and sexist comments. These comments are inevitable posted anonymously and associated with made-up email addresses or urls.
In the political blogosphere, where this sort of situation is less uncommon, there is an ongoing debate about the role of pseudonymity in blogs. A number of Sierra’s readers were sent there via the conservative blog, Protein Wisdom, whose author experienced a similar verbal attack from a commenter featuring vile “hypothetical” threats of sexualized violence (in that case targetting children, if I recall correctly). At the same time, the author of Protein Wisdom, Jeff Goldstein, is often criticized in the sort of left-wing blogs I frequent for engaging in threats to “out” pseudonymous bloggers while at the same time claiming to stand for civiility and sponsoring a set of ethical guidelines for bloggers.
Defenders of pseudonymous blogging make the point that not everyone is free to speak in public about political and social matters without fear of retaliation. Further, they argue that it is the persistence and consistency their assumed identity to which their reputation attaches, and that a perosn posting day in, day out, for years, as Sifu Tweety or Atrios is every bit as accountable for his (or her) words as someone signing their posts with a “real” name.
In Sierra’s explanatory post she called on several bloggers by name, blaming them for instigating the climate that incubated these attacks and for allowing them to escalate. She also cited a few less well known identities: one calling himself Siftee, who sent her a threatening email message, and another signing his posts Joey, who wrote apparently about a fictional character named Kat in misogynistic terms in the vicinity of posts attacking Kathy Sierra.
Of the contributors to Mean Kids, only Frank Paynter has come forward to apologize, without reservation, for his role, however inadvertant, in the development of this situation. I consider Frank a friend based solely on a shared history of reading each other’s bloggings, occasionally linking to each other, and even more rarely exchanging brief notes. I’m connected to Frank through Twitter and older social network environments and I admire his forthrightness in this situation.
Jeneane Sessums and Chris “RageBoy” Locke have been less willing to apologize or to own any responsibility for what happened. Sessums disclaimed any involvement at all with the sites although others seem to believe she was involved with the Mean Kids project. She has also refused to discuss the topic further in public. Locke argued that he did not write any of the sexually crude scenarios or send any threats and that hence Sierra invoked his name only to drive attention and embroil him in her controversy.
I feel that both of these people could have made an apology and still attempted to clarify their own culpability while distancing themselves from the statements they wish to disown.
Finally, “Joey” and a fellow named Paul Ritchie have mounted a more aggressive defense of themselves and the Mean Kids and Bob’s websites, arguing the Sierra is deliberately grandstanding and deluding her readers in order to form a lynch mob online, drive more sales to her books and increase her speaking fees.
I do not find these arguments compelling and I am not sympathetic partly because neither of them seems willing to repudiate the grossly indecent verbal attacks on Sierra (nor the violently misogynistic fantasies involving imaginary stock female figures).
What I will grant is that all of the people I just mentioned have to some extent been willing to go on the record and produce themselves in public in the aftermath of Sierra’s accusations, cancellation, and self-enforced seclusion.
Thus far I have not seen a public statement from Alan Herrel either claiming or disowning the misogynistic entries Sierra included in her blog post, which were posted under the name “Rev ED” on the Bob’s site using his familiar avatar
Both Paynter and Locke cited a motto from the Well known as “You own your own words” or “YOYOW,” and I find this interesting. Paynter referred to it when discussing how the two snark sites did not censor their contributors, saying “Misogynistic postings at MeanKids.org led me to try to moderate, but indeed the group there was of the ‘You Own Your Own Words’ tradition, so moderating or central editorial control wouldn’t work. I tore the site down.”
Locke likewise cited YOYOW in his defense of himself on his own blog:
I was a conference host on the Well 15 years ago where the core ethos was acronymized to YOYOW — You Own Your Own Words. This has remained a guiding principle for me ever since. I will not take responsibility for what someone else said, nor will I censor what another individual wrote. However, it was clear that Sierra was upset, so it seemed the best course to make the whole site go away.
(I know Locke only by reputation but have exchanged email with him in the past.)
What struck me about this is that I think they both may be missing some of the key elements of that philosophy. On the Well, while contributors may adopt pseudonyms at any time, their real names are always discoverable and each user is allowed only one single identity. This has long been considered a key reason why so many Well conferences manage to stay on topic and avoid the sort of flame wars that tend to eventually ravage utterly free-wheeling online discussions.
Furthermore, Well conferences are hosted, and hosts are given a handful of moderation tools and guidelines for how to use them to manage situations that are spinning out of control and contributors who are causing grief. These tools range from verbal warnings to the ability to hide or scribble offending posts to the power to ban members from the conference entirely (usually for a limited three-day cooling-off period).
When people can post whatever they like without having to accept any impact on their own reputation or identity, when they don’t establish and main tain a consistent finable presence online then they are not in fact owning their own words. I don’t think the YOYOW ethos is intended as an excuse for moderator to avoid managing the tenor of their discussion forums, and I find it interesting that the people involved who have at least engaged Sierra’s complaints are all, except for Joey, people writing under their real names or who have at least established longstanding records of their thoughts online under their chosen handles. (Sessum specifically points to her blog archives as a character witness.)
One last point about owning your own words: To varying degrees Joey, Ritchie, and Locke have argued that Sierra is victimizing them by associating them with words they did not write or by painting them as part of an organized conspiracy when anarchy and permissiveness are all they actually engaged in. Here I think owning your own words again comes into play. If you gleefully call yourself a mean kid and stand on the sidelines egging on bullies, don’t cry foul when the bullies’ victims fight back and you find yourself tarred with the same brush.
UPDATE: I see that Doc Searls has posted an email message from Alan Herrel denying authorship of the post that used his avatar and saying that this scandal has effectively destroyed his online presence. Reading his words I feel sympathy for him, particularly if his systems are being attacked as he describes and if he is being harassed off the net, but I still find myself wondering whether he distanced himself from the person who had assumed his image when the inflammatory comments were originally published.
These slides are only minutely useful as they are nearly all images without any notes or bullet points. When the podcast comes out I will work on synchronizing my remarks with the slides.
I’ll be posting Ted Nadeau’s slides next. His were much more content rich.
Update: Here are Ted’s slides:
So I just wasted, er, spent a half hour surfing twitter pages and poaching friends of friends. I noticed that I had a strong gut sense of who I felt it was ok to befriend, most of the time, but that it doesn’t necessarily map to people who are actually my friends or whom I’ve met, although it may factor in how recently I’ve dealt with them.
For some, I added them because I’m interested in what they have to ssay or what they’re doing. I anticipate that their feed will be intereesting, or the preview of their recent thoughts is copmpelling. I’m aware that some of these people may not remember me, may not add me back (which is fine) or allow me to add them if they are twittering privately.
The etiquette is awkward. The UI at twitter sort of implies you should add people back, but that may be just in the contexts of private twitters.
I often notice odd disjunctions between my friend lists or various social services. Some people have talked about being able to bulk upload friend networks using hcards or something from one service to the next, but I wonder if that mapping really makes sense. For whatever reason, for example, Joi Ito is a contact of mine in Flickr but not on LinkedIn. At least one of us probably wants it to be that way.
The whole topics of reciprocity and social guidelines about when it’s ok to ignore a connection or a friend request and when it carries a social burden to do so is interesting too.
This has been another in a series of posts full of questions and half-baked proto-thoughts with few answers or real insights.
Speaking of twitter, I’ve dressed up my sidebar with badge bling. Been thinking hard about seriously redesigning my main blog and possibly moving it over to mediajunkie, which may be the catchiest domain name I own.
This story (Open Call From the Patent Office - washingtonpost.com) suggest that a breath of fresh air may be entering the patent-review process:
The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency’s examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia.
via, everywhere
oh, and this is the sort of thing I would have posted to the The Power of Many blog in the past but in the interests of blog-consolidation I am posting it here now.
Which means I have to next import all the PoM original posts into this blog, under a single category, and then have the PoM site subscribe to that category from this blog so it can still have fresh content on its home page from time to time.
Hey, I’m only a month late on congratulating Jay Rosen on the launch of NewAssignment.Net (“an experiment in open-source reporting”). My excuse is I was finishing a novel and working full time, but what about the blogs, Christian? And who will think of the children?
Here’s some tidbits from Jay’s update of the time, which have no doubt been superseded by new news that I will be sure to report sometime in mid-2007:
The launch package includes…
- an interview by Amanda Michel with Regina Lynnn, sex device columnist for wired.com who uses a forum she runs to do one type of smart mob reporting
- my announcement of the launch (yesterday) of the Polling Place Photo Project, which will attempt to collect digital photos from polling places across the USA
- a feature by David Cohn on what Netscape.com is doing, which Jason Calacanis calls “meta-journalism”
- my interview with Asa Dotzler
- Steve Fox, formerly of washingtonpost.com, explains why he quit there and agreed to work with us; and more.
Our plans for the test site are…
- daily content, M-F that tracks new & noteworthy developments in open source journalism and networked, pro-am reporting, plus any related Web. 2.0 stuff;
- interviews with key people (practitioners like Asa Dotzler of Mozilla and Regina Lynn, observers like James Surowiecki of The Wisdom of Crowds)
- lesson-learning from prior projects that definitely bear on NAN
- we will introduce elements of NewAssignment.Net’s operating style, preview and critique some possible projects for 2007, and begin to recruit participants and contributors - i.e., build the network during Nov., Dec. and January 07.
One thing you will notice is a tab section for NewAssignment Lab. That will be the section of the site where we invent stuff, run experiments and trials, try to break ground. Matthew Burton’s proposals on reading the laws open source style will go there. Reports on the Poling Place Project will go there. Anything have to do with invention.
Last month I posted an entry about Platial and commented that “I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people, even if it is still sometimes hard to tell them from publicists or PR professionals in general.”
This prompted Tracy Rolling to write me a long interesting email message about how she became a community advocate and what the job entails. I asked for her permission to reprint it here on the blog and she agreed:
It’s a really interesting question because it’s one that those of us in these roles are asking and answering for ourselves as we go along. I know another person who does a similar job at another site, and what she and I both have in common is that we were underemployed, educated moms for a couple years, spending way too much time on social networking sites and blogs and such. We are online community junkies. I was a latecomer to the internet, partly because I lived in France during the 90s and partly because the internet never really seemed that compelling until I found my first online community (an egroup of friends of a friend, all from Iowa like myself). Email? I was and still am an avid epistolarian (is that a word?). Buy train tickets online? I pass the SNCF outlet every day. But yack it up with a bunch of new and old friends, gossip, tell secrets, discover that the imaginary people are actually real… that’s compelling. Both myself and my friend got our jobs by writing a lot of free feedback for friends’ websites and having the friends say, “Hey, want to work on this project with us?”
There’s an interesting problem in the social web boom. Often the people who are most knowledgeable and savvy about the politics, functioning, and workings of online communities are people who have been spending a lot of time slacking off in front of the computer in recent years. How does a new blogging network service, for example, go about recruiting these slackers? Or even understanding that it would be a good idea to have one on staff? I know of one site that had a guy in my role whose background was in e-commerce. He had never belonged to or even heard of any major online communities except for Friendster. He didn’t even really use the site he worked for that much! But he was recruitable.
I do a lot of different things at Platial. Marketing to be sure, but specifically grassroots-style, relatively low-impact marketing. I contact people who have great content and try to help them make maps. I write to online community mods and ask them to post about maps that I think are interesting to their communities. I write to bloggers.
The most important thing I do in my job is I communicate with users. That’s the community I’m advocating for. I make more maps than anyone and know how to use the site best. I gather feedback, I chart feedback, I follow up on feedback. I’ve got some kind of friendly relationship with most of our main power users. If I notice someone on the site having trouble with their images or something, I send them a message offering help. I answer ever single feedback email we get within a week, usually faster. I listen to people and I advocate within the company for what the users are asking for. Because I use the site myself every day, I know their frustrations when things are broken and I know the excitement when a long-awaited feature gets added.
I also try to make connections between users sometimes. We have a beta tester club comprised of people I’ve chosen to invite because of the high quality of their feedback. These people get early notification of new features and often get to test drive stuff on a testing site we set up. It’s great having a bunch of extra hands on the site looking for glitches in the hours before a new site launch, and we really appreciate how much those people care about what we do.
I keep the faq updated, I make how-to screencasts and instructables, I blog, and I do a ton of qa. We’re a small company (5 full time, one part time, and a design intern), so everyone ends up doing a lot.
Thanks for your time (if you made it all the way to the end—I know it’s long). When I read your post it set me to thinking.
So there you have it.
Robert Birnbach, who shot the awesome author photo on the page-cover book-jacket flap of The Power of Many writes to tell me about an evening lecture suries he is helping start called The Grattan Speaker Series, “featuring locally and nationally renown authors, educators, activists and thinkers, and focused on themes that resonate with San Francisco families, neighbors and concerned citizens across the City.”
Here’s more about the series:
Offered 4 times during the school year, the series seeks to grow a sense of community and demonstrate Grattan School’s commitment to being a place where the well being of children and families are addressed at the highest level, where dynamic thinking occurs, and where community is engaged. The talks will be held in the school’s auditorium and a suggested donation of $8 will be asked for at the door, with all proceeds benefiting the school. No one will be turned away.
In addition to the evening adult audience, each speaker will also be asked to commit to time with Grattan kids during regular school hours, thereby integrating the speaker themes into our student community. These kid forums may take the form of general assemblies or small classroom audiences and will be offered at an age-appropriate level.
Dates:
- Thursday, September 28 - Tim Redmond, Editor-in-Chief of the Bay Guardian
- Thursday, November 16 - Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist
- Thursday, January 18 - tbd
- Thursday, March 1 - tbd
Newmark will be speaking on the topic “craigslist (community in the 21st century).”
When I have a moment, I’ll upload the lo-qual cellphone pictures I snapped and embed them here. Maybe I’ll even get around to cleaning up these raw notes into something coherent or even listing who all was there. For now, all I have time to do is dump the notes I t9’d into my “smartphone” and gmailed to myself:
warner:
tech change cuts through everythingfundamentalist fear of sweeping change… how to prepare people for the inevitable change?
beyond tech industry policy issues
how to help people get their voices heard
most politicians lesson from Dean is fundraising, meetup, and something vague about blogs
danah:
media, always a generation gapnatural to kids, unnatural to parents
adina:
industry issues more about incumbancy vs innovationswarner:
i fought the incumbents on the telecom issuesi think we need a national policy re broadband and need to protect innovator’s ip
??:
a creative commons model plus individual choiceadina?:
principles going back to the foundersanil:
tech industry is politically incompetentwe look to politicians for leadership
tech change not inevitable
warner:
i would argue america got seduced by the tech bubblebut it’s happening now… evangelism is called for
jon:
and educationdanah:
we are behind in mobile because of carrier lock downpolitics needs to get beyond money
me:
how to get politics beyond money???warner:
tech = economic promise but the issue got elevated beyond national leadershipmary:
i disagreecraig:
i strongly disagreemary:
1890s railroads bubble (analogy), then carnegiewas approached by a candidate in 2004 but not interested in campaigns… unless it’s taken straight into governance… but they were scared
craig:
acceleration… viet nam 8 yrs, iraq 3 yrs
in the next 3 wks i’m scared of a gulf of tonkini believe just get the bad guys out of the way…
kaliya:
overarching theme is freedomanil, wagner james:
techies exhibit real unseriousness about terrorism and predatorswj:
partisanshipspace race target analogy
cultural not political the 30s
danah:
parks analogyme:
freedom opportunity national greatness
Mario Rizzuti pointed me to his vaguely Digg-looking discussion-forum project called glorum. I asked him to describe the purpose or “mission” of the site and he responded thusly:
It is an attempt at building a concept for online discussions alternative to the usenet model.
The key ideas are
- using tags (no groups)
- +/- feedback (no moderators)
- browsing (tagged) users (social networking potential)
Hopefully it would reach some kind of critical mass, prove some value and take 1 of 2 directions:
- a delicious-like database. Ideally this would make niche discussions possible, something like a long tail of discussions.
- an open source piece of software that would compete with current message boards. In this case the news would be that discussions and users could now (at least theoretically) be aggregated thanks to tags.
It’s online since 4 weeks. It is currently just a prototype with about 30 users.
Sounds like an interesting experiment.
Here’s Jay Rosen’s announcement of a $100,000 grant for his NADN project: PressThink: Editing Horizontally: Thanks to Reuters, NewAssignment.Net Can Hire Someone
My first thought was, “This sounds like a job for George,” but George already has a job….
I like that Rosen wants to have both a paid editor and a paid “network wrangler” to pull off this “pro-am” journalism experiment.
As I disclosed last time I posted about this, I am an advisor to this project. Rosen was in SF recently to do some brainstorming about the NADN website. I wasn’t involved in that meeting (it sounds like it was a very fruitful meeting) but I did have a chance to get together with Jay over dinner last week and I’m very excited about the potential of this project to catalyze an evolution in journalism beyond how it’s currently practiced.
More on this when I have time to reflect and write.
Tracy Rolling, the community advocate for Platial.com (“the people’s atlas) recently sent me a heads up about a new styling feature for the DIY maps that Platial makes it so easy to, er, make.
And, by the way, I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people, even if it is still sometimes hard to tell them from publicists or PR professionals in general. They usually seem to understand, though, that I’m a sucker for people who’ve read my book or follow my blogs or both and say they like my writing. Still, I won’t blog about anything! I’m not a total flattery whore.
OK, so back to Platial. Tracy demos the new feature in her own blog, The Sputterly Utter, and describes the service and the process like so:
Platial, the website which allows people who don’t know what an api is to create their own Google mashups, has just launched a new feature called Mapstyler. Now you can build your own map and then give it a custom style for publishing on your website or blog. People can also upload their own css files and custom markers, to have their way with Platial maps and integrate them into their blogs and websites.
Note to Woody: Investigate for Bikr?
Blogger (and former Kos front-page poster) Kid Oakland has been gradually building a network called Blogs United to help local political bloggers learn from and support each other:
Local bloggers are citizen journalists and activists. They are a vital part of the emerging netroots infrastructure. My goal this election season is to show how local blogs are changing the political landscape of the United States. And my goal with Blogs United is to try to provide a forum that is useful to local blogs and bloggers themselves. Something is going on here just below the radar. I’m committed to tracking it and helping to explain it.
Disclosure: I’m a member of Blogs United and am helping K/O with some technical stuff.
Back in late July, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen announced an initiative called NewAssignment.Net. (Full disclosure: I am one of a medium-sized set of advisors to this project.) The goal of NADN, in my words, is to leverage blog networks and traditional editorial expertise to define, assign, write, and edit news articles covering assignments that might otherwise go unreported. To hear the project explained much more effectively, in Jay’s words, check out this interview with NPR’s On the Media.
Karl Martino says “paradox1x: Social software can’t be a fad since the WEB is social software”:
The fact is the most successful web services - since the beginnings of the web - were social software applications. The Web’s participatory architecture lends itself to them. It’s always been a Two Way web as Dave Winer would say. We’re simply seeing an evolution of what’s come before. The revolution is that so much of it has become mainstream (MySpace is mainstream) and the barriers to launching a service that incorporates participation have fallen so low. Not that there is some new fangled set of features that everyone must go out and implement to stay relevant. Knocking some hot air out of the hype is warranted. Some of these newer services resemble those dot coms that launched in the late nineties that didn’t grasp what Amazon.com, eBay, Blogger, and others, were *really* doing. You know, those sites that thought if they had a clever domain name, niche, and a particular set of features, they were on their way to riches. … By and large it was “social media” that survived the original dot com crash. And I expect that, by and large again, the best “social media” will survive whenever next bubble pops. So when the next time of reckoning comes, and it will, look at what lives on. And think about why. Burn this in your brain - the Web *is* social software.
Can I get an amen?
My friend Freeman Ng alerted me to this post at Slashdot: Slashdot | Bloggers 1, Smoke-Filled Room 0:
MarkusQ writes “A few days ago a bi-partisan bill (PDF) to create a searchable on-line database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans, financial assistance, earmarks and other such pork was put on ‘secret hold’ using a procedure that does not appear to be mentioned in the Constitution or in the Senate bylaws. This raised the ire of bloggers left and right and started an all out bi-partisan effort to expose the culprit by process of elimination. As it turns out it was our old friend the right honorable Senator from Alaska, Mr. ‘Series of Tubes’, Ted ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ Stevens.”
The day after last year’s Personal Democracy Forum I attended a Civicspace workshop event and Gregory Heller conducted a brief interview with me talking about PDF, Civicspace, and how to run conferences with an “open API” so that other events can plug-in and piggyback.
…what a great illustration of how social media, inadvertently or not, blows away all normally private separate identities and separate worlds! I don’t just know something about the person who took the phone, I see some of the more intimate details of their family and life. Social media and applications create conditions which would otherwise be impossible. These technologies are only beginning to have a profound impact on social norms and behavior.
I think 12 frogs is onto something here with Why social software is good for introverts.
I was looking at the Haddock blogs aggregator and in their links gutter I came across a transcript of a presentation given at Notacon 3 (whatever that is) in April of this year by Jason Scott. You can listen to the audio if you prefer.
I tend to like the Wikipedia idea, warts and all, but this talk is a pretty compelling look at its flaws. Here are a few choice excerpts that jumped out at me:
What Wikipedia has taught us now, is that in a vacuum of politics, politics will be created. There is no vacuum of politics. People who are encountering this space where they can not lord over others for technicalities and gain power for themselves will then proceed to invoke technicalities, take power from other people. They just do this. This is what human beings do.
and
One of the big fallacies that people currently have is “well, even if people undo your work, at least you can see it.” It’s not true. People will go to the history of an article that’s disputed, and they will find that that history’s actually been utterly and completely purged from Wikipedia. The history is gone.
and, also
Wikipedia tends to be, at this point, the first hit for most proper and non-proper nouns. Putting in anything gives you the Wikipedia entry. In fact, if you have Trillian, Trillian has an automatic setting so that any word you have in there that matches on Wikipedia ends up as an underlined word. You click on it, and it tells you what the answer is. To someone who’s using instant messaging, they don’t know where this entry came from when they clicked on it, they also tend to be out of date because they index it across the Trillian … and so on. So as a result, you can’t say just go in and change it, because it’s actually using older and older indexes. That’s what I mean by the concern I have, the worry that I have, when I make these big points.
Kaliya “Identity Woman” Hamlin writes:
Webwide distributed SSO is finally happening… Learn more from the core guys behind this emerging standard for user-centric digital identity. August 10th 6-9 in Berkeley at 2029 University, Upstairs. RSVP to me kaliya (at) Mac (dot) com and please pass this along to those who might be interested… OpenID is the emerging standard for web wide distributed single sign-on. It works with OpenID enabled URLs and i-names. The goal of the evening is not to geek out on identity but to connect with developers working on applications that require users to log in. Find out more about what it is… how it works… how you can install it. The incentives to learn are high with the $5000 bounty for having OpenID in Open Source projects. Presenting and answering Questions:If you know a developer - pass the word along.
- David Recordon formerly of Live Journal/Six Appart now of Verisign will be presenting a bit about the origins of OpenID but most importantly how it works… and how you install it.
- Andy Dale from ooTao will talk a bit about i-names and how they work with OpenID2 and looking forward to what comes next after authentication - profile sharing. ooTao is also data sharing, are running ibroker services.
- Scott Keveton from Jan Rain a development shop in Portland that has been ond of the leading instigators of OpenID. He just posted a walk through on his blog.
- Mary Hodder CEO of Dabble will talk about the work happening around the development of itags.
Perhaps the vision of a universal single sign-on on the Web isn’t just a utopian pipedream after all?
David Hinojosa has got a project called Stock Artist that offers a simulation (for now) of a rationalize the art market.
I’m not sure I fully understand the concept, but this appears to be the nut of it:
The central nucleus of Stockartist is the “transformed art piece’s concept.” This concept consists in dividing the value of one work, or a group of them into little pieces called “stock-art.” The stock-arts have two characteristics: they represent one part of the value of the “transformed art piece” and they are themselves art works. In other words, the stock-arts are at the same time art works and an instrument of investment that besides of representing their own value, they represent other’s. The stock-arts share some common physical characteristics as: maximum weight, maximum size, security codes, etc, and they contain unique characteristics imposed by their creator.
Adrian Chan asks Is attention over time not identity? while suggestiing, semifacetiously, that Creative Commons and AttentionTrust should merge.
Is what I make, and what I pay attention to, over time, not, basically, my identity? That’s how an Amazon would look at it. The consistency of my choices over time is, well, it’s what I like, and therefore to any commercial enterprise, it’s who I am (as far as they care). Perhaps we could use a CC/AT/ID mashupcamp. Call it EgoCamp?
I seem to recall playing with a prototype of PeepAgg back in the heady social-web miniboom of 2003 but it seems that the real thing is now in alpha.
I was invited, I joined it, and I’m poking around. In many ways it looks like other social network systems, especially Yahoo! 360 and Tribe, in that, like both of them, it allows you to integrate content hosted elsewhere (such as Flickr photos, Delicious bookmarks, and presumably blog posts and other RSSable streams, most likely including events and reviews and such).
There’s a fairly subtle friendship model, though subjective of course, with five distinct levels, from haven’t met, to acquaintance, through friend, good friend, to best friend.
(PA founder Marc Canter considers me, and no doubt countless others, as a good friend.)
There are both Groups and Networks and I haven’t figured out what distinguishes them. I also haven’t figured out how to plug in my content from elsewhere, and I’m reluctant to hand-populate yet another profile.
More as I have time to explore.
dKo draws my attention to A Shift Among the Evangelicals by E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post (Friday, June 16, 2006; Page A25):
Sometimes very important elections receive very little attention. When the Southern Baptist Convention elected the Rev. Frank Page as the group’s president… One other force was at work in this year’s Baptist voting: the rise of the blogosphere. Over the past several years, an active network of Baptist bloggers has opened up discussion in the convention and given reformers and moderates avenues around what Parham called “the Baptist establishment papers” and other means of communication controlled by the convention’s leadership. Thus may some of our oldest and most traditional institutions be transformed by new technologies.
Brian Dear from EVDB wrote me recently to bring to my attention the Eventful Demand service on Eventful.com (the event-planning website powered by his EVDB service). He is justifiably proud of this new feature:
We premiered it at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego in March. Eventful Demand is a set of tools to enable fans to form grass-roots campaigns to “demand” an event to happen, by inviting their favorite performers to come to their town. Performers might be lecturers, book authors and journalists, musicians, bands, filmmakers, politicians, entrepreneurs, astronauts, scientists, who knows… it could be anyone. The idea is, put the power of creating events in the hands of the people who want most to go to the event - the people! What’s great is that we’re seeing performers start to embrace the technology, and participate with the fans in making events come about.
I have to admit, that last bit does sound cool. If you’re interested in watching this in action, you can view the “hottest” current demands
The first two sheduled events to emerge from this service were a book signing / film screening by blogger, author, and actor Wil Wheaton in Boston, and a music concert in the DC area by Jonathan Coulton (of the Thing a Week blog project and the classic multimedia song Flickr).
To grease the skids, Eventful Demand also provides tools for performers to encourage fans to start “demanding” them. I wonder if this could be adapted for the next Ross Perot or Wesley Clark to encourage supporters to draft them to run for office?
Paul Bissex has released Jabberwocky 2.0. Of course it’s still in beta (unlike Flickr, which has recently upgraded to gamma).
In the world of web design, especially among those developing community sites or sites for collaboration, 37 Signals’ Get Real philosophy is all the rage, but frankly those guys are too timid. They come close to a breakthrough but then they fall back on safe ideas and the tried and true.
Thus its falls to me to unveil the new new model for social web app design, which I call…
Getting Really Real
The Starting Line:
Stay Lean:
Priorities:
Feature Selection
Process
The Organization
Staffing
Interface Design
Code
Words
Pricing and Signup
Promotion
Support
Post-Launch
Conclusion
According to Boing Boing, the recent LA student immigration protests have been organized on MySpace. The revolution will be smartmobbed?
Update: Here’s danah boyd on the same topic. Check her next post too, in which MySpace inadvertantly takes down the NPR when Tom sends the community there.
I’ve just ducked down to my room on the 8th floor of the Hyatt Regency Vancouver to get some money to buy drink tickets at the welcoming cocktail party at the IA Summit.
Ran into David Weinberger, who’s been refining the plenary keynote he’ll be giving to kick off the official proceedings tomorrow. We talked about some of the emerging themes in his current book project (called Everything is Miscellaneous and eagerly awaited in this corner) and he mentioned that he’s noticed recently that marketing and particularly PR folks seems (finally) ready to board the Cluetrain.
“If blogging were to change PR,” he said (quotation approximate), “that would be big.”
“Let’s hope that PR doesn’t change blogging, though,” I said.
“It already has, to some extent” he kinda replied.
“We wouldn’t want blogs to become the silencer on the gun of PR,” I said, gesturing with my hands as if screwing a silencer onto a gun, something I would have no idea how to do in real life, but I’ve seen a lot of movies with Nazis and gangsters in them.
“That’s a great image,” he said. “You should blog it.”
tags: iasummit2006, iasummit
Seems like a lot of the Web 2.0 skeptics come out of Australia. Not sure why that is. Personally, I hate the whole "2.0" concept. It's already played out as a meme and it means nothing (or everything, which has the same effect).
Now a blog called Squash claims to have detected a sign of Web 2.0 fizzling.
Things definitely felt hype-y at SXSW this year. While some of that optimism and energy is based on real advances and growth, in some ways it reminded me a lot of the 1999 energy when everyone with a web idea seemed to think they could launch it, get millions of users and flip it within a year or so, except now the popular exit strategy seems to be to sell out to Google or Yahoo! instead of having an IPO.
I’ve nearly recovered or recreated all the pages and templates that were damaged by the nasty little scriptkiddy who hacked our server. I’d rather not go into detail about how it happened, at least until I’m sure we’ve locked the barn door.
Here are my raw notes for beyond folksonomies: knitting tag clouds for grandma:
from pidgen to creole
tags popularized by (delicious, flickr, technorati)
hodder on usability problems
a lot of web 2.0 sites, hoping people will fill in all the info, but interfaces poorly done … half-done systems because others got critical mass (which makes them interesting)
swedlow mentions goals: wants people to become comfortable discovering, sharing, making meaning
think about tools/features/usaiblity
what are people really trying to do?
question (bill anderson): i’m just having fun - it doesn’t bother me. i don’t care about most of that stuff (paraphrase)
(emergent issue)
question: analogy to designing object oriented systems (classification), we need better tools to let us refactor
swedlow: problem: that’s a lot of work and we’re all lazy
comment: i guess i’m just obsessive compulsive
swedlow: that’s great, but the other 99.5% is lazy
question: tags are made by individuals, we’re not building community up
(but [me] doesn’t delicious tell you what tags other people have used? … this is a great conversation BUT it feels kind of obvious, protests too much)
Hodder discusses Dabble, video tagging. there are 98 commercial video hosting sites, 15 noncommercial. about half have tagging…. about 53% of videos have tags
distinction between implicit and automated tagging: implicit meaning aided, automatic tending to reinforce groupthink
Liz (finally - that ghod) jumps in (and says the new headset mics are incredibly uncomfortable), asks how many of you use tagging tools?
80% of hands go up
you are not like most people
too many places
i’m not going to use shadows - my links are on delicious
interop problem
(mention tagsonomy… dria’s article)
comment from audience: real existing folksonomies example: each person’s folder structure
(my thought: yes, but folder vs. tag, folders are hierarchical… gmail breakthrough… search don’t sort = i do that in outlook now)
new word: “emergently”
comment: iTunes folksonomy/tags are “political” (example: they put downtempo under ambient but “ambient doesn’t have a beat and downtempo does”)
question: best practices for tags UI?
hodder mentions i-tags.
I just got off the phone with Jeannie Yandel, the producer of a show called The Conversation on an NPR station in Seattle, KUOW 94.9 FM. She asked me about how online communities cross over into the real world, what did I think about the rash of bad-news stories about teens on MySpace lately, and whether online communities are here to stay.
It looks like I’ll be on the air live around 1:25 to 1:35 pm, speaking with the show’s host and possibly with callers as well.
The promo for the show looks intriguing:
MySpace is a web site where you can post a personal profile with your picture and your interests. It’s become hugely popular among teenagers. MySpace gets more than twice the web traffic of Google. It’s just the latest example of social networking on the web, following Friendster and Meetup.com. Is this a revolution in the way we relate to one another? Or is it just a fad? Do you use a social networking web site like MySpace, or do your kids? Is it worth your time? Has anything good come from it? Has anything bad every happened? Do you have a history of on-line social networking? How has it changed? Have you dropped out of on-line social networking? Why? Do on-line social networks really connect people or are they just simulations of real human interaction?
They’ve posted some related links as well:
- ‘Show and tell online’, The Guardian
- ‘Scenes From the MySpace Backlash’, Wired
- ‘MySpace: The Story of the Month’, Poynter Foundation
- ‘20 Calif. students suspended for looking at MySpace site’, USA Today
- ‘My daughter is on Myspace.com and I’m concerned…’, The Seattle Times
- ‘The cases your judges are hiding from you’, The Seattle Times
Sketch Swap gives you space to draw a picture. When you’re done, you submit it and get someone else’s picture in return.
Dispatches from Blogistan says that Amazon is experimenting with product wikis. I hope they have better luck with that than the LA Times did with their “wikitorials” experiment. At least Amazon already hosts a culture used to giving feedback (with their reviews feature).
I’m still hoping for a way to aggregate product feedback and reviews from across the blogosphere instead of expecting to find it all hosted on one commercial site.
Aaron Swartz is building infogami in public. So far, it lets you set up a site more or less instantly(junkyard) and edit it like a wiki. The site comes with a blog. Not sure what else it’s going to do. Looks like there are Google text ads down the side. Guess that’s the business model.
Oh, and you can let everyone edit the site or just yourself. I set up junkyard for everyone.
danah boyd has posted her “crib notes” for a talk she gave at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February, Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace.
Worth reading for everyone curious (or fretting) about MySpace’s popularity with the young.
The good folks at Participatory Culture have unveiled a key component of their “Democracy Internet TV” platform, the desktop Democracy Player software (for Windows only, so far):
This Windows version, while still in beta, means that we now have a complete set of tools for democratizing online video — and marks the beginning of our campaign to establish a free, open-source video platform.
We’re re-naming the desktop software Democracy player (formerly DTV)…. We hope you agree that open tools for publishing, watching, and sharing video are important for the future of online media.
Interesting trend over on Kos of late. Senators and reps have been posting on Kos for at least a year or two. The first one I happen to remember was from Senator Boxer, and folks just loved her for it. But the frequency of these big-name-posts has definitely been on the rise, especially over the last month. A few recent examples:
During the NSA hearings, Rep. Conyers urged folks to tune in to CSPAN. Over the last week, with the Alito filibuster effort under way, Kerry and Kennedy have both repeatedly posted on Kos, urging action. (The first Kerry post was especially interesting -- he generally took a shellacking on Kos during the election. And now he shows up, says he reads the blogs and doesn't mind the abuse, and just as quick, hundreds of comments form a love parade. Makes you wonder what if anything might have happened had he posted there a year ago October).
It's a fascinating power shift -- senators and reps (or at least, staffers of senators and reps) taking their message directly to their base. Does anyone happen to know if the same phenomenon has been seen on the right? Does Santorum post on freerepublic.com for example?
I’ve always felt (and I said this all over the book) that it was wrong to think that the Internet inherently isolates people or makes them behave antisocially.
A Pew report issued Wednesday, supports the idea the use of the Internet expands social contact:
The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care, financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people to which to turn.
Further rebuking early studies suggesting that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it “was actually helping people maintain their communities,” said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew report.
The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about 25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well. The increase is even greater for cell phones.
“There’s a certain seamlessness of how people maintain their social networks,” said John Horrigan, Pew’s associate director. “They shift between face-to-face, phone and Internet quite easily.”
Meanwhile, Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts — a median of 37 compared with 30 for nonusers — and they are more likely to receive help from someone within that social network.
It looks like Dan Gillmor is rebooting. Bayosphere didn't work out exactly as he had hoped, but he's got a new project already launched in cooperation with UC Berkeley's J-School and a star-studded cast of advisors.
I wonder if the Pajamas Media guys are watching?
I was trying out Technorati’s new ego-charting feature on my last name and discovered a few sites out there mentioning the book or linking to this blog. For example, Know More Media lists The Power of Many under Blogging Books that Influenced Us, We Media 2.0 lists it under Appendix: Books - Other, and it looks like the person building a community site called Gator Grad Student has posted a number of blog entries about the book: The Power of Many, Alternatives to Meetup, The Dark Side of the Tipping Point, Digital Places and Crossing Communities, virtual vs. physical self, and the [murmur] project, readings, and misc..
I’m blogging from the SXSW Interactive party in downtown San Francisco. It’s still the depths of winter but I can imagine the spring thaw. It’s time to add an SXSW badge to my blog and make my travel plans for Austin, Albuquerque, and Vancouver.
Update: Before I left I saw Min Jung Kim, Renee Blodgett, danah boyd, and a few others I’m spacing on at the moment.
I swear, all the cool kids are at Yahoo now: Susan Mernit's Blog: Newsflash: I'm joining Yahoo!
Tired of end-of-the-year top ten lists and predictions? Try Blake Ross’s Ten predictions for the new year. Here’s my favorite:
Yahoo, acclerating its bid to dominate the social space, will announce that it is buying the actual societies of 32 cash-strapped governments. Citizens will be allowed to link their existing names to their Yahoo accounts.
Happy New Year!
Ron Fournier, political writer for the Associated Press, put an article on the newswires on Christmas Eve summing up a trend over the past few years: Internet Fosters Local Political Movements. Sound like a familiar premise? The examples he cites include MoveOn, Meetup, and BlogsforBush.com. Not sure what prompted the article, but there's no time like the present to note an ongoing trend I suppose.
Meanwhile, I just blogged over at PDF about eBlock, a service that provides neighborhood-level websites: eBlock addresses the 'bowling alone' problem.
Bookmarklets were always a hack, says Kevin Burton in his Feed Blog: Bookmarklets 2.0?. Is it time for some (don't say it!) standards?
A day or so after reading that a number of national governments are unhappy about Google Earth's aerial views of their sensitive buildings and installations, I read in the Telegraph (UK) about Insurgents 'using Google Earth'.
There's no real way to avoid these trade-offs, is there?
First Typepad had its embarassing outage and now Delicious is feeling some pain:
Due to the power outage earlier in the week, we appear [sic] a number of continued hiccups. We've taken everything offline to properly rebuild and restore everything. I apologize and hope to have this resolved as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience.
Updates will be posted on our blog as we have them.
I got a call from a producer of a CBC show, The Hour, last night, looking for someone who could discuss the Siegenthaler brouhaha on Wikipedia from both a cultural and technical perspective. Hey, I'm that guy! They taped five minutes with me this morning and it should be airing about now.
Since I don't get CBC here in the States, I have to wait till they send me a CD or tape of my appearance to found out how I did. It's funny being a talking head twice in two weeks.
They were happy to cite my book as proof that I'm an "expert" on the subject of emergent authority and the living web. It's ironic, of course, that earning credibility by publishing a book is very pre-web.
And how did they find me? Google, of course.
Sheesh! What Web 2.0 startup or blog fad *won't* Yahoo acquire?
Yes, this is envy speaking.
Jeremy Zawodny comments on potential synergies between Delicious (I stopped typing the dots a while ago) and MyWeb 2.0.
Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book for Peachpit / New Riders’ “Voices that Matter” series, called Dispatches from Blogistan. She is interviewing a number of bloggers (including yours truly) and of course blogging the process of writing the book.
Now she has posted an entire chapter in her blog: Dispatches From Blogistan :: chapter two: the urge to publish is universal and irrepressible and is inviting feedback.
It’s a brave move and one that I think we’ll see more of. Why not get commentary and insight and even criticism before the copy is locked down on paper?
Here’s a little excerpt, but you have to click through to get it all:
By the time Julius Caesar assumed power, the written word had become a powerful political tool. Caesar was quick to realize that the roads linking his far-flung provinces could facilitate more than just the movement of troops and merchants. In 59 BCE, he dictated that daily reports from Rome be posted throughout the empire for all to see.
Called Acta Diurna—literally, “news of the day”—these missives recorded on sheepskin and metal sheets not only listed official decrees and judicial rulings, they also broadcast the results of gladiatorial contests, announced notable marriages, births, and deaths. They also recorded astrological omens, as well as recaps of ever-popular celebrity trials and executions. These uniform daily reports lent a sense of cohesion to the motley Empire. Respect for the written word wasnt universal, of course. In 48 CE, Caesars successors sacked and burned the Alexandrian libraries, but the Acta did continue without a break until the year 200. By then the marauding hordes were moving in from the eastern steppes and not that interested in old news from Rome. But the legacy of the first daily news lives on.
Some etymologists believe that the word journalist derives from these Acta Diurna.
When Napster hit it big a lot of people pointed to the success of the Grateful Dead despite having almost no hit records and ascribed it to their liberal tape-trading policies. Part-time Dead lyricist and EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow spread the gospel of music sharing and how a liberal intellectual property regime had fueled viral word-of-mouth advertising for the band.
Not only that but Deadheads played a big role in the development of early online communities, as I touched on in the book. There were a lot of hippies enthralled by the potenial of the personal computer (Timothy Leary saw it as the next LSD), and Deadheads helped get the Whole Earth spinoff, the Well, off the ground back when it was a dial-up BBS. Deadheads were also overrepresented in the early days of Usenet, spawning the first subdivision of the old net.music newsgroup. While taxonomical purists objected to the creation of net.music.gdead (now rec.music.gdead) before broader genres and forms had been split off, a filibuster by Deadheads finally led to an agreement to give their own space, helping crystalize the Usenet principal that spawning new branches in the tree can help prevent people from getting on each other’s nerves.
The Dead’s tape trading culture experienced a digital revolution, as mangy old cassettes gave way first to DAT (digital audio tapes) and later to CDs and raw non-lossy digital files. The folks at etree.org tried to model the old bubble-wrapped snail mail tape trees in a digital format to enable people to download and share digital music more easily. Along the way they conceived of the ultimate Grateful Dead archive of live concert recordings, to preserve and distribute the music well past all of our lifetimes.
At some point the etree folks approached Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive to ask if he’d be interested in mirroring (backing up) their collection. This led to the creation of the Live Music Archive, which offers downloadable and streaming recordings from a huge and growing collection of bands and other musical entities.
The Dead collection on the Archive supposedly exceeded 2300 recordings when contact from the Grateful Dead management led to all of the downloads being removed from the website and audience recordings only being made available for streaming.
The fans reacted, mostly shocked by the seemingly greedy action of their heroes. Pro-EFF blog Boing Boing accused Jerry Garcia’s widow of being behind the shutdown. Rumors and petitions spread. The mainstream media picked up the story, and the explanation for how what happened happened started changing day by day. Dead bass player Phil Lesh posted an announcement on his website saying he had not been consulted and disapproved of the change. Barlow condemned the policy, seeing it as a repudiation of the Dead’s formerly open trading policy (and, incidentally, belying one of the music-sharers’ primordial myths).
The New York Times picked up the story and ran with it for several days. As did the AP, CNN, Yahoo News, and so on. Deadhead blogs also provided commentary and shared tidbits, binding together themselves as a new offshoot of the longstanding Deadhead online presence. I did my best to cover the story at Uncle John’s blog.
As of yesterday the band changed their policy. Now it’s OK for fans to download (fan-created) audience recordings and to listen to streams of (crisper but unofficial) soundboards. Most of the outraged ‘heads seem satisfied by this compromise. (Many bands do not permit soundboards to circulate, even on LMA.) And the band reaffirmed its commitment to the community-building activities of tape trading and music sharing.
What was essentially a PR snafu (the music was alreadey out there and was already showing up on Bit Torrent sites and elsewhere) may have been pulled back from the cliff, and a 40 year-old band that broke up more than ten years ago managed to stir up ripples throughout the online world and the mainstream media. It’s been quite a week.
I’m taping a discussion about this with CNN blog reporter Jackie Schechner this evening. It will air at 7 pm eastern tomorrow (Saturday, December 3) and again at 1 pm on Sunday (December 4).
Micah Sifry wrote up a Rasiej Campaign Post-Mortem analyzing how Andrew Rasiej’s campaign for Public Advocate in New York City managed to fall so short of success despite its embrace of open-source philosophies, techniques, and themes.
Gregory Heller responds in Thoughts on the Sifry Postmortem of the Rasiej Campaign, suggesting that Sifry may be blaming the open-source community for not embracing his candidate instead of truly examining the shortcomings of the campaign itself.
Aldon Hynes, blogmaster for DeStefano for Connecticut weighs in as well with Reflections on grassroots technology driven campaigns.
Disclosure: I am a contributor* to Personal Democracy Forum which is owned and financed by Andrew Rasiej and edited by Micah Sifry. I met Gregory Heller at the last PDF conference, but I do not know him particularly well. I’ve been friends with Aldon Hynes since the Dean campaign.
*Then again, I’m not a very good contributor to PDF. I haven’t posted anything worthwhile to the blog there in several months and I have thus far failed to submit the last two stories I agreed to write for them (but Kate I am working on them, honest!)
I meant to post a link to Free Alternatives to Meetup back in September:
Meetup is a Ghost Town
I checked out the list of largest vegan meetups on Meetup.com and over half of the once active groups are now inactive for lack of an organizer. Meetup seems to recognize this as a problem. I have received several emails from them asking me to step up as organizer to the groups I once belonged to or organized for "just $19/month". They are even offering a 30-day money back guarantee. Hmmm. Let me think about it. No!
I suspect some groups are staying because they don't want to lose members in a transition or spend time setting up a new site for their group that may have fewer features. I hope they will reconsider after Gatheroo.com and CityCita.net launch. Collectively, they are spending thousands of dollars that could be going to much better things.
Whatever they decide, I am confident that new groups will choose to organize their local interest groups on Gatheroo.com and CityCita.net. After they launch, I will be posting information about how you can spread the word about them, so people everywhere can get together to learn, share, organize and support one another in their local communities. With our support early on, these sites are more likely to be able to offer their valuable services to people for many years to come, so stay tuned!
(I posted this with Flock, so I'll have to add a category later I guess. It wants me to put on tags, but I'm not sure how that translates for this blog.)
Reader Nicolai wrote a comment on the blog telling me that I've been tagged (by name) for the first time, adding "how's that for digital identity?" His comment led me back to a review of this book (in Danish) on his blog.
He kindly translated it into English for me:
The power of many
The story about the 1960 American election tells that JFK and Nixon debated on shows broadcasted on both radio and television. The story also tells that Kennedy lost the debate in the ears of the radio listeners. The convincing winner in the eyes of the voters who followed the debate on television was on the other hand Kennedy. Kennedy read and understood how to use the new media - television. He lnew that the media demands other playing rules than those that work on radio.
According to Christian Crumlish the Internet took on the role as the new media during the in 2003-4. And with a purpose of writing a book about some of the new methods and techniques that people use to create virtual communities Crumlish writes among others things about his participation on the Howard Dean campaign.
In The Power of Many Crumlish writes lively and engagingly about the Dean campaign and how they untraditionally took use of the new opportunities given by the Internet in a political context. Their mission was to get voters. And these voters should generate even more voters.
He also writes about different forms of social networks and relationships across geography and generation. And he writes about weblogs. A phenomenon, that floats through the entire book.
...the strange new word "blog" wasn't coined until 1999, the buzz didn't start till 2000, and the first big wave of political bloggers didn't get traction until late 2001 in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. (Crumlish 2004:8)It is with this phenomenon (the weblog) that the challenges for future democracy will find its strengths. And with Crumlish' comparisons with the Gutenberg invention of the print press he describes the power that indispensably arises when people are given the opportunity to express themselves. And the Internet technology has opened a new dimension for freedom of expression - it has made it independent of both time and geography.
But it is not all about American election campaigns. Crumlish also airs other tendencies that are possible because of the Internet. Subject such as dating, locality - virtuality, environment, eBay, and pop cultural communities where you jointly can love and listen to The Grateful Dead or read Kurt Vonnegut.
And in continuing the pop cultural talk we are also presented to net marketing/ viral marketing/ WOM. And who other than Seth Godin with his publications on ideavirus among other things is representing this business.
I think Crumlish touches too much in this book. A focus solely on for example the use of the Internet and blogs in the Dean campaign would have been more than worthy of reading. This is also the subject on which Crumlish seems to show the greatest engagement in his writing.
Crumlish still blogs at thepowerofmany.com.
Crumlish, Christian (2004) The Power of Many: How the Living Web Is
Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life. London: Sybex.
Chris Pirillo and his Lockergnome cohorts launch yet another social meta crawler-y tag search engine site. This one's called gada.be. I first looked at it a week or so ago when Chris was showing it around in beta. I guess it's still in beta. So was that alpha? Pre-launch stealth beta? Whatever.
The main cleverness thing seemed to be its handheld friendliness, from the easy-to-tap url to the way a search is coded as a subhost of the gada.be url. The thing also eats and excretes RSS and OPML, so it's jiggy like that.
I haven't really plumbed the depths though, so I'm mostly going on faith here that when Chris puts his energy into something it's usually fairly cool, at least until the bills come due.... (kidding).
Update: One skeptic currently commenting over on Pirillo's blog suggests that the page results are going to look and behave like pay-per-click page spammers, because of their unique URLs. The advice is to have a robots.txt file block bots from the search engine results page. This is probably a good idea, assuming the goal isn't to "have thousands of 'sites' with scraped content and text ads."
Congratulations to Andy Baio (and Gordon Luk and Leonard Lin): Waxy.org: Daily Log: Yahoo and Upcoming, Sitting In A Tree
I'm a day late and a dollar short here, but had to note this.
Yahoo is really getting aggressive about their whole Web 2.0 strategy. A lot of the big names are being gathered under one umbrella.
Speaking of Web 2.0, I'm not doing the O'Reilly conference (busy with work, can't afford it, not comped as press or a contributor, etc.) but I will be at the Web 2.0 Bash (sponsored by del.icio.us, WordPress, wink, Flock, SocialText, Technorati, Odeo, and Flickr) tomorrow night at Swig in San Francisco.
See you there?
Another from the "meant to post this a while ago" files. A fellow named Mike Reining from MindValley wrote me to tell me about their BlinkList service. Mike successfully got my attention by showing awareness of this site (and also You're It), writing to me about MindValley's passion for "how online tools are transforming the social fabric of how people interact, learn, share, and make transactions online."
So how does something like BlinkList differ from, say, del.icio.us or Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0? Mike says:
In my prior history I worked for eBay (on the craigslist deal in fact) and now I have decided to go out on my own to bring some new ideas to market. One of them is on social learning and sharing. I guess it is generally referred to as social bookmarking and social search, but I think that misses out on the "learning and knowledge sharing aspects" that make this field so interesting.
Mike also drew my attention to an interesting review of the BlinkList beta at Blended Edu:
Simply stated, MindValley recognizes that online community hinges on the users ability to easily access their information without frustrating them to the point they won't use the software (a point which is - surprisingly - often overlooked).
...
As you store and tag more content, it becomes more and more difficult to remember what tag you used for similar content. But don't fret! MindValley Labs has come up with a slick way to help you to maintain tagging consistency. Here's how it works: as you add links and other content to your cache BlinkList automagically suggests tags you have already used. This simple step makes it easier to find content at a later date, prevents user frustration with the technology, and allows students to focus on their learning.
Ready for another neat techno-constructivist BlinkList feature? When you click on a tag, BlinkList shows related tags, thereby allowing users to easily find topics and resources related to their search. But wait. There's more! By using the tag filter you can drill down even deeper into the BlinkList community knowledge reserves to locate the resources most relevant to your particular needs.
Looks like a site to keep an eye on.
The Onion, America's Finest News Source, reports: Congress Abandons WikiConstitution:
WASHINGTON, DC - Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. "The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. "But when so-called 'contributors' began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought it might be best to cancel the project." Congress intends to restore the Constitution to its pre-Wiki format as soon as an unadulterated copy of the document can be found.
Over the long weekend I witnessed a flurry of email messages from the network of activist techies and techie activists I'm connected to since the Dean campaign and the work on this book. Some of this coalesced into the PeopleFinder project to help cross-correlate all the missing persons and I'm OK data being gathered across distributed newspaper a and other websites. They are still looking for help:
A few weeks ago, Kent Bye, director of the Echo Chamber project, tipped me off to a new vlog (video [web] log) he's producing. This first episode includes an animation that tries to illustrate the folksonomy concept as well as interviews "about the upcoming media revolution" conducted at the most recent Personal Democracy Forum.
He told me, "I attempt to visually represent the 'folksonomy tag' concept for adding context and meaning to web sites and film sound bites to a broader audience in 10 seconds or less."
Here's his official description:
This is the first vlog episode about an open source, investigative documentary about how the television news became an uncritical echo chamber to the countdown towards war in Iraq - and proposed tools for collaborative journalism that can provide some solutions.
Featuring: Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jonathan Landay, Pamela Hess, Bill Plante, Halley Suitt, Marilyn Schlitz and Kent Bye.
If you'd like to have future videos automatically delivered to you, then follow the directions listed in the link above for subscribing to the Echo Chamber Project with either iTunes or FireANT software.
Chris Nagele from Wildbit gave me a head's up about a 35-page report on social networks his company is offering for download as an Acrobat file free of charge: Social Networks Report
He says
My company, Wildbit, is currently working on a social network and community web site. Part of the research to understand and prototype the design involved researching current social networks and defining the key attributes. The result is a 35 page report on the topic. Since you are a leader in the industry I was hoping to get your thoughts on the report.
I've read the report but to be honest I've been too busy to give it the kind of careful attention that would enable me to share any insights. Then again, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to quote myself being referred to as "a leader in the industry" - heh.
If you read the report and send feedback to Tidbit, let me know or post a comment here as well.
I'm in the Saturday morning opening session at blogher, which is about whether women should "learn to play by the rules" or "change the rules."
danah boyd just got up to clarify a misstatement claiming that women don't do social networking as much as men do. danah explained that women and men (tend to) do social networking in different ways.
"Women form dense social networks with fewer people and stronger, more intimate ties. Men tend to spread it around."
Lots of buzz around this week about Marc Canter et al. announcing the GoingOn network, a meta social network that will provide a platform for stitching together existing social network and digital identity systems and standards, or something like that.
JD Lasica interviewed Valerie Cunningham for a better explanation of what's going to be going on, to mangle Marvin Gaye.
Marc also responds to and clarifies some positive coverage at Dana Blankenhorn's Moore's Lore Corante blog.
When I posted about my panel at the Sierra Summit, Philippe Boucher wrote in suggesting we try to arrange for bloggers to meet at the conference or to offer some sort of workshop or hand's on event for people interested in blogging:
Maybe this conference deserves more than a half hour on Saturday about the new media? I was wondering about using this opportunity to have the bloggers in attendance (if there are any) to meet.
I'm not sure what sort of time people will have available, and I don't think I'm personally able to organize a blogger's "birds of a feather"-type meeting. But if someone does organize such a meeting I will certainly attend and would be happy to speak and or help-facilitate.
Philippe goes on:
I also suggested to the organizers a hands-on workshop for people willing to learn about blogging and podcasting by doing it during the conference.
Again, I don't know about schedule or availability, but I'd be happy to contribute to a blogging workshop. I'm still a novice when it comes to podcasting, so I don't think I could anchor a workshop on that but I'd definitely be interested in attending one.
Finally, Philippe asked me, "Is there any plan to record your session for a podcast?"
I'm not aware of any such plan, but I'll find out.
Laura Lemay just sent me a LinkedIn invitation that made me laugh out loud (or LOL), although I realize that it would only be funny to a geek:
#include <linkedinsuckup.h>Picked up a print copy of the Onion in a coffee bar yesterday and saw they had taken the piss out of online social networks (The Onion | 13 July 2005 | Infograph).
Because the link will rot eventually, I stole the graphic, too.
Quoting from Waxy.org Links: News Corp buys MySpace for $580 million:
holy cow
Lots of kids and bands on that site.
The always-insightful How to Save the World blog by Dave Pollard (repeatedly misnamed in my book as "How to Change the World" for I don't know what reason - brain damage, most likely) recently published an entry abstracting seven principles of social networking.
It's one of Dave's shorter posts, too, so don't be afraid to click through!
Here's the short form of the seven principles (but definitely read the explanations to fully grok the big picture):
(via sbpoet in the Well's blog conference)
I'll be speaking at the Sierra Summit on Saturday afternoon from 11:30 to 12:30 PM, on a panel in the Working Smart sequence called "Technology and Organizing: A Civics Laboratory."
The panel features Joan Blades from MoveOn and Zack Rosen from Civicspace as well as myself, so we should have a lively conversation and be able to range widely while keeping things tied down to concrete, practical advice. We'll be up against the ubiquitous George Lakoff so the pressure will be on to keep it lively and to frame our metaphors carefully.
Lazy Independence Day reblogging, quoting from Blog While You Book
NYT: For years, book authors have used the Internet to publicize their work and to keep in touch with readers. Several, like John Battelle, are now experimenting with maintaining blogs while still in the act of writing their books.
Tantek (among others?) has launched a site to promote XHTML-based microformats as a microcontent solution building on existing standards.
(Boy, poking my head into Yahoo 360 sure gets me up to speed on industry buzz quickly. Then again, that's more a function of the social network I brought with me and a bit of currentness - currency - working together).
Anyway, check out the microformats wiki to see the formats being discussed so far, currently including
Other formats, including hReview (I've been looking for a unified review data model for quite some time - so we can make a distributed "epinions"-type network out of the world's blogs), are under discussion as draft specifications.
My Web 2.0 looks like some kind of taglicious social search engine.
As the LA Times seemed to have learned, perhaps editorials aren't the best context for publicly editable wiki-ing.
Wikis seem to work best when used to build a repository of information by people who share a common goal or ethos.
I wrote about this last week at Personal Democracy Forum in an article my editors entitled "Wikis: Productivity or Plague?"
It seems that the wiki got slashdotted, which lead to pr0n being posted (goatse, I wonder?), and the site being removed in response: Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: LA Times WikiTorial Update - vandalized.
(via Nancy White, via Weblogsky)
In the POM book I talk about a technology practice that I refer to as ARM, meaning "activist relationship management," modeled on the idea of CRM (customer relationship management). ARM is big business these days (see Personal Democracy Forum's coverage of the flap over ARM vendor Convio's policies regarding who they will work with as customers).
All of these various *RM concepts can be loosely related together under the heading of GRM or group relationship management. Over on Weblogsky, Jon Lebkowsky is exploring the idea of Weblogsky: Group Relationship Management, which keeps cropping up in the online discussions of activist technology, CivicSpace, CiviCRM, and related topics.
This sounds llike a cool idea (Bright Lightbulb Overhead: LATimes.com Goes Wiki):
I won't believe this until I see it launched and operating unmolested by higher-ups for a good month or so, but barely a month after relaunching a cleaner, freer web site, LATimes.com is planning to launch a wiki to invite public comment and discourse on its editorials.
This will take the form of something called slyly - but vaguely - "wikitorials," according to today's op-ed message from editorial pages editor Andres Martinez....
Via Waxy.org links comes news of yet another feed reader, FeedLounge that offers tagging along with some NetNewsWire-type features, such as saving feed entries forever and flagging entries. It supports all browsers and imports OPML, naturally.
Currently in an invite-only alpha.
The web-based feedreader market is getting crowded. When will they start doing more dynamic attention-y things? There's no way this manual management of feeds is going to scale.
From this post at Am I Patriotic it sounds like plans to develop an open source meeting scheduler to replace Meetup continue afoot.
Sharper eyes than mine have caught Bret Schundler's campaign website compositing images taken from the Dean campaign (Thank God I'm Not a Republican!):
Separated at Birth: Bret Schundler and Howard Dean:
One photo was taken at a 2004 Dean for President rally sponsored by the American University College Democrats in Washington, D.C.
The other photo comes from Bret Schundler's campaign website, advertising Schundler's Reform Gear
Photo Copyright John Pettitt 2003, courtesy CloudView.com
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Brad DeLong says "All Schundler needed was ten enthusiastic young supporters and a camera. And he couldn't find them?"
I was going to post this over at Personal Democracy Forum but Kate Kaye beat me to the punch.
Steve Gillmor, a champion of the attention.xml concept, wonder whether there is an inalienable right to not just our own data but also the data describing our "gestures" and the record of where we've spent our attention.
These are not easy questions to muddle through as the urge to monetize Web 2.0 heats up all around us.
Hmm, seems like I could have added a pro-technology perspective to the proceedings (Geodog: A night at the Oh-So Berkeley CyberSalon):
As long time readers know, I love the People's Republic of Berkeley, foibles and all, and have celebrated its wonderful quirks in my writing and photography for the last 3 years, and even been banned from Adsense for having done so. But sometimes the Berkeley scene and its inhabitants much-lampooned well-meaning but sometimes unthinking do-gooding missionary zeal and neo-puritanism is too much, even for me, and tonight's evening at the Berkeley CyberSalon was an example of such.
I recently read about the Berkeley CyberSalon on Scott Rosenberg's blog, and joined the mailing list based on his recommendation. It seemed like a good opportunity to hear about new ideas in technology as well as a good way to meet other people in Berkeley interested in socio-political issues around technology....
Read the whole thing!
I've become a little more understanding about the lame robotic invitations that are suggested by default by most social network services when you invite a new member. I've been told that providing the user with a canned invitation instead of requiring that the user write their own increases the utility of the invitation service.
At the very least, though, I still regard that moment of sending an invitation to be an opportunity to rise above the common sward and send a personalized note. I recently received a LinkedIn invitation from Mark Glaser that was witty and engaging. I'd have agreed to connect with him anyway, but it was a pleasure to read an actual message rather than a spammy-sounding sub-email type of communique.
Scot Hacker recently sent his wife a generic LinkedIn invitation and learned that it was not particularly endearing (birdhouse.org: LinkedIn Invitation: Decidedly Unromantic):
Every now and then someone sends me an invite to hook up with them on LinkedIn. I generally accept the invites, but have never done much with the service, aside from getting back in touch with a few old Ziff colleagues. Yesterday Amy discovered the site. We didn't find ourselves automatically in one another's networks, so I sent her invite. This morning I hear her reading her email out loud, in a voice dripping with sarcasm:
"You are a person I trust. I'd like to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn. I'm using it to discover inside connections I didn't know I had." And then, "Gosh honey, you're SO romantic."
Marriage tip: When sending a LinkedIn invitation to your life partner, edit the default text before sending.
Quoting from Darknet: The Installments (at Joho the blog):
JD Lasica is beginning to post long installments from his entertaining new book, Darknet: Hollywood's War against the Digital Generation. First up: The story of some teen film-makers. He'll also be posting new material. [Technorati tag: drm]
With the Nuclear Option's timing in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's hands, there won't be enough warning to send out an email alert the moment he drops the bomb on the Senate. But we can deliver a text message straight to your mobile that embeds a Senate phone number based on your state.
I'm at PDF2005 at CUNY in New York city today. I moderated a panel called "Tools and Ideas for Empowering the Edges" in the morning, so I'm off-duty now, able to participate as an audience member and on the really snarky backchannel chat.
Right now Micah Sifry is interviewing Andy Stern of the SEIU. More comments when I've had time to digest the people and ideas I'm encountering here.
Quoting from Everything is miscellaneous:
I haven't yet figured out exactly how I want to handle blogging the writing of the book. I don't think I want to put a blog at EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com (there's nothing there yet because I've had some domain issues) because researching and writing this book isn't an isolated act for me. So, I'll probably blog it here, using the tag "EverythingIsMiscellaneous." Yes, it's long, but tagging it "Miscellaneous" really would be misleading as an external tag.
I wrote my previous book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, completely in public, posting each day's draft. Since I woke up every morning and, Penelope-like, undid what I'd written the previous day, that wasn't a very useful way of getting readers involved. So, this time I'm thinking I'll post drafts of chapters when I think they're readable. And then I will beg for comments.
[Technorati tag: EverythingIsMiscellaneous]
I was just talking to a publisher yesterday about some (very preliminary) ideas for what might turn out to be my next book. When the time comes, I will be sure to try to include as open a creative process as possible.
Of course David's concern about how to tag book-related posts is interesting, as it implies a kind of meta-mobius entanglement based on the fact that (I suspect) his book will be to some extent about tagging and categorization itself, so the meaning of miscellaneous is relevant in several ways.
Clay Shirky congratulates his students who developed Dodgeball and have now sold it to Google
Gmail, Orkut, and now Dodgeball all touch this issue. Dodgeball in particular is built on a mix of three different kinds of maps: maps of location (118 rivington St), maps of place (a bar called The Magician), and maps of social environment ("I'm here. Where are my friends?") By mixing them, Dodgeball mingles informational and social aspects of a user’s life into something more valuable than either of those things in isolation.
Andy Baio suggests "some interesting possibilities with Blogger and Google Map."
Quoting from Conversate:
Conversate lets you create instant online discussion spaces. It's simpler, faster, more polite, and less annoying than group emails.... Try inviting friends to a conversation, no login needed. If you're intrigued, create an account, it's free-- you'll get buddy lists and more options.
(via Zephyr)
Quoting from Lucky Friday This Week:
There's a gathering of grassroots-media types and celebration of JD Lasica's new book, Darknet, at the Varnish Gallery in San Francisco Friday evening, 6-9 p.m. Address: 77 Natoma street between 1st and 2nd St. and Mission and Howard.
It's after 5 so I'm now free to announce that John Wiley & Sons has acquired Sybex, the publisher of The Power of Many.
Here's agent Matt Wagner's take on the news (from One less independent?):
The tech book market has been brutal the last few years, so maybe it's inevitable that we're seeing another big acquisition. Word has it John Wiley & Sons is purchasing Sybex...
Andy Baio writes: Upcoming.org gets a wiki
not much there yet, but I'd love some help fleshing it out; feel free to add your feature requests
From the people who brought you Basecamp, here's a new web-based tool for personal information management, to do lists, organizer: Backpack
Gather your ideas, to-dos, notes, photos and files online. Set email and mobile reminders so you don't forget the little things. Easily collaborate with others.
No data lock-in, that's a plus. I want to try this. Right now I'm pretty comfortable with my VoodooPad desktop wiki, but that's not web-enabled (at least not in a way that's practical for me), so this seems worth a try.
Quoting from Some thoughts about extended feeds & microcontent
Do reviews belong in the feed or in the content?
How about calendar events—in the feed or in the content?
If it’s just generated via template, why not both? Or is this where the law intends I should be conservative?
Is anyone working on a Markdown of microcontent?
The first time I heard about BzzAgent was at South by Southwest this year, when I was on a panel about open source marketing and Jason Calacanis brought it up as a negative example, explaining that the agency's methods involved inducing agents to shill for their clients in the guise of ordinary social interaction. Invite your friends over to a barbecue, flip the new Soylent™ brand burgerlike patties on your grill, and casually mention that they are Atkins-compliant and contain fewer transfatty acids than the other leading genetically engineered cow-orker food product, or something like that.
Sounded bad to me, like a cheap parody of honest, enthusiasm-driven word-of-mouth advertising. Then again, Jason has been known to take extreme positions, so I wasn't sure I was getting a full view of this company and its practices.
Then, over the weekend, the blog world was brief... er... abuzz with news that Creative Commons had been taken on by BzzAgent as a pro bono client, an apparent marriage of light and dark. Suw Charman posted in her Strange Attractor Corante blog that this was a revolting development and Dave Balter, BzzAgentfounder hit back in the company blog with Bloggers as Liars. Shoot the messenger, much?
Apparently, BzzAgent sees itself as king of the hill when it comes to offline word-of-mouth and views bloggers as margin online blabbers who miss the big picture and spread lies. Somehow the idea that agents competing for points and rewards might disguise their flacking and shilling as ordinary conversations with their friends doesn't similarly strike the BA folks as dishonest. Frankly, I don't see how any of my friends could maintain their credibility if they were trading on our relationship to win the equivalent of green stamps.
Because Metafilter daddy Matt Haughey is the creative director or something like that for Creative Commons, the controversy got a full airing over there (CC and Marketdroids? WTF?), Suw responded with Apparently I am a liar, CC granddaddy Lawrence Lessig wrestled in public over whether to stick with BA or drop them and thus far I still haven't heard Balter enumerate the twelve alleged falsehoods he claims Charman included in her blog post that kicked off the hullaballoo.
OK, that catches you (and me) up to Sunday. Has anything new happened today?
Update: Balter has apologized to Charman and Corante, and Charman has accepted his apology. Anything else?
Quoting from How to interest more girls in tech careers at Misbehaving:
Jacquelynne Eccles, a University of Michigan psychologist, says that girls steer away from careers in math, science and engineering because they view them as solitary pursuits: "In order to increase the number of women in science, we also need to make young women more interested in these fields, and that means making them aware that science is a social endeavor that involves working with and helping people."
See: Why Women Shy Away from Careers in Science and Math (via Mind Hacks)
Frankly, we all benefit if technology is viewed as a social, people-centric pursuit and not just another expression of the lone-genius slash auteur slash mad-scientist meme.
With Yahoo! 360º - Yahoo! 360 Product Blog, the Yahoo 360 team is eating its own dogfood in public, but can any group of people (or Yahoo! Group) have its own blog there, or is this just a custom work-around?
Chris Nolan guested a week or so at PressThink with The Stand Alone Journalist is Here.... Be sure to read if you're interested in the impact of blogging and syndication on journalism.
Today I are one! OK, I've dabbled in journalism before, but it's been a while and it was mostly in the tech trade press. Today my first article has been published at Personal Democracy Forum, Meetup Says Put Up or Shutdown:
On April 12, Meetup.com dropped a bomb on its users: the online group organizing service announced that it would now charge group organizers monthly fees. The notification has forced political campaigns and issue advocacy groups to consider alternative methods for mobilizing their supporters. It's already prompted an exodus among some organizers who have since resigned from their roles managing Meetup groups.
The previously free Web service is widely credited with helping Howard Dean’s Democratic Presidential campaign spread virally, and take its online mojo offline into local communities across the U.S. But now Meetup needs to develop a sustainable revenue stream, and its decision to charge group organizers using the system to schedule and promote local, in-person meetings has been a hard pill for many to swallow.
Go over there and read the rest!
Quoting from All-Podcast, All-the-Time Radio:
A San Francisco radio station is going to start airing nothing but user-submitted podcasts beginning on May 16. The station, which calls itself KYOU Open Source Radio, will broadcast on 1550-AM/San Francisco and the Internet.Submitted podcasts must be 60 megabytes or less in size and can be in any format. The categories on the submission form demonstrate how strange this is likely to be -- traditional fare like news, sports and politics is mixed with over-the-road trucking, sex and wiffleball.
This could be one of the great wheels-off radio experiments of all-time -- at least until earnest liberal San Franciscans fill it with local community news, activism and independent music.
The station sounds like a good opportunity for Jacksonville weblogger Todd Smith, who devotes his site to Americana music and has a Saturday morning show about the music on a local college station.
