mamamusings: social software

my talk at google

I mentioned in a previous post that I’m going to be giving a talk at Google next week. For the Googlers among my readers, here are the details:

Title: The Evolution of Expertise (or, “The reports of authority’s death have
been greatly exaggerated”)

When and Where: Friday, November 02, 2007 at 11:00 AM (60 min) in Seville, Mountain View

Abstract: Does Web 2.0 represent a triumph of the wisdom of crowds, or the
tyranny of mediocrity? The truth—as truths often do—may fall
somewhere in the middle. New tools have indeed allowed access to new
ideas, voices, and expertise. But at the same time, it has become
increasingly difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. In education,
the shift from “the sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side” has
been underway for quite some time. The same shift is happening on the
web. Experts aren’t disappearing, but their roles are changing. How
can tools and infrastructure best support this shift in the role of
expertise and authority?

—

My understanding is that the talk will also be made available via Google Video, so you can watch it later even you’re not at the Googleplex that day.

apologies in advance on twitter "friend" requests

Because I really like Twitter, and am using it as a way to keep better connected with people I already have at least somewhat strong connections with, I’m not going to be accepting friend requests from people that I don’t have a relationship of some kind with already. That means, in most cases, you have to be someone I’ve met in real life and had a conversation with, or that I have a long history of online interaction with.

If I don’t accept your request, it’s not a repudiation of you personally; it’s simply an acknowledgment that I don’t think we’re really close enough for either of us to have all that much interest in the minutiae of everyday life.

tagging vs folksonomies

Is this a reasonable statement to make?

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

Yes? No? Discuss.

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

how do i love flickr? let me count the ways

I just renewed my Flickr Pro membership, which got me to thinking about how much I love Flickr.

I first used Flickr when it bore no resemblance to the service it is today—back in those early days, it was focused on real-time photo sharing and chatting in an interactive Flash-based environment. The first photo I uploaded, in December of 2003, is photo number 216 in the system—which makes it, so far as I know, the first photo uploaded by someone who didn’t work for Flickr.

Three years later, I’ve uploaded 2,160 photos, which have garnered (as of a few moments ago) 99,914 views.

Wow.

So, that list…

Flickr revitalized my interest in photography. I take more pictures because I want to share them with others.

I bought my first cameraphone because of Flickr, and now it’s an essential part of my life. I use it—along with Flickr and the marvelous Shozu software—to document day-to-day details of my life. The small events that are under the bloggable radar, but important enough to remember and share.

My Flickr photos led me to long-lost family members in Brazil.

This week I’ll be receiving the ten free cards from Moo that my Flickr Pro account entitled me to. The samples I ordered will include ten different sunset photos I’ve taken. If they’re as good as everyone who’s written about them says, I’m pretty sure I’ll be buying lots more—for myself and as gifts.

Because of Flickr, every day I get visual updates from people I care about. I know that Eric and Nicole dressed as pirates for “Talk Like a Pirate” Day. I know that Stewart is (was?) in Taipei, that Tantek is in Tokyo, and that Jill has a new camera (ooooo….I’m so jealous! a canon digital slr is at the very top of my wish list these days). I know that Weez has the boys this weekend, that Julie took her kids to visit a salmon hatchery, and that Gina went to a wedding. And I know all that not because of lengthy emails or telephone conversations, but from the constant stream of photos from friends that I see in Bloglines.

I know there are more reasons I love Flickr, but it’s lunchtime and I promised to take Alex to Panera.

what i've been working on

I’ve been somewhat vague about the work I’ve been doing at Microsoft this year, for a couple of reasons. First, much of the work was vague…I spent a lot of time talking to people, acting as consultant and catalyst, rather than creating things. Second, some of the projects I worked on were (and mostly still are) still not public knowledge.

There’s one project, though, that’s really my baby. I conceived it, spec’ed it, and am in the process of seeing it get built. And I’ve reached an agreement with MIcrosoft about the IP for this project that means I can now blog about it unfettered. So, for those wondering what I’ve really been working on, here it is.

It’s called PULP…for “personal ubiquitous library project.” (It was originally just “personal library project,” but I added the “ubiquitous” so it would have an easy to remember name.) And it’s the result of mashing up features from social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and CiteULike and LibraryThing, personal library tools like Delicious Library and MediaMan, and mobile scanning and annotation tools like Aura.

So, why does the world need another social bookmarking/library tool? I’m not sure it does. But this one is intended to address some problems I’ve had with the tools listed above.

First, it’s going to be an enterprise-based tool, that will be installed and managed on your own server. That’s because centrally-owned and managed social bookmarking tools present a problem for people working on non-public projects. I was made aware of how much of a public trail I can leave in my bookmarks when one of my students knew about my plans to come to Seattle before my department chair did—all because he’d noticed what I was bookmarking and how I was tagging it. When I started working here at Microsoft on competitive projects, I cut way back on my use of del.icio.us, because I was concerned that I might give away too much of what I was working on to competitors.

Second, it’s going the leverage the extreme coolness of Marc Smith’s AURA project to enable SmartPhone and PocketPC-based data entry. I love that Delicious Library and MediaMan let me use a webcam to scan barcodes. But that’s not useful when I’m walking through a bookstore, or visiting a friend’s house. I want to be able to scan in the barcode of a book with my mobile device and add it to my collection.

Third, it will distinguish between items that I have (or have access to), and items that I’d like to have but don’t. I love the idea of being able to browse a colleague’s virtual bookshelf…but it’s much more helpful to me if I know that these are items that s/he actually has and that I can therefore look at or borrow. That’s even more helpful when I’m in a bookstore, since I’ll be able to find out immediately if the book I’m considering purchasing is one that someone I work with already has a copy of.

That’s all planned for the first version of the system, which I’m hoping we’ll be able to deploy at RIT and MSR this fall so that we can do some research into how people use the system.

In the second version, I have a more ambitious plan. I want to develop a rich desktop client for the data that will incorporate p2p sharing, much like iTunes does for music. That way, even if my server is at RIT, and yours is at, say Yahoo, we can meet up at a conference and share items with each other. I can browse the stuff that people near me have marked as public, and I can share out items tagged for a talk I’ve given or a topic I’m studying. (I was delighted today when I came across this post describing how someone essentially turned iTunes into a paper-sharing tool.)

The way this is going to work from an IP and development resources standpoint is that MSR is developing the backend database for the service, and the mobile client will be based directly on the AURA client that will be made widely available in the foreseeable future. Everything that my students and I create—the UI, the web pages, the code to make the interface talk to the database—will be in the public domain. MSR is quite generously funding my students for this work, with sufficient funds for me to be able to get some great RIT students working hard on it all next year. So really, everybody wins. And I’m very grateful to Marc Smith and Turner Whitted at MSR for supporting this project, and making it possible for me and my students to continue working on it even after I return to RIT.

As we get further along in development, I’ll be posting more information about the project.

scathing critique of wikipedia by jaron lanier

Today, edge.org posted an essay by Jaron Lanier entitled “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.” Here’s the abstract:

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

This is a must-read piece for anyone interested in social computing generally, or wikipedia in particular. Whether or not you agree with Lanier, his criticisms are worth considering.

itwf 06: diana oblinger on "educating the net generation"

Diana Oblinger, the keynote speaker today, is the VP of Educause—which has recently put out an e-book on this topic of “Educating the Net Generation,” which I downloaded last week but haven’t read yet… She’s got quite an impressive vita, including a stint at Microsoft. And she seems like a dynamic speaker, which is great.

She says she’s not going to talk about IT directly. She wants to help us understand more about the differences in today’s learners. We’re all products of our environment, she points out, and there are very different factors influencing the “Net Gen” (web, cell phone, IM, MP3s, online communities) than those influencing Baby Boomers and Gen X. She shows a chart shwoing the average amount of media exposure the “average person” will have by age 21. (Average starting where, I’m not sure…)

Talks about “neuroplasticity”—the brain reorganizes itself throught life. Stimulation changes brain structures, the brain changes and organizes itself based on the inputs it receives.

Who are these learners? (She notes these are generalizations, broad-brush portraits, and of course there are exceptions.) Five characteristics: digital, connected, experiential, immediate, social. (Her definitions of “connected” and “social” seem quite similar…)

Educationally, what does this mean for learning preferences? Peer-to-peer learning. Interaction and engagement (this doesn’t mean “entertainment,” or “easy,” which seems to be how Baby Boomers perceive it). Visual and kinesthetic—images, movement, and spatial relationships are important. “Things that matter”—they want socially relevant, problem-solving contexts for learning.

(Five-minute assessment: she’s great! and her slides aren’t awful! Also, it appears that I’m a NetGen mind in a Baby Boomer body!)

These are also time-constrained learners. 87% of college students commute, 80% work, 35% are adult learners, 31% of enrollment increases will be in adult learners. (Wow. These are stats I hadn’t heard before.) But much of what we do in education is not designed for people who are time-constrained.

She shows figure about children 6 and under consuming media. Interesting that “screen media” (which combines both TV and computers, things I see as very different) is one category, and “reading” is another. Much of what my kids do on the screen involves reading. Does reading only count if it’s books? If so, I don’t do much “reading” anymore.

“Interpretive flexibility”—meaning is shaped by culture, technology, our understanding of education.

Students are harbingers of social and cultural change. Back to the “connected” issue—the Internet is their primary communication tool. “Peer-to-peer”—she talks about social bookmarking! She mentions del.icio.us and CiteULike!! In my head, I do a happy dance!!! Wikipedia as an example of “distributed cognition.” Talks about the culture clash between traditional academia and “amateur culture.” (Implicit “wisdom of crowds” references—I’m currently reading that book, and have a post or two brewing on it.)

Another characteristic that’s emerging is “self-service”—people are doing more for themselves, like online banking, shopping, travel arrangements. It’s an obvious segue to self-service learning, as well as informal, organic, activity-based, self-activated, open-ended learning.

(Yow. I can’t keep up with her.)

She talks about Flickr, and shows screen shots. (!!!) She talks about how hard it is for her to go from her inherent preference for text to multiple media. (This is forcing me to rethink my current development project, which is good but also daunting.)

Time-shifting—from TV it’s a short hop to controlling other kinds of content delivery.

This is a move away from the traditional hierarchical higher ed model.

Now she’s talking about MMORPGS (she calls them “alternate realities,” which I find somewhat problematic). She shows numbers on amount of time spent on games, number of players, revenue for the industry. Points out the average age of an online gamer is 37.

Now she’s on to participatory media and culture. Cites estimates of number of blogs, blog readers, posts per day and hour (Lark, 2005 — don’t recognize the reference).

[I am beside myself with delight that the topics I’m most passionate about are being inserted into this event, and being done so by someone who’s so engaging and articulate.]

The cultural shift is towards networked, mobile, participatory. There are also different perceptions. Today’s students were born after the change curve had started its dramatic upwards curve, and as a result their expectations are different—they don’t expect to have 3-5 years to master a technology before a new one supplants it. (That’s an important point, one I’ve not heard made before. Academia has so not kept up with new technology, and the idea that we can or should spend 5+ years studying the use of a technology is becoming increasingly problematic.)

These interfaces are shaping learning. She talks about Alice in Wonderland—new technologies are offering that model, the ability to “fall into” these immersive virtual environments. Cites JSB’s “learning to be.” Points out that we need not just immersion, but also reflection. Need to be able to take a step back and think about how it worked. That combination is very powerful.

Shows some sobering figures on US higher ed generally, challenging the “we’re number one!” perception.

New critical skills for the workforce: expert thinking (identifying and solving problems for which there is no routine solution—pattern matching, metacognition), and complex communication (persuading, explaining, interpreting information; negotiating, managing, gaining trust, teaching, etc).

Key point: education is not equivalent to content. Lots of good points she’s making, but I can’t keep up.

If you sum up everything we know about educational research, you find that we get educational value from:
* challenging ideas and people
* active engagement with challenges
* supportive environment
* real-world activities
* social activity
* unbounded by time or place

Provides some interesting examples:

• Allowing students to do a virtual version of a science lab before doing a real-world version, the quality of the real-world experience is greatly enhanced. Both is better than either/or.
• Shows an archaeology class project from UBC where the students had to build a virtual fly-through of Athens.
• Hand-held genetics game called “live long and prosper” where students move around the room “exchanging DNA” between their programs. More experiential, more interactive, more engaging.
• MIT “Environmental Detectives” game where students work in teams to solve a hypothetical local health problem—they have to interact with the environment to accomplish this

Games are fundamentally immersive (she points out it’s not just the graphics, it’s the gameplay that makes them immersive and engaging).

Shows a classroom just like ours—everybody stuck behind a big monitor. Contrasts to room (apparently at NCSU) with circular tables and laptops, designed for “built pedagogy.” A single focal point at the front of the room with chairs bolted facing forward—this forces a mode of teaching. Putting people at round tables says “we want you interact.” (Which is why we’re doing the symposium setup in rounds of 10, rather than classroom/lecture layout.)

Talks about NCSU’s SCALE-UP program (“student centered activities for large enrollment undergratudate programs”). This looks fabulous! Need to read more about it.

Emphasizes the need for more informal learning spaces. NCSU again—“fly spaces” in the student center, easily configurable for small group work. Glass matters—seeing people practice their profession is fundamentally engaging (I love this about the Golisano building at RIT).

Moves on to information literacy—cognitive, ethical, and technical aspects (gives props to librarians, who’ve been talking about this for decades).

What do employers really want from students, in terms of learning outcomes? It’s not being able to program in C++. It’s the more abstract skills like communication and problem solving (how many times have we heard this from our advisory board? but this isn’t completely true—often the technical skills are the baseline, and what differentiates two students with the same skills are those higher-level cognitive abilities).

Shows figures on satisfaction with web-based learning (study done at UCF); younger students are least pleased by the web-based environment. (She translates that to the young people wanting to have more social interaction, but it seems to me there’s more going on there. I suspect that some of it is that the majority of the web-based course management tools are horrendously awful, and younger people have higher expectations.)

She’s done. (Phew. That was an amazingly content-packed hour. I wonder how much, if any, got absorbed by the audience.)

First question—how do we convince our administrators to put in the kinds of collaborative spaces that she described? She answers that Educause is doing a lot more executive outreach to help facilitate this. They’re trying hard to raise awareness of the importance, but they need face time. They’ve got a book coming out in August on learning space design—will have to look for that. Like the NetGen book, it will be a free e-book.

(lunchtime!)

2006 msr social computing symposium

Two years ago, I was thrilled when I received an invitation to Microsoft Research’s first social computing symposium. I had a wonderful time at the event, and found a lot of kindred spirits in the world of social computing research and development. I also made my first contacts with Lili Cheng and Linda Stone, who’ve gone on to be the best mentors anyone could ask for. Lili, who managed the social computing group at MSR (until she left to direct the user experience team for Windows Vista), was responsible for my sabbatical invitation.

Last year, with my plans to join the group over the summer well underway, I combined attendance at the second symposium with a househunting trip, and once again connected with people who amazed and inspired me.

This year, I find myself not just attending the symposium, but running it. Upon Lili’s departure from MSR, followed quickly by the departure of Shelly Farnham (who’d masterfully managed the event for the past two years), Marc Smith inherited the event and asked me to run it. The event takes place May 7-9 this year, and we’ve narrowed the focus a bit from past years. The two areas of emphasis for this year’s symposium are online “third places” and/or mobile social software. As in past years, we’ve split the group approximately into thirds—Microsoft & MSR, industry experts, and academics. We’ve also made a significant effort to bring in new names and faces; the repeat rate from past symposia is quite low (38/90 who have been to at least one of the events, only 19 who’ve attended both; those numbers are 23 and 9 if you look only at non-Microsoft attendees).

First, the bad news—the symposium is totally full. We keep the event small, both to foster community and to keep the cost manageable. Microsoft covers the entire cost of the event—facilities, meals, and transportation/housing costs for those presenting (and for doctoral students). Now the good news—if you weren’t invited, you’ll still have a chance to participate. We’ll be webcasting the event live (the panels and the closing keynotes, though not the “open space” discussions.) We’ll also have a live backchannel, probably IRC. (I was thinking about trying Campfire, but they’ve got a limit of 60 concurrent users, and with 90 participants onsite and an unknown number of external visitors, that’s probably too low a cap.)

I’m working on getting a public web page up with information about the event, including the schedule and participant list—with any luck, that will be available by the end of this week, at which point I’ll update this post to point to it.

This year’s event wouldn’t be happening if Microsoft Research wasn’t maintaining its commitment to social computing and open dialogs, and if MSN/Windows Live hadn’t stepped in to help support the cost of the event. Also providing some support were Channel 9 (and its new sister, on10), and MSCOM. (So you understand why the number of invitations had to be constrained, the cost of the event will end up being over $60K. Seattle’s not a cheap place to throw a party.)

It’s easy to hate Microsoft—there have been many reasons over the years (from business practices to blue screens of death) to do so. But it’s worth giving them credit for activities like this one, which benefit the community as a whole through fostering community and collaboration. Anyone who’s attended the past events will tell you this is not a marketing ploy, and that they got something of value of out of the experience.

Currently playing in iTunes: Nobody Else from the album “Los Lonely Boys” by Los Lonely Boys

edge cases and early adopters

This week was the fourth version of Microsoft’ “search champ” program, and the first one where I’ve been heavily involved in the planning (rather than simply being an attendee). It was a great meeting, with some amazing people providing input into new product development in MSN/WindowsLive. I got see to old friends (like Cindy and Walt), and be a fangirl (hi, Merlin!).

During the wrap-up session, when Robert Scoble was talking about designing tools that would optimize everyone’s syndication experience so that they, too, could read 840 feeds, I called him an “edge case.” He didn’t like that. Not one bit. But his defense was, to me, unconvincing.

Robert’s an “edge case” to me in this context because very few people will ever have the time or the inclination—regardless of how good the tools are—to read that many sources. Robert does not because he’s some freak of nature, but because he’s got a job that requires him to monitor activity in the technology community. When I worked at the Library of Congress, I had a job that required me to read dozens of newspapers and magazines every single day, looking for articles related to governmental initiatives. That made me an edge case. Most people don’t read dozens of news publications every day, and it’s not that they want to but simply haven’t found the tools to do it. It’s that they don’t have a need for that much diffuse information.

He felt I used the term derisively, which I didn’t. He’s right that edge cases often push us in new directions, and I’ve got a long-standing interest in liminal spaces (the fancy academic term for those in-between spaces where contexts overlap and new ways of thinking and acting often emerge). But in his reaction, he confused what I see as two very different things—edge cases and early adopters. In this case he’s both. But his response focused much more on how his early adoption of new technologies—from macs to blogs—foreshadowed broader adoption. That’s about being an early adopter, which is not synonymous with being an edge case.

So what’s the difference? To me, an early adopter is someone who recognizes the value of a new technology or tool before it becomes widely used or accepted, and often evangelizes it to others. They recognize trends before they’re trends, and are the ones who are always acquiring the latest-and-greatest technical toys. An edge case is someone who’s on the extreme edge of an activity, regardless of whether they’re an early adopter. Someone who reads 840 blogs is an edge case. But so is someone who reads dozens of daily newspapers, or runs 10 miles every morning. Their choices may influence our behavior—those edge cases are great at recommending things to others—but most people will be far more moderate in their behavior.

There’s a story I cite a lot when I’m talking to people about diffusion of technological innovation. Back in my early days as a librarian in the 1980s, online searching didn’t mean launching a web browser and going to Google. Instead, it meant connecting via dial-up to an online database and doing a searches with complex boolean operators. Librarians loved this, and decided that the whole world needed to learn the “joy of searching.” It was that whole “teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime” mentality. One day at a library conference, I heard a wonderful speech by Herb White in which he scolded librarians for this mentality. “I have no joy of searching,” he told the audience. “I have joy of finding!”

In that context of online searching, librarians were both edge cases and early adopters—much like Robert is with blogs and syndicated feeds. They’re edge cases because they do in fact love to search as much as love to find. They find it hard to believe that not everyone would want to learn arcane search syntax in order to improve their online search experience. But they’re also early adopters—they were finding things online before the web was born, and they continue to push the limits on how you can use online search tools (one of my most popular posts ever was a transcription of Mary Ellen Bates’ fabulous “30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes” talk from the 2003 Internet Librarian conference).

Anyone who’s looked at aggregated query logs from a search engine knows that most of the people doing online searching these days aren’t masters of the boolean query. They didn’t become like the edge cases. But they did follow the early adopters—just in a more limited way.

So, Robert, my point wasn’t that because you’re an edge case nothing you do is relevant to other users. Nor do I think being an edge case is bad (I consider myself to be one, too). But the people who follow your lead as an early adopter won’t do it the way you do. They’re simply not going to want or need to read 840 syndicated feeds. And to try to optimize the user experience based on the needs of edge cases isn’t, I think, in anyone’s best interest.

world of warcraft primer

Over the past several days, a number of friends and colleagues have asked me about getting started with World of Warcraft, so I thought I’d summarize some of the key ponts here for others who may be wondering.

You need to buy the retail box for the software in order to start playing—each box has a unique registration code necessary for creating a full account. You can borrow a friends’ disks and set up a ten-day guest/trial account, but to upgrade to a full account you’ll need your own retail box. List price is $49.99, but it frequently goes on sale at game and software stores for $29.99 (that’s what we paid for ours). Right now, Amazon has it for $39.99. When you buy the software, you also get one free month of play included with it. If you want to continue after the first month you can pay Blizzard $14.95/month directly, or you can buy prepaid cards for 30 or 60 days of play. We’ve seen 60-day cards on sale for as low as $24.99.

Once you set up your account, you’re asked to select a “realm” (a server, basically) to play on. Each realm is identical to the others in terms of geography and content—they’re each their own self-contained virtual world, on which thousands of players interact. There are a few differences among servers. Some are more focused on player-vs-player combat (as opposed to player-vs-environment or role playing). Some are geographically focused, to deal with both language and network issues.

Once you’ve selected a realm, you have to create a character to play. This involves choosing a race, gender and class for your character. Your choice of race places you on one of two sides (“factions”) of a global war—either the Alliance side (composed of Night Elves, Humans, Gnomes, and Dwarves), or the Horde side (composed of Orcs, Trolls, Taurens, and Undead). You can create more than one character on a server, and can also have characters on multiple servers. So, for example, on the Khadgar PvE server I have a female Night Elf Druid who is automatically an Alliance character, whereas on t he Magtheridon PvP server I have a female Troll Priest who’s part of the Horde. (I chose both of those servers because people I already knew had created guilds and invited me to play with them.)

While you can interact (typically by way of fighting) with characters from an opposing faction, most social interaction on the servers is among characters in the same faction. You can only add players from your faction to your friends list, and can only group with or join a guild with players from your faction.

Many aspects of the game can be soloed—played by your character without the assistance of others. However, a number of more complex quests and activities require the skills of a variety of players, which is where groups and guilds come in. You can group with other players on an ad hoc “pickup” basis, or you can join a guild and participate in regularly organized “raids” with other members of your guild. These collaborative efforts often take several hours, and thus are typically planned in advance.

There is, of course, far more to all of it. But that’s the basic landscape. If you decide to start playing, consider yourself warned—it brings out the worst obsessive-compulsive tendencies in many people, and it’s easy to spend far too much time playing.

blurring boundaries between real and virtual worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

worth repeating

From Jenny Levine’s blog:

The Shifted Librarian: Morning Conversation with Brent:

Brent: You’re always on the computer — you’re addicted to it. What are you doing — are you talking to someone?
Jenny: Yes, I am. And I’m not always on the computer…
Brent: Can I talk to them?
Jenny: Not right now you can’t, no. And I don’t think you’re one to talk, Mr. I’m-Addicted-to-Instant-Messaging.
Brent: I’m not addicted. I just like talking to people.
Jenny: You know, you can talk to them on the phone, too.
Brent: Not to five people at once I can’t.

I think Brent and Lane would get along really well…

corante ssa: "is business ready for social software?"

This is a panel that Stowe Boyd is leading, with Seth Goldstein and Kaliya Hamlin.

Seth says that the answer to the question of “Why now? Why is business now noticing and implementing social software solutions?” is three letters: API. Says that sites like del.icio.us and Flickr only got interesting/popular when developers were able to create things using the API. (Not sure I completely agree with those examples, but I agree in concept with the importance of APIs. What he’s not acknowledging though, and what I think is also important, is ease of use and design simplicity.)

(This is being held in a large law school lecture room, theatre style, which is not well-suited to audience engagement. These kinds of rooms trip my “bored student” switch, and I find it much harder to stay engaged.)

Seth quotes Josh Schachter describing del.icio.us as “crystallized attention.” (Ah…just realized that Seth’s the president of AttentionTrust.org.)

Stowe asks if we’re going to see a backlash against these social, collaborative tools in the enterprise—will employers see this as “wasted time” because the ROI is less explicit? (My unspoken comment: We’re already seeing that backlash with email. Also, we need research that makes that ROI more explicit—how does the organization (not just the individual) benefit from use of these tools.

Seth: We all work for Google, whether we know it or not.

Comment from Adam Greene in the audience—quotes someone as saying that “tags are about memory, not about categorization.” Do you take the “folks” out of folksonomy when you impose tagging “rules.”

(The backchannel discussion is becoming more interesting than the panel discussion…not because the panel is boring, but because conversation is inherently more interesting that presentation in most cases. The exceptions are speakers like David Weinberger who can really grab your focus.)

Kaliya talks about the “Hollywood model” of teams that come together for a project and then disband and go to other projects. Stowe asks how many people in the audience are working in that mode now, and a number of hands go up. In the backchannel, the question of whether this is necessarily a good thing is raised—as is the fact that key players in those Hollywood groups are unionized in order to ensure that they’re compensated appropriately.

Seth talks about AttentionTrust—says it’s founded on the idea that we all are entitled to a record of our own attention. Google, Amazon, etc are doing an excellent job of recording our actions and attention data; consumers haven’t had good ownership of their own data. (I’m not convinced yet that these attention.xml files are much more than a way to make it easier for more companies to have more data about me…)

[I apologize to the panel for not better representing their remarks. Between jetlag and room architecture I’m having a hard time staying focused.]

corante ssa: david weinberger opening remarks

Today I’m at the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture (hereafter referred to as “SSA”), which is an interesting collection of both “the usual suspects” and some faces that are new to me. Stowe Boyd from Corante did some welcoming remarks, and then turned things over to David Weinberger.

David breaks the shit and fuck barriers in the first two minutes of his talk. His powerpoint is for shit, he’s fucked because he dropped his laptop and it won’t work now. (And by transcribing that, I’ve probably just guaranteed that this blog post will be filtered by most library computers…)

David starts by saying that we’re all probably tired of explaining blogs at conferences (most of us never expected that we’d be using the term “reverse chronological order” quite so often, he says). This symposium assumes that everyone here is past the point of needing to have the technology carefully explained to them.

He says that social software is in some sense the fulfillment of the hope that the Internet could fundamentally change relationships in business contexts.

References Eleanor Rosch, and says we need to start by defining what we include within the umbrella term of social software. Tosses out a list of tools (wikis, weblogs, email, IM, etc), then asks what these things have in common?

• they connect people to people
• they tend to be relatively low-tech, small, bottom-up, inexpensive
• very human, suffused with human voice

He talks about the publishers’ responses to Google Print, and says the stupidity of the arguments is an indication of the fear of cultural change—“both sides are getting stupider,” he says, which is the indicator of significant change. The battle he sees is between centralized, controlled information and a “wide-open” model of information that the web represents.

(My unspoken question: isn’t Google Print just another form of centralized, controlled information?)

We’re moving from pyramidal to hyperlinked organizations™. Social software lets us route around the hierarchy of the organization.

What does David worry about? Three things:

1. Social software (and the net in general) has a tendency to blow apart the old ways of connecting; how are we going to reconnect?
2. Social software allows us to localize, and form smaller and often transient groups. How do we get the knowledge out of the small group? How do we avoid getting too comfortable in our small groups? (The world isn’t flat, he says, it’s “lumpy,” filled with clusters that form and dissolve…)
3. Are we now forming a “new boys’ network”? New groups form, and then exclude others (for the best of reasons…). Will existing patterns of exclusion persist, or will we create new ones? (e.g. those who can use IRC vs those who can’t)

Criticizes the “echo chamber” label, because it turns the very basis of conversation into something negative. If you look at only one site, you’ll see only one conversation, true—but most people choose to look at a variety of sites. (This is a huge challenge in building the tools—how do you avoid the Memeorandum effect on conversational spaces?)

You need some degree of sameness to enable conversation, but you need some degree of difference to even be able to approximate the truth.

multiple urls in os x address book?

Recently, it’s occurred to me that I’d really love to be able to integrate my address book more with the social tools I use online. For example, Quicksilver makes it easy for me to go to a person’s card in my address book and send them email, chat with them via IM, or copy their snail mail address or phone number. But what if I could, from the same screen, view their del.icio.us bookmarks, or their Flickr photos?

At first I was thinking that these would need to be customized fields, but then I realized that it’s just an issue of adding additional URLs. Which would be simple, except that in Address Book you can’t add more than one URL. That’s stupid. Most of us have more than one URL that we’d like associated with us (or with others).

So, is there a plugin or hack for Address Book that allows adding additional URLs? So that QS will recognize them as launchable URLs? And if not, could someone please write one?

del.icio.us inboxes are back!

…and there was much rejoicing.

What’s a del.icio.us inbox, you might ask? It’s a list of all the new bookmarks added by the people you subscribe to in del.icio.us, and all the new posts to tags that you subscribe to. Here’s mine. Links on the left, subscriptions on the right.

As Joshua has pointed out to me, it’s really just an aggregator. Whatever. It’s my information lifeline—my sense of what the people whose “information instincts” I trust are looking at. My personalized web recommendation system. And I’m soooooo glad it’s back.

Thanks, Josh!

last.fm and audioscrobbler

I started to write about how I’ve discovered the joys of Profile Radio over on last.fm, but it drifted into musings about definition of social software, so I put it over on Many-to-Many instead.

lab for social computing at rit

Over on Many-to-Many I’ve made an announcement about a new Lab for Social Computing here at RIT.

"there's something big happening"

I’m taking a break from grading my students’ web pages to read David Weinberger’s ongoing coverage of the Harvard “Votes, Bits, and Bytes” conference. Wish I’d been at the session he wrote about this morning, organized by Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon.

Ethan says that we’re here today to talk about blogs as bridges, borrowing Hoder’s metaphor from yesterday (blogs as windows that give you insight into someone’s world, blogs as cafes where people can talk together, and blogs as bridges). There’s something big happening, Ethan says.

Indeed there is.

Omar from Iraq talks about the importance of blogging as a way of routing around propaganda. Then he talks about how the open comments from around the world on his blog helped his nephew “If I visited America a year and a half ago, I would have felt llike a stranger. This time I feel like I’m with friends, and that is the greatest gift I can think of.”

This is how I feel, as well. From Norway to Australia, France to Japan, Brazil to South Africa…I have friends around the world now that I would never have had without this blog to facilitate connections. I can say without a flicker of doubt that my blog is the one technological tool that has most fundamentally changed my professional life.

new blogs of note

Two new blogs added to my aggregator this week.

The first, “Bad Mother” by Ayelet Waldman, was recommended by my friend Allison. Ayelet is a published novelist, married to a Pulitzer-prize winning author, with four kids ranging from 1 to 10 years. Her blog is delightful—what’s not to like about a site with an entry that begins “There are not enough drugs in the world to alleviate the horror of being home alone with four children, one of whom is completely enraptured with his father.”

The second, “Hurtling” by Richard Hodkinson, is more of professional interest to me. Richard is a graduate student at USC’s Annenberg School, and shares my interest in backchannels as a destabilizing communication tool.

very cool os x app for cataloging your personal media

This is brilliant.

Delicious Monster has nothing to do with the del.icio.us bookmarking system, but it’s every bit as cool.

Run your very own library from your home or office using our impossibly simple interface. Delicious Library’s digital shelves act as a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games. A scan of a barcode is all Delicious Library needs to add an item to your digital shelves, downloading tons of info from the internet like the author, release date, current value, description, and even a high-resolution picture of the cover. Import your entire library using our exclusive full-speed iSight video barcode scanner, our Flic® Wireless Laser Bar Code Scanner, or (the slow way) entering the titles by hand. Once you have all of your items in your Mac, you can browse though your digital shelves, check stuff out to friends using Apple’s built-in Address Book and calendar, and find new items to read, watch, and play using Library’s recommendations.

Wow. I’ll definitely be trying this out this week. Stay tuned for a review. (And eat your heart out, Windows users. This is OS X Panther only…)

Update, 11/11/04

It’s as good as it looks! It took only seconds to install. I clicked on the camera button, held a book’s bar code in front of my iSight, and with a scanner-like beep all the information appeared in the window (and the program read the title out loud). w00t! This is so cool! I am so sending in my $40 today.

textual gratification

I met both my husbands online. The first on a DC-area BBS called TMMABBS (Terry Monks’ Macintosh Apple BBS), and the second on a FidoNet echo. In both cases, I fell in love with the prose before I met the person. And also in both cases, their ability to speak as well as they wrote and to engage in verbal banter sealed the deal.

I don’t know how typical that is, but after a conversation with a friend this weekend who mentioned how instrumental IM had been in the start of one of his relationships, I realized that I’m certainly not unique in having this particular weakness. There’s something about well-crafted text that just does more for me than six-pack abs (not that the latter is necessarily a bad thing, mind you…).

I don’t read FidoNet echos anymore, but I do read blogs—and am still as delighted by good writing there as I was when I encountered it on bbs’s and mailing lists. And now I add to that tools like IM and IRC, which give me real-time textual gratification. While I’m completely uninterested in tools like Skype (I avoid most voice communication, other than face-to-face, like the plague), I love IM. I love the way it lends itself to banter, to creative exchange, to plays on words. (I’m happily married now, and so my interests and needs have shifted a bit…but just as I don’t mind watching handsome actors on TV, I also enjoy watching skilled writers show off their talents.)

In my IM and IRC use I’ve resisted the move to increasing brevity, to the SMS-speak that’s gaining such popularity among my students. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of nuance in phrases like r u ok, or s^ (which my son had to teach me is shorthand for “what’s up”). Yes, I let an occasional “LOL” slip into my communication, but not much more than that.

Written language has a long history in flirtation and courtship…I worry a bit that mobile culture and its focus on speed and efficiency will lead to the death of seductive prose. Although I suppose I’m simply part of a continuing stream of elders who express that kind of worry about every new technology, from typewriters to SMS. Damn. Now I feel old. <sigh>

ichat synchronicity

I had a lovely dinner last night in LA’s Chinatown with Annenberg grad student Richard Hodkinson, which reminded me of how much fun it is to spend informal social time with people who share some of my intellectual passions.

When I got back to my room, I started thinking about how I was going to get to the ocean on Sunday—it would be criminal to fly to LA and see nothing but sidewalks and conference rooms. I was feeling sad that so few of my LA-based friends were in town this weekend, and that I wouldn’t have someone to chat and banter with as I wandered.

Before I turned the computer off, though, I took a quick look at my buddy list, and discovered that my good friend Simon Phipps, with whom I almost never cross paths in the real world, had an iChat status line that read “Ventura, CA”.

For those of you who don’t know California, Ventura is just north of LA—about an hour away in light traffic. I immediately pinged Simon, and discovered that not only was he there, but that he also had all day Sunday free before flying to a business meeting on Monday. Woohoo!

So later this morning he’s going to drive down to LA, pick me up at the hotel, and we’re off to play at the Apple Store (I’ve never been to one, can you believe it?) and the shore.

To me, that’s the best part of social software. Not the use of the tools themselves, but the way they facilitate opportunities in the “real world.” Without IRC and AIM at the symposium, I probably wouldn’t have ended up having dinner with Richard. And without the tagline on Simon’s iChat account, I’d never have known that we were close enough on this trip to actually spend time together. But because of those social software tools, my trip to LA has been immeasurably enriched.

educause on educational social software

The September/October issue of Educause Review is devoted to “New Tools for Back-to-School: Blogs, Swarms, Wikis, and Games.” The articles are well worth taking a look at.

del.icio.us tools

Just found a couple of new bookmarklets for del.icio.us that are extremely useful.

The first is nutr.itio.us, which replaces the del.icio.us pop-up posting window with one that includes your tags, as well as an option to view the del.icio.us history for the link so that you can see how other people have tagged it before assigning your own tags. Brilliant!

Another useful tool is Tasty!, which lets you simply view the del.icio.us history for a link to see who’s bookmarked it. If you’re just curious, and don’t want to bookmark it yourself, this one is nice—the rest of the time, the nutr.itio.us approach seems more useful.

this is my brain on extisp.icio.us

Kevan Davis has written a program that takes your del.icio.us tags and creates a visualization—items with more links are larger. I’m not entirely sure how the positioning works, but I suspect that tags that often appear together on an item are located closer together.

Pretty amazing. Such a simple idea, so elegantly implemented, and so remarkably accurate at mapping my cognitive space. (Click on the above image to get to the real-time version, which allows you to click on any of the tags in the image and go directly to my list of links in that category.)

blog networks as faculty commons

The past week has been hectic—the combination of japanese, houseguests, and pulling off a wonderful blog panel at MEA took a lot out of me. So blogging has been unsurprisingly light. However, when your houseguest is Jill Walker, and your weekend cookout guests include both Jill and Seb Paquet, it’s hard not to generate some new ideas…so blogging may pick up a bit as I work those out.

The blog panel at MEA was not as well attended as I’d hoped (we were towards the end of the day, alas), but it was great fun to be a part of it. If you couldn’t attend, Collin Brooke did a wonderful write-up of it. Thanks, Collin!

And if nothing else, the panel provided a wonderful opportunity for the five of us to all meet each other—Jill and Seb had never met any of us before, and Alex and Clay had each only met me. The face-to-face interaction is obviously not a necessary component for collaboration and connection, or the panel never would have happened to begin with, but it certainly is a welcome and strengthening addition.

Last night Seb and Jill and I were talking about how the connections we’ve formed through our blogs are actually more important to us in terms of collegiality than the connections we have to people that we work with. I “know” Jill and Seb better (at least professionally) than I know most of the people in my hallway. I think this will be increasingly the case for academics—social software tools will foster and support collaborative networks that cross disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and those networks will become the important spaces in which creativity research develop. As Jill said, these social-software-supported networks have become closer to the ideal of the faculty commons than anything on a real campus has ever been.

So, what happens to research and scholarship—what happens to the current concept of a university, in fact?—when these formerly invisible colleges become not only visible, but more important than the traditional, geographically and disciplinarily (not a word, I know, but there isn’t one for what I want) bound colleges we’re accustomed to?

Virtuality simply isn’t going to replace physicality in toto; there’s too much value in physical presence. That’s why Jill and Seb and Clay were all willing to trek to Rochester for this panel—it was worth the expense (in time and money) to be able to connect in a physical space. Location matters—I live where I live for many reasons unrelated to my job, and that’s true for most of the people I know. So how do we blend our modes? How do we get the most out of the emerging blog commons? I don’t have answers yet, just questions.

shrook problems

So, I really do like Shrook, and I even paid for my copy. However, I’m having consistent problems with it killing my Internet connection, which may mean I have to drop it in favor of another newsreader (NetNewsWire comes highly recommended).

I’ve never before had the experience of an application single-handedly killing my Internet connectivity, but I’ve been able to replicate the problem enough times that I’m quite sure it’s not coincidence.

The problem occurs only when I’m viewing a site that I’ve set to show me web pages rather than the RSS entry—one if the features I like best about Shrook, really, so I’m loathe to just turn it off.

The process is this…I start up Shrook, it does its checking, all with no problem. I can then view entries from any of my “channels” without difficulty, until I get to one where the setting is to view web pages. More than 50% of the time (but not 100%, which is frustrating from a troubleshooting standpoint) nothing happens. No information appears in the window. And at that point, all of my other TCP/IP apps stop working. If I pull up the Network control panel in OS X, it shows me as being online with a valid IP address for 1-2 minutes after that, but then it switches to a 169.254 self-assigned IP. Attempting to renew my DHCP lease doesn’t do anything; I have to restart the computer to get my connectivity back. This happens both at home and in the office, and only when I click on a Shrook entry that’s been set for web page viewing.

(I’m running OS X 10.3.3 with all current software updates installed, btw.)

I figured I’d post about it in case anyone else has or had the same problem; I searched for it and couldn’t find any other information about it. If you’ve got any ideas or solutions, please let me know!

Update, 4/26: It’s getting worse; now it appears to be causing my connection to die without my even loading a web-view channel. I’ll need to stop using it until an update comes out to address whatever network instability the application is introducing.

when worlds collide converge

I spent most of the day Thursday at a workshop on cyber-communities sponsored by the sociology and anthropology departments here at RIT. (It was planned in conjunction with Howard Rheingold’s visit, who gave a great talk last night; Weez and I streamed it from my laptop for #joiito members, and the official archived version is already available on the RIT web site in .ram format.)

There weren’t very many people at the cyber-communities workshop, unfortunately, which was primarily due to the lack of good publicity for the workshop. Even though I was speaking at it in the afternoon, I didn’t realize that some really cool people were going to be giving talks, including Keith Hampton (I’m writing up his excellent talk for M2M this weekend—in the meantime, check out his site and read his papers!), and Lori Kendall (whose book, Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online, I’m going to have to get and read this summer). The only web page I could find for the workshop was a press release on the RIT news site—which seems surprising for a cyber communities activty. Why weren’t “cyber tools” being used to promote this?

Part of the problem, I think, is the tendency for people who study about technology and its impact to disassociate themselves from those who study it directly. Happily, that’s happening less and less at RIT—this week was a great example. On Wednesday, digital poet Loss Pequeño Glazier , founder of the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo, gave a wonderful talk on campus. He was there as part of a series of talks for a digital poetry my mom is team-teaching this year, and they’ve brought in a number of technology focused people (including me…) to talk to the class. The cyber-communities presentations included talks by several people from IT or technology fields, as well.

What was particularly nice about my day yesterday was that it marked the first time that my RIT world has significantly intersected with my social computing world. Having Howard and Keith on campus, going to dinner with them and colleagues from RIT, was both strange and wonderful. I’ve felt for the past year or so as though I’ve been living dual professional lives, and yesterday was the first time it felt as though the two might be converging rather than diverging.

So yesterday was wonderful, and today I woke up to a birthday with sunshine and spring air and birds chasing each other around the backyard. It’s shaping up to be one of the best birthdays ever. And on that note, I’m headed outside to play!

books in the wild

So clearly I’m late to the party in discovering Bookcrossing. But it’s still worth writing about, if only because of how thoroughly it has captivated both me and my kids.

I first heard about the site when Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup, spoke about it at the Microsoft social software symposium. I was intrigued—regular meetings of people who wanted to swap books? As a bibliophile whose house is full of books I’m unlikely to read again but hate to throw away, that sounded intriguing. I took a look at the Meetup site, and even signed up for one of the meetings…and then promptly forgot about it. Th