Category: Uncategorized

I’d love to see a “really social bookmarking”. Delicious has lots of bookmarks, and shows which bookmarks are popular, but it’s hard to figure out who people are because most people use pseudonyms. Magnolia (RIP) had much more social presence but was small. Twitter is timely and social but amnesic. Friendfeed has people and multiple services, but you can’t navigate it by content type (links) and topic (tags).

I’d love to see bookmarks through a multi-service friend of a friend network, browsable by topic, prioritized by number of links. That would be a great way to find classic information and good curators.

WordPress lets you set up a website that looks more like a site than a blog. You can create “pages”, and compose hierarchical site navigation by putting a list of pages in a sidebar or header. There are any number of pre-packaged themes that give you multi-column templates, and you can use widgets to put navigation and other content into the sidebars.

So, how do you put the pages in the order you want? The sidebar widget lets you choose the sort order – alphabetical, or something called “page order.” What the heck is that? After some “I feel dumb” searching, I looked at a page. There is a small section to the left of the page that lets you add a number which sets the sort order. So if you want your navigation pages to be sorted 1-5, you go into each page, and put the right number for each page. Kinda clunky but works

Since it took me some extra time to figure this out, I wrote this post to help others.

Back in the day, Google’s pagerank used many individual acts of linking to calculate the relevance of pages. These days, the acts of linking are occurring in near-real time and viral waves on Twitter and social network services. Links in social media are a powerful indicator of relevance. A link has been retweeted, friendfeeded, bookmarked and facebooked. So there could be a “social network page rank” algorithm that calculated the relevance of links, and a “network digg” that showed the heat of a meme.

One problem is that twitter’s 140 character limit encourages the use of url-shortening services like bit.ly and tinyurl, which obscure the destination and content of the link. So the service would need to expand and compare the urls, and do a little analysis to figure out when slightly variant urls link to the same content.

A secondary problem is potential spam, but a social white list – in Clay Shirky’s geek-felicitous term, foaf-filtering – could mitigate that. Social self-promotion (I’ll retweet yours if you retweet mine) could be a problem, but I suspect the echo chamber effects would be fairly localized for garden variety topics, and the pop culture or political fangames would be interesting in their own right.

Does this exist yet? Urls welcome.

Update 1. via Chris Messina, Backtweets are the new technorati.

Update 2. John Battelle The Conversation is Shifting on the trend toward social search. I don’t think it stops at neophilia.

I just decloaked @alevin for the Socialtext Signals launch, with ambivalence. There are two main reasons I was private. I tweet about trivia sometimes — farmers market visits, workouts, misadventures with car repair. I know that’s supposed to be sympathetic and human and “good for the personal brand” but darn it, I’m an introvert. I feel much more comfortable sharing trivia with people who know me, even a little, and who have chosen to pay attention. And I hate spammers and MLM scum with a passion. I hate to think they get whuffie by following me.

But public tweeting makes it easier to participate in the public conversation, so here goes.

Who are the effective people you know? They’re not just smart and good at what they do. They know how to get things done. In an organization, they know how the system works in ways that aren’t written down. They know who really knows what (and that may not be the person with the title). They may not know everything, but they know who knows what. They don’t have all the skills and contacts themselves, but they know how to find the key people. In an organization, functional relationships and functional skills are only a part of what makes people successful.

Being successful takes network skills. The org chart is not the network.

This principle is bolstered by classic studies of social networks. Healthy social networks are characterized by “strong ties” in the core of groups, and a set of “weaker ties” to individuals in other groups. The strong ties enable groups to get things done with social cohesion and skill. The weaker ties enable the organization to be responsive to new information and changes to processes. See: weak ties and diversity in social networks and weak ties for social problem solving in enterprise 2.0

Traditional enterprise software is about making the org chart more efficient, by automating the functions and processes within org chart. Sales automation, support automation, marketing automation, finance automation. Access control is a primary concept – the pattern is to restrict information to the smallest number of people of have permission to see the information. These patterns are important and continue to be important. Strong processes are critical for organizations to work effectively and cost-effectively. There are legitimate needs for confidentiality in HR, finance, and other areas.

A good part of the magic of enterprise social software is that it’s a network overlay on top of the org chart. What does this mean?

• it means that you can see people in your org chart group and outside
• it means that you can make connections to people in other groups and see their activity
• it means that you can work collaboratively in org chart groups and cross-functional groups
• it means that you can build “strong ties” with people in your group and “weak ties” with people in other groups

People who design and configure enterprise social software need to be aware of the org chart and the network.

• you want to enable information sharing by the org chart, but not constrain it to the org chart
• you want to enable the creation of groups by the org chart, but not constrain it to the org chart
• you want cross-functional contribution, without confusion and chaos

Successful design and implementation of enterprise social software requires taking into account the benefits of the org chart and the benefits of the network, and design a system that takes the best advantage of both.

LibraryThing, a site for booklovers who catalog and review the books on their bookshelves is the opposite of those FaceBook junkfood applications designed to get you to use them once or twice, annoy all your friends, and move onto the next big thing. LibraryThing is deep. The social features of LibraryThing aren’t about popularity and making lots of friends, but the opposite — they are designed to help people find a few “like minds” with the same obscure shared interests. From the LibraryThing blog: the fun of LibraryThing isn’t just in the widely held books, it’s in those that are shared by only 10 or 20 other members. It’s easy to find someone who has read The Hobbit. Finding someone to discuss your more obscure books isn’t quite so simple.
Recently I listened to Jon Udell’s interview of Tim Spalding, founder and programmer at LibraryThing. Spalding designs LibraryThing for engagement and depth. It’s best customers are booklovers who put in the time, not only to catalog, rate and review, but to disambiguate titles, variants, translation, and authors helping to build a coherent database out of a gnarly ontological problem, and making the tool more useful for all.
In the interview, Spalding has an interesting insight about why Amazon’s customers don’t tag. When you’re browsing Amazon, your goal is to find books to buy, and to leave. You don’t have an incentive to stick around, to make the site better for yourself and others. LibraryThing is for connoissieurs, not shoppers. LibraryThing’s customers appreciate their collective bookshelp and want to keep organizing it and making it better.
Spalding approaches LibraryThing as a tinkerer, experimenting, remodeling and building wings and extensions. His recommendation tools are works in progress. He’s been gradually adding social features: groups, discussions, recommendations of others with similar tastes. It’s not a site designed to get big and get bought. It’s designed to continually add engagement for members.
Several takeaways from the interview about the design of social software
* Social Software doesn’t get “finished”. It’s more like a building, in Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. Brand writes about how buildings are continually adapted, remodeled and refitted over time for new uses as its occupants’ needs change.
* Social software rewards depth over time. The joy of Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter is about letting people know what their friends are doing moment by moment. LibraryThing enables you to make a friend because you have the same 15-year old book (tip: you can run LibraryThing through FriendFeed to get the immediacy, too)
* Social software rewards deep engagement. The reason to add features isn’t because there’s a checklist, it’s because people can continue to do more valuable and enjoyable things in the environment over time

I listened to a telling example of the detachment of Republican conventional wisdom from reality, last weekend while washing dishes. Two conservative bloggers, Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg fretted on Blogging Heads about the impending Democratic victory. How could it be that the Republican party betrayed our vision of limited government, and what will happen to that vision when the Democrats take power? They did see that Republicans had *not* lived up to their promise of “small Government”. But they had only the foggiest of pictures of what Republicans had been doing.
They acknowledged some of the Bush administration’s problems with incompetence and corruption. What they didn’t see was that their beloved vision of “small government” had been paid for by corporate interests who wanted the freedom to dump hog manure into vast lakes, or invest vast quantities of other people’s money with minimal collateral. The small government vision hadn’t been betrayed by a few corrupt greedy people. It had been bought by the corporate lobby from day one. Libertarian arguments, and honest libertarians, too, are and always have been the pawns of communally destructive self-interest.
Douthat and Goldberg acknowledged that some of the issues like “busing” and “crime” that helped Republicans gain power decades ago were no longer salient, that recently, Republicans had not been successful at persuading the public about the dangers of immigration, and that Republicans had not delivered on the social conservative agenda. What they didn’t see at all was the pattern behind these single issues — the fact that, from Nixon’s southern strategy to Karl Rove and Sarah Palin, Republicans have sought to win elections by picking some minority to demonize, and that strategy is starting to backfire spectacularly, with Hispanic voters, young voters, voters in the “unAmerican” parts of Virginia, all voting for the candidate who inspired with a vision of American unity in diversity.
They acknowledged that the Iraq war was a well-intentioned mistake, and the neocons had been a bit too optimistic. But they saw the failure as a failure of tactical execution. They didn’t acknowledge that the fearmongering, militaristic style of patriotism that characterized the Republican convention had burned peoples synapses; the word terrorist is a Pavlovian cue for many fewer people, and the promise of the circus isn’t distracting people this year from the uncertainty about where they will get bread.
It is a fine thing that conservatives and Republicans are reflecting on their recent failures. But unless they understand the relationship between the goals of the coalition partners – corporate, fundamentalist, pro-war; and the outcomes of Republican governance, they may not make much headway. Whether and how they can face these things honestly? Not my problem. I do miss sane republicans. How to wrest some sanity out of the corporatist, militarist, nativist, theocratic mess that Bush republicanism became? Really glad that’s not my problem.