Rob Patterson from: The Science of Love and how this works in the 2.0 World
I am increasingly aware that the great potential for social software and the 2.0 world is not exclusively to make our business world better but to make our larger world better - to reconnect us to each other in a more human and more social way.
I like that because it is so happening. I feel sorry for those that are letting this moment pass them by.
The Library of Congress is placing 3000 photos up on the Flickr Commons with the hope that the public will help tag them.
That’s why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).
Cool idea for sure. Whoever thought of this pilot deserves a lot of credit for thinking differently. I guess the only possible complaint is that they are being placed on a commercial site, but the images are in the public domain and there is no reason they couldn't be put on other sites as well.
This is a great example of how the public can be turned loose to create value. We need to see a lot more of this sort of thing.
David Weinberger points to this post by Donnacha DeLong: Web 2.0 is Rubbish. David does a great job of addressing the substance of the article, Is the Web as weak as its weakest link? I won't go there. Instead I want to address something that I've been thinking about for a while.
So what's wrong with it? Isn't increased participation and feedback from our "users" -- readers and viewers -- a good thing? Of course it is, but the problem with Web 2.0 is not how it introduces these elements to the media, but how it's seen as replacing traditional media.
That's the point. It is not "seen as replacing traditional media". It absolutely is replacing traditional media, and every other form of "expert mediated" content production. I just don't see how it matters whether it's rubbish or not. It could be complete crap. So what?
The people have voted with their mouse clicks. What is is. You can bitch and moan, or you can start to think about how you might co-exist in the new-media ecosystem. Longing for the days of old isn't going to save you.
Thanks to David Weinberger for pointing out this Google Presentation on Web 2.0 by Ed Yourdon. Several things about this:
From Valeria Maltoni at Conversation Agent: How Social Networks are Disrupting Everything you Know About Business
...you will not be able to shift your business model to blur the lines between static and dynamic, push/pull and conversation until you participate yourself.
Which is what I've been trying to hammer home for a while. I have been so totally ineffective in "describing" to people what is going on that I have stopped trying. This is not something you can get unless you are an active participant. You have to be the ball.
I was looking at this SlideShare presentation by Twitter's Biz Stone: Social Alchemy and this slide caught my attention..jpg)
Yikes! I know Twitter's community is made up of early adopters, and are most definitely ahead of the curve, but 20x? That is huge! That's the future of information consumption on the Web. Kiss your homepage goodbye.
At the current growth rate Facebook would have 220 million members in a year.
So how do you ignore that?
David Cushman at Faster Future: Publishing possibilities now and beyond has a great read on how our world is changing. As he says, "This article is not necessarily intended for regular readers of this blog. You guys get it."
It's a long and very good read. Buried near the bottom he lists the new rules. If you don't understand the implications of these rules they're pretty much explained in the post--just click through and read...
There are new rules:
1. Serve the community first
2. Niche global NOT mass.
3. Two-way flows – NOT broadcast
4. Networks NOT Silos
5. Power of the node over power vested in hierarchies
6. Adhoc, self-forming communities over directed teams.
7. Persistent conversation trumps ‘capturing’ ID.
8. Real-time, niche-community-focused, user-generated information over News
9. We should all act as shared contributors to and users of common pool resources.
10. We should learn to cherish Group Forming Network Theory (Reed’s law).
There they are-- all the scorecard you need to judge your readiness going forward. Will your organization survive? Keep in mind that your organization is no longer self-contained. Are your information systems?
Can you build a community by being totally hands-off? Is push finally dead? Is push nothing short of rude and old school? From Harold Jarche: Opt-in
Now that we’re inundated with information, e-mail and invitations to the next great Web 2.0 thing, pull is looking a lot better than push. Pull means that the individual decides what to read or who to talk to. I wrote about this earlier, in Please don’t push my learning.
One reason that I have been such a fan of Elgg is that this open source, social learning platform has at its core the concept that the individual has to decide to opt in, whether it be to connect with an instructor, a learner, a community or a group.
I think we've reached the tipping point: Push= pushy. It's just not appropriate any longer. Maybe it never was.
I saw this on the Green Chameleon this morning: Thinking About Wikis - and Wiki Raids. The problem of getting people exposed to wikis for the first time is not insignificant. Obviously, their power comes from a group working together to pound out something new. When used correctly they are nothing short of phenomenal. If you haven't experienced this magic first hand then you really can't understand the power. This is all about being the ball. If you haven't been there I don't think you can understand it.
So, when I saw this piece on wiki raids it definitely got my attention. This is a nice prescriptive approach to a quick and meaningful wiki experience. We'd talked about having hackfest types of events to get people exposed to working in wikis, but this is so much simpler and better. The recipe:
And here’s a recipe for an activity we tried some months back for a group that wanted to start using a wiki to draft a new set of policies collaboratively, but (a) weren’t too familiar with wiki technology and (b) weren’t too familiar with the new policy template they were using.
1. Invite the drafting group to a half day “wiki raid” in a meeting room with intranet connections and one PC/laptop for every two people (or they can bring their own).
2. Have the policy template set up on a wiki, with each section on a separate page.
3. Working in pairs, the participants each take one section of the policy paper and start drafting.
4. After 20 minutes, get them to save their wiki page and move to another section drafted by another pair, which they refine. (Be consistent about which direction they are rotating in).
5. Repeat.
6. Repeat.
7. Do a spot review and identify the sections that have most work left to do.
8. Repeat the cycle, working on those sections.
Result? By the end of an afternoon you’ll have 90% of a policy paper that might have taken endless committee meetings and draft-bouncing over several months. Oh, and they’ll have figured out how to use the tools.
That sounds very cool. I so want to try this...
Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategies has a great post: A Checklist: Before you select that White Label Social Networking Site. The checklist contains some real gems to ask before you start down the path to building a community:
1) What business problem are you trying to fix? What’s broken? What does success look like (without mentioning features)
2) There are different tools for different problems, Are you sure a Social Networking site will fix this?
3) Where are your community/market/users currently?
4) Not sure? Then look again, don’t proceed farther until you find them.
5) Have you considered joining that community before creating your own? You know of the Walmart 10 week fiasco right? Trying to recreate MySpace doesn’t make sense because it already exists.
6) How open/closed to you want your community? Think about long term, does it scale?
7) What incentive are you creating with this SoNet that will drive users to your site and share?
8. How do you plan to kick start your community, you know that just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come
I especially like 3, 4, and 5. Your potential community members all belong to a social network somewhere. Even if you think you want to create your own, you need to join the existing. Social networks are far more complex than they appear on the surface. I don't know how long you need to be a member of a social network before you might decide to branch out, but I'm thinking it would be measured in years - not months.
Things may move fast on the internet, but community building is about wetware not software. Wetware requires careful attention to all those icky human sorts of things like caring, empathy, understanding, and trust. These are things that cannot be simply untarred and installed.
From Umair Haque (who is one of my absolute favorites) on the failed Times Select strategy:
...strategy in the edgeconomy requires dropping yesterday's tired assumptions about "monetization" - and requires deep insight into how, when, where, and why value is created.
Ginny Redish has a new book, Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works. From the book's Web site:
People have asked to see samples from Letting Go of the Words before buying it. That’s a fair request, so I’ve posted two chapters. They are in PDF because you want to see them as they are in the book...
Wrong, wrong, wrong! You lost me at PDF... The first rule of writing for the Web is that the reader is in control. You must provide access to the content in the manner that the reader chooses. Period! This is not an option! We are way past the day of Web sites attempting to control the user experience.
OMG this is entertaining and a great time waster: Human Brain Cloud
It's described as a "massively multiplayer word association game". I will not rest until I make the leaderboard.
Thanks go out to fresh+new(er) for the find.
I kicked-the-tires on the new USAToday site back in March when they first rolled-it-out. I declared at the time that it wasn't going to work:
I suspect that I will never return to their home page again. Even though I personally liked the design I don't go to "destination" sites anymore. The bottom-line is their site design just doesn't matter- social networking or not.
Can they be saved? I doubt it, but then I'm firmly in the camp that most newspapers are toast. There are several things they should do immediately to try to stem the bleeding:
I just loved this blog post from Jim McGee at the FASTForward Blog: Knowledge management: the newest battle between the neats and the scruffies. A taste:
In most large organizations, knowledge management has been characterized as a technology problem or as a analog to financial management; placing it squarely within the purview of the organization’s neatest neats. This is a recipe for disappointment, if not outright failure.
It might possibly be an open question whether knowledge management can be eventually reduced to something as structured as accounting or library science. But it is a lousy place to start. Most organizations aren’t yet mature or sophisticated enough about knowledge work issues and questions to be obsessing about taxonomies or measurement and reward systems for knowledge work. But those are activities that are neat and specifiable and only superficially relevant. They lead to complex efforts to get to the right answer when we would be better served by simpler efforts to make things better.
Pretty much sums up the dilemma of Web 2.0 adoption in the enterprise. Somewhere along the way our IT shops were taken over by the neats. If enterprise 2.0 is going to make it we're going to have to restore some balance. Fortunately, the 2.0 technologies are organic and bottom-up and can't be easily contained.
Umair Haque is absolutely one of my favorite thinkers, period! He's got a really interesting read on Apple's long term mobile phone strategy. It basically goes like this:
1) Pick an industry which sucks (ie, imposes significant nuisance costs/menu costs/externalities on consumers)
2) Redress the imbalance by making something consumers love
3) ...Which disrupts the long-standing industry equilibrium, and shifts market power
4) Use said market power to redesign (a hyperefficient) value chain
It's a brilliant strategy, and one that absolutely put Apple in the driver's seat in regard to the music industry. Looks like they are getting ready to repeat that performance for the mobile industry. None too soon for me I might add...
Can we think of some other industries/institutions where this strategy might also be applied?
I found this quite interesting: German Wikipedia receives state funding
For the first time, the German edition of the open Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia will be receiving state funding. Germany will be setting aside part of its budget to improve information about renewable resources in Wikipedia. Over the next few years, several hundred articles will be written on this issue.
Makes total sense to me... Go to where the people are looking for information instead of expecting them to come to you. It'll be interesting to see the people extend this content and make it even more useful.
This is an example of what feed aggregation can do for you. Namro Orman, a SL medical librarian, has created a MySyndicaat newsradar for Second Life news articles:Second Life News all-in-one.
This is a good example of using aggregated syndication feeds to stay abreast of a topic without having to subscribe to hundreds of feeds.
I hear lots of people remark that they don't have time to subscribe to a bunch of feeds. If you're a knowledge worker I don't see how you can't make the time, but that's another topic. There are new tools coming every day to help you cope with the deluge, but you have to use them in order to reap the benefits.
The Semantic Web is not dead; but the grand vision of “A Semantic Web” will not be achieved, despite Tim’s noble efforts. Instead, we will see the Emerging-Semantics Web, derived from how people/developers use lightweight formats and tags on popular platforms such as Flickr and YouTube.
Where he mentioned a bunch of reasons for why this is going to happen it mostly comes down to this:
There is no way that we can engage the masses in annotating media with “semantic” labels. At best, we can get the people to annotate content (such as Flickr images or YouTube videos) with short text descriptions or tags.
I've been following this stuff for a long time, and semantic Web technologies are years away (if ever) from providing "average" people with something they will actually use. Things aren't going to stand still waiting on the research community to catch-up. The Web is already moving further away from the vision of a semantic Web. We are seeing some walled-gardens (islands) of semantic content emerge, but these are not efforts that will touch the masses.
If you look at user behavior you can see the future, and it is one of compromised and scaled-down functionality rather than more. Less scales. You see this being played-out in the discussion of Google's new universal search. The question is being asked, "Google Universal Search - is Vertical Search Space Finished?" The answer to that question is a resounding yes! Is vertical search better? Yes! Does it matter if it's better? No! We've always been able to build better search of our own unique databases using SQL queries. So what? People won't come to your site to use them. Just like they won't use advanced search options when they are just one click away on Google's homepage.
In the end, all that matters is what people are willing to do. So, I'm with Mor, in declaring the semantic Web as it has been envisioned, dead. All of these so-called "advanced" functions are dead except in very controlled user environments, and no one would ever be foolish enough to describe the Web as controlled.
UPDATE: You might like taking this poll on universal vs vertical search. Not to bias you, but I lean more towards "dead meat" than "goneburger".
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