As part of the final exam for this class, I joined two other students in piecing together some strategies for the design of better digital social networking tools.
Blog assignment 6:. How can social software help to build new kinds of public space and discourse? Analyze one of the networked political organizations (such as MeetUp or MoveOn - or others) to understand how new forms of political coordination and power are being created.
I interrupt this assignment to offer the following suggestion about future weblog assignments. I love the lectures, the readings, the class weblogs and the wiki and I find this to be one of the most exhilarating and useful experiences I've had as a student -- in one sense. But the detailed, strictly-defined nature of the weblog assignments counteracts those benefits, and the frantic frequency of the assignments at the end of the semester amplifies this effect. These constraints are too tight. My creativity's in a straitjacket.(I may belong in a straitjacket but my creativity doesn't.)
Consider this assignment. It starts strong: "How can social software help to build new kinds of public space and discourse?" Now that's a great question! I could produce a compelling essay that explores that question because I'm fascinated by the prospects for new sorts of place, space and discussion that will arise when computer-mediated communication is combined with face-to-face interaction via locative services, augmented reality and tech that allows people to examine their face-to-face encounters in new ways.
But I don't have time to delve into this fresher and more interesting stuff, because the second half of the assignment forces me instead to analyze MeetUp or MoveOn, each of which has been analyzed to death by dozens of other people and now will be analyzed further by dozens of my classmates. So I'll just offer a few juicy links that suggest what I'm getting at, before I MoveOn:
Encounter Bubbles
Location-Aware Thumb Ratings
Hocman - - -Thanks for breaking from traditional instructional style to experiment with weblogs; this was a useful and enjoyable exercise. And the next class will get even more out of this if you pose more open-ended questions, or if you ask them to explore their own questions within each week's theme of study. Weblogs embrace fluid forms of discourse by their nature; strictly formalized assignments are a better fit for occasional class papers than for often-updated weblogs.
I think the flash mobs phenomenon can tell us something about the MoveOn and MeetUp phenomena. Dozens of mainstream media reports and more than a few weblog entries mischaracterized the flash mobs of 2003 as being created via the use of networked mobile communications devices such as cellular phones and handheld computers. Some SMS activity was reported surrounding a few of the flash mobs, particularly those in Europe and Asia, but even there mobile devices didn't play a central role in these events. The 2003 flash mobs were built upon e-mail, Web sites, mainstream media reports, face-to-face speech, and paper slips (which informed participants gathered at initial meeting points where to go and what to do from there). But many webloggers and journalists made the mistake, over and over again, of tying flash mobs to mobile phones and PDAs. Some mainstream media and weblog reports also implied that flash mobs were completely decentralized. It's almost as if they wanted the sort of computer-mediated, decentralized social swarming behavior predicted in Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs to become a reality; it's almost as if they read these things into the situation.
Then again, perhaps the flash mob participants experienced similar feelings; maybe they vaguely sensed or hoped for the emergence of such promised new capabilities and phenomena, before the location-sensing technology necessary to support "smart mobs" was ready for mass consumption. Perhaps that's what motivated the surge of flash mobs popularity.
Perhaps I've ventured too far into Speculationville, but let's keep going anyway. I can suggest a similar hypothesis to explain MoveOn and MeetUp and the Dean campaign. Perhaps people (webloggers, journalists and voters too) really wanted particular new forms of computer-mediated civic action and discourse that have been predicted for years in Wired and in weblogs and in Smart Mobs and in magazines and newspapers. Perhaps we all wanted these things so badly that as soon as we saw something like MeetUp (which makes organizing local gatherings among people who already want to gather easier, but probably doesn't provide the desire to gather in the first place) or MoveOn (an echo chamber that doesn't really encourage people to form new arguments or movements, but only provides another way for people of a particular political stripe to reinforce one another's very similar beliefs). Maybe one day our technology will catch up with our wishes, maybe that's not possible. Perhaps I've crossed over into Rambletown; I'd better get back on the highway and head home to Assignmentsburgh.
Here's a brief application of the Networks and Netwars reading to the Howard Dean campaign: the campaign was strong at the Narrative and Doctrinal levels. It told a romantic and compelling story about an underdog building up grassroots support, and potentially unseating a bigger, better-funded opponent. Core to the story was the way this was happening - through the use of the Internet as a campaign tool. The media ate up this story and it intrigued people across the globe. I assume that this powerful story and its success in moving outsiders encouraged the network of Dean supporters to enthusiastically embrace their doctrine.
(By the way, the National Defense Research Institute's Networks and Netwars reading is a useful and enjoyable piece, and not just because it uses the phrase "malcontents, ne'er-do-wells, and clever opportunists" without sarcasm or irony. I recommend it to anyone interested in emerging social networks.)
Blog assignment 7:LinkedIn. Connect with people you know. Fill out your profile. Analyze how you construct your identity on LinkedIn Is this service an effective way to find job connections? Why (not)? Analyze the service considering the Granovetter readings.
LinkedIn seems very clearly designed around Granovetter's concept of weak ties, especially as applied to job hunting. Granovetter considers "strong ties" to be the relationships between you and those people who you have very close relationships with: family members, go friends, and so on. "Weak ties," on the other hand, are relationships between you and people whom you aren't so close to - but these people are important because they link the tight social circles that you belong to all the other social circles. Granovetter posits that weak ties are extremely important to the flow of information through social networks, and he found that among white-collar professionals, jobs were found more often through weak ties than through strong ties.
LinkedIn encourages you to compose a professional presentation of yourself and to bring your professional colleagues in to the system. It allows you to search within this representation of your extended professional network for people within given industries, regions, companies, and with given titles. You're also given a free-text search field, an important feature that helps you find pieces of information in people's profiles that the designers couldn't have predicted or categorized.
By now I'm accustomed to the unnecessarily strict constraints that online social services place upon members' profiles; LinkedIn isn't the worst offender here. It steers you through the process of entering information, putting forth categories and instructions that encourage you to present yourself in a professional and businesslike manner, which is appropriate to an extent. But when it comes to professional experience, it makes the same mistake that so many job sites make: it tries to force you to toss aside that resume that you spent so many hours perfecting and instead waste a lot of time entering the same bits of information into a bunch of text boxes and dropdowns in a way that makes it very easy to lose a page worth of information and have to start the page over again. I understand the benefit of placing information into discrete categories so that it can be more easily searched, so that the computer can find and present results in more contextually appropriate ways. Nonetheless, the service should allow people to attach a plain-text or PDF resume and allow that to be searched, because many people are like me and are not willing to enter all this information over and over again across multiple sites in such an inefficient manner. The site should at least accept resume documents and then attempt to fill in its form fields automatically; many items such as names, addresses, well-known company names, position start and end dates, and the like can be fairly reliably parsed in this way. LinkedIn should ask live users to edit pre-filled fields if anything - they shouldn't saddle us with the painful task of filling out every single box and pulldown.
So I didn't follow this advice from LinkedIn: "As a job-seeker, you should add your past positions. It will provide an online resume through which users can find you!" I already have a perfectly good resume and I don't have time for this nonsense. Because I didn't fill in "positions" I don't even have the chance to seek an endorsement, and I don't think I'd feel comfortable asking any former clients to log in and post an endorsement for me here.
But I did fill in my "professional overview" with a suitably professional-sounding summary, which I lifted directly from the top of my resume. I also filled out a few of my core "specialties" because that section seemed like one that would be important in searches. I also adjusted my "receive requests" settings, configuring them at a fairly loose and liberal level because I don't expect to be flooded with requests from LinkedIn users.
I think it's too soon for me to tell whether this service is an effective way to find job connections, because so much of the answer to this question depends upon how many people who need my skills log in to the service, upon how much they trust LinkedIn connections, and so on. It seems like a much better way to find job connections than the other social networking services I've tried because it brands itself as a professional-networking service and it encourages members to present themselves in that way. I will certainly try to find jobs through LinkedIn and I wish I would have devoted time to it earlier in the year so that by now the pump would be primed.
A particular pet peeve: attempting to form a connection with another LinkedIn member is unnecessarily difficult, because you can't simply click a link to send them a connection request - you must enter the person's e-mail address. This is a very bad idea for several reasons:
1. It's a hassle; you have to go track down the person's address.
2. Many folks use multiple e-mail addresses, so when trying to connect to a few of my friends I wasn't sure which e-mail address to enter.
3. Because people trying to connect to me face issues 1 and 2, they will tend to enter my primary e-mail addresses, which they know me by, into LinkedIn. That destroys an important mechanism that I use to protect myself against spam and other invasions of privacy. Here's how that mechanism works: I sign up for a couple of free "spam-catcher" addresses at Hotmail that I use exclusively for Web site registrations. That way if any of the sites that I sign up for sells my e-mail address to spammers, or if they attempt to send me their own spam, I don't have to deal with it because it goes to my spam-catcher accounts which I studiously ignore. But I don't have this option on LinkedIn because even if I sign up using a spam-catcher account, my friends are likely to reveal my real e-mail addresses. What does LinkedIn do with these addresses? It's not clear, and even if they permanently trash them they should clearly notify users of that fact. But the really important issue here is -not- what LinkedIn does with those addresses, it's what LinkedIn members worry that LinkedIn might do with those addresses. LinkedIn is not paying enough attention to its brand and its customers' perceptions here.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting this, but it seems that when you find someone who's more than two degrees away from you, the system only tells you which of your contacts that connection goes through. In other words, to arrange an introduction to that person and take advantage of the weak tie you'll have to ask your contact who's closest to her to pass on your contact request to the next person along the line. This preserves the important gatekeeper function carried out by people who link different groups of people. On the other hand though, it certainly can create new tensions because when a friend asks you to provide some social capital and put yourself slightly at risk by introducing you to one of your contacts, that's usually acceptable because you can judge both people in the situation and feel relatively sure that both people can be trusted and that neither person will feel inappropriately put upon if you provide the introduction. But if your friend asks for an introduction to a friend of a friend of one of your friends, you can't vouch for two people in that chain and you can't be sure that the person at the end is an appropriate fit for your friend at the beginning who's making the request.
Another class at another school (The University of Minnesota) is also using weblogs to support discussion of class readings as applied to Meetup.com. Here is one of the students' weblogs.
I'm following Lisa's lead by linking to Geoff Nunberg's 5-minute segment about weblogs from NPR's radio show Fresh Air.
Nunberg, a Stanford linguistics professor, shares a fresh perspective about weblogs, weblog language and weblog motivations. I thought his little essay was more original and thought-provoking by far than most of the weblog literature that I've come across. Then again I'm a word nerd and a recovering print journalist so I'm just a little biased towards Nunberg's point of view.
Blog assignment 5: Examine three blogs of your choice. Aim for diverse blogs (group vs individual, personal vs journalistic, different types of people, etc).
Interview bloggers as part of your analysis.
Consider the content using genre analysis.
What motivates the users to post?
How do they categorize their entries?
How do people decide who to link to?
Use information theory (as reported in the game readings) to analyze your blog sample.
I studied a close friend’s almost completely text-based personal weblog (The Official Record: www.creamy.com/blog), a frequently-updated personal site that consists mostly of photos (Satan’s Laundromat: www.satanslaundromat.com), and a weblog that resembles an opinionated business column (Reiter's Camera Phone Report: www.cameraphonereport.com). I interviewed the owners of the first two sites; the third weblogger didn’t answer my interview request.
Genres
R. Blood classifies weblogs into three basic types: filters (which focus on content external to the weblogger), personal journals, and notebooks (which can focus on external or internal content but are distinguished by longer, focused essays.)
S. Krishnamurthy proposes a weblog classification system consisting of a graph with two axes, as seen here:
The Official Record lies far towards the individual side of Krishnamurthy’s spectrum and it tends strongly towards quadrant I (“online diaries”) although it often veers towards the more topical territory of quadrant III (“enhanced column”). Blood would consider The Official Record a personal journal.
In one sense Satan’s Laundromat fits squarely into the “online diaries” quadrant and is clearly a personal journal. But keep in mind that this is primarily a photolog, and I’m not sure these classifications are quite as appropriate here as they are in describing mostly-textual weblogs. Many photos (and particularly those on Satan’s Laundromat) are of personal interest but simultaneously of universal interest. I don’t care to read what a stranger ate for breakfast, which I can find on many journal weblogs, but a photo of the funky greasy-spoon diner where that breakfast was eaten will probably interest me. I think many people feel the same way).
Satan’s Laundromat author Mike E. doesn’t even consider his site to be a weblog, although it fits the definitions provided in our weblog readings. Mike wrote:
I certainly don't consider myself a blogger. I recognize that the site has bloggish aspects, but I don't think of it as a blog. Of course, honestly, protests that your site isn't a blog tend not to be believed once you're nominated for a Bloggie… I'd definitely describe SL as a photolog, which is more or less synonymous with photoblog. Basically, when I think "blog," I think "I had X for breakfast, I'm not sure I like the new Lipton label design, sometimes my girlfriend gets on my nerves, and I sawlast night and wow! And I hate hipsters!" Or I think "list of links with brief commentary." Of course, there are varying levels of quality, and some are quite good, but for me a "blog," without further qualification, is text-based. There are genres, of course, like political blogs, but for me political blogs are blogs in a much more real sense than most photo[b]logs are. (For one thing, they are much more likely tocomment on a post on another site and intelligently discuss the ideas in it, which is quite rare in photo[b]logs.)
Reiter's Camera Phone Report falls squarely into quadrant III of Krishnamurthy’s classification system, the quadrant labeled “enhanced column”. It’s very much a filter but it’s also something of a personal journal. Reiter specializes in the world of camphones, he makes a point of keeping up to date with news and theory and discussion about these devices and through this site he summarizes and links to such material, but he also shares his own opinions liberally throughout the coverage.
Motivation
David D., author of The Official Record, keeps his weblog primarily for his own records. “More than anything,” he writes, “I want a record of my thoughts and experiences so that I don't forget them. Of course, I also want to share useful information with others.”
Mike E. of Satan’s Laundromat started his site as simply a way to share his photos of funny or interesting things. Mike wrote: “I just wanted to put some photos up, didn't feel like doing a bunch of coding, and hit upon Movable Type as a CMS [content management system] to use, mostly because [a] friend was using it and I figured I could ask her for help if I needed to.”
I can only guess at the motivation behind Alan Reiter’s Camera Phone Report because I haven’t spoken to Reiter. But based on the content of Alan Reiter’s site, it seems clear that an interest in camera phone news along with a desire to network, grow his personal brand and become well known in the camera phone industry all motivate the construction and maintenance of his site. Come to think of it, many webloggers use their weblogs to grow their personal or company brands. No; come to think of it, most of them do; some are more modest about it, some come across in their weblogs as regular publicity hounds. Neither of the weblog analysis frameworks that we covered in the class readings address this important and widespread motivation behind weblogging. [NOTE: After writing this I came across my classmate Jon's entry that's all about weblogs as branding and marketing tools; check it out if you're interested in the subject.]
Categorization
David D. does not use official sortable categories in his weblog, but he does write what he calls recurring “columns” such as “Book Review” and “NYC Restaurant Review,” and “Last Weekend” in which he describes what he did the previous weekend. Many entries have no categories.
Satan’s Laundromat provides no categories that are visible to readers, but author Mike E. does attach his own internal, geographic categories to his photos. Technical difficulties involving content-management templates prevent him from sharing these categories – his current categories would spur gigantic pages for his biggest categories, wasting bandwidth and slowing down the site’s performance. He plans to implement category-archive templates that will solve this problem but until then he’s not publicizing the categories.
The entries in Reiter’s Camera Phone Report are divided into 30 categories such as “Applications - Camera phones,” “Reviews – Camera phones” and “Future - Camera phones.” It’s not clear why every category ends with “Camera phones” when camphones are the subject of the entire site.
Links to Others
David D. is sensitive to privacy issues, he’s savvy about weblogs and search engines, and he never uses friends’ last names. When recounting activities with friends he avoids linking to those friends’ weblogs and he refers to friends using the first name, last initial format (for example: David D.), because he thinks that “it's not my place to tell my friends' readers what my friends are doing in their free time.” David D. provides permanent links to eight weblogs belonging to friends, along with an offer to link to any other friends’ weblogs that he has forgotten.
Mike E. links to friends’ sites and to sites that typically either are photologs that he likes, or are weblogs that involve New York, or are New York photologs.
From the front page of his camera phone weblog, Alan Reiter permanently links to:
To be honest, this analysis really lacks useful substance. The Blood/Krishnamurthy/Nardi/Herring weblog-analysis frameworks might be a start, but I think they're not very useful in analyzing blogs. In fact, I think adherence to these frameworks' artificial constraints is counterproductive. Perhaps our collective conceptions of weblogs are changing too quickly to realistically capture them in such frameworks? Maybe it's just me; I have trouble just separating my laundry into lights and darks.
British Telecom is testing a "small world" phone directory service called SWORD. The pilot version is an internal directory of corporate BT phone numbers for use by BT employees. It tracks who calls whom and adjusts search results accordingly. It notes your social network of colleagues (people you have called or who have called you), and colleagues of your colleagues -- so if you look up "John Smith" and there are 500 John Smiths in the directory, those John Smiths who are your colleagues show up first, colleagues of colleagues show up next, and so on.
Here is BT's public-relations explanation of the service.
BT is considering a mobile-phone version of SWORD that can use customers' personal address books and calling patterns to populate a database of phone numbers, including those belonging to people who have not registered their numbers.
This is intriguing stuff, there are some useful ideas here and I hope they'll work out well. Unfortunately BT seems to have overlooked the key privacy and vulnerability issues that will concern users of such services, judging from the public relations article. If the firm doesn't clarify the issues for its customers and if it doesn't provide them appropriate feedback about personal information flow (and appropriate control over that flow) from the start, these products may be cursed with a cloud of Gmail-style hysteria.
In the meantime, I'd love to know how those BT employees are reacting to SWORD.
(Thanks to Reed Hedges for the link).