Octavianworld is now a featured blog on MITX Exchange. (Thanks to MITX for the privilege, and especially to Dean Whitney for all his hard work building that site.) I'm honored to be there, in good company, and hope to put back even a little of the lots I've learned through MITX people and events.
I'm joining Jessica Lipnack, Bill Ives, Patti Anklam, and Doug Cornelius on the "What Blogging Brings To Business" Panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston on June 10.
This viral messaging campaign by Ten4 for SonyBMG's release of a collection of Bob Dylan's music last fall was enormously successful. I've always loved the original video, and harbored ideas of recording my own version of it at home to kick off various presentations I've given in the past, but hadn't pulled the trigger. Then I saw this (via Scott Kirsner -- thanks Scott!) and was really impressed. The mind races to all the other similar possibilities, though doubtless there are intellectual property issues that weren't a problem here.
Reminds me of another viral favorite, Mr. Picassohead
Jerry Mechling, who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School, and runs the "Leadership for a Networked World" (formerly E-Government Executive Education) program there, invited me to a talk by Sir Tim Berners-Lee last Wednesday evening. The audience included ~50 current and former senior public-sector information technology officials attending one of Jerry's sessions.
Sir Tim's comments included:
Podcast of Ze Frank's very entertaining presentation at a recent Rails conference here. The second half of his talk, in which he describes "the anxiety of acceleration" that he experiences as his audience becomes his partner in producing content, is especially interesting and highly relevant for publishers pursuing user-generated-content. Possibly NSFW, probably not.
I recently wrote a post reacting to Brad Fitzpatrick's August 17 essay, "Thoughts On The Social Graph". Brad recently left Six Apart to go to Google. Now, as many predicted, the other shoe has dropped, with Google and others announcing the new "Open Social" standard.
Here's today's NYT article on the subject.
The concept of the social graph -- a digital map of who knows whom -- represents an increasingly critical element of many web applications, especially public ones. Early social networking services like Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook (and behind-the-firewall versions like Contact Networks, where I used to work) became valuable because they offered advertisers and other business users "viral pathways" to communicate through that more closely matched how people really filter/ absorb information -- word of mouth from trusted, or at least known, sources -- in an age of information overload.
Facebook recently pushed the utility of the "social graph" one step further by providing an API to allow others to build applications that take advantage of it. This strategy has been a runaway success. Third-party developers get more efficient access to an audience than would be possible through the conventional "email to a friend and then have each one register separately" MO we've been using for ten years. Facebook gets inventory to advertise against, and maybe a cut of commerce at some point. Users get more utility out of a platform they already like -- which means free stickiness for Facebook. All this goodness is why Facebook is worth 100x revenues to Microsoft (and whatever other investors get announced).
Now, as is the way of all flesh in the software business, a group of Facebook competitors, who individually and collectively find themselves behind in the race to build their own social graphs, have banded together to see if they can re-capture the initiative. The vehicle for this is a new standard called "Open Social".
Continue reading "Open Social: The Empire (and Friends) Strike Back" »
via Lori Cohen, this news of the re-launch of Carmun.com, an education-focused "social search" service which I wrote about a while back:
Congratulations Lori and Jonathan!
It seems not a day goes by that I don't get an invitation to connect with someone on one social networking service or another. It's all very flattering, but it's getting really hard to manage, especially as many of these services don't syndicate well, or at all.
In an ideal world, I could connect and interact with people and groups from a single interface. Of course, different providers of these services would feel very differently about this. Smaller ones would love to have this outlet as an alternative to almost-certain obscurity. Bigger ones say, "I already got one, it's my world, and my users are just living in it, thank you very much."
Via Caroline Meeks and TechCrunch, I just finished reading Brad Fitzpatrick's August 17 essay, "Thoughts on the Social Graph". Brad does a very good job of laying out the problem to be solved and how to go about solving it. Better yet, he and friends are actually working on it. With Google behind him, this is pretty serious.
Still, I wonder if it's a bridge too far. Prediction: with agents like Jonathan Miller and Ross Levinsohn at Velocity now out there trying to aggregate interesting web properties into networks with the minimal reach necessary to make them interesting to advertisers (i.e., moving them up from the AdSense basement I live in), we'll soon see "federated" APIs based on these individual properties' collective social graph emerge. Why? Because doing so will make it more interesting for advertisers to build their own versions of "Facebook applications" on top of these social graphs.
Let's take an example. Let's say mythical new age ad network "Travelamigos" goes out there and rolls out a bunch of small travel social networks. People who use these networks are more likely to find and connect with buddies if they are connected across all relevant networks, not just bilaterally, so they'll find such a capability useful and be more likely to join the underlying services. Advertisers will have a larger, better-connected user base not just to sell ads to, but also to develop services for.
For large media firms, who currently control and are expanding their own "social media" properties, aggregating and exposing such a "social graph API" would also seem to be a natural progression.
Many of us have been wondering for a while when LinkedIn would get around to opening up its API so others could take advantage of its networks of registered users to build applications that could be spread virally through those networks. Facebook has stolen a march on LinkedIn, first by allowing anyone to create a group, and most recently by exposing an API to allow others to develop applications that use its registered user base and networks -- or what they call the "social graph".
Facebook applications have taken off like wildfire, and with this initiative Facebook has raised the "platform ante" beyond where Google, Amazon, and Yahoo had it (i.e., rich APIs and data sets to query through them, but limited networks of users) for anyone aspiring to build a large-scale web presence. My favorite Facebook app, which I think best (most simply) demonstrates what Facebook has made possible, is the "Friend Wheel". When I look at mine, I realize how many friends I still have to introduce to each other! (Maybe what I need is a Facebook app that implements "graphic friendship" ideas...)
Now there's speculation about LinkedIn getting with the program. Folks fret about whether the LinkedIn UI could handle the weight of a bunch of apps. That's a red herring, IMHO. Based on the relative rate of connection requests I've been getting in the last few days (4 or 5 to one in FB's favor), it would seem LinkedIn has no choice.
But what's even more compelling about what Facebook's done, and why the imperative for LinkedIn is even more urgent, is the economic opportunity it creates. Everyone in the network can now make informed choices of apps to place on their profile pages, and a smart platform player will ultimately do a three-way rev share -- some for the member, some for the app developer, and some (ok most) for itself. It will be interesting to see how soon Facebook gets around to this.
(Click on the graph and add del.icio.us in one of the comparison boxes at bottom.)
My take: These properties were initially both communities and technology demonstration projects. Now that curious folks are moving on to other properties where these features are deployed in support of other interests, we're winnowing back down to the core folks who came for the community in the first place. Bigger picture: the Web 2.0 bubble is passing, and the core ideas are increasingly just "part of the furniture" in lots of other places. 2007 MBA's take note...
A while back I wrote down some ideas about viral marketing prompted by a meeting with an entrepreneur who was having some trouble executing a campaign. Today, I came across a really interesting research paper, "Memes and affinities: cultural replication and literacy education", by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, presented in November 2005 at the National Reading Conference annual meeting. The paper is here: http://www.geocities.com/c.lankshear/memes2.pdf.
Continue reading "Think Viral, Act Tribal, Part II: What, Why, and How Memes Propagate" »
Following on the recent post I wrote about Twitter, it's occurred to me that location is a major feature of many of the use cases I envisioned. Today I came across Twittervision, an interesting Google Maps mashup described here. Picture scenarios that filter Twittervision into logical groups (pre-defined groups of people watching a webcast, or people linking and reacting to news, for example). Now picture further parsing the Twitter posts for the occurrence of keywords signaling reactions, a la We Feel Fine, and then mapping those occurrences to a heat map overlay on the Twittervision Google Map. What emerges is an "evolving geospatialized map of emotional reaction to events". Surely this has to be useful to some news organization?
The social shopping service Kaboodle recently announced the availability of its "Help Me Choose" Widget. Essentially, this allows Kaboodle users like me (my wife and I use it to maintain a shopping wish list for home and kids) to publish a poll on external properties like this blog, so friends can offer input into certain purchase decisions.
Continue reading "Kaboodle's "Help Me Choose": Another Clever Structured Collaboration Example" »
Gustaf Neumann, who teaches computer science at Vienna University, has been a very important contributor and innovator in the OpenACS/ .LRN community in the past several years. Recently he has authored a very powerful wiki module, built with the OpenACS toolkit. More recently he's integrated some other tools to deploy a "Collaboration Graph" page he's published on the xoWiki instance running at openacs.org. The tool graphs co-authoring relationships for wiki pages among OpenACS community members. Here is an example that plots co-authoring relationships for my friend Caroline Meeks, and here is Gustaf's introduction on the OpenACS forums.
Continue reading "Graphic Friendships, Part III: The OpenACS "Collaboration Graph"" »
With encouragement from my friend Perry Hewitt, I've been fooling around with Twitter to get a better sense for what all the fuss is about. Conclusion: it's a service that provides an asynchronous chat room for group interaction via SMS, and this has its place and time.
A lot of marketers these days are asking themselves how they can take advantage of "consumer-generated media" ("CGM"). The knee-jerk association for the term is with bboards, and more recently blogs and wikis. I've suggested in the past that providing such "unstructured" publishing vehicles as a starting point for productive interactions online is often not very helpful. A more sophisticated approach offers means of contribution where what they're for and how to use them (both to contribute and consume information) are more self-evident.
Continue reading "Bazaarvoice Reviews: Another Good "Structured Collaboration" Example" »
After a year of dormancy during which "Tom" has been my only friend on my MySpace page (set up to check out the service), I added a link to Octavianworld. Stunned by its genius, three of the 163 million reported MySpace members sent me friend requests in the last two days.
"Yahoo! Answers Adds Social Networking", writes Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal (nice demo video from the Yahoo! Answers team included). With everyone trying to build an online community to grow these days, what to make of Yahoo's latest gambit?
My new colleague Steven Forth, who is CTO of eMonitor (the content technology arm of Monitor Group) referred me last night to Many Eyes (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home), which is a social data visualization and interpretation service developed by the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research Group at IBM's Watson Research Center. As the intersection of social software and content analysis is currently a high-priority professional interest, I decided to try it out.
Among other visualization approaches to structured data sets, Many Eyes generates tag clouds from free text files. Steven noted that in particular, the two-word view seems like a very powerful 80-20 cut at inferring predominant meaning in a body of text.
I experimented by exporting the contents of this blog as a text file, progressively scrubbing useless Typepad artifact words and html tags that appear frequently (like "title", "breaks", "comments", and my name) out of the source file -- to do this I simply ran "edit/replace/'word', '[]'" in Windows Notepad -- and then publishing the file on Many Eyes. Here's the result (click on the image to manipulate the cloud on Many Eyes):
The two-word view does a pretty decent job of communicating the themes I write about, I think. Unintended side benefit: highlights recurring cliches and verbal tics I need to purge from my writing, like "drive higher" (argh).
This whole effort took about 30 minutes, from registration to pasting the syndication html into this post. Two-thirds of that time was spent scrubbing the data iteratively. This could have gone faster in one of two ways. First, Many Eyes could provide a custom scrubbing interface where I could register multiple words to be eliminated or replaced from a text file. Second, and better, they could allow users to share not only comments, but scrubbing filters that would be applicable to data sets coming from common sources with common problems, such as Typepad exports, or government information.
Beyond this, I can imagine a thematic matching capability -- "based on two-word 'keyphrase' frequencies, this data set seems to have lots in common with these other ones..." Such a capability could be further enhanced by ex-post user rating, so people could confirm whether, for any given algorithmically-suggested match, the result was actually good, a la "was this useful to you?" This, like the "Graphic Friendships" idea I wrote about a while back, could help to make the web browsing experience more productive.
Dell got a lot of press recently for launching its new Digg-knockoff "ideastorm" site (http://dellideastorm.com) for receiving and prioritizing customer feedback on its products and plans. Right around the same time, The Wall Street Journal pointed out that on Digg itself, there's an extreme power-law distribution among contributors: one guy, "Stoner", accounts for 13% of posts that got voted onto the Digg home page recently, and only 30 of the 900,000 registered users account for a third of Digg home page posts. The bias that such extreme concentration can create is immediately apparent on the ideastorm site: Linux (or more-generally, open-source)-oriented suggestions account for 18 of the 30 highest-rated suggestions on the first two pages of the site's list.
Set up this way, where so many "precincts" vote in the same general pool, voting sites like ideastorm can quickly alienate folks that don't have time (or money) to organize support for their ideas. Erick Schonfeld's post, here on Rojo, suggests what sites like these need is a "trustworthy reputation system" where people can disclose more fully who they are and who, if anyone is paying them to place stories there.
I come to a different conclusion. I believe voting sites, like other forms of "structured collaboration", are best managed in subgroups, defined by shared interests, and coordinated through active moderation by volunteer "editors" -- much as Wikipedia has evolved. From direct experience in managing a social bookmarking application, I can foresee (in fact we've specified) several specific administrator-defined (subgroups, categories, recognition and networking opportunities for volunteers) and user-defined (e.g., tags, profiles) mechanisms to make this work.
On ideastorm, which takes the trouble to tell you how many people have endorsed a particular person's (in this example, Gautam's) idea, it would be especially useful to publish a page that ranks submitters by the number of endorsements from unique others. These listings might include links to these submitters' profiles (including addresses for blogs if they have them, or perhaps at least bios). Dell could then draw its volunteer moderators via further screening of this pool, maybe offering a piece of equipment or some public recognition as a thank you for assiduous moderation. (Reddit provides a stats page that's sort of like this, though its "karma"-based rating -- explained here -- isn't particularly intuitive, to me at least.)
More generally, I think there's lots of room for "shades of gray" models between "fully-edited" and "fully-user-generated" content that would provide more transparency about how members of a group promote submissions. Think in terms of "concentric circles of delegated moderation", where trusted insiders recruit trusted outsiders from a pool of folks who have demonstrated passionate, constructive participation.
(Note: This post was originally published here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cesarbrea/stories/storyReader$8 on November 26, 2003)
I left Bain in the summer of 1999 to join ArsDigita, a small firm of ultra-talented software engineers led by Philip Greenspun, and famous for its open-source application framework, the ArsDigita Community System. Philip's ideas for online communities as the best use of the Web, and of open-source software as a more effective means of realizing such constructs appealed to me on many levels, and I felt I could make a real contribution to the firm. So I signed on as the second "business guy".
The rest of The ArsDigita Story has already been told from many different perspectives. This little fragment has stuck with me (to the groans of friends who have heard me tell it one time too many). It's said that "within every insanity lies a grain of genius," and for me this proves the point.
Continue reading "Past As Prologue: The Tale of The Binge-o-Matic" »
