MySQL 5.1 is out as a GA release, but with crashing bugs that should give likely users pause. Perhaps worse, the problems are blamed on essential breakdowns in the project management: “We have changed the release model so that instead of focusing on quality and features our release is now defined by timeliness and features. Quality is not regarded to be that important.”

Still, people are finding inspiration in OurDelta and Drizzle. Competition from those braches/forks and criticism from the community are sure to help re-align the MySQL core, or provide a reasonable alternative if Sun/MySQL can’t deliver. In the meanwhile, the High Availability MySQL blog is worth following.

All yesterday and this morning I’ve been seeing tweets about SWIFT, so I finally googled it to see what it was about. The service promises to help organize conferences in some new 2.0 way, but it looks to be about as preposterous a social network as WalMart’s aborted 2006 attempt at copying MySpace.

There are some real lessons here, however, about how to court the early adopters that are essential to making an application that depends on user activity successful:

• The license matters. Nobody wants to invest the effort it takes to get the ball rolling just so somebody else can profit from it. Wikipedia’s GFDL was essential, SWIFT’s license policy is already strangling the site. Don’t call them “users” if they’re really the ones building the site, and don’t expect them to work for free if you’re going to make a killing off of it.
• Details matter. Would you trust a company that can’t figure out permalinks in WordPress (the site’s blog is powered by WordPress) and has URLs like http://www.imswiftblog.com/?page_id=698 to be technically capable of protecting your privacy or solving the problems that matter to you? What does the placeholder text in the last page of this FAQ suggest?
• Your friends matter. A supposed social software app that associates with a conference that looks like astroturf has already lost my trust.
• If you find yourself explaining what value your service offers to the very people who you hope will be early adopters, you’ve already lost them.

Anybody want to bet me a drink that SWIFT won’t break the 1,000 users mark before the end of CIL? I doubt anybody using the CiL wiki would take me up on that.

Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is one of my favorite photographers on Flickr. Her photos are amazing, and it’s clear a lot of people agree. That’s the easy part. Then two problems arose: First Rebekka discovered that somebody was selling her photos for profit, and she posted about it. The community was shocked, and angry. And then, and this is the second thing, Flickr removed her post about it.

And then the storm got worse.

More than a few cried “Censorship!” And the troubled spilled into the support forums, where 312 comments flooded in in almost no time at all. Finally, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield wrote in.

I’ve gotten the whole back story from the team and have read the forums, various Flickr groups topics and blog posts on this topic (as of a few hours ago), so I have a pretty good idea that we screwed up for which I take full responsibility.

He was on vacation when the news got to him, writing from a Treo in the desert, but he still managed to write the sort of message that a company dealing with a crisis dreams of.

The problem turned out to be that people were posting threats and home addresses and such, the kind of thing that can be real trouble (and serious legal and moral responsibility). Nobody really knows how to deal with that, I mean, communities have argued about that sort of thing for ages.

But in this case, Flickr closed the doors and removed the post and all its comments.

The photo was deleted — again, mistakenly — because of the direction the comments had gone, which included posting the personal information of the infringing company’s owner and suggestions for how best to exact revenge. It is an emotional issue and most people were there to support Rebekka in a positive way, but some of the angry mob behavior crossed the line.

Flickr is not a venue that we will allow to be used to harass, intimidate, threaten incite hatred against people — even if those people have done something wrong. We strive to be free and open, but just like laws against crying “fire!” in a crowded theater, a desire to promote free speech has it’s limits.

We get challenging situations on Flickr all the time: ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, ex-husbands and wives, disputes between business partners or landlords and tenants, posting photos and text with the intent of hurting someone else. These can be quite tricky to deal with morally and legally, and almost all of the time we make the right choice.

Having said that, this time, we made the wrong choice. The person who made the call is not, as has been suggested, stupid, incompetent, underpaid, under qualified, inexperienced or mean. They just made a big mistake (and feel inconsolably awful about it, by the way). We also did not have the right policies in place to prevent it from happening or rectifying it afterward. And that’s entirely the responsibility of the Flickr leadership team, and myself in particular.

flickr, customer relations, censorship, community, community standards, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir

Ironic secret: I don’t really like most wikis, though that’s probably putting it too strongly. Ironic because I love both Wikipedia (and, especially, collabularies), but I grit my teeth pretty much every time I hear somebody suggest we need another wiki.

Putting it tersely: if wikis are so great, why do we need more than one of them?

I think my concern is that wikis appear to depend on either very large or very, very active communities. Critical mass doesn’t come easily, and just because anybody in the world can edit a page, doesn’t mean they will.

Take the World66 Denver travel guide as an example. The site doesn’t have much more than a link to the slightly more informative Wikitravel page for Denver, and even that falls far short of the possibility or promise. Who’s contributing to these things, and why? Who would want to?

Jenny’s thoughts on the argument from Internet Librarian 2005 (yeah, a year ago) address the rather specific issue of Open Internet Librarian Blog and the Internet Librarian Wiki (both now abandoned). Thing is, the real gem in her post was her suggestion that “the tool that ended up working the best in this situation was Technorati. It was the one spot [where] everything was pulled together.”

And that’s where I think Josh Porter’s thoughts fit in: “personal value precedes network value.” That is…

…each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network.

Blogs are intensely personal, wikis less so. Issues of “ownership” and our definition of “personal” all play a larger role online that might have previously been imagined. One of the mistakes of Web 2.0 is the notion that users will generate content for free. Money may not be the issue, but “value” is.

Perhaps the pre-burst notions of the attention economy were correct, or maybe something else is at work. But even without an economic theory to explain it, none of us has ever heard of a “wikier,” even as the world appears overrun by bloggers. (“Wikipedians” are the exception that proves the rule.)

Perhaps I cringe at any suggestion to create a new wiki because I wonder why that content can’t be published on an existing wiki. Perhaps I cringe because I wonder if the proprietary motivation to create a new wiki is itself in conflict with the community nature of wikis. Perhaps anybody can have a blog, but it seems to take a whole community to raise a wiki.

community, critical mass, rant, wiki, wikipedia, wikis

Ryan tried to tell me about it a month ago, Jessamyn gets the idea but uses Facebook instead, DeWitt fell for it, Ross said it tipped the tuna, and now I’m finally checking Twitter out. I signed up yesterday and immediately went looking for ways to connect Twitter, Plazes, and iChat.

Tweet is an AppleScript that works with Quicksilver (a launcher) and Twitterrific (a desktop Twitter client) to make updating even easier. Matt Matteson updated it to set iChat status, and Ruben Broman added Plazes integration.

What’s it good for? Think of it like a snack-sized micro mini blog if you want. Or think of it like chatting with your 500 (or 5 million) closest friends. Or think of it as another way of extending personal presence in the electronic age, little bits of information that exist in the environment.

twitter, Twitterrific, chat, chat status, communication , community, plazes, twazer, tweet

Right there are the beginning of Esther Dyson’s ten-year-old book, Release 2.1, she alerts us to the Web 2.0 challenge we’re we’re now beginning to understand:

The challenge for us all is to build a critical mass of healthy communities on the Net and to design good basic rules for its public spaces so that larger systems do self-organize and work effectively. Rule-making is not the job of legislatures and governments alone. You can make your own rules by designing an online service — or by setting up procedures in your workplace. Anyone you offers a service or product, anyone who votes in a PTA or discusses corporate policy with her boss, is a rule-maker. What will make this world a better place for you and your children (or friends) to live in? It’s up to you to figure it out and to make it happen.

That is, the communities are real, and they’re self organizing and policing, but do we yet understand them?

I’m surely not the only one who smiles kindly and feels bad for those who look for some authority to “fix” Wikipedia, but take a look at the arguments about what is or is not offensive in Flickr and we find it: that’s a community struggling with the Dyson’s challenge. That’s the struggle that makes Flickr’s status as a community undeniable.

challenge, communities, community, esther dyson, release 2.0, release 2.1, web 2.0, web20

I certainly don’t mean this to be as snarky as it’s about to come out, but I love the fact that Isaak questions my claim that linkability is essential to online discussions (and thus, communities) with a link:

• Linkability Fertilizes Online Communities
  I really don’t know how linkability will build communities. But we really need to work on building support platforms for the public to interact with the library and promote social discussions, whether offline or online. Currently, the only way for such interactions is through the High Browse Online blog, but even then, there are not much discussion going on. Maybe librarians need to go in more often to post useful comments. And we might need to read this to find out how to solicit more comments on the blog. [link to High Browse blog added -- Casey]

The big challenge here is to realize that the entire web is an online community, unbounded by geography or even the narrow confines of a single website. And I’m not sure I could point to a better example of that than Isaak’s post. Rather than comment at my blog, he instead posted on his — with a link back to mine.

But hey, you’ve gotta love that they’re hosting rock shows in the library.

book discussions, book talk, community, conversations, durable link, findability, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library systems, linkability, online community, permalink, social software

Lichen, who’s had a great string of posts lately, pointed out Amy Campbell’s website, which opens with the following:

So I guess this myspace thing is going to catch on.

I resisted for a long time. These things make me nervous – myspace, messenger, emoticons… I can’t help but see it as some sinister forerunner of the complete degredation of language and of human interaction. I’m worried about a generation of people who’s definition of “friendship” consists first and foremost of an anonymous exchange of links.

Maybe it’s the way that words lose their meaning that scares me… “friend”, “buddy”, “comment” … These things used to require effort, investment, thought and emotional risk. At first I was sending a personal note, intoducing myself, with each “friend request” I made to an artist I admire. But within a week I came to realize that myspace culture doesn’t even require this… “add”, “approve”, “deny” … that’s all there is to it. But somewhere in the back of my mind, a little voice keeps chiming “Approval and the approve button are not the same thing”….

But let’s be honest, what scares me the most is how easily I’m getting sucked in. “Friend requests” inflate my ego… Pending requests hurt my feelings … Just a little, but enough to make me worry. The amount of time I spend (and could, if I let myself) fiddling around with this thing is truly alarming.

I want my music to be delivered by hand, to people in a room, whose faces I can see. I want to make contact using all my senses… And while I realize that the improved communication methods of the electronic age needn’t threaten that, I’m afraid of the day when we can’t muster the motivation to go out and make and hear music in real life.

It’s the search for deeper meaning I feel becoming obscured. And it troubles me that my first instinct in the search for deeper meaning is to google it.

That said, I’m still hoping you’re going to click the link above and give me some approval.

see you out there,
Amy Campbell

Amy Campbell, community, inclusion, myspace, seduction, social software

It’s hard to know how Fuzzyfruit found the WPopac catalog page for A Baby Sister for Frances (though it is ranked fifth in a Google search for the title), but what matters is that she did find it, and she was able to link to it by simply copying the URL from her browser’s location bar.

The link appears among her comments in the discussion about her post on an early letter she’d written to her mom. Fuzzyfruit’s comment spawned more comments about the book from Sarahq and Coffeechica.

We talk here and there about how “libraries build community,” but how does that work in the online world? How do our systems support or inhibit community discussions online?

book discussions, book talk, community, durable link, findability, google economy, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library systems, linkability, online community, permalink, social software

Peter Caputa dropped a comment on Jeff Nolan’s post about Zvents. The discussion was about how online event/calendar aggregators did business in a world where everything is rather thinly distributed. Part of the problem is answering how do you get people to contribute content — post their events — to a site that has little traffic, and how do you build traffic without content? The suggestion is that you have editorial staff scouring for content to build the database until reader contributions can catch up, and that’s where Peter comes in, suggesting that content and traffic aren’t where the value and excitement are:

At the end of the day, though, we need to bring the people that plan events together with the people that attend them, so that the planning happens together. Pulling massive amounts of data together and getting eyeballs doesn’t help event planners. What event planners need are tools that help them engage the attendees in the decision making process, promotion process and the documentation process of events. That’s what we aim to do.

We’ve been talking about social calendaring, but Peter’s comments obviously address a much larger concept, one that suggests the web really is turning things upside down. Now we’ve heard it from a dot-commer. We’ve heard it from the Pew Internet Project study on teens. And we’ve heard it from Jenny Levine when she talks about the “4Cs” of “conversation, community, commons, and collaboration.”

collaboration, commons, community, conversation, decision making, documentation, inclusion, involvement, jeff nolan, pete caputa, promotion, social calendaring, social software

Drawing from John Blyberg’s ILS Customer’s Bill of Rights and
The Social Customer Manifesto, Jenny Levine offers this Online Library User Manifesto:

• I want to have a say, so you need to provide mechanisms for this to happen online.
   
• I want to know when something is wrong, and what you’re going to do to fix it.
   
• I want to help shape services that I’ll find useful.
   
• I want to connect with others that share my interests.
   
• I want to use your services on my schedule, not yours. I don’t care if it’s noon, midnight, Sunday, or Christmas Eve.
   
• I want to know how your library works.
   
• I want to tell you when you’re screwing up. Conversely, I’m happy to tell you the things you are doing well.
   
• I want to interact with institutions that act in a transparent and ethical manner.
   
• I want to know what’s next. We’re in partnership…where should we go?
   

The basis of this, is of course the critical mass of users who are making online services a part their everyday lives. And it’s not just the millennial generation, as it turns out that it’s the 35 to 44-year olds who are most likely to buy movie tickets online, just as one example. But a recent Pew Internet Project study on millennials does reveal an interesting trend, one that the above manifesto seeks to address:

These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.

And if that isn’t clear enough, take a look at the message in the marketing world.

collaboration, commons, community, conversation, interactivity, millennials, manifesto, jenny levine, social software, online library user manifesto, library, libraries, future library, future of libraries

Arguments about Wikipedia’s value and authority will rage for quite a while, but it’s interesting to see where the lines are being drawn.

On the one had we’ve got a 12 year-old pointing out errors in Encyclopaedia Britannica (via Many2Many) and now on the other side we’ve got John Seigenthaler, a former editorial page editor at USA Today, piping mad about some libelous content in his Wikipedia biography page.

Now, I have to agree with Seigenthaler in as much as I would never want anybody to make such claims against me, and I’d probably consider my legal options in such a matter, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets a chuckle over the matter. I mean Seigenthaler is the founder of The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, after all.

It all sounds the same as the Attack of the Blogs story in November issue of Forbes Magazine. That story began ominously:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

But Forbes and Seigenthaler both conveniently ignore the fact that lies, libel and invective are common in other, older media. And Seigenthaler should know well the limitations of editorial authority over the millions of words published by hundreds of writers in a newspaper every day. Mistakes are made, and yes, counterfactual material is often slipped in. (Sadly, it’s also worth noting that real lynch mobs of the post-reconstruction South often enjoyed the support of their local newspapers.)

And unlike those old media, corrections are easy and quick, and in context with the original information. Take a look at how the Wikipedia entry addresses Seigenthaler’s complaints as an example.

Yes, the decision structure around these social applications is different from old media, but that doesn’t make it any more wrong or bad or dangerous. It is, perhaps, a comment on the obscurity of Seigenthaler’s biography that it went uncorrected for four months, but it’s also a comment on how responsive the system is that accommodated Seig’s corrections so quickly. Now, imagine how much Seigenthaler could contribute to Wikipedia. Imagine how much richer our online community could be with his participation?

And that’s what Seigenthaler and the Forbes article miss: the blogosphere and Wikipedia are built by those show up to the game. People and companies who ignore it do so at the peril, but there are many examples of success for those who participate.

wikipedia, wiki, social, social software, community, communities, moderation, editor, editorial control, Seigenthaler , John Seigenthaler, usa today, editorial, opinion, slander, libel, blog, blogs, bloggers, forbes, fear, findability, google economy

I’m here at NEASIS&T’s “Social Software, Libraries, and the Communities that (could) Sustain Them” event, presented by Steven Cohen.

He’s suggesting we read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds.

Surowiecki first developed his ideas for Wisdom of Crowds in his “Financial Page” column of The New Yorker. Many critics found his premise to be an interesting twist on the long held notion that Americans generally question the masses and eschew groupthink. “A socialist might draw some optimistic conclusions from all of this,” wrote The New York Times. “But Surowiecki’s framework is decidedly capitalist.” Some reviewers felt that the academic language and business speak decreased the impact of the argument. Still, it’s a thought-provoking, timely book: the TV studio audience of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire guesses correctly 91 percent of the time, compared to “experts” who guess only 65 percent correctly. Keep up the good work, comrades.

(emphasis added)

I’ve seen the bolded text quoted before, and I’ve been quoting it myself a lot. I guess I’ve got to go find it.

tags: communities, community, consensus, crowds, libraries, library, neasis&t, neasist, social software, social software, libraries, and the communities that (could) sustain them, steven cohen, web 2.0, wisdom

Jenny Levine alerted me to the Pew Internet & American Life Project report on teens as both content creators and consumers.

It turns out that teens, and teen girls especially, are highly active online IMing, sharing photos, blogging, reading and commenting on other’s blogs, and gaming. An especially strong trend in this group is the use of web technologies for collaboration. Interactivity, increasingly, is being defined by the teen’s ability to ask questions, comment, or contribute. Take a look at this quote, (found via this BBC report):

These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.

Jenny calls this the “4Cs,” for conversation, community, commons, and collaboration. Clearly, services that allow those 4Cs are preferred over those that don’t. Competitively, where do you stand? How well have you embraced the 4Cs in your online services.

tags: 4cs, collaboration, commons, community, conversation, interactivity, internet, jenny levine, pew internet, pew internet & american life project, pew internet project, social internet, social software, social web, teenagers, teens, youth

They say “Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology.” What I’d like to know, however, is whether Zmbra is a community driven, social software answer to the problems of groupware — typically driven by management’s needs.

tags: collaboration, collaboration technology, community needs, community, groupware, management needs, open source, oss, social software, software, zimbra, zimbra collaboration suite

I might be overstating it, but Identity Management is the next big thing for the open source community to tackle. That’s why I like Sxip, even though I know so little about it.

There are a number of other solutions stewing, but most of those that I’m aware of are targeted at academic and enterprise users. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some federated system of identity management among blogs?

Yes, IdM is the next big thing, but as an infrastructural technology, it will be invisible when it works.

Here’s another link: The Identity Initiative : iname, FreeID, LID, SXIP, What’s Your Favorite Emerging Digital Identity?

tags: community idm system, community, digital identity, federated, federated identity management, federated system, identity, identity management, idm, open source, open source community

David Rothman points to a Daily KOS story that points to a MyDD story titled “Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating.” What’s the point? Of the top 40 political blogs, more than half are ‘liberal,’ and more importantly, they support community involvement — including basic features like comments — that the conservative blogs shun.

of the five most trafficked conservative blogs (over 200,000 page views per week), only one [...] even allows comments…

[...]

Community moderated blogging platforms [...] have provided us with an excellent means of finding new voices, and these are the voices that are generating the accelerated growth in the liberal and progressive blogosphere when compared to the right-wing blogosphere.

Chris Bowers may have a point. He’s certainly got the numbers and I suggest taking a look at the links above to get the full weight of the story.

Though I’ve had my own frustrations with comments here, I keep them open because I believe that honest debate is the center of democracy. I keep them open despite my concerns about the tone of comments in stories like this, and despite the comments from conservative snipers in a number of my political stories. Republicans are working hard to stifle debate in our traditional news media and our universities, it’s no surprise they’re doing the same for new media too.

Technorati Tags: aristocratic, blog, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, chris bowers, comment, comments, community, conservative, daily kos, dailykos, david rothman, debate, democrat, differences, difference, honest debate, liberal, mydd, politics, progressive, republican, snipers, stifle, story