All Facebook is happy to share the ten laws of Facebook advertising, but will those rules lead to better results than the .02% CTR Bob Gilbreath got a year ago?

Why BuddyPress? “Build passionate users around a specific niche.”

Do you have to become a social network? “No, look at GigaOM Pro,” a recently launched subscription research site based on BuddyPress.

But, yo do get “BYOTOS: bring your own terms of service.” That is, you get to control content and interactions. And your service won’t be subject to the whims of a larger network like FaceBook (or vagaries of their service — think Ma.gnolia)

It’s pretty easy, Andy says, to create a custom BuddyPress component, and there are already a number at the BuddyPressDEV Community.

Facebook’s guide to sharing details some meta tags to make that sharing work better:

In order to make sure that the preview is always correctly populated, you should add the tags shown below to your html. An example news story could have the following:

<meta name="title" content="Smith hails 'unique' Wable legacy" />
<meta name="description" content="John Smith claims beautiful football is the main legacy of Akhil Wable's decade at the club. " />
<link rel="image_src" href="http://www.onjd.com/design05/images/PH2/WableAFC205.jpg" />

As shown, title contains the preview title, description contains the preview summary and image_src contains the preview image. Please make sure that none of the content fields contain any html markup because it will be stripped out. For consistency’s sake, please use the <meta> tag to provide text data for the preview, and the <link> tag for any source urls.

The title and summary tags are the minimum requirements for any preview, so make sure to include these two.

If you remember Ask.com, you probably remember Jeeves. Now he’s back on the UK site. It turns out that people liked the old chap, and in this age of social media, it’s probably prudent to have a corporate avatar (it looks a lot better on Facebook, anyway). There’s more about the resurrection at Search Engine Land.

WiFi and college choice

• 90% of college students say Wi-Fi access is as essential to education as classrooms and computers
• 57% say they wouldn’t go to a college that doesn’t have free Wi-Fi
• 79% say that without Wi-Fi access, college would be a lot harder
• 60% agree that widely available Wi-Fi on campus is an indication that a school cares about its students

WiFi and where they use it

• 55% have connected from coffee shops and restaurants
• 47% from parks
• 24% from in their cars

WiFi in the classroom

• 55% have checked Facebook™ or MySpace™ and sent or received e-mail while using their laptop in class
• 47% have sent instant messages to a friend during class
• 44% used Wi-Fi to get a head start on an assignment before a class was finished

WiFi and linkbaiting statistics

• If forced to choose, 48% would give up beer before giving up Wi-Fi

Survey methodology: “In conjunction with the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wakefield Research surveyed 501 U.S. college students in September 2008. The sampling variation in this survey is plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.”

Social Media in Plain English and RSS In Plain English, among others from Common Craft among the best explanations you’ll find.

Then there’s Jessica Hagy’s explanation:

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut on Vimeo.

From DataPortability.org:

The DataPortability Project is a group created to promote the idea that individuals have control over their data by determing how they can use it and who can use it. This includes access to data that is under the control of another entity.

• You should be able to decide what you do with that data and how it gets used by others
• Open Source solutions are preferred to closed source proprietary solutions
• Bottom-up distributed solutions are preferred to top down centralized solutions

DataPortability – Join The Conversation from Smashcut on Vimeo.

Hi, I’m Casey. I developed Scriblio, which is really just a faceted search and browse plugin for WordPress that allows you to use it as a library catalog or digital library system (or both).

I’m not the only one to misuse WordPress that way. Viddler is a cool YouTube competitor built atop WordPress that allows you to tag and comment inside the timeline. StayPress is a property management and booking system also built atop WordPress.

BuddyPress is a social network in a box — really, take a look at the theme screenshots. Each user has a profile and friends. Users form groups and engage in discussions or private messaging. And of course, it’s WordPress afterall, users can each have one or more blogs. And then all of that is brought together in this activity updates view.

And again, because BuddyPress is just a bunch of WordPress plugins, you can use it in conjunction with Scriblio to get faceted searching and browsing of all sorts of materials, and, perhaps, use it in your community to build a community driven digital archive.

But this social network isn’t necessarily your social network and not everybody can login to my system. The solutions so far are OpenID, which makes it easy and secure to use multiple systems, and OAuth, which makes it easy and secure for users to give other applications or websites permission to use your data without having to toss their username and password around the web like confetti. And those are foundations of DiSo, the distributed social network, which leverages open formats to reduce social network fatigue (see xfn, hcard, and xoxo).

And that’s cool, because the goal of this isn’t to build a new social network, the goal is to build new applications that are socially aware (and geographically aware too).

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.

A post to Web4lib alerted me to this U Mich survey about libraries in social networks (blog post) that finds 77% of students don’t care for or want libraries in Facebook or MySpace.

the biggest reason being that they feel the current methods (in-person, email, IM) are more than sufficient. 14% said no because they felt it was inappropriate or that Facebook/MySpace is a social tool, not a research tool.

This isn’t bad news. It’s worth remembering that 23% of the respondents said they were at least a little interested in connecting with libraries in social networks. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore this opportunity to question the push to put libraries into those spaces. And the first thing to ask is if we understand them.

I doubt the patrons of an average bar would welcome libraries if we tried to set up shop there, and not just because we’d get nitpicky about the weekly trivia games. Bars and libraries are both social spaces, but that doesn’t make them equivalent spaces. Whether libraries belong in Facebook anymore than they belong in my local bar is still an open question in my mind (one major factor is that FB is working to make itself a social applications platform, something that should have all of us paying attention).

That doesn’t mean Facebook and other social applications don’t matter. Quite to the contrary, so let me say it again: Social Applications Still Matter To Libraries.

One giant lesson we can take from the entire history of the internet is that social matters. There have been blips and bubbles where we lost sight of it, but the internet spread because of social applications like email and chat. And more than Ajax and rounded corners, web 2.0 has been all about Social. And now we find it everywhere. Flickr defines itself as a photo sharing site, but it only works because of the social features there. And though Facebook allows image sharing, the different purposes of the two sites are clear to all who use them.

It is essential that we build social features into our libraries. Comments, easy linkability (short, sensical URLs), and findability in search engines are must haves in our systems. But that isn’t enough. We also need outstanding librarians to breath life into them. Librarians who can speak in a post-Cluetrain voice, and be accepted and respected in Facebook, Second Life, and in the comment threads in our own libraries.

There are so many cool things in Fred Stutzman’s recent post, but this point rang the bell for me just as I was considering the differences between World of Warcraft and Second Life. More on those games in a moment, first let’s get Stutzman’s description of ego vs. object networks:

An ego-centric social network places the individual as the core of the network experience (Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster) while the object-centric network places a non-ego element at the center of the network. Examples of object-centric networks include Flickr (social object: photograph), Dopplr (social object: travel instance), del.icio.us (social object: hyperlink) and Digg (social object: news item).

But how are they really different?

the problem with ego-centric networks lies in the fact network-reestablishment is the main chore. Talk to individuals joining Facebook today – what are they doing? They’re using inbox importers and searching to find their friends/ex-classmates/etc. It’s a game, it’s fun for a bit, but then (say it with me readers) “What’s next?” Yes, the what’s next moment occurs. This is not to say the network becomes useless: no, it’s very useful rolodex, and the newsfeeds introduce concepts of peripheral participation (or social surveillance), but the game is in essence over.

All of this relates to World of Warcraft (WoW) and Second Life (SL) in that WoW offers the framework of a game, with new items to be found and new quests to be explored. WoW is a social experience, to be sure, but it centers on those quests. SL, on the other hand, is “a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents.” Thing is, who can argue with this statement: “MySpace is a 2-D virtual world entirely created by its residents.”

I’m technically amused and interested in the affordances SL offers for remixing the experience, and some users have demonstrated that it could become object based, as Stutzman uses the term. But, for now, I’d argue that it’s a far more ego-centric experience. People pay to participate in SL, so it’s unlikely that people make a mass exodus as MySpace users have, but what’s driving outsiders to join?

I’ll admit that I’m the guy who long ago praised the description of IM as “all the interruptions of a phone call with all the frustrations of typing,” (though I can’t remember where I read the quote), and now I describe it as an essential business tool. As a realtime distance ed environment SL can’t be beat, and I can imagine something like a chemistry lecture where the instructor brings in 3-D models of various compounds, highlighting elements during a short lecture, then students highlighting other elements (or bringing in other compounds) during their questions. I just can’t imagine another reason for me spend time there, though, as always, I reserve the right to change my opinion.

NPR : Back to School: Reading, Writing and Internet Safety

As students return to school in Virginia, there’s something new in their curriculum. Virginia is the first state to require public schools to teach Internet safety.

MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed.

myspace, second life, twitter, social software

Web 2.0 has matured to the point where even those who endorse the moniker are beginning to cringe at its use. Still, it gave me pause the other day when Cliff (a sysop) began a sentence with “Web 2.0 standards require….”

Web 2.0 is now coherent enough to have standards? We used to joke about rounded corners and gradient blends being the rule, but something more has indeed emerged. O’Reilly defined Web 2.0 by example, Time Magazine echoed Kevin Kelly’s assertion in naming You as person of the year: Web 2.0 is about people. And “the rules” are emerging as a matter of market forces and natural selection.

Open Source

No matter your position on the Free Software Foundation’s philosophy, open source development reduces costs while improving quality and helps projects get to market faster with new ideas.

Flickr is among those that’s been rather public about their use of the LAMP stack, though Google and others have quietly built their business on it too. WordPress, a rare example of a downloadable Web 2.0 application, has enjoyed active development (and even a resurrection) due to its GNU license.

Still other Web 2.0 applications extend the open source model further. Open source content, or the user’s ability to declare a Creative Commons license on their content in these Web 2.0 applications is becoming common (and demanded by some). We may argue about the efficacy of Wikipedia, but the fact is that it’s among the most likely sites to appear for a web search and it’s consistently ranked among the top sites for traffic.

Wikipedia’s early contributors, looking at a young site with an unclear value proposition, could trust that their work would be protected by license (specifically, the GNU Free Documentation License).

Built for Remixing

Amazon reports that almost a third of their sales are attributable to remixers and boasts 180,00 registered developers of their API.

Google Maps didn’t include a public API when first released, but the community responded with enthusiasm and quickly reverse engineered the JavaScript to build new applications. Google responded by releasing a public API, making internet mapping and Google almost synonymous.

Dan Cat mashed up flickr and Google Maps on his own before Yahoo!/flickr snatched him up to build those features into flickr’s own site. But the company still enjoys the efforts of developers building applications to the flickr API, independently developing new features and adding value to the service.

Like open source, remixability and APIs engage a larger pool of talent than is available inside any company and serve two very important audiences: those who want features and those who care about their exit strategy. Neither group is remarkably large, but both are influential, passionate users. (More: Usability, Findability, and Remixability, Especially Remixability.)

Well Behaved and Social

Predictable and reliable URLs are essential to allowing users to bookmark and link to your site; well-formed semantic markup makes it easier for screen readers and search engines to make sense of the content. Semantic markup and microformats aid in remixability, contribute greatly to the Semantic Web, make site redesigns easier, and generally display better in a broader variety of formats and clients (think HTML vs. RSS).

People are anxious to leave comments telling us how right or wrong we are, so a site without comments/trackbacks/pingbacks is turning its back on its users. Good sites recognize the value of their users and cultivate the community. Caterina Fake did a lot of that for flickr (see her comments on my first photos there), while MetaFilter exists entirely as a community.

That doesn’t mean users are itching to build somebody else’s site, the lesson is that personal value precedes network value. Good sites make it easier for people to do what they want to do, not what their boss or the site’s creator wants.

If it isn’t obvious already: empower the user to achieve their own goals and control their experience.

rules, web 2.0, web applications, open source, remixability, social software, well behaved

We all know social networking may be a feature, not an application, but one person’s feature can become another’s bane.

So when Netflix offers a handy Friends feature that makes it easy to share your viewing history and recommendations, it opens itself up not only to the value of social interaction, but also the awkwardness it can sometimes be rife with.

Titration’s story is instructive:

So I have this friend who has invited me to become her “netflix friend” twice now. The first time I totally ignored it. But this time I feel I need to say something. The thing is, I am not “out” to her. And frankly my movie listing would give me away. Straight christian women don’t tend to watch things like “The ‘L’ word” or “If these walls could speak 2”.

I have no idea what to say. I was thinking of trying to joke a bit about my movies being inappropriate for all audiences. But the problem with being a good girl like I am is that she will not believe me.

She will ask me questions. And then I will have to say “I’m not comfortable sharing.” And she will know something is up anyway. Maybe I should just let netflix out me. I think it is much better to tell a friend to their face shocking news like this. But dang nabbit it all I am not yet ready. I think I’m a bit befuddled on this one.

social software, out, netflix, awkward, friends, outed, social networks

My own feelings about Twitter have gone back and forth across indecision street for a while, and despite a moment of excitement it’s still not part of my life-kit.

So I was amused to see Blyberg pointing out Kathy Sierra’s poo-poo-ing of Twitter.

Ironically, services like Twitter are simultaneously leaving some people with a feeling of not being connected, by feeding the fear of not being in the loop. By elevating the importance of being “constantly updated,” it amplifies the feeling of missing something if you’re not checking Twitter (or Twittering) with enough frequency.

Though I think what I really liked about Twitter was the potential for a really _really_ lightweight blogging platform (or easy to use message broker), I have to admit that Kathy’s criticism of the social aspects (costs) is pretty close to the mark.

virtual communities, twitter, social software, social networks, cold water, anxiety, anti-twitter

Rebecca Nesson, speaking via Skype and appearing before us as her avatar in Second Life, offered her experiences as a co-instructor of Harvard Law School’s CyberOne, a course being held jointly in a meatspace classroom and in Second Life, and open to students via Harvard Law, the Harvard Extension School, and to the public that shows up in Second Life.

Nesson has an interesting blog post about how it all works, but she also answered questions from the audience about why it works:

As a distance learning environment it’s head and shoulders above anything else because of levels and types of interactions possible versus any previous tool.

It’s a poor format for lectures, but a great format for discussions, so it really encourages conversation and discourse.

It’s a community that exists independent of the class meeting. In here we have much more of those liminal times when people are just hanging out. …We have more opportunities for interaction.

academia, cyberone, distance learning, gaming, harvard law, nercomp, online courseware, rebecca nesson, second life, social software, sstl2006

They don’t want to engage in chat with their professors in the classroom space, they want to chat with other students in their own space.

— from Eric Gordon’s presentation this morning.

Hey, isn’t that the lesson that smart folks have been offering for a while now: “Nobody cares about you or your site. Really.” How could learning environments not be subject to the same cluetrain forces affecting the rest of the world?

Students love IM. They love Google. They love FaceBook. What does your courseware matter to them?

IM, SSTL2006, academia, academic discourse, chat, nercomp, social software, students

It’s really titled Social Software for Teaching & Learning, and I’m here with John Martin, who’s deeply involved with our learning management system and portfolio efforts (especially as both of these are subject to change real soon now).

Aside: CMS = content management system, LMS = learning management system. Let’s please never call an LMS a CMS…please?

On the schedule is…

• Social Software in the Classroom: Happy Marriage or Clash of Cultures? (Eric Gordon, Emerson)
• Teaching and Learning in a Virtual World (Rebecca Nesson, Harvard)
• Electronic Constructivism: Inspiring and Motivating Students with Thought Provoking Questions and Emerging Technologies (Dr. Maureen Brown Yoder, Lesley University)
• Social Computing Tools in the Curriculum (Katie Livingston Vale, MIT)

learning, nercomp, social software, teaching, nercomp, SSTL2006

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

I was amused this week to see two examples of workflow getting sexy. That’s not how the developers describe their efforts, but the departure from old groupware notions is clear.

In daring defiance of Zawinski’s proclamation, Jeffrey McManus, with Approver.com, and Karen Greenwood Henke, with Nimble Net (as reported yesterday), are tackling workflow and approval processes.

Combine the increasing numbers of people who are self employed or working in very small businesses that can’t afford those old enterprise groupware “solutions” (but who nonetheless have to get a job done) with the combination of luck, pluck and smarts these two seem to have applied to the challenge, and there’s a chance these new products — groupware 2.0 — might have legs.

Still not sure how Approver.com will get somebody laid (the true definition of social software)? I’m just waiting for somebody to submit for approval a document titled “proposal for licentious relationship including sex and other carnal acts.” With tools so easy to use, and a willing approver, how could it go wrong?

approver.com, groupware, Jeffrey McManus, Karen Greenwood Henke, nimble net, sexy software, social software, stuff that gets you laid, workflow, Zawinski’s proclamation, Zawinski’s proclamation

Amusing. One one side of the world is Jenny Levine, the original library RSS bigot, pushing libraries to adopt new technologies from the bottom up, and here on the other side of the world is NewsGator offering their products for top-down adoption.

Why are law libraries interested in NewsGator? Could it be that social software increases productivity? Might it offer some competitive advantage? Do they just make it easier to communicate (and keep track of our communications) in today’s web-driven world? Well, that was all part of the sales pitch.

AALL, AALL2006, American Association of Law Libraries, feed management, law libraries, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, newsgator, rss, rss syndication, social software

I’m more than a month late to this bandwagon, but whatever. Jessamyn alerted me to DOPA, the proposed Deleting Online Predators Act. What’s the point? When conservatives pit FUD against free speech, reasonable people would do well to pay attention. And what’s social software? Take a look at what Meredith Farkas has to say about it.

cipa, copa, Deleting Online Predators Act, dopa, libraries, library, 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