DOPA, Social Software, and Libraries

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 [...]

Linkability Fertilizes Online Communities

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 [...]

Living The Life Embarrassing, Stupid Online

Without contradicting the moral weight of social software post from last week, let’s take a moment to look at three stories from Arstechnica about MySpace and others: online video leads to teen arrests, shooting rampage avoided due to MySpace posting, and Google + Facebook + alcohol = trouble.
These are the stories we’ve come to expect: [...]

The Wealth of Networks

Wendy Seltzer gave a shout-out for Yochai Nenkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, describing it as…
…an economic history of information production. We’re moving from the age of industrial information production to one of social information production. Ever-faster computers on our desks let us individually produce what would have taken [...]

Danah Boyd On The Moral Weight Of Social Software

Danah Boyd posted recently at Many-to-Many about the future of social software. I’ve been more than a little bit gung ho on web 2.0 for a while, but I do like her caution:
If MySpace falters in the next 1-2 years, it will be because of this moral panic. Before all of you competitors get motivated [...]

Identity Management In Social Spaces

(note: the following is cross-posted at Identity Future.)
Being that good software — the social software that’s nearly synonymous with Web 2.0 — is stuff that gets you laid, where does that leave IdM?
Danah Boyd might not have been thinking about it in exactly those terms, but her approach is uniquely social-centered. She proposes “SecureId”
What is [...]

Involvement, Inclusion, Collaboration

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: it’s the opportunity to involve fans in the event planning and marketing process.

Facial Recognitition Spytech Goes Social

Troy expressed both great amusement and trepidation in his message alerting me to Riya, a new photo sharing site:

I don’t know whether to say cool, or zool.

The tour explains that you upload photos, Riya identifies faces in your photos, then asks you to name them (or correct its guesses!). Then you get all your friends to join up and we can all search for everybody by people, location, and time. So say “hi” to Andrejs and Nora.

Our Connected Students

Just when you thought I was done talking about how the internet really does touch everything, Lichen posts some details from the most recent University of New Hampshire Res Life student survey and it gets me going again. In order, the top three activities are:

  • socializing (15.8 hours/week)
     
  • studying, excluding in-class time (12.5 hours/week)
     
  • instant messaging, (9.3 hours/week)

This Is What Social Software Can Do

The FlickrBlog reports this message from Gale:

People have been submitting good humpback whale fluke shots to a group called Humpback whale flukes. I volunteer at Allied Whale which holds the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog and I was able to make a very exciting match with one of the whales that was posted on the group by GeorgeK.

George saw this whale in Newfoundland in the summer of 2005. It matched with HWC#2943 in the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catolog ….. this whale was seen only once before in March 1984!!! on Silver Bank (the breeding grounds North of the Dominican Republic).

This is what flickr has the power to do.

The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People

Bob Garlitz, who’s trying to decide between blogging at Typepad and Blogspot, wrote to offer a somewhat older phrase for the success of social software as described in The Wisdom of Crowds and in the definition of collabulary: “the ignorant perfection of ordinary people.”
Bob is at a loss to identify the source (and it pre-dates [...]

PodBop Rocks Your Calendar

Ryan Eby pointed out PodBop, a site that podcasts sample tracks from bands coming to your area (or any other area you select), and we both wished we’d thought of it ourselves.
There’s nothing coming to Warren (of course). But they’ve got coverage for Denver, where I’ll be in May, so it immediately found a place [...]

What Does Facebook Matter To Libraries?

Lichen pointed me to this Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette post about new technologies:
Keep up to date with new technologies that you can co-opt for library use. So what if no one will ever listen to the pod casts of your bibliographic instruction lectures, subscribe to the RSS feeds from your library’s blog, send your reference [...]

Jenny Levine’s Online Library User Manifesto

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 [...]

Social Software Works For Organizations Too

Ignore the politics for a moment. MoveOn’s CTO, Patrick Michael Kane, remarked that the organization’s membership to Flickr, the photo sharing site, has paid off: “Flickr has got to be the best $24.95 we’ve ever spent.”
Why?
Micah Sifry explains in a story at AlterNet that MoveOn had been soliciting photos of events from members for some [...]