Ben Hammersley http://rdfweb.org/foaf/ http://www.benhammersley.com/benfoaf.rdf

http://www.benhammersley.com/archives/001536.html#001536

Matt Jones +44 7747 604200 ---- http://www.blackbeltjones.com/work http://www.disappearing.org http://www.warchalking.org

[1] "Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled." -- Ted Nelson

Cameron Marlow MIT Blogdex

Ray Ozzie http://www.ozzie.net/blog/2002/10/08.html#a70

I'm Scott Heiferman, and I run Meetup, a new platform that helps organize real-world group gatherings about anything anywhere

http://iwantmy.meetup.com.  Does geography matter? What role will geography play in the future of social software? * What happens when online communities turn into offline communities?

http://www.e-thepeople.org/a-national/article/12553/view

The history of democracy shows that big things happen when people gather.

Would love comments, suggestions, ideas on this.

And please spread the word about http://nowarwithiraq.meetup.com if you feel so inclined.

Ward Cunningham's Wikiman

http://www.benhammersley.com/archives/001530.html#001530

http://www.upl.cs.wisc.edu/~bethenco/halloween.html

(Via Danny O'Brien of NTK, who is guest blogging on Cory Doctorow's BoingBoing.)

Rusty Foster:

> One thing I've been asking myself for the past year or so is whether a > system like K5 could be used to create a new source of hard news, > collected, edited, and reported by nonprofessionals or some blend of > nonprofessionals and freelancers.

This is very much like what Dan Gillmor is talking about with his Journalism 3.0 idea. His original post is at http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_g...

Finally, IMC reporters get to be "insiders", even at events where they have no special access or privilege, like a protest. They get to be talked about by the Evil Corporate Media and feel important and dangerous. Some version of this is probably the main reason most reporters get into their line of work. Walter Cronkite has called it "having a front-row seat for history."

Community is the media within which reputation lives

It used to be that physical distribution was the expensive part of news. You needed big machines and big logistical systems so every word you printed or second of broadcast time had to count. The internet hasn't driven that cost down to zero, but has reduced it so drastically that perhaps every thousandth word or ten thousandth word has to count. Predictions of the imminent death of expensive industrial media were rampant.

But it didn't happen then, and it eventually became clear that lurking in the shadow of the cost of distribution was a second cost which didn't matter so much when distribution was such a yoke, but sprang out of the closet as soon as that was removed. That was the cost of production. Incredibly few people have the temperment to be a journalist or an editor, which by and large are shitty jobs that involve long hours, low pay, and a public image that aspires one day to rise to the glorious heights of "tarnished". Of the "uncredentialed losers, outsiders, dilettantes, frustrated lawyers, unabashed alcoholics and... creative psychopaths"[1] that do have the mindset for it, even fewer are actually capable of doing the work. The net didn't even threaten industrial media because it turned out that there was almost no one capable of producing a worthwhile product outside the existing news structure.

What we're seeing here, and where social software comes in, is the first attempts to route around the cost of production by combining the small contributions of a large number of more or less unskilled individuals to produce quality media. That idea tends to strike journalists as implausible in much the same way the automated loom struck skilled weavers as implausible, the automobile assembly line struck skilled mechanics as implausible, and the mass-produced die-stamped steel rifle struck the machinists at Enfield as implausible. But it's exactly the same process -- using technology to remove the skilled components from a production process. Instead of relying on the long editorial production experience in the head of one grizzled newsman, we're relying on the emergent consensus of a lot of inexperienced observers. I think the latter can pretty closely approximate the former, but it has a huge advantage in being able to do it for almost no cost.

The industrial media is in a fairly major upheaval right now. From the "golden age" ethos that news can and ought to be run at a loss as a public good and the responsibility of good corporate citizenship on the part of media companies, we've moved to today's drive toward profitability at any cost. The mass media has centralized and cost-cut at an increasing pace, and in the US, it appears that Mr. Powell's boy is gearing up to remove the last remaining FCC barriers to complete monopoly media control. The cost of profitability has been trust and quality. Saddled with the ironclad cost of distribution, broadcast media has only been able to significantly cut costs on the production side. So just when they're most threatened by the journalistic assembly line they're also chucking their basic advantage (production quality) over the side and alienating the news junkies who will defect to producing their own news if they're not served well enough by the media they're accustomed to.

Is it the end of News As We Know It? No, because collaborative models don't work in broadcast media. But broadcast (one-way) news is, I think, destined to become the red-headed stepchild of participatory media -- the kind of thing that's accepted as a stopgap in the absence of a good network hookup but not relied on for real information.

It's been a little quiet, so I thought I'd perhaps spur a little conversation and simultaneously enhance Matt's outboard brain.

The boggling and flummoxing book mentioned in http://www.blackbeltjones.com/work/mt/archives/000400.html#000400, "Cheap Complex Devices," is K5er John Sundman's second novel (and second self-published novel, which is a situation he certainly wouldn't mind changing). My review of it is at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/7/29/17621/1043, and John gave me permission to warez it to this list. It's a 1.7Mb PDF, so attachment is out, but download at http://www.kuro5hin.org/images/rusty/Cheap-Complex-Devices.pdf.* (It includes graphics and unusual type/layout stuff, so plain text is also out). John also has a recent article in Salon about being on the manual labor side of the dot-com bubble, building CMGI tycoon David Wetherell's Martha's Vineyard trophy mansion at http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/10/23/wetherell/index.html which is worth a read.

The point of all of this, from our perspective, is that the book is framed as the result of a writing competition between programming teams trying to create "HALs", or human language storytellers -- computer programs which are capable of writing novels entirely from scratch. Needless (probably) to say, this competition hasn't actually happened yet. But can it be far off? And is that sort of thing social software?

We've kind of cruised a little in defining what social software *is*, which is fair enough because that's always a difficult question. But we probably should, at some point, put a little thought into defining it, or at least penciling in some boundaries. Leaving aside the hypothetical HALs, how about IRC and AIM bots, whose purpose is to interact with people in a social manner? One IRC channel I spend most of my IRCing time in has a bot named zuul, who, among other thing, keeps track of who's been around recently. Ask it "zuul, seen rusty?" and it will tell you when I was last on, and what the last thing I said was. It responds to basic questions, and is programmable by anyone in the channel to respond to new questions or provide new kinds of information.

Is zuul social software? I think so, because it helps mediate group interactions between people. That's one boundary I'm pretty comfortable with.

Now what about a storytelling program? Is software social if it is designed to *act* in a social manner? That is, it's not there to help people, it's there to be a person (or a some subset thereof). In one sense, software that performs some function for a single user is no different than your standard single-user apps. But on the other hand, designing software that "acts social" is a whole different ball of fish than deciding what options to put in the _F_ile menu.

I guess my main questions here are: where's the line between applications, social applications, and social software? And how much do the latter two groups overlap in challenges and lessons? Has anyone here written or used software that is intended to mimic or create a person-to-person type of interaction? Is this beyond our scope?

Clay says Here's what I think:

Social software is any software that only works if its used by a group, or, put another way, social software is any software that treats triads different from pairs.

Three is a magic number. There are lots of differences between conversations between two people and conversations among three. I think the most important ones are:

1. Identity

Keeping track of identity is a cinch in pairs: Anything not said by me is said by you. In a group of three or more, however, this breaks down. I have to keep track of more than me/you. I have to keep track of two or more yous, so I need some ID handling mechanism to do that.

2. Audience effects

In a two-person conversation, everything I say _to_ you is also _for_ you. You are the sole recipient. In a group of three or more, there is always an audience, and you either tune your words to the whole group, or you speak to one person knowing someone else is listening.

3. Persistence

In a two-person conversation, if you leave, the conversation ends. The conversation has no existence separate from the participants. With three or more, any one dropping out changes the conversation, but it doesn't end it. The conversation is persistent.

So when the line I draw is around those three things. Group software designed to handle identity, audience effects, and persistence is my version of social software.

So I'd say zuul isn't social software in a standalone way, since it could function no differently from Eliza, but it is an embedded function within irc, which makes it different from eliza.

Rudy Rugles see http://idea-x.net for the public site). It's been rolled out at several large organizations, but we're always learning more about how to make the software better, but more importantly how to make our overall approach better. We've written lots about our ideas, but if you're interested in a relatively quick overview of our point of view, check out: http://idea-x.net/display_topic.php?topic_id=239