Archives for Social Software

Visualising your last.fm listening... (September 16, 2007) I've been having enormous fun playing with Lastgraph over the last week or so. You tell it your last.fm username and it runs off and plots you a nice colourful graph that visualises your listening behaviour. I've been with last.fm...

On Andrew Keen... (September 5, 2007) Andrew Keen makes me furious but I don't write about him as a rule. Why not? Because you don't feed the trolls. And I don't think I've ever seen anyone so clearly acting like a troll. I mean, you only...

Methods for the social archiving of mailing lists... (February 26, 2007) Imagine you're on a mailing list that archives URLs that people share in some form, and that this creates indirectly some kind of archive or directory. Imagine that this archive has generally been maintained by hand and in a formal...

Social whitelisting with OpenID... (January 24, 2007) My ex-colleague Simon Willison has recently been doing some profoundly good work out in the wilds of the Internet promoting and explaining OpenID. In fact, the best articulation I've seen anywhere on the Internet of the OpenID concept is his...

Thoughts around "Social by Design"... (November 15, 2006) No doubt tomorrow when they've sobered up there'll be a good bit of reportage from the Techcrunch UK guys about the Beers and Innovation: Social by Design event that I got back from a couple of hours ago, but since...

Slides from my Future of Web Apps (SF06) talk... (September 20, 2006) Last week I talked at the Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco as detailed in my euphoric debrief on Saturday. It was not a talk that I looked forward to enormously, but I have to say that the...

On things that aren't fun, and fun that is bad... (August 9, 2006) Last Friday - around ten in the evening - Pentheus, my main character in World of Warcraft, hit level sixty. Thinking back, I'm now not entirely sure where he was when this happened, although I believe it was in the...

On Massively Multiplayer Propaganda... (August 8, 2006) Simon drew my attention to a site called GIYUS.org the other day and it's been in my thoughts ever since, and I've come to think of it as a really troubling kind of troll-supporting political malware, representing a technologically-empowered massively-distributed...

Who's afraid of Ashley Highfield? (July 19, 2006) Today it was announced that the BBC's New Media operations are going to be restructured radically. At the moment most of the content creation parts of the organisation are kind of co-owned - for example, Simon Nelson who was the...

Self-reflexive rulesets in online communities... (May 9, 2006) It's Tuesday morning and I've been in Seattle since Sunday evening at this year's Microsoft Social Computing Symposium and frankly, I'm completely braindead through jetlag. I'm barely hanging on to intellectual coherence by my fingernails. Sunday evening I got...

What do we do with 'social media'? (March 31, 2006) I'm a nervous public speaker, and so when I was asked to talk at the Guardian Changing Media Summit, I started to scratch out some notes about specifically what I'd say about Social Media. When I'm talking, I never really...

My 'Future of Web Apps' slides... (February 13, 2006) Right then. My slides. I've been trying to work out the best way to put these up in public and it's been more confusing than I thought it would be. Basically, the slides are so Keynote-dependent and full of transitions...

On Metafilter's folksonomic subdomains... (January 14, 2006) I'm going to move on quite quickly back onto something way way less embarrassing and mainstream back into the boring semi-beating heart of one of my pet work-related fetishes, the folksonomy. In particular I thought I'd talk about a new...

A quick review of Yahoo! Podcasts... (October 10, 2005) Double disclaimer time here - firstly I'm knackered and what follows is badly written and I will edit it later for clarity, punch and drama. The other thing is that - of course - the viewpoints represented here do not...

How to build on bubble-up folksonomies... (September 2, 2005) [This post takes up some of the themes that Matt Webb, Paul Hammond, Matt Biddulph and I talked about in our paper at ETech 2005 on Reinventing Radio: Enhancing One-to-Many with Many-to-Many. A podcast of that talk is available.] A...

Reinventing Radio: On Phonetags... (August 29, 2005) This post concerns an experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to bookmark, tag and rate songs they hear on the radio using their mobile phone. It was developed by Matt Webb and myself (with Gavin Bell, Graham Beale...

On Live Journal mood tracking and zeitgeists... (July 8, 2005) There are two or three major things I'm thinking about at the moment - and one of them is zeitgeists. Which brings me rapidly to The World according to LiveJournal which is an awesome tracking system of LiveJournal moods over...

Two cultures of fauxonomies collide... (June 4, 2005) There's been an enormous amount of good stuff around about tags and folksonomies recently, which I've not really had enough time to interrogate fully. One particularly interesting experiment has been the Cloudalicious service. Cloudalicious was apparently inspired by the Grafolicious...

Trackback is dead. Are Comments dead too? (April 27, 2005) I think it's time we faced the fact that Trackback is dead. We should state up front - the aspirations behind Trackback were admirable. We should reassert that we understand that there is a very real need to find mechanisms...

Social Software for Set-Top boxes... (March 23, 2005) You can download the core part of the material that follows as a PDF presentation entitled Social Software for Set-Top Boxes (4Mb). A buddy-list for television: Imagine a buddy-list on your television that you could bring onto your screen with...

Preamble towards a post on Social Software for Set-top boxes (March 23, 2005) The following post contains some of my thoughts about Social Software for Set-Top Boxes. But before I do so, I thought maybe I should write really briefly about some of the context. I've been thinking around this stuff for a...

An addendum to a definition of Social Software (January 5, 2005) I'm loath to wake the old evil beastie of definitions of social software, but I came across some old notes that I sent off to someone in October and I'd like to keep track of it for later. Basically the...

Weird context shifts caused by IM on hiptops... (December 20, 2004) I'm having a crisis of etiquette caused by what I believe to be bad user interface design. Basically it works like this. I look at my iChat buddy list (to the right) and I see a big list of people...

Towards tag-based bookmark management in web browsers? (October 4, 2004) So since playing with Flickr and working on a little fun project at work on (cough) folksonomies with Mr Webb, I've become obsessed with tags and the ways in which they can be used to build better navigational interfaces. Currently...

Sharing multiple digests could be kinja's killer app... (April 5, 2004) So I looked at Kinja and I was pretty impressed. I looked at it and saw something clean and simple that would hopefully appeal to people who find the morass of weblogs out there to be overwhelming. I thought it...

Live from Etech: Joe Trippi... (February 9, 2004) Rapid recontextualisations make my head hurt. Nonetheless today I'm not in Los Angeles having fun with friends in drag. Today instead I'm watching Joe Trippi talking about American politics and the consequences and effects of the Dean's internet-enabled online fund-raising...

On fires, string quartets and the new politics of online communities... (January 24, 2004) In the Guardian article Four's a crowd, cellist David Waterman talks about how to keep a string quartet together over many years without the interpersonal relationships forcing the group apart. I love articles like this - articles that don't seem...

Is physical presence necessary for community? (December 19, 2003) A few months ago I responded to a site that claimed The Internet is Shit with a reposte designed to illustrate that although our networks might contain difficult and unpleasant material, they also contain enough of value and facilitate enough...

On a frustration with pundits and social networking tools... (November 8, 2003) I have to say, I'm vaguely appalled by the way that some people have become so obsessed by social networking services. Business 2.0 is the most recent drunken advocate to go all giddy about them, describing them as "technology of...

The Power Law, iCan and Weblogs... (October 25, 2003) So the BBC has launched a public pre-beta version of iCan - their attempt to help people re-engage with and self-organise around politics at an local/national/international level. The early stage makes it almost inevitable that there are going to be...

Political economies in self-moderating communities... (October 13, 2003) Derek Powazek wrote an interesting piece last year about rating-based moderation systems: Gaming the system: How moderation tools can backfire. One of the most important lessons in online community management is that top-down management is seldom particularly successful in forcing...

The final solution for persistent trolls? (October 13, 2003) So what do you do when nothing else has worked and you're left with a board that is at the mercy of a persistent troublemaker? There aren't very many options. Firstly there's taking the situation to the ISP or workplace...

Modelling a space for group-activity... (September 28, 2003) In preparation for a piece of work we're doing this afternoon, Mr Webb and I have been thinking around social software and its relationship to the other things we do in our lives. In other words - how often is...

Friendster as neocortical prosthetic... (September 9, 2003) I've been reading connected selves on the 150 person limit for weak ties and its relationship to Friendster: "When i have 200+ friends on a site like Friendster, i'm not a social networks anomaly. What is actually being revealed is...

On the 'one big site'-ness of weblogs... (August 28, 2003) Here's a weird quote about weblogging: "I believe in my heart that people should come up with their own publishing methods. Frankly, it's boring to surf the blogosphere and see so many sites using the same, tired weblogging tools. The...

The Ugly Wiki (Part Two) (August 21, 2003) A few months ago a conversation emerged across the net about whether or not wikis were ugly (see also Many to Many) (and moreover whether the fact that they was ugly affected how useful they were). Obviously, the whole issue...

Hating your community... (July 28, 2003) So I think the worst thing about running online communities is that fundamentally you have to spend at least some of your time dealing with incredibly unpleasant people who want to do nothing more than fuck you and said community...

Superdistribution and Superlocalisation... (July 27, 2003) So I did my talk yesterday at EUvolt and I think it went OK. The paper was a bit of a Frankenstein's monster of components of older papers glued together with liberal smatterings of last-minute thought-goo - but I think...

Things to do with RSS readers... (July 13, 2003) When I was in Helsinki, I started thinking about RSS aggregators like NewNewsWire. More particularly I started to think about what extra functionality they should be able to provide. Personal Blogdex: Here's the most obvious idea. You have a whole...

Discussion and Citation in the Blogosphere... (May 25, 2003) A few days ago a stunningly interesting article was published on Microdoc News called Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story which aimed to look at exactly how a story or discussion moved through weblog space. I've been thinking along similar lines...

How do we find information in the Blogosphere? (May 16, 2003) It has become almost a truism in critical examinations of the Blogosphere to talk about how - with the explosion in weblog numbers - it becomes difficult to find the best insights on any given subject. I first came into...

My working definition of social software... (May 8, 2003) A while ago I wrote about a potential definition of social software based around Englebart's theories of augmentation. Shortly before I went to ETCon I was talking about related issues with Will Davies of the iSociety and included (in my...

Steven Pinker and the Perfectibility of Man... (May 8, 2003) There's fragments of a paper in my head. I need to find ways of noting this stuff down that doesn't collide with my writing on this site. It goes back before Clay, to a place of darkness that is somewhere...

Writing a Hydra Conference Template... (May 2, 2003) During the second-to-last presentation I attended at ETCon, I decided it was about time to try and drag the format of the collective annotations into some kind of order. There's a certain amount of pleasure lost by overly structuring these...

User name epithets... (May 1, 2003) I find the way in which communities self-organise totally fascinating - almost as fascinating as I find those situations where communities fail to self-organise. I always wonder what went wrong?, when really I should be asking what went right in...

The Ugly Wiki? (May 1, 2003) So the rumour is that Wikis are ugly. Lots of people seem to agree and a good few seem to be cheerfully prepared to engage in the debate. And I'm going to put myself on the line here and say...

"UpMyStreet Conversations: Mapping Cyber to Space" (April 24, 2003) So. A bit delayed. Sorry to all concerned. I'll post later about the experience of delivering a paper at Emerging Tech later, when I've had a chance to assimilate the whole experience, but if you're looking for the PowerPoint presentation...

Hydra, Biological Computing and Eric Bonabeau (April 23, 2003) Right. I'm going to keep amending this post as I think of things to say and get other things done. I'm in the middle of a talk with Tim O'Reilly at the moment (how cool is my life), but I...

Emerging Tech 2003 (April 23, 2003) So on Thursday I'll be delivering a paper at O'Reilly Emerging Tech called "UpMyStreet Conversations: Mapping Cyber to Space". The paper, which I have co-written with Matt Webb and Stefan Magdalinski, will be mostly about the basics of how...

Thinking about iChat... (April 16, 2003) I've been thinking a bit about instant messaging clients since I submitted my IM contacts to Buddyzoo. In order to upload my buddy lists I had to switch from iChat - my default messaging client - to AIM. For the...

Don't write off Conversations as a geek toy... (April 14, 2003) So there's an article in the Guardian today about UpMyStreet. The article is called Street Plight and aims to understand why the company is in administration. Now generally, it's a pretty flattering article - and a fairly accurate one -...

An Artisan in Social Software... (April 5, 2003) I'm going to take the unusual approach of linking through to a comment I've made on someone else's site. The comment is flawed - it's full of typos and errors and gets a bit over-excited every so often - but...

On the Guardian and UpMyStreet Conversations... (January 9, 2003) There's at least one clear analogue for the process of (1) getting exciting by a work project, (2) getting completely involved in said work project, (3) going at it like a mad badger and (4) collapsing exhausted afterwards. And the...

The excesses of "Social Software" (January 7, 2003) What is it about "Social Software" that is starting to worry me? Is it the abandonment of concepts of 'online community' and the complete rejection of familiar terms and paradigms like the message board? Is it the increasing lack of history? Or is it the desire to claim a territory as unexplored when it's patently not?

Being a rant about - and to an extent a caricature of - some of the excesses of the Social Software movement... (January 6, 2003) The Excesses of Social Software: There's a post over at Matt Jones' site at the moment concerned with attempts to define and discuss social software [Defining Discussing 'Social Software'] and I find myself reacting to it in a completely unexpected...

A quote from Jonathan Franzen's Why Bother? (January 3, 2003) A quote from Jonathan Franzen's Why Bother? (from his book of essays How to be Alone) that I think is interesting in that it presents a different perspective - a tangential perspective perhaps - on the loss of social capital...

On the augmentation of human social networking abilities... (December 19, 2002) I've been reading Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, by D.C. Englebart (Stanford, 1962) and there's this really interesting paragraph in it that I think is true: The process of developing this conceptual framework brought out a number of significant...

While cleaning out my virtual closet I found... (December 12, 2002) While doing a routine purge of my computer I stumbled upon three graphs made to illustrate the difference between an increased marginal 'effort' cost and an exponential one. This is a flashback to a now old argument about whether or...

First thoughts on Wiki (December 10, 2002) A few thoughts on Wikis: There aren't enough simple sets of instructions for people who are completely unfamiliar with Wikis. It's quite hard to make the mental leaps necessary to get past that very initial stage of frustrated apathy. But...

In which Tom mentions that he's just started his first Wiki... (December 9, 2002) Little to say except that I've spent some of this evening working to install my first ever Wiki using UseMod. I've got a very specific project in mind - getting a group of less-than-totally-tech-savvy community members to get together and...

Towards a way of measuring a stale paradigm... (ps. needs an edit which I'll come to later) (December 7, 2002) Let's start by positing the idea that Thomas Kuhn is right when he talks of paradigm shift - that ideas don't simply change slowly over time, but instead occasionally move with seismic speed, size and repercussions. That the progression from...

Yet again manufacturing scarcity... (December 6, 2002) In the interests of fair exposure, I'm going to link back to Scott's response to my response to his comments on my thoughts about manufactured scarcity, although I'm going to have to leave a more thorough response for another day...

On the manufacturing of scarcity... (December 4, 2002) I really want to write a proper response to this piece on randomchaos.com which discusses the ethics of 'manufacturing scarcity'. But I've been meaning to write something thorough and intellectually satisfying for days, and nothing's coming. So I'm just going...

On democracy and online community... (December 3, 2002) Here's a really useful piece of writing by Robert Putnam, author of the astounding Bowling Alone about the decline in social capital in America: Anonymity and the absence of social cues inhibit social control - that is, after all, why...

In which I respond to a huge post about social software with a huge post about social software... (November 13, 2002) Must-read interaction/community techblog of the moment is City of Sound, a site that I found initially via the Slipknot be-hoodied Matt Jones. Our two otherwise independent vectors of interest have recently collided quite heavily around MP3s, list-making and social software,...

The Awesome Clay Shirky... (November 8, 2002) So Matt Webb and I went to a talk-followed-by-panel held by the iSociety people today. The feature performance was the awesome Clay Shirky, with support from a variety of charming panelists, including weblogging's own Matt Jones. The panel was essentially...

Some of my favourite UpMyStreet Conversations (November 8, 2002) UpMyStreet Conversations is starting to pick up now, which means that I can start directing people to some of the best and most useful threads that I'm finding on it... Congestion Charges Does anyone know when these are due to...

Introducing... UpMyStreet Conversations... (November 6, 2002) So I can finally tell the world what I've been working on for the last few months - and in fact, more to the point, I can finally try and get some of you people to try it out. UpMyStreet...

Who's afraid of community participation? (October 23, 2002) The most interesting aspect about discussing "UK weblogging culture" is how uncomfortable people seem to be with the concept of being part of a "community" at all. Perhaps more fascinating still are the assumptions of what participating in a community involves...

If this truly is the future of Google news, then the project I've been trying to persuade people to undertake for the last six - eight months is dead. (September 22, 2002) According to Google Blog there's potentially a new front-page emerging for Google News. The current page can be viewed at news.google.com, and its apparent replacement is here. To be honest, this news doesn't fill me with the love and happiness...

Proposal for a new relationship between weblog and mainstream publishers (August 6, 2002) The Situation:Imagine, if you will, that a prominent web magazine had decided to start hosting Weblogs. Imagine if shortly afterwards another prominent online publisher said they were doing the same. And then imagine if rumours abounded that they weren't going...

XCOM2002 and TAKING IT OUTSIDE (June 9, 2002) An attempt to write a huge piece on my experiences of XCOM and TAKING IT OUTSIDE, at which I sat on three panels and left very very tired.

Conversations about community... (April 10, 2002) One of the best conversations on the web at the moment about community development is taking place over at MetaTalk at the moment. It's about how to handle the burgeoning size of Metafilter and it's particularly interesting to me, because...

Signal to Noise on Community Sites... (February 28, 2001) Inspired by this post over in a thread at Metafilter about the signal to noise ration of community sites (which reminds me of this thread over at barbelith.com) I am beginning to think through the implications of information transmission and...

On Regional Metafilters... (November 11, 2000) The whole Metafilter discussion has taken a couple of interesting turns in the last hour or so. Firstly, prol suggested a rationale for the suggested europe.metafilter.com: "The common language would be English. This would mean only people who write good...

On a web-based intermediary for hit-men... (June 21, 2000) Katy and I have just had a great idea for a new money-making venture targetting a completely underexploited section of the e-marketplace - professional hitmen and the criminally violent. The idea is just like that in Strangers on a Train,...