Weblog
Jul 11, 04:53 am: Pay close attention to NTEN's We are Media
NTEN‘s We are Media is a fabulous — fabulous! — community media project facilitated by the indefatigable Beth Kanter. It’s build, week by week, by, well, by you and anyone else who wants to participate. It can be as easy as collecting (just use the tag wearemedia) or as indepth as jumping into the wiki with both typing hands to help shape the information.
This is great, not just to see the end result, but see a community building a lasting resource.
(quick disclaimer: I’m in the Advisory Group)
Jun 4, 03:10 pm: FriendFeed: Get in the Room
Thanks to Jonathon D. Colman for getting the nptech room going on FriendFeed. At just under a hundred members, it’s already proving to be a great source of information and conversations.
And, though I’m finding it useful, I’m also finding it time consuming. The jury is still for me with regard to FriendFeed. I love, love, love the room feature. It combines social bookmarking, feed reading, and the casual interactions of twitter into something that works somewhat like a mailing list.
So, if I’m loving that why am still not sure? Mainly because I can’t process the information as quickly or as seamlessly as I can with any of the tools that I regularly use for social bookmarking, feed reading and the casual interactions on twitter.
I use Google Reader much the same way I use my email inbox. To very quickly triage information, making decisions about whether or not I want to come back to the content chunks, how and where I want to share it, how and where I might want to be able to recall it. I treat information differently if I’m tagging it for design reasons, because I might need for my own research, or if it’s something I think other nptechers might be interested in.
I can’t churn through the info like that on FriendFeed.
And, though I can tell icon-easy where the info came from — this helps distinguish between a link someone posted on a service like del.icio.us from a something that they might have written on their own blog — I don’t like that I don’t have ways to sort or organize the information based on its source (I have to jump back to Google Reader for that).
But the conversations. FriendFeed is another place for me talk and to discover interesting people and things and so that has me dipping more than my toe in. I’m up to my waist, in fact, but at some point it’s going to have to not just augment the other services I use but give me a way to replace some of the tasks that I do on them (more organizing features? I might ditch using Google Reader to follow people and only use it follow mainstream news sources and search-based feeds and alters. Ability to add meta-data? I might ditch a social bookmarking service if I can organize my links and find ones that have been tagged in similar ways).
What do you think? Do you think it’s FriendFeed is additive? Is it already replacing some other activity or you? Does it have to?
May 7, 04:42 am: How do Communities and Networks Relate to Each Other?
Nancy White writes about the magic between communities and networks and points to some tweets on the topic. I’ve been trying to work out the difference between the two. Or if not the difference, the way they interact with each other.
In the comments to Nancy’s post Beth Kanter says that she’s been thinking about this two and in relation to the nptech tag.
I’ve been trying to work this out too. I think it matters for design of a web site and the architecture of the community. Often, I find myself using the words almost interchangeably. But they aren’t. When I think about it, LinkedIn feels like a network but Twitter feels like a community. And the nptech tag? Well, that feels like a way to share knowledge. But I do think that’s it lead to people finding each other and becoming engaged in community activities on places like Twitter and certain in the work that NTEN does.
So, what’s different about this? To me, it feels like a network is a place where people perform actions because it benefit them but those actions also benefit the community. Del.icio.us is a great example of this, as is Flickr. In both cases, I use the services because it helps me organize my bookmarks or my photos. But my behavior, using tags and sets or bundles, adding comments, helps the other members of the network be providing them interesting or valuable information. And if I stop at that. Using the network platform as a tool to enrich my own experience and, perhaps, borrowing from others use of it. Well, that’s a network. And that’s a lot. It’s very good and very helpful.
In a community, people start behaving in ways that aren’t immediately helpful to them but build the space — physical or ideological — that is jointly shared. This happens on Twitter when people answer questions of other users. And when they share what they are working on to continue a conversation.
Does that sounds like it’s going in the right direction? What do you think? What is the difference and the overlap between the two?
(Photo credit: D’Arcy Norman’s “Map of Online Communities”)
Apr 17, 04:33 am: Are specialized tools contributing to the fractured conversation?
I don’t know. I’d like to get that out of the way upfront. Okay. Now that the pressure is off.
Three years ago, five years ago, I was saying that blogging was about the conversation. About the ability share short snippets of information or thoughts easily and quickly.
And now I’m saying that about Twitter
And it seems Twitter has taken on a kind of blogging – microblogging is to easy a phrase. It’s seems there are a passel of tools that have taken on microblogging. Twitter is one, okay, but so is are social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia. Tumblr also has a place in that list. Taken together, those tools are specialized bits of what used to be blogging.
Does that mean that blogging has matured? Is about making a place for the wide range of sharing that used to happen under the label of blogging?
I’m not trying to get old school here (back in the day we all used blogger. And we liked it. Hell, we loved it. There was snow). I am trying to understand how the tools are fracturing along with the conversation.
And if the tools that we use to talk on the Internet are becoming increasingly more specialized it makes sense that the conversation is fractured. Things like friendfeed, Facebook, and even some of the revamps in MyBlogLog approach the problem from one direction, by pulling together a life stream and giving people a way to subscribe and interact with it.
But is that helping. Sure it creates a unified presence but I’m not sure that really unifies the conversation. And do we even need to unify it? I mean, in regular walking around life conversations are fractured. Interactions with the same people are dictated by the environment (we may be talking to the same people, literally, but we probably to talk to them different in a bar than we do in a meeting room). They change because we are moving through time and space and changing our minds. Why shouldn’t the Internet be like that?
In the 3D world, though, we know the strength of our ties. But do we know them on the Internet? I mean, maybe I can upload my address book and be connected to people on anyone of a gazillion services but there might be someone, on one service, with whom I have a deeper relationship. How do we measure and see those?
What do you think? Are fractured conversations good or bad? If we want to unify them, what do we use to do that? Is it already there? Or is it missing?
Tags: nptech, net2, conversation, fractured, tools, evolution, tools, socialgraph
Apr 3, 02:18 am: I care and want to share and contribute
I’ve shared this photo before. It touches an issue I care about and one that can often make the country feel cut-off to me.
I think that we should be able to make our own families and have those families recognized and protected by law. There are a whole lots of bits and pieces of that. And I’d like to contribute to the broader information and efforts, which includes sharing them, in smart ways.
And I have to say, ACLU, a badge is not a toolkit.
You’re maps showing legal issues are great. How about some code so that I can publish those maps? How about a way to add my stories to it ala Active Trails.
Tags: aclu, lgbt, tools, share, contribute, social, issues, activism
Mar 17, 05:31 pm: Cast your ballots
NetSquared starts voting week today. Find out the hows and then vote for the projects you think can best use the resources of the Net2 community at the annual conference.
On a side note, we think the process will be easier on everyone than it was last year. You can say “no drop down list of 150+ items to select from?” We have, though, stayed with the basic rules (you’ve got to vote for at least 5 different projects). It’s our hope that this helps balance out, at least somewhat, the difference in outreach from project to project. We’ve also added some various ways to sort the projects so, we hope, discovery of new and interesting things will be easier.
Feb 6, 04:27 am: Do you have 46 minutes?
That’s what it’ll take to get you started in the NetSquared Mashup Challenge.
tagged: net2, nptech, challenge, mashup, earnestbrows
Oct 22, 10:05 pm: Thoughts with those in Southern California
If you get a chance today – make the chance if you don’t get it – donate to the Red Cross. The Southern California wildfires are raging. I lived in San Diego County for over 30 years and this strikes close. My family is evacuating and right now, along with so many others, they do not know the state of their homes.
The San Diego Union-Tribune has good detailed information on the evacuation areas.
Sep 25, 04:12 am: Measuring your web presence
We need a social analytics tool.
Forget about developing your own website unless you are offering some kind of services over the web. Instead, develop a web presence and then aggregate this on your site. It’s sort of the Suprglu idea. You go out and create accounts where it makes sense — share links, pictures, drop comments, participate and then have it aggregated back on a core site. Why? This allows a small nonprofit, business or even just a person to participate and have a representation of that participation. That representation have with more and less sophistication, pulling everything together on a central domain or using a service (facebook is a candidate) to aggregate.
But then what does that do to web analytics? How do you map these social networks? What tools are available? What tools do we need? This isn’t just about measuring numbers. It’s got to be about the depth and value of the connections between members in a social network. How does that get represented? TouchGraph is interesting and gets at some of this idea.
What else is out there? How do we measure our social networks?
(hat tip to Beth Kanter’s nptech roundup and Christine Herron for informing this post)
tagged: analytics, measurement, presence, net2
Aug 14, 02:57 pm: Get your social actions noticed
Peter Deitz over at Foik (soon to be renamed Social Actions) asks us to tag any group fundraising pleas with sa-topten. You can further promote the effort by plugging a widget into your site to republish some of those efforts (you can see what it looks like below).
I’ll certainly help spread the word. I think anything that can help get the word out and bring more visibility to nonprofit efforts is a good thing. Okay maybe not anything. But this thing is worth the old college try.
There are, though, some tweaks that might make it more likely to succeed:
- tell us what a group fundraising effort is. I hate to be dense and maybe I’m just speeding through the feedreader too quickly but I’m not sure what makes something qualify. How do I know what to plug in there?
- give us an easier tag. Probably too late for that one but I just can’t remember sa-topten. I keep having to make sure that I’ve got it right. And that’s even with, you know, getting that the tag is “social action top ten.”
- make it even easier. Peter made it dead easy to promote the resulting links. Make it even easier. Give me a little link for my browser that automatically adds the tag when I do my social bookmarking magic. Something that works like the del.icio.us buttons but already populates the tag field.
I’m quarterbacking here before the game’s even started but I’m taking my little focus group of one public.
So, you all, prove me wrong. Use the tag like wild fire and tell me why it works.
tagged: nptech, net2, fundraising, tagging, group, community
