Weblog
Jun 17, 01:30 pm: What is the value we give our communities?
I spent yesterday (and am spending today and tomorrow) at Supernova 2008. You can find my unfiltered notes on the npbrain wiki (a little experiment in its own right).
Yesterday’s series of talks seemed to add up to how transactions are processed on the web. And I don’t mean processed in the credit card vendor sense but processed in the how to do we describe value and make sure that we (people connecting and moving around via the Internet and the grace of our mobile careers) give it and receive it and how to companies (the people who have set up shop on the internet) attach something financial to that value — whether through advertising, targeted pitches, friend recommendations, or by giving us something (a piece of hardware, say) that will meet the needs that they are confident we have.
There was some argument, mostly headed by Esther Dyson, that asked whether or not that transaction was really everything that happens on the web. Her central point: people are on the internet, using mobile phones for reasons that transcend a quid pro quo kind of transaction.
I don’t know what I think, honestly. I think mainly people engage in a behavior because it has a value for them. Because they think they are “buying” something with their time, attention, actions and dollars. But that doesn’t always means that the results of the transaction are immediate, like they are at the grocery store (I give you some money; you let me leave with food — very neat and clear). In fact, it seems to me figuring out what the transaction is, over time, is a huge part of the debate of the Internet and mobile services.
Clay Shirky set the stage well by talking about two things necessary for a community to take collective action:
- density: you need to have enough people to make the collective action work (two people can’t raise a barn, for example)
- continuity: you have to have faith that the same people will be there later when you need them
It’s all a good combination and, taken together, is one that’s important for social benefit organizations to have. How are we providing value to the people who support us? It can’t just be the thank you notes that we send for donations. How are we providing value for signing up for our newsletter, passing along an outreach message, providing volunteer support and giving donations? Thank you isn’t enough. Are we making our key supporters stars? Do we make sure to get people good timely information about our cause? Do we give people a venue to come together and meet others? And, in that value, are we creating a community that is dense enough and long-last enough to come together for collective actions that build rather than just protest?
Jun 11, 02:27 pm: Creating imaginary topical friends on FriendFeed?
The value of FriendFeed, clearly, is the ability to have people you know, like and/or respect (sometimes all three!) point to things and the comment on them in one big friendly pile.
But Marshall Kirkpatrick’s thoughts on microsites have been stuck in my head. That’s a great use of the internet for nonprofits. As Jon Stahl said in the comment here, “building out a thoughful custom project by weaving together a “pipeline” of commoditized services from the interweb, rather than relying on a monolithic “do-everyting” application.” Still, though, I’ve been trying to suss through easy ways to do this.
Maybe a combination of imaginary friends and rooms on FriendFeed is a way to do this. So, the imaginary friends feature lets you pull together the RSS tracks of your friend’s internet trails — if your friends haven’t yet done this for themselves on FriendFeed. And rooms is a way to gather together and join in a conversation.
Let’s say you want to pull together a microsite based on marriage equality — a topic that doesn’t get a lot of result in the FriendFeed search box but does show up on sites like flickr, del.icio.us etc. Well, find those RSS feeds, pull them together as an imaginary friend and then start a room joining that friend to the conversation (can you do that? I haven’t tried yet).
Of course, since an imaginary friend has an RSS feed this might be a way to pipe the aggregated content onto another site. Much less elegant than Marshall’s plan* but it might be quicker and easier way to do it. And it has the bonus of making it easy for people to follow, share bits, and engage in conversation.
Have you seen examples of this? Is there value to doing it in this tool or should it just happen on a website or, say, in a blog?
Jun 10, 10:54 pm: What's your favorite imaginary mashup?
In the run up to this year’s NetSquared, we asked ourselves what would happen if we got some terrific ideas that can’t happen because the data isn’t open and accessible?
Good, we said, to each. Great. It could be a way to advocate for a different kind of openness.
It seems according to this post, Where Are the APIs for Government Data, some other folks agree. Authors from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy write:
Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonpror commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to nd and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.Which leads me to ask: what’s your favorite imaginary mashup? The data that you’d like see combined if only you get your mitts on the data?
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”)
May 3, 03:40 pm: It's got to be easier than this
Marhsall Kirckpatrick has a great detailed post on putting up an RSS-based microsite. Though this was done to support an event, it’s easy for nptech readers to translate to an issue-based site. Such a microsite could be great for managing information internally or externally.
But what he writes about is hard. Frankly, we need at tool, out-of-the-box, to do some of the basic things he’s suggesting:
- figure out way to measure “popularity”
- get rid of duplicate posts
- measure the various links
Marshall does a fantastic job of cobbling together a variety of tools but should that be necessary?
[From Marshall Kirkpatrick » How to Build an RSS and Blog News Site for Your Project]
Apr 3, 06:11 pm: Twitter Resource Roundup
Twitter is a good tool and you can certainly just dive right into it. But here are some resources to make getting to know Twitter, and the people and topics on it, a little easier.
Tutorials and Intros:
- Twitter in Plain English: The fine folks at Common Craft do an excellent job of describing twitter in this short video.
- Twitter Tutorial for Newbies: It’s short and has screenshots. Always a good combo.
- Twitter Me This: Get the free recording of the NTEN webinar.
Posting Tools:
- TwitterMail: send messages to Twitter via email
- Twhirl cross platform desktop applicaiton making it easier to post to twitter
- Twibble cross platform desktop application making it easier to post to twitter
- Twitterific desktop application for mac
- TwitterBerry: posting from your, you guessed it!, blackberry
Search and Stats:
- Tweetburner: shorten the URL and get stats on it so that you can tell what people are clicking.
- TwitterLocal: put in your location, select a radius and find (and subscribe via RSS) to the tweets that are in your area.
- twemes: follow messages marked with hashtags (words or phrases after the # sign)
- Twitter Karma: Allows you to sort through your friends and followers and see a variety of info about them
- Quotably: allows you to follow conversations by user
- Tweet Scan: Allows you to search twitter. This can be a great help when you are looking for people to follow.
- TweetStats: Shows you your twitter behavior, or the behavior of any twitter user. Nice to see, in your own stats, who you send tweets to the most.
To find an exhaustive list check out Twitter Fan Wiki.
And thanks to edobejar, silverbell, LittleLaura, ahynes1, ruby, danieljohnsonjr, astrout, and CarrieBethH for their twitter tool thoughts.
Updated: with the additional tools of a lotta smart and helpful twitterers.
Apr 2, 06:43 pm: Twitter helps with conversation
When I was thinking about Week 4 in my little 52 week series, I started thinking about what tool people should use to start the process of publishing on the web. And so I turned to twitter to ask.
Beth Kanter took the question further in her post, Marnie Webb’s Chicken or Egg Question: Twitter or Blogging?. She writes sums up the responses and has some great comments.
In writing up my own comments, I came to one of the reasons I feel that publishing starts with Twitter. It’s not about publishing. It’s about the conversation.
Blogging has lost some of that. I think that people are taking it increasingly more serious and the tools encourage that as they become more sophisticated. Twitter can’t help but be about conversation.
I think that starting there helps to encourage a habit of conversation and questioning, a sort of pose, that can be brought into the blog that helps to genuinely engage the people you are talking with.
Tags: twitter, conversation, questions, socialtools, web2.0, nptech, net2
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.
