Social software

Freewheeling about social media

This post is about Twitter, and yet it’s not. I’m trying to deal with a bigger issue.

First, do take a look at these two posts: Phillie Casablanca’s Ten Commandments and Paul Downey’s Twit or Twerp? Both are excellent; I have the privilege of working with both these guys, and I’m delighted that we have people who really try and understand what’s happening with social media.

While the discussions in the post are primarily about Twitter, I think the issues they discuss extend further. It’s worth looking at three aspects of any such discussions:

1. Prescription. Phil talks about his discomfort with the word “commandment”, and how he looked at using “etiquette requests”, but felt that it didn’t have the requisite ring or zing. We need to be careful in positioning any of these statements as guidelines rather than diktats. There are many people using Twitter who wouldn’t necessarily have the faintest idea what IRC was, and wouldn’t know a microformat if it hit them in the face; this doesn’t make them bad or stupid. In fact one of the biggest attractions of contemporary social media is the lowering of historical barriers, and we have to make sure that we, collectively, concentrate on providing advice and assistance and best practice rather than prescription or diktat. We need to be heading towards a place where we can say “If you want to get the best value out of Twitter, and if you want to make it easy for others to obtain value from Twitter, then you should consider doing the following things, and not doing the following things”.Â That’s how I read the two posts, and I will strive to become more of a twit and less of a twerp.

2. Polarisation. For whatever reason, the industry I have found myself in just loves polarised debate. Everything, just about everything, is 0 or 1, black or white. Big-endians versus Little-endians. What’s happening right now is that our walls are coming down. “Vendor” power is shifting to the customer. “IT Department” power is shifting to the customer. “Standards Body” power is shifting to the customer. While we need new standards, we need to be sure that we don’t pave the cowpaths, create new sets of polarised standards “on behalf of the customer”; we need to be comfortable with letting the customer decide. Sometimes it’s going to feel like helping a child grow up and discover things for himself; as “parents” we cannot do the learning for them. [Reminds me of my favourite JSB quote: How long does it take for a five year old to become a six year old? One year]. For people like me, it’s about getting out of the way. For some of you, it may be about recognising the continuing existence of “grey”.

3. Personalisation. For many of the people playing with these tools for the first time, there are no rules. They will find ways of using the tools that the creators of the tools haven’t considered; they will find ways of making the tools their own. Whatever we advise, whatever good practices we suggest, whatever standards we come up with, we need to keep one perspective in mind. The newbie isn’t wrong. Just different. We need to encourage the newbies rather than reinvent the ivory towers and holy-of-holies of the past.

Lack of prescription. Avoidance of polarisation. Support for personalisation. These Ps are key, whatever else happens.

Along with passion. And patience. Lots of both.

We’re on the verge of a new golden age, centred around community and participation, as the underlying technology stabilises and becomes invisible. Let’s make sure we get there.

On WTF and Yogi Berra and related stuff

I knew it, someone to come up with a way of making sure that people want their posts to be Flamed!

A couple of days ago, Dave Sifry wrote about a new feature in Technorati called WTF, which stood for Where’s The Fire?

I guess it means many things to many people, but to me it seems simple and worthwhile, a natural extension to the World Live Web, as Doc tends to call it. What is it? You write an explanation for something, anything, that you feel will help others. And then you let people vote for it. Your friends and family can vote for it, helping you kick-start the process. If you succeed, then it rises towards the top of the Technorati search response for the term you seek to explain.

When you do succeed, the entry you make has a little Flame next to it.

So in a way it’s Wikipedia. Each entry is an article, an explanation of something.

In a way it’s Firefly, it’s Amazon ratings, it’s StumbleUpon, it’s Digg. Collaboratively filtered information. A community popularity index.
In a way it’s Google. Ranking information that forms a searchable base and returning results according to some algorithm.

And in a way it’s Technorati. Working primarily in and around the blogosphere.

Some people have compared WTF as purely a Digg competitor. I guess it could become that. If we let it. Personally, I am not interested in yet another way of ranking news stories per se, and that’s what Digg seemed to become. I’m completely uninterested in what Paris Hilton or Britney Spears get up to.
All this reminds me of my favourite Yogi Berra saying:

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

If I’ve read Dave correctly, it’s up to us what WTF becomes. To me it represents a golden opportunity to try and solve something, a problem that Wikipedia has not been able to solve so far.

The problem of wisdom-of-crowds versus expertise. Something I’ve written about many times before, one of my pet subjects.

If we use WTF as a means of “voting” for articles on specific subjects, and we make sure that Linus’s Law is made to hold …. there are enough eyeballs …. then maybe we could get somewhere different. The original article writer remains the creator and editor, but the comments made on the article are visible as well. Who knows, maybe the comments themselves get WTFed, with the leading 25 comments always visible.

I think we can come up with something that’s harder to game. No Googlebomb equivalent. No editorial frenzies. I’m not entirely sure why, but there is something about WTF that appeals to me. It may have to do with the fact that overt control is being passed to all of us.

[An aside. A few decades ago, the company I was working for sent me on a Public Speaking course. It was a pretty expensive one, video tapes and playbacks and all that jazz. The guy who ran it was meant to be the guy who trained Margaret Thatcher; a significant portion of the course was spent looking at real footage of Reagan and Thatcher et al; the rest was spent cringing as you watched yourself on tape and got critiqued by all and sundry.

While we covered a lot of material on things like linguistic style and projection and body language and stuff like that, we spent a great deal of time discussing the “devices” available to public speakers. While all this was interesting, what really struck me was something altogether different.

How, according to the course leader, politicians had only one objective: to say something meaningful yet catchy enough to make one of the top three headlines in the evening news. The age of soundbites.]

As I write this, I hear that Digg have stopped publishing their list of top contributors, because people were beginning to game that. There was a market forming, people were paying the guys who showed they could get a story to fly.

As long as we create bottles we will have bottlenecks. Bottlenecks are there to be gamed.

How can we avoid this? We have to make sure there are enough eyeballs.
Each WTF post is a story, part of a conversation. Each has the potential to be a Global Microbrand, as Hugh MacLeod is wont to say. Each has the ability to rise in value within the market where such conversations are held, via the WTF votes. After all, markets are conversations. [Incidentally, when are we going to see Cluetrain 2.0? ]

In the meantime, I’m going to do my best to support WTF. That’s the only way I can learn about such emergent phenomena.

Four Pillars: The Power of Context

Have you ever seen Adelson’s Illusion?

The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey.

I won’t spoil it for you by giving you the proof here. Instead, why don’t you go visit the original site and see for yourself? There are a number of really worthwhile illusions there. I first saw it maybe ten years ago. Like you, I’ve seen many such illusions in my time, but none of them has had the same impact as this one had. Some of you may not have seen it, so I thought I’d share it with you while musing about context.

I think context is the key differentiator for Web 2.0; whether you look at it from the viewpoint of Four Pillars: Publishing, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation, whether you’re one of those people really into the Semantic Web, whether you’re more of a Mashups person using GPS or other location-sensitive tools, whether you’re into deep dialogues and arguments about microformats or identity… it’s all about context.

Hold that thought for a minute and come for a tangential wander.

In the past, I’ve had my rants about e-mail, about spreadsheets and about presentation tools. Like with most other things, these have good uses and bad uses. For some reason, the bad uses seemed to proliferate. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation and not tell you I’m doing it. I like spreadsheets and presentations so much I insist on reading them on my BlackBerry. I trust everyone so much that I’m going to keep online and offline copies of every version of every spreadsheet and presentation I’ve ever come near. I like you so much I’m going to show you a draft of something and then use something completely different at the meeting a day later. Recognise any of these?

Enterprise collaboration tools are by themselves fairly useless unless people actually want to collaborate, unless people want to share, unless people want to work together. E-mail and spreadsheets and presentation tools are by themselves not evil, but can be subverted into bad uses.

For many years I wondered why people did this, why people misused the tools. And I’ve only been able to come up with one logical explanation, one that fits with my belief that people are intrinsically good. You see, many of these tools came out during the 1970s and 1980s; during that time, many of the basic tenets of enterprise employment were being turned upside down; security of tenure went flying through the window; downsizing and rightsizing and wrongsizing were all the vogue; outsourcing and offshoring were being discovered; the war for talent had not yet begun.

Now the primary and secondary sectors had already been through all this, but not the tertiary sector. And within the tertiary sector, the term “knowledge worker” was just beginning to emerge. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a question of timing. Insecure people were learning that knowledge had power, while being presented with tools to protect, fortify, even submerge, that knowledge. Are they to be blamed for using the tools selfishly?

Okay, back to the context argument. Tools like e-mail and spreadsheets and presentations, because they were so individual and stand-alone, could be manipulated. And could be misinterpreted.

They did not come with context.

What we are seeing with Four Pillars tools, with Web 2.0 tools in general, is the very opposite:

The way that conversations persist allows context to be captured and shared, whether in IM or wikis or blogs
Modern tools for archival and retrieval, via the use of tags and non-hierarchical processes, allows context to be enriched
The availability of location specific information, of tags and microformats, of semantic web concepts, all coupled with better identity and authentication and permissioning, allows the enriched context to be made more relevant and timely

Context. Captured and shareable. Enriched and made available. At the right time, in the right place, to the right person.

I wish it were all that simple. Whenever I see the sheer power of the tools today, I also see the stupidities. Stupidities in the context of DRM and IPR and The Series Of Tubes and and and, which have the capacity to kill this goose before any golden eggs are laid.

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