Engaging

Explaining tagging

Bill Ives points to a Good Article on Tagging – HP Labs:

Pito Salas of BlogBridge sent me a link to a great article on the concepts behind and within tagging, The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems by Scott Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman, Information Dynamics Laboratory, HP Labs. They describe collaborative tagging as "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".This is what is commonly referred to as tagging at the moment and what was popularized by sites such as del.icio.us and Flickr. In the abstract write that they "discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge".

Adding

Earlier, I did a brief general introduction to tagging.

Citizens reporters get paid by bloggers

From Robin Good's latest news: Citizen Reporting Offers Opportunities To Talented Bloggers: The Creative Reporter Network Pays For Your News Tips:

Creative Weblogging has just launched a new service called Creative Reporter allowing readers to contribute tips, news, pointers and full articles to its thematic network of blogs. Readers can post not only text information, links and background references but can also upload digital audio recordings and video clips in the most popular formats. The user-driven contributions are then filtered, evaluated and selected by Creative Weblogging own editors-bloggers, now counting more than 40, who may decide to repost them as they are or to incorporate them into other coverage or news items they are working on. Grassroots reporters uploading content to the Creative Weblogging blog network get also a monetary compensation for their quality contributions in the...

The internet circa 2010

Smart Mobs reports on The internet circa 2010:

This news article says a report written by Trevor Bar , Alex Burns and Darren Sharp looks at the future of the internet and "quotes internet heavy-hitters".One of whom is Mr Howard Rheingold. Professor Barr's report,(PDF) Smart Internet 2010,"explores four schools of thought on the next five years of internet evolution.The Adaptive User Environment suggests that the most successful technologies will be those that can fit user needs;proponents of Not the Smart Internet want a simple,user-friendly web;Rich Media advocates want to be able to see "any content,on any device,in any format,at any time";and the Chaos Rules school holds that the internet "may be in a continual state of decay and worsening disorder".The report says "ubiquity will be the byword of the net's future.Said Professor Barr:"Instead of the net society,it's about the net in society.It will become this indispensable lifestyle tool".

Writing as you talk works best

Kathy Sierra in Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass:

If you want people to learn and remember what you write, say it conversationally. This isn't just for short informal blog entries and articles, either. We're talking books. Assuming they're meant for learning, and not reference, books written in a conversational style are more likely to be retained and recalled than a book on the same topics written in a more formal tone. Most of us know this intuitively, but there are some studies to prove it.

Using video for learning and discussion

Shawn Callahan at Anecdote in Learning from experience using video:

Video is finally making it into the mainstream for organisations to see and hear, almost first hand, the experiences of their colleagues. The availability of reasonably priced video capture and editing solutions are now available. It is simple for someone to pick up a video recorder, film a colleague, download the video to a computer and make the clip available for anyone to view. There is an interesting video-driven lesson learning activity occurring on the web called Channel 9 run by Robert Scoble at Microsoft (see http://channel9.msdn.com/). Robert is visiting his Microsoft colleagues and asking them to talk about their projects. There are many interesting features of what has been built on Channel 9, but the most important is the efforts to build community around the video with features such as the ability for anyone to comment and rate each video posted.

Web 2.0 == glocalization

Barb Dybwad in Web 2.0 == glocalization further expands on an article by danah boyd

In the continuing effort to define the artist currently known as Web 2.0, danah boyd brings in the concept of glocalization, which is about envisioning Web 2.0 as foregrounding the need for local communities and communities of practice to situate global information in local contexts. Local here is not defined as it once was by geography, but rather by shared interests, goals, values and projects.

Adding:

Web 1.0 was the exuberance of believing that we could construct some universal, global commons in which everyone is connected and everybody has equal access to the same information. Now it's becoming clear that there is no such thing as 'universal information' - information needs to be interacted with, remixed, repurposed, reused, recreated and shared in order for it to be truly useful to groups in their own local contexts. Think of the parallels in education, and the difference between being a passive absorber of facts handed down versus an active participant in engaging with the material to create new recombinant forms. In order to make sense of new information, we have to situate it inside the local contexts that are relevant to us this operates on the individual level in a learning environment as well as at the community level, as groups of individuals need to make decisions on how to best take action in response to the knowledge they have at hand.

Technorati Tags: Web_2.0, why_web20_matte.html

eRider Starter Kit

An eRider Starter Kit is now available, explaining how to starting projects providing technology support to nonprofits:

This 130 page guide outlays how to start, manage and run an eRider project. It was created by Teresa Crawford and the Tactical Technology Collective with the support of the global eRider community.The Starter Kit directly pulls on the experience and work of eRiders in over 15 countries and 400 organizations.

From Tactical Technology Collective

Technorati Tags: socialtech

Help us research Authenticity and Trust

Jesper and Jon at e-mediators ask people to Help us research Authenticity and Trust, explaining what their research thesis on corporate blogging leads them to believe in relation to blogging:

Our take on this is that there is a strong relation between trust and authenticity. We have ended up with a trust-authenticity duality; you can't have one without the other. On one hand authenticity leads to trust, as human beings, we dare trust a person who is authentic. On the other hand we need a certain level of trust to actually perceive a person as being authentic. The relation between the two is way more complex though!
We would love to get some input from you guys. Do you have examples of what makes you perceive a blogger or a company as authentic? Do you trust a company because it has bloggers whom you find authentic? How do you see the relationship between trust and authenticity?. We would be grateful for any comments that could help us deal with this complex phenomenon.

Technorati Tags: blogs

Book review - Wisdom of Crowds

Explanation of the thinking behind Wisdom of Crowds

The simple idea upon which Surowiecki builds is that, under certain conditions, groups of people make better decisions than any individual could hope to make. There are three conditions: the group must be diverse; the individuals should make their decisions independently; and the people must be decentralised, thus ensuring that decisions are based on local knowledge.

In Anecdote

Unexpected knowledge sharing

Lilia Efimova on the importance of leaving digital marks so that people can finding stuff that may be useful to them, in Unexpected knowledge sharing: on recording and discoverability of knowledge traces

Public weblogs may serve internal audiences too

Lilia Efimova reflects on Public weblogs as a tool for (internal) knowledge management, suggesting that creating rigid divisions between the internal knowledge systems of organisations and external may not be helpful. While confidential content must remain internal, it may be useful to share externally ideas that might attract responses from a wider audience. That means colleagues must look outside as well as in for useful knowledge.

Technorati Tags: blogs

E-learning modules on partnership working

Five e-learning modules on partnership working have been made available for all to access on the ourpartnership web site. The modules cover Structure and Strategy; When and how to negotiate; Risk management; Communication and people; Communication strategies. More details, and register for access.
Via Volresource

Technorati Tags: partnerships

Wikis compared

The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning July 2005 offers Wiki Products: A comparison .

In the current study, seven wikis are reviewed: EditMe, MediaWiki, seedwiki, Socialtext, Swiki.net, and WikkiTikkiTavi/ InterWiki. The educational potential of each is discussed.

For educational purposes the evaluation team favoured Seedwiki, and and also liked Editme and Swiki.net. (I think the review was carried out in 2003. I couldn't now find swiki.net. Seedwiki is free. Editme - from $4.95 a month - I've used and like it.)

CSS Examples And Showcase: The CSS Zen Garden

Robin Good features CSS Examples And Showcase: The CSS Zen Garden:

CSS Zen Garden is an interesting initiative launched in 2003 to demonstrate the benefits of using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). With the same fixed HTML code, many web designers have contributed different CSS files that produce a dramatically different web page, with the same contents. CSS Zen Garden is a website created in 2003 by Dave Shea. Half manifesto and half gallery, according to his own words, CSS Zen Garden appeared as a reaction to the elementary and uninspired use of Cascading Style Sheets that was usual at that time.

The Internet Ten Years Later

Irving Wladawsky-Berger offers insights into The Internet Ten Years Later drawing on developments he has seen at IBM.

Most exciting of all will be the impact on business and society at large. We are already seeing the emergence of open, collaborative innovation as a serious mode of economic production that has arisen because large numbers of individuals can now organize themselves for productive work. This challenges the long-held notion that the firm is the only way of organizing value-creating work. Indeed, social computing is creating all kinds of new communities -- and all that information out there will likely transform the way companies deal with each other and with individuals - employees, customers, partners, shareholders, and others.
Once more, I find myself struggling to explain to people in business why they should pay attention to things their children are doing like blogging and participating in community games. I think that collaborative innovation and collaborative knowledge are breaking out beyond the world of open-source software and blogging and are now becoming major forces that businesses need to learn to embrace, just as they had to learn to embrace "universal reach and connectivity" ten years ago. It will be fascinating to see where this new round of Internet and WWW energy takes us.

Wiki Wednesday

Wiki enthusiasts are getting together tomorrow at various locations for Wiki Wednesday. There's chance in London to meet Ross Mayfield whose company Social Text is a leader in the field. Details of Wiki Wednesday London here ... I'll be there.

RawSugar for social bookmarking

If you use http://del.icio.us to bookmark and tag sites, it's worth looking at RawSugar, which David Weinberger has checked out recently

You can think of RawSugar as a searchable del.icio.us with automagic, hierarchical clustering. (Users can also manually create hierarchical tag sets.) So, instead of seeing a long list of links on the left and a long list of tags on the right, at RawSugar you see a list of links on the bottom and your top-level tag categories on the top. The higher level tags are automatically propagated to the lower level ones. So far there is no way for users to publish their tag sets so others can use them.

Brake's Bunch of Mac apps

David Brake, who recently converted back to Mac, offer's Brake's Bunch - "a set of freeware, shareware and open source stuff I have accumulated over the six months." Many have Linux and Windows versions

Collective meaning and group decision making

Shawn Callahan at Anecdote reflects on the difference between Collective meaning and group decision making

I just had an interesting distinction drawn to my attention: the difference between collective meaning and group decision making. I've just finished Wisdom of Crowds which argues that under certain circumstances a group will make a better decision than any one individual. The author, James Surowiecki, provides many examples including finding a submarine, guessing the weight of livestock, and Google s ability to find relevant web pages. Wisdom of crowds are all examples of group decision making.
For Nancy Dixon the intended outcome of collective meaning making is a new way of understanding something that is shared across the collective.

Blog types

Dan Janal ask What kind of blogger are you? and says he finds that there are thinkers (thoughtful pieces), linkers (... to thinkers), blingers (self promotion)... commenters add zingers (criticising others), flingers (loads of stuff, see what sticks), snoopers, buzzers...