Typepad Connect was not getting the job done. It was a great idea in concept but failed in execution. A few issues:
Recently, Nancy White honored me by asking me to join the Communities and Networks Connection. I think communities are hard, and to be honest, I'm not sure what defines a community beyond the network that connects. I suspect it has something to do with a sense of belonging in the community's members.
Since restarting this blog, I decided to offload commenting to a webservice from Six Apart called TypePad Connect. Basically, over a couple of years, I had collected over 500,000 spam comments. When I went to upgrade the blog and clean all of that out, the system stalled. I had to crawl into its guts and manually delete spam from the database. It took several emails to a professional mailing list and not a few hours of making sure I was doing the right thing before undertaking a series of meticulous steps.
Too much work.
The idea behind TypePad Connect is that they handle all comment management, including spam removal, and basically republish the comments on your blog. It's one of several competitors including Intense Debate and Disqus. These services offer several advantages for both blog commenters and blog owners that I'll be discussing in future posts.
I was talking with Jude Yew today, a Ph.D. student at Michigan's School of Information. He's interested in facilitating learning via online forums and has been working with me on my learning blogosphere and learning remix projects. The conversation veered around a little, and we came to his idea of using threaded comments to blog posts to promote class interaction.
I won't go into what I think are the merits of that idea, but one of the key points that came up was identity. How do you consistently identify the commenters? Last November, Kaliya Hamlin and I had a conversation on that very topic, and she was convinced that establishing identity was key to community work.
I've been buried with work and obligations. There is much to report. Expect to hear more here soon about veg-o-matic, blogging bootcamps, and new initiatives.
We're in the third week of the latest blogging bootcamp, and we're just about to cover how to track conversations. In the process, I've come to the conclusion that mass conversation tracking just doesn't work. It's pretty easy to see why.
Just consider technorati. They track 26.3 million sites and 1.9 billion links. That's less than 75 links per site. In a good month of blogging, I can generate that on one site. So, technorati's coverage is not adequate to the task of tracking every link. The same is true of icerocket and Google blog search.
An issue with blogging is that it is public speech. People get to reading your blog and developing a perception of you. You feel you need to live up to that expectation. Blogging slows dramatically or stops as you attempt to stay on message. Ken Yarmosh might call this one type of blogging burnout.
I let this blog go for a while in December at a time when I thought I might actually accelerate. As it turns out, I was actually blogging elsewhere, almost daily. Sometimes since Christmas, I have been blogging multiple times a day on a personal blog, Michigan Muscle Boy, "A michigander who sometimes feels like a god in the gym". Hey, who's going to debate the finer points of the long tail when they can talk about feeling like a god. Not this correspondent. I was also blogging in the BIT320 Remix trying to corral the final round of student activities.
Frankly, I got tired of debating things like the long tail. I'm just not convinced they are an adequate description of what motivates people. I think I'm blogging as a part of a larger social enterprise. I'm a bit amazed that I am now keeping a personal blog, something I thought I would never do. But, it's refreshing.
I also got a little tired of blog gaming, commercial enterprises that seem to try to manipulate the blog conversation for their gain. I think commercial speech in blogging is fine, but sometimes you just want something you know is what the person really thinks. That's not always the case when it's team against team as it often is in the commercial arena.
Much in store for the new year by the way. We've got another bootcamp on the way this Saturday.
Over the past month, I've come to the conclusion that all of this discussion of the long tail is crap. The idea of the long tail is that there are a few winner main stream sites that receive the lion's share of attention. However, there is hope for lesser niche sites because the Internet audience is large enough that they will still be economically viable. So, for instance, digg may be the winner for now in technology sites, but there is still room for specialized sites like the Corante web hub.
Well, maybe, but for the most part, I think it is the wrong point of departure. Most (real, not SPAM) people who write blogs are not writing them to capture some piece of a larger pie. Rather, their point of departure is to communicate with some local audience. Oh, it would be nice to gain greater general visibility, but that is not the motivator. In fact, it may be distracting from the real value creation process. Here are two illustrative cases:
I'm building a text book for the next rendition of the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp using O'Reilly's Safari U. The main advantages I see are:
But, I wonder how they are bringing this thing to market. In many ways, they are tied to their book publishing model. A lot of the recent content is not really available because it has not been converted for custom publication. Also, the custom book has to be ordered in quantity, no one-offs. This requirement essentially dictates that the book be pushed through traditional marketing channels. You can't really offer it to small client groups over the web. Finally, any access to the book is only available online for a fee. Why not provide a preview as in their regular Safari offering? Frankly, such previews would just provide more reason to purchase a Safari subscription.
I'm having some frustrations getting the material I want out of this service. I may resort to a last minute coursepack from a local copy center. The copy center will call O'Reilly for permissions, and the book should be done in time for the January class. Ironically, although the bootcamp is about Web 2.0, we are likely going to have to resort to pre-web methods to get the textbook produced.
Local copy centers integrate publishing and delivery, simplifying up the process of creating custom books for customers, and providing more certainty. Oddly, O'Reilly decouples these two processes making the process more complex and less certain, all under the veneer of advanced web technology.
Over the past couple of months, I've been developing a new rendition of the high octane blogging bootcamp. We ran the original at The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business last Spring. In that bootcamp, 33 MBAs were able to alter the search landscape in Southeast Michigan for queries on the cleaning and restoration industry with 6 weeks of blogging effort.
This rendition will be offered at University of Michigan's Ross School of Busines starting in January and at Quinnipiac University starting in March. In the bootcamp, we treat blogging as an introduction to the interactive web. Teams of participants will have as their project to create a family of blogs around a partner business or their own business. The projects will be judged on the extent to which they follow strategies that build search visibility and traffic.
The bootcamp is broken into a set of seven modules that build on each other. Each module includes an overview, some practical examples, and exercises for participants to complete in service of their project. Here are the modules:
A few months ago, I announced the veg-o-matic project. We developed user scripts using Greasemonkey to then republish microformatted content into reblog 2.0 Alpha. The idea was to create a way of generating an attention stream that could be shared with a group of people. This attention stream would extend beyond material made available in RSS. For instance, members of a work group could extract contact information of an important sales lead (formatted using the hCard HTML microformat) from a web page and post it in their information stream for other members to use.
The advantage of using greasemonkey was that it allowed full access to firefox's exemplary XML-processing capabilities in a pretty easy-to-master scripting environment. For security reasons, the most recent release of greasemonkey doesn't allow you to use a large portion of firefox's native XML support in greasemonkey scripts. This change effectively breaks the front-end of veg-o-matic, and it is unclear there is an easy fix.
While I understand the developers' security concerns, it seems like one of the major selling points of using greasemonkey just went away without much compensation.
Update: The lead developer of Greasemonkey has posted a comment in which he assures me the removal of the XML processing capabilities is only temporary due to a bug. The one nit I would pick is that how to convert legacy code to the now-supported E4X, an emerging javascript standard for XML-processing, is not always obvious. Let me recommend this resource for it which got me going enough to realize the extent to which my stuff did not work.
A lot of perspectives on business opportunities for mashups are just too driven by the idea of using big company data. The real value-add in any information business is the information, hard to easily duplicate if the business is viable. So, of course, companies are not just going to give this away for you to generate revenue off of. Matthew Hurst and Greg Linden state this well:
On the other hand, the commercial examples are, as Greg points out, making offerings with no guarantees. In fact imagine the following example: data is made freely available; everyone throws in their idea; whenever a killer app emerges, the data is suddenly no longer free (I believe Alexa has been very open about this strategy). Now what do you do with your users?
Data Mining: Greg on MashupsThere is no business model for mashups. If Web 2.0 really is just mashups, this is going to be one short revolution.
Is Web 2.0 Nothing More Than Mashups
But I think this misses a larger point.
As readers of this blog are aware, I've been running a sort of mini version of a Corante hub in class at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our hub, which we call a "remix" is different because it is meant to serve as a distributed blog space for the class to see each other, share information, and interact. There is no editor, it's sort of self-editing.
Well, just the other day, Lindsay, one of the students, came up with a real coup when she discovered suprglu. My cut, it's the 15 minute facsimile to the class remix (one guy has actually done this with his creative writing class). I've also done one so my bodybuilding personal trainer friend can track some relevant blogs I have found.
It lacks some things though. Let me provide a quick list:
As Stowe Boyd mentioned yesterday, Corante has established a network of topical sites that re-aggregate content from "thought-leading" bloggers and provide editorial insight on emerging trends. I'm honored to note that this blog was chosen to be part of Corante's web hub. I'm also proud to announce that The Community Engine played a pivotal role in getting the technological infrastructure to work.
I really learned some things at lunch and the cocktail party. I really liked the people I talked to and their openness to conversation. Now, let me spend a moment detailing how I might fix some of the things I did not like.
Still at the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture. Intriguingly, JD Lassica starts of suggesting that we re-invoke the Liz Lawley rule, namely that people who want to participate need to come to the front of the room. Remarkably, this comes after Liz's observation that there is only so much room at the front.
Do these guys realize how they come off? Clearly not, there is no feedback loop. Maybe, they just do not care. After all, they are the ones not paying the conference fee while the rest of us are. We are here to participate with them, not the other way around.
I'm not sure I entirely endorse the view I just expressed, but it certainly goes through my mind as I sit here. I think both JD and Liz would just like to be closer to people. Why don't they walk into the audience? Frankly, when you are creating a market, you need to go to the people as much as you tell them to come to you.
I started out with Kevin Marks and shared with him my misgivings about his session, namely that there was no there there. I did point out to him that he had succeeded in getting me to contribute to the IRC room by putting it on screen, something I never do.
Liz Lawley is leading this. She notes that there is a tendency for people in the blogosphere to just hang out with birds of a feather. She also notes there is a core group that comes to all of these events and some new people. Liz is an absolute jerk by demanding that people who want to participate come to the front half of the auditorium. Hey, not my fault the auditorium is set up the way it is. Unimpressive and overly exclusive, paying to go to a conference and having someone tell you you are not part of their space.
Tina Sharkey and a guy (Joe ?) who used to run Friendster are also on the panel. Tina remarks that AOL wants to facilitate meta-social interaction (people figuring out how to interact and making connections vs. talking on topic). Joe remarks that people in different cultures use the services differently.
Hosted by Kevin Marks and Mary Hodder. Kevin is making the case for why we have centralized top-down control in communications. There are just too many voices.
Participants are: Stowe Boyd, Seth Goldstein, and Kaliya Hamlin. The central question seems to be why is business adopting social software now? Stowe Boyd thinks there is huge potential for businesses to transform themselves. My question is this: do existing institutions want to change? Or is it that new institutions will arise?
Seth Goldstein seems to think it is the API. How many people know about APIs? I don't know of any managers who are thinking about APIs. My wife who now uses social software does not know about APIs or any of the mash-ups they enable. She just likes to communicate. She also likes being able to look back on past conversations
I'm at the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture being held today at the Berkman Center. Things are rather informal and plans are evolving as it moves forward. I think this format is fine for people in town or nearby but hard for people coming from out of town.
My little post on the Google reader prompted a couple of responses inspiring me to lay out how I browse the web. The Google reader is one of many offerings that allows you to follow web sites using their syndication feeds. Essentially, the reader gathers the feeds from each site and presents them to you in one single web page, making web surfing much more efficient because you now only have to go to one page.
If you think of feedreaders that way, then it's clear that the issue is how to construct the most efficient display. This screenshot illustrates my most recent strategy:
I like Google's portal pictured on the left. Their new reader, announced at Web 2.0 today and pictured on the right, just does not compare. The portal outperforms the reader on all measures you would think the reader would be better at.
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Yesterday, I signed up for the Ning developer program, and today they accepted me. Ning is a platform for developing interactive web applications like this little bay area restaurant guide, an Ann Arbor version of which is depicted here:
Fred Wilson has suggested that Ning might lower the cost of entry for point web applications, i.e., those designed to fulfill a specific need very well. In its current state, I don't think so. In the example "Things around Ann Arbor" app I tried above, there were three items that were configurable without programming: the number of items to display on a page, the map image to show, and the google maps key. Everything else required modifying code intensive php pages. Examining these, it quickly became apparent that I was going to have to spend some time with the API documentation to make any real progress beyond showing Ann Arbor on the map.
Now, my work might lower the cost for someone who wants to simply copy my application (a process called cloning in Ning), but having to learn the Ning web app structure is a clear cost increase to me for just getting started. I have a recommendation that might help.
I've been trying out Ning, which has been written about by many people. Ning is essentially a platform for creating interactive web apps. Here's one of them:
Dave Winer thinks it's a product that does not do anything original. I have a slightly different view. It's a product that has some potential if it can make developing and maintaining interactive web apps so easy that non-programmer community entrepreneurs can do it.
I discovered a service called FeedDigest today. Launched in July, 2005, it has over 10,000 users with each one generating approximately 3 "digests". Digests are web pages or RSS feeds generated from aggregations of other RSS feeds. Currently users integrate digests into their sites either through javascript or PHP. There is no hosting of digest newspapers, likely due to load and bandwidth issues. The site blog has detailed how they are dealing with the capacity issues brought on by exponential growth over the last few months. Though nothing has been announced publicly, certain of the blog posts suggest that outside investment was secured in the second-half of August. Ten thousand users is a benchmark that Silicon Valley VCs often cite for seed investment.
So, we've launched the remix learning site. The idea here is that students in a class about databases and information contribute by making blog posts and bookmarking web pages. Students tag each blog post and bookmark based on the class conversation topics they feel they contribute to. Posts with multiple tags contribute to multiple conversations.
The remix learning site gathers student contributions several times a day and archives them in a movable type blog. The interface allows people to view contributions grouped by tag. That's great, but the question is how to present these topics to people in a way that they can view: the most recent, the most talked about, the whole universe.
To do that, I have come up with this tag cloud:
The key element in the default view is that items are sorted in reverse order by recency. Frequency is indicated by size of the tag in the cloud. Visitors also have the option of sorting alphabetically and by pure frequency.
A perennial classroom issue is student participation. Even if students are enthusiastic, limited time dictates that only a few will be heard in any single session. Limited participation limits instructors' opportunities to find out what students know and inhibits the potential discovery of useful information for everybody. This post outlines a web-based learning remix project at Michigan's Ross School of Business that is designed to remove classroom limits on student participation. The system operates according to a few simple pinciples:
We believe our system achieves the first and second goals and makes good progress on the third. On the input side, each student makes fifteen tagged (informally categorized) microcontributions per week by bookmarking sites in del.icio.us and making blog posts in WordPress Multi-User. Multiple times each day, reBlog and the Movable Type publishing platform gather, remix, and present the student contributions based on the tags students supplied.
Richard MacManus makes an interesting tie between blogging for business visibility and spam in referring to our recently reported bootcamp experience:
This is what could be termed The Good Side of blogs for businesses. The Dark Side is the spam and fake blogs I wrote about above. It seems to be relatively easy nowadays for both sides to gain search engine ascendancy over old-school websites.
Read/Write Web: Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 8-14 August 2005
Well, I'm glad to be on the good side, but I wonder what that really means? Where did that comparison to spam come in?
From May 10 through June 23, 2005, we ran the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp for 33 MBAs at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our client for the bootcamp, Coach's, served the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan market for disaster cleaning and restoration services. Recent surveys indicate that over seventy percent of households search the web when shopping locally for services such as Coach's. We wanted the bootcamp to demonstrate how Web 2.0 technologies like weblogs and RSS could help better establish a company's search presence to take advantage of this channel. To really push the idea, we informally set a goal that bootcamp participants' team weblogs outperform Coach's site on searches for its own keywords.
Microformats are a way of writing html pages so that they are amenable to automated data processing while still easily read by people. Lucas Gonze feels the standardization inherent in the microformat writing process drives out innovation, specifically:
Microformats are really just a way to combine human and machine readability in one web page. Microformats are superior to similar infrastructure plays because the average web designer can incorporate them with very little work.
So, what's the business proposition for combining human and machine readability? Right now, I can come up with two.
In response to my post about blog search imitation on Wednesday, Marc-Olivier Peyer of pointblog has asked if we could not benefit from a little more innovation. That seems reasonable, and I'd like to frame my response in terms of where we have already seen innovation based on the revenue potential. I expect that that is where we will see more in the future.
The first thing I note is that blog search engines exist because blogs are different from traditional web pages. Blogs are increasing at a faster rate than the rest of the web. Blogs, with an average update frequency of once every 10 days, are updated more frequently than the rest of the web. Blogs, with an average of 100 outbound links, have more outbound links per site than the rest of the web.
As a result of these differences, the value of blog search engine's indexes is closely tied to timeliness and the ability to represent linking relationships in addition to the traditional elements of coverage and relevance. Businesses in search of market intelligence seem the most easily monetized market for this kind of data. Businesses are typically aware of the need for market intelligence, and they are willing to pay when they perceive significant opportunity. By contrast, monetizing blog readers through contextual ads does not offer significant revenue potential.
Today, Jason Calacanis wrote about how icerocket, a blog search engine, had added tagging support. Jason's remarks were, typically for him lately, riding technorati a bit.
But it's how IceRocket supports tags that's the real kicker. They're using the reltag microformat invented by Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, and Derek Powazek of technorati as explained on this IceRocket help page.
This post announces release candidate 1 of xFolk, an xhtml microformat for social bookmarking as popularized by del.icio.us and a growing host of other services. Microformats are conventions for conveying information on the web in a way that is easily machine processible. Users can then experiment with ways of presenting and combining it. These experiments are, in effect, a sort of low-cost R&D, that web publishers may choose to capitalize on as they pan out.
At O'Reilly's Where 2.0, Stephen Randall put it best in terms of what he wants for usability:
Neither Movable Type nor distributed tagging (via technorati) are like this, but they need to be.
I'm at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 today. Microsoft has presented a neat application, Virtual Earth. It's not out yet, but you can see propaganda at the site I linked.
What's neat about this service is that they make explicit allowance for social applications. You will be able to do things like put up reviews of local businesses and integrate them with maps. I had been talking with Ryan King at technorati about this just two days ago in discussing a location microformat. I wanted to find a set of reviews for local gyms near my sister's house in San Francisco. Sure, she and her friends had ideas, but they were not tuned in to the kinds of things I look for (I am a workout addict).
Yesterday, I spent the day at technorati and the evening with Tantek Çelik, Ryan King, Jeff Barr, Chris Messina, and a host of others at the second ever (?) microformats group dinner. A lot happened, and I'm not here to give a blow-by-blow account. Rather, I want to convey the one major insight I walked away with (there were many minor ones). To answer Jon Udell, Microformats enable the remixable web.
As announced at O'Reilly's Where 2.0, Google released their mapping API as did Yahoo. Microsoft is also mentioning that their Virtual Earth will be for free. I'll leave it to others to discuss the key elements of these APIs. From my perspective, the kicker is the licensing terms. For instance, Google is offering their API for free as long as people can use your mapping web application for free.
I had a chance to follow up a bit with Mark Law from Microsoft's Virtual Earth on their licensing terms. In particular, what does it mean to be non-commercial? According to him, non-commercial means you are not making money off the map data, so it sounds like Google. They plan to introduce a tiered pricing structure for access to the data for commercial use, based on volume and number of services used.
I'm listening to "What is a sustainable business model for data?" at O'Reilly's Where 2.0. The guy from Navteq has mentioned that they sell data based on use. In other words, they are trying to price discriminate. Non-commercial use is free. What is non-commercial? Maybe it means not making a lot money yet, so we won't pursue you.
I'm listening to the John Battelle panel on local search at O'Reilly's Where 2.0. John Frank of Metacarta just raised the point that dhtml (aka ajax, an easy javascript technology for mixing in content into web pages from web services) enables copyright infringement, a bad thing from the perspective of the recent Supreme Court ruling on file sharing services. You're probably okay if you do not encourage stealing of copyrighted materials. I wonder if things like microformats and easy data sharing will push more and more providers into putting more liberal copyright restrictions on their work that allow for sharing.
As many are no doubt aware, a number of folks have started a microformats blog, wiki, and repository at microformats.org. It is very likely that I will move xFolk to that venue.
To be honest, as an outsider to the founding group, it's possible to feel concerns about control. Will I find xFolk arbitrarily changed by founding group members? Will they give it prominent enough position?
My interactions with Tantek Çelik, Ryan King, and Kevin Marks, three of the founding members, and my own edits on the wiki to date suggest to me that these concerns are remote at worst. More importantly, I think xFolk will gain by being out in the public space open for edits and debate by the community at large. I do plan to maintain an editorial role in xFolk using the usual wiki mechanisms, and I also plan to continue promoting it.
So, I think I will move xFolk to microformats.org. Any thoughts?
On a wing and a prayer.
Microformats are pre-agreed, human friendly ways of formatting web posts so that machines can process them. Microformats exist for calendar entries, reviews, tagging web posts, and tagging links in link blogs. In brief, microformats are like templates in Microsoft Word but aimed at the open format world-wide web.
It turns out that some arcane features of microformats can be quite determinant in creating search engine visibility. In particular, the reltag format (for tagging blog posts) requires that tags (labels you apply to posts so that people will know how you categorize them) point at a URL that acts as a repository or definition page for the tag. This requirement means that tag repositories are likely to receive a lot of links giving them high search visibility and effectively making tag pages aggregators for vertical search on specific topics.
As I mentioned last week, technorati seems to be one of the first organizations to actively build a business model around this phenomenon. A question raised in subsequent emails is how can an individual site or family of sites use tagging and microformats to get themselves on the map like technorati. In this post, I'd like to propose a light weight mechanism for doing just that.
June 26 – 30, I'm going to be in the Bay Area (San Francisco, specifically) catching up with Tantek Çelik and "The" Ryan King on microformats, likely attending the Vertical Leap conference signaled to me by Dave McClure of simplyhired, and attending at least part of Where 2.0. It's going to be an exciting trip. As I signaled earlier this week, microformats have some real implications for distributed business models. Specialty search engines like technorati, simplyhired, and gataga would seem well positioned to take advantage of microformats in their business models.
If you would like to see me on this tour, drop me an email. I'm very interested in meeting readers. Please note that my geographic knowledge of the Bay Area is limited. For instance, I thought the SDForum where Vertical Leap will be held was in San Diego (SD, get it), so keep that in mind when suggesting meet-up locations. Fortunately, a quick phone call with Dave McClure cleared up the SDForum confusion before I booked a flight to San Diego.
Recently, John Battelle and Charlene Li have taken up the subject of structured blogging. The underlying issue is making publishers' data visible to specialized web aggregators. These aggregators make a business of publishing specialized content like movie reviews, typically perceiving revenues from advertising placed around the targeted content.
Most reviewers perceive the discussion so far to be largely theoretical. This perception is actually incorrect. Technorati, a blog search engine, has been making profitable use of a related but simpler technology called microformats for the past six months.
Specifically use of the reltag microformat has propelled technorati to top search results for niche terms like podcasting and "social software". The increased search visibility translates into more traffic to technorati's pages and more exposure for their sponsored links.
Current wisdom has it that, in web publishing, content is king. As the web has grown to upward of 11.5 billion pages, search has become the default way of navigating the web. Search engines determine a site's ranking based on indexable content, so content as seen by search engines had better be your king if you want to be found.
What current wisdom has not allowed for is the idea that folksonomy tag aggregators like technorati might form an intervening layer between content providers and search engines. There is evidence that this has started to occur in topics related to social software during the six short months since technorati began to aggregate weblog posts by tag.
Steve Mallett, creator of de.lirio.us, has formatted their folksonomy listing pages in xFolk:
I set up de.lirio.us to do this [publish using xFolk markup] a few minutes ago. I must say I do like this a better than the technorati tag format thing. I like technorati, but it's a bit too technorati-centric.
Conversation on tags & liberating tagged data - I did it anyway | Fooworks - 'blog of Steve Mallett
Steve's major issue was how using xFolk would affect the end user, a point raised just today by Tantek Çellik in regard to gaining acceptance for microformats.
As put so well by Peter Merholz among others, xFolk is:
... a markup extension to allow tags to be created anywhere, not just through systems like del.icio.us.
You're It! » xFolk - technology for decentralized tagging
Just to be clear, the "tagging" he is talking about is when people bookmark things they find on the web under informal categories (tags). These tags can make that bookmark easier to find later and to quickly find related (similarly tagged) resources. Systems like del.icio.us enable the tagging (labeling) itself, and they let users share the tagged bookmarks among themselves. Tagging has proven to be quite popular, at least among a certain group. You might think of it as appealing to the same urge that causes people to become coin, art, or music collectors.
The point of xFolk is to make it possible to easily share your bookmarks outside of systems like del.icio.us. One important step in getting this vision to reality is to get services that enable tagging to use the xFolk format. BlogMarks.net (a social bookmarking tool originally signaled to me by Jonas Luster) has been kind enough to share template code that you can use with their blog sync feature to make xFolk formatted bookmarks from their service appear in your blog.
In describing one of the fundamental building blocks of decentralized blog communities, James Farmer remarks:
If you're implementing blogs in your school, college or university or even organisation one of the first things you're going to want to think about is aggregation.
BLOGSAVVY » Savvy public aggreation tools, the key to binding your blogs together
Nothing could be more true. The "River of News" style public aggregators that James then goes on to review all do a good job of displaying a decentralized community's zeitgeist. But, by itself, zeitgeist as captured by near real-time blog aggregation is insufficient to sustain decentralized communities for the long term. For that, these communities need archives.
Archives crystallize what such communities found important over time and ultimately define the community.
Peter Merholz makes an interesting observation regarding what many are starting to call Web 2.0:
On a sales call with a potential client, I tried to impress upon her the need to fundamentally reconsider how her company approaches what they do, and I used the analogy of Snapfish/Ofoto/Shutterfly and Flickr. The former were stuck in pre-Web, pre-networked-world ways of thinking about people, things, and relationships. The latter is built, ground-up, *of* the Web, and recognizes that the "value-add" (as business types like to call) lies not in the production of things (which inevitably get commoditized and provide negligible margins), but in the provision of services that provide an experience you simply can't get anywhere else.
peterme.com: Death Throes of a Business Model
I've been giving this topic a lot of thought lately as I have moved forward with developing and trying to sell business owners on the xFolk xhtml microformat, a format designed specifically to commoditize large aspects of the types of services Peter is describing.
In remarking on Google's apparent plans to add RSS to their Personalized Homepage (missed by me when I reviewed it yesterday), Richard MacManus makes this remark:
One thing: why are all the bigco's so intent on building portals, when users are more and more using RSS Aggregators as their central means of access to Web content ('homepages' in Web 1.0 parlance)? The answer may be that the portal products of Google, MSN and Yahoo are, over time, turning into RSS Aggregators.
Read/Write Web: Google and MSN's Web 2.0 Homepages
My cut is that we are moving to something beyond RSS consumption in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Let's call it RSS++. RSS++ is the combination of RSS with other information services to make for a real power information consumption experience. RSS is the part where you bring your trusted sources to the table, letting you revel in the walled garden of your community.
John Battelle reports on Google's new personalized home page which appears to be called just that, "Personalized Home Page".
Google is launching the kind of personalized integration tool that many thought they'd never do. At first it was thought to be called iGoogle, but the name is uncertain at this point.
John Battelle's Searchblog: MyGoogle Is Coming Today
Well, I've tried it, and for a proof of concept, I think it is great. Basically, it lets you add a limited set of sources to your main Google search page including Google News, Slashdot, BBC, Wired News, Weather, GMail, and Driving Directions. These fit my "quick hit" information needs.
There are no ads!
But, I would like just one more thing.
I'm kind of impressed with James Farmer, Richard MacManus, and Darren Rowse. In case you did not know, James Farmer just started a consultancy called Blog Savvy and is a well-known pioneer in educational blogging. Richard MacManus has slowly been building a reputation as a sponsored blogger for Web 2.0. Darren Rowse supports himself to the tune of 6 figures using targeted advertising on his blogs. As a one-man, self-funded operation, he is more impressive in his personal earnings than bloggers for old-new media networks like Weblogs, Inc.
Frederik Wacka makes a great point:
I guess the question is when to stop saying You should consider blogging and start saying You know blogs, right, what if you should use that kind of publishing to strengthen your web presence? or even Hey, shouldn't you write more openly and authentic on your site?
CorporateBloggingBlog: ...Once Known As A Blog...
For the past several months I have been presenting blogging as pushbutton web publishing with syndication and interaction. This view is fundamentally different from the static web site that has not been updated in 6 months to a year. It also implies that you cannot make a separate, high-value career out of simply maintaining a blog. Most companies that are blog candidates simply cannot afford those kinds of fees for that one activity.
Blaise Cronin, Dean of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University notes:
The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.
via Robert Scoble in The Red Couch: Blog backlash, academian style
Although many don't realize it, Information Science has played a central role in the evolution of the Internet and is one of the fields that finds itself the most altered by it. Lately we've seen a lot of respected professionals like Dean Cronin weigh in on the value of blogging, tagging, and other social media. Invariably, the refrain is a call to return to a higher, earlier standard, or at least a plaint about the current degradation of standards and lack of true intellectual content.
I have a few reactions:
xFolk is an xhtml microformat that allows people to apply tags to links in web articles and even whole articles themselves. These tags can be thought of as subject headings that help readers understand what the linked reference is all about and perhaps lead to whole repositories of references on that heading. By providing this service to readers, xFolk also enhances the ability of search engines to process and index the pages in which the links occur as well as the pages the links point at. In this way, xFolk also provides the benefits of structured blogging without introducing any markup beyond standard xhtml.
This post provides a new iteration of xFolk markup based on extensive feedback from Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, and Thomas Vander Wal as well as various postings from around the web. The purpose of the new iteration is to provide a version that: (1) fits within the standard approach for defining such formats as provided by examples like XFN, Votelinks, XOXO, hCard, and hCalendar; and (2) can be easily implemented in weblog and other softare. The new iteration also retains the original goal of allowing authors to express explicit semantics (meanings) for their tags if they choose.
The rest of this post proceeds as follows. I'll simply lay out the new version of the microformat. Then I'll very briefly lay out the conceptual use cases and finally go through ten applications pulled from working sites on the web.
What technology your grandmother understands is irrelevant to your web content strategy. In particular, you should ignore grandma's opinion about RSS. What you should pay attention to is this:
So, in a nutshell, the argument for RSS is this: (1) There's an expanding user base that is becoming significant because of main stream media involvement; (2) Neither you nor this user base need to understand any of RSS's technical niceties to subscribe to or provide relevant content. Rok Hrastnik and Chris Pirillo take heart.
Tagback: RSS.
Folksonomy tagging is a growing practice on the web where people apply one or more one word tags to things like bookmarks and photos to help them recall them later. Services such as flickr and del.icio.us provide centralized community web sites where users store these tagged items. As a value-added feature, both services then provide aggregations for tags so that users can see what they and everybody else has given a tag of say “Boston”. In today's Search Engine Blog, Danny Sullivan raises the flag regarding potential abuses of tagging:
Wide-open tagging, where anyone can get their pages to the top of a list just by labeling it so, is going to be a giant spam magnet.
Another Poke At Tags As Search Savior
To which Steve Rubel responds:
Web 2.0 is supposed to be a transition out of the html world of people viewing web pages and processing information to an xml world of machines processing web content without human intervention. Lest Web 2.0 sound too scifi, search engines and the services that have grown out of them (like this combination of Google maps with Craig's List) are examples of Web 2.0. Although search engines deliver services to people, they perform these services without human intervention.
In my spare time for the past several weeks, I've been working on xFolk, an xhtml microformat to allow people to tag the links they put in their blog posts and share those tags, often referred to as folksonomy. The tags consist of one or more one word descriptors that tell what the link is about. The altruistic value of tagging links is that the tag can help people better determine what you intend for them to draw from the link, and the tag can tell them where to look for more information. Fine, but what's the business proposition?
Steve Rubel makes an excellent point regarding the power of folksonomy in response to a Business Week article on tagging
The BW article also underscores the rising importance of tags for marketers. Often I am asked why I think tags are a big deal. The reason is simple - it makes consumer-generated content a lot more discoverable.
Micro Persuasion: When It Comes to Tagging, You're It
Sometimes in the fervor of generating a new idea, you neglect that the reason to charge ahead is not as apparent to others. This is particularly the case if the machinery that makes the idea work has not been built yet. Such, I think, is frequently the case with xhtml microformats which can be thought of as a means to annotate web pages for better machine processing. Josh Porter put it well earlier today:
What I’m not sold on yet is the usefulness of microformats. I don’t have any use for them yet, and as far as I can see there has been a lot of pushback on the “nofollow” microformat. But what about the others? I know of rubhub.com, but what use is it? Any ideas out there? I’m new to this stuff…
Joshua Porter, Bokardo
I spoke with Mike Lombardo of Newsgator today. He wanted some hints on how Newsgator might be able to fit into the educational market. The interesting angle in all of this is the content archive Newsgator has amassed since they created Newsgator online.
In six weeks time, I will be helping teach a course on small and medium enterprises at Michigan business school. We're going to use blogging in an innovative way, and I would like some feedback.
The course is a project course where evening MBA students (4 – 7 years experience) work with a small enterprise to help it improve its business. The business that will participate is interested in a blogging strategy to increase Internet visibibility.
In folksonomy, people tag digital artifacts (web articles, media files, etc.) and share the tagged artifacts with others. Want to see the latest web articles on folksonomy, look under the technorati or del.icio.us aggregations for the tag folksonomy. Want to find the latest pictures of Boston, look under the flickr aggregation for the tag Boston.
Either of the experiments I just suggested will show both the strengths and weaknesses of organizing archives based on common tag. You will discover things you consider personally relevant mixed in with a lot of dreck. The debate on the quality of archives organized by tag has reached the point where David Weinberger finds it possible to debate himself at length on the topic without reaching a solid conclusion.
Rather than just focusing on folksonomy for navigation, it may be more useful to adopt the perspective that folksonomy is one means of self-expression in a group, a sort of: "let me share with you my vision of the world by tagging parts of it". Further, considering folksonomy as individual expression opens the mind to many useful aggregation and analysis possibilities. For instance, what does the aggregate of tags applied to given artifacts tell us about how people perceive them? How can individual tagging patterns across artifacts help us figure out a translation between personal tag vocabularies to better communicate with one another?
When I first proposed xFolk a week ago, I mainly saw its utility in helping people share this type of individual expression. To do so, xFolk has to meet a number of technical and social desiderata. Feedback over the past few days has helped me narrow down issues with the first proposal, the state of other efforts to achieve goals in line with xFolk, and various ways of better expressing the microformat for semantic “correctness” and generalization.
In the rest of this post, I want to lay out a revised view of the issues xFolk should address and a strategy for doing so. In a later post to follow shortly, I will return to the nitty gritty of xFolk's markup.
This post is somewhat of an insider's post. I am assuming you have read and are following with interest the xFolk topic I started here.
After some feedback from Thomas Vander Wal and Tantek Çelik, it appears that xFolk is going to require some iterations. There were eight issues with the initial proposal:
Believe it or not, these all seem surmountable, but they will require redefining important aspects of the microformat.
Folksonomy is an emerging practice on the Internet where people tag digital artifacts (e.g., pictures, bookmarks) with their own labels and then share them. Of course, people in the real world have been tagging and sharing collections for years; consider record and coin collections with tags like classical, rock, jazz, Merovingian, etc. One factor that makes tagging on the Internet different is that items and their tags can be shared with the world at large very easily, allowing for an emergent understanding of how common, tagged items are viewed by a large number of people. Further, folksonomy tagging with web-based tools (e.g., flickr and del.icio.us) is also very easy.
As a result of ease of tagging and sharing, folksonomy is spreading on the web like wild fire. Fickr, the folksonomy-based photo sharing service, has over 300,000 users, and Robert Scoble has signaled folksonomy tagging to Microsoft's senior management as an area requiring strategic investment.
Currently, all folksonomy data formats are proprietary and idiosyncratic to the service providing them, likely as a result of folksonomy's ad hoc development to date. There is no easy way to transfer one's data from one service to another. Further, there is currently no format for sharing or even expressing one's explicit understanding of the meaning of his/her own folksonomy tags. Tag and object tagged mutually and implicitly define each other without an explicit anchor point.
In this post I will motivate and sketch xFolk, a microformat for specifying and publishing folksonomies using components already part of xhtml. Since xhtml is already a well-established web standard, a compelling motivation for creating the xFolk microformat is that it will enable users to independently maintain their own folksonomy data while still being able to easily share it. A byproduct is that xFolk will allow those who wish to define explicit semantics for their folksonomy tags to do so, and these semantics will also be easily shared.
xFolk is inspired by Eric Meyer's and Tantek Çelik's panels at SXSW 2005 on emergent semantics and extending xhtml. My thoughts are at a very early stage and might even be termed a pre-proposal, but I am publishing them here because I think they are sufficiently developed to profit from community interaction.
Sixapart's blogging products power roughly 40% of all current blogs. At the SXSW conference this past weekend, I had a chance to see and speak to Jay Allen, the product manager for Movable Type (MT), Six Apart's standalone server blogging product. Six Apart is looking to make MT into more of a blogging application platform. They are also considering how MT will integrate with advanced technologies like Ajax, a combination of browser and server technologies that creates a more seamless user experience.
I'm continuing my thematic coverage of SXSW (South by Southwest) with two oddly interconnected panels, both were done by Tantek Celik of Technorati. Tantek is very into light weight methods to achieve effects. In the XHTML panel he held forth on a method he and others have been pioneering for extending XHTML without having to go to all of the trouble of creating a formal namespace. This talk was the technical side of a talk by Eric Meyer on emergent semantics that I blogged earlier.
Folksonomy refers to how people organize their personally collected information into categories. Think of how you file documents in directories based on the project they are for. People are now applying the term to how they organize bookmarks in online bookmarking systems or photo sharing systems.
A lot of the power of folksonomy comes from being able to look across how a number of people are tagging an item and finding items tagged by other people with the same tag you are using. However, a major issue with folksonomy is that the tags you use are relatively undefined. You yourself may even forget what they mean and there is frequently tag drift as tags are used slightly differently by different people. Today, Eric Meyer gave an interesting talk on the idea of emergent semantics and suggested a mechanism that may help a bit with tag drift.
I'm at South by Southwest, part of my early March conference tour to help get The Community Engine launched. I noticed Brian Bailey is blogging it, and thought I would throw in my 2 cents. He's very upbeat about the content. Me, much less so about the content. I've seen the conference more as what he described of Zeldman (attended; where's the meat?) and less of what he described of Fried (did not attend).
My cut is that this is an incredible networking conference andy may be worth it just for that. It can go from substantive networking (you feel like you are talking to someone who shares real interest and passion) to schmooze (trying to get in good with big wigs) to social grooming (everyone's in a clique and petting each other). I'm a bit more on the substantive networking side but can certainly schmooze. I tend not to get into cliques but find them interesting to observe.
Recall this post about using del.icio.us to spread your meme that Steve Rubel was so kind to just pick up and publicize about a month ago. Well, Steve has become a practitioner. He is asking people to indicate their desire to have him link to their blogs by posting the link under the del.icio.us tag “micropersuasion”.
Yet another IASummit find; Carnegie Mellon where I got my Ph.D. is at it again. A CMU spin-off, Maya is trying to create an information commons. The idea is that this would be a repository where people could put appropriately licensed information (practically speaking, creative commons licensed information) for access.
Why isn't this just another wikipedia you might ask? Well, if you think about wikipedia (an increasingly group-effort encyclopedia on the web), you realize that it uses one method of social aggregation for all of its outputs. Essentially, in wikipedia, people have to agree with what you write. Otherwise, you will find it edited or deleted outright. Basically, your contribution will disappear. As Danah Boyd points out, there is no firm attribution and, in some sense as a result, no permanence in wikipedia.
First, I have to get this off my chest, IBM's user experience group is going to be experimenting with folksonomy in parts of IBM's intranet. It's very exciting because they are going to be pursuing folksonomy as user data, an approach that just seems to make so much sense for a corporate environment.
This news flash comes from a fascinating talk I attended at the IA Summit today on the use of taxonomy in IBM's intranet. The scale of this intranet is remarkable. It serves 315,000 IBM employees worldwide in multiple languages with personalization by business role and interest among other facets. Even more remarkably, they have used a controlled taxonomy, one version of which contains 3700 nodes, to organize the information in this intranet.
To understand why IBM might consider investigating folksonomy, you need to understand the role of taxonomy in their intranet and how that role is affected by the scale of their operation. My conversation with the IBM folks after the talk was the one of the most fascinating and revealing I have ever had in this regard. I was impressed by the group and their dauntless pursuit of solutions, and I thought it might be worthwhile to spend the rest of this post giving them some free advice on how they might use folksonomy. It will be interesting to hear what they actually do.
Did Paris Hilton keep metadata in her cracked T-Mobile Sidekick? It does appear from reports that she labeled her address data with nicknames and tags. Inasmuch as these could be used to infer something about the data being stored: "friend", "business", etc., then she kept metadata.
Today, at the Ann Arbor ITZone, I gave a talk on the business value of interacting in blogs. It pulled on some recent business examples as well as some survey work that I have done that I will report more fully in a later post. Basically, the talk gives a quick overview of blogs and then gets into the reinforcing feedback loop that interaction engenders. I give some recommendations for how to make this work. I am making this post to distribute the slides and invite discussion.
[Update: I think you have to be using acrobat 6 or higher to view these pdf slides. See the reader comment. Drop a comment if the slides worked for you too please. Bud]
You might think that the new trend toward highly targeted micro-content optimized toward search engines would run counter to design. If you think that, you're only getting half the equation. Once you get people to your site, you want them to return and engage in business transactions (either online or off). As noted by Greg Edwards, visual design can play a big role in directing people's attention to the messages that will get them to return and convert.
Folksonomy can be thought of as a free form survey where users are asked to tag (classify) web pages (and other information objects) using one or more one word descriptors. An easy example is flickr where people do this all the time with pictures. Another is del.icio.us where people do this with bookmarks. You can use the tags to later recall everything that you gave that tag. See a picture of a baby and tag it as “cute” and “baby”. See a picture of a pretty girl and tag it as “cute” and “girl”. Later, go back and retrieve everything you tagged as “cute”, and you'll get the picture of the baby and the girl.
It's clear to anyone with a marketing or business background that this type of activity could be useful for both market research and market action as Steve Rubel initially suggested over a month ago. However, folksonomy seems to be viewed in the main as a classification tool for individuals or cohesive groups. This view of folkosonomy is currently shaping the types of things that are easily possible with folksonomy tools and impeding the richer uses of folksonomic data that would be desired by marketers or any applied data analyst and could even be of use those wanting to use folksonomy for retrieval. In this post, I'll lay out the “data analytic” view of folksonomic data. I'll then suggest a few changes to how current tools such as del.icio.us and flickr let you access the already collected data that could dramatically increase the data's usefulness both for applied data analysts and those focused on retrieval.
Speaking to Fredrik Wacka (CorporateBloggingBlog: Crisis Blogs - Plan Them Well), Oliver S. Schmidt, Managing Partner of C4CS, a crisis management firm, observes:
If done correctly, corporate blogging in a crisis can significantly enhance communication with external and internal stakeholders.
As I noted yesterday, this quote confirms the value of handling negative interactions directly on your blog, something many would consider a cost.
In Social Software: Stuff that gets you laid... Clay Shirky reiterates JWZ's suggestion:
If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
The theme of the piece really is that social software by its very nature upends many traditional top-down organizational forms. Ed Vielmetti and I have been having a discussion around a similar theme in the comments section of a post I made a couple of days ago, and Scott Moore and I have had similar interaction regarding a large, institution-based social/educational software attempt. To me, the more provocative question is: “Can you sell social software to the organization it replaces?”
I was just over reading a post on Lou Rosenfeld's blog about his continuing skepticism over using folksonomies as a basis for retrieving documents from corporate archives. A simple example of a folksonomy would be a bunch of people coming up with one word labels for a New York Times article (e.g., “rant”, “insight”). The folksonomy, or folk taxonomy, classification of the article is the aggregation of all of those labels. Lou is concerned that using such a system to archive important corporate information would lead to chaos. It would seem there should be only one well-defined label or set of labels for the article.
However, anyone who has spent any time in a large corporation knows that corporations are composed of silos that do not talk to each other. They don't have a shared vocabulary to begin with even when talking about the same things. Believe it or not, I think folksonomies provide one of the keys to breaking these silos.
Many-to-Many: From Personalization to Socialization:
Replace the word information with relationship, and you get how people want to use the net, with other people. What is shared through filters is very different from a blogger saying, “hey, my group of readers would be interested in this,” or “Doc makes a fine point, but when you consider what Jon says it really changes things,” or “everybody I know is talking about this.” When my network socializes information for me as a natural byproduct of interaction, while respecting my privacy (an important aspect of keeping things personal), I discover relationships that make my life convenient and empowered.
It's not entirely clear to me that people want to use the net for relationships. They want to use it as a medium for communication and information search. Relationships are an overlay on top of that. If you give people the means to easily communicate and find information, they will form relationships.
Steve Rubel has announced that his firm CooperKatz is going to start a blogging PR practice called Micro Persuasion. Steve Rubel knows the particulars of blogging very well and hopes to make a splash in a growing list of PR/Marketing firms entering this arena (e.g., the highly specialized PR/SEO firm Expansion+, as well as the better known MWW Group and Bacon's, a clipping service). The bulk of the effort at all of these firms is “listening”. What's that? It's basically tracking your firm's meme (core business concept; brand) in the blogosphere (the blogging community at large). What do these firms need to do to give you some bang for your buck?
I had a chat with Andy Seidl of MyST Technology Partners today. Andy has a web service called blogsite. This is a package deal for marketers that allows them to tap into syndicated searches and blog content, blog themselves, and syndicate their own content. Further, Andy provides read-outs on technical quality (broken links, etc.) and whether you are blogging frequently enough. All of the syndication features are available for the do-it-yourselfer in various web services such as technorati, pubsub, feedster, and findory. They can be tied together using feedreaders and blog posting software. A lot of work for the neophyte. Further, neophytes have a hard time maintaining blog frequency.
The nearest competitor I can find to this type of service is the new sponsored content blogging service recently announced by Paul Short. He wants to blog for marketers to the tune of $20–25K per month. Is this a blogging replay of “Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel” (the children's classic of man vs. machine)?
I had a conversation with Lou Rosenfeld yesterday, author of a post about folksonomy (definition) that produced a lot of controversy last month. In that post, Lou basically held that folksonomy might serve as a good basis for more formal classification systems done by professionals. He was basically making an argument for the value of human editorial input in electronically aggregated archives and classification systems. Others (e.g., MacManus, Udell, Rubel), myself included, have viewed folksonomies as means of tracking the extent to which a given meme (pivotal idea) has penetrated the marketplace and even who it has penetrated with. No editors needed or perhaps even desired. The interesting question from this latter perspective is how one spreads his or her meme. I suspect that folks taking Lou's perspective (e.g., Liz Lawley) might want to edit some of these efforts out, or maybe not.
In figuring out how to spread your meme, there seem to be two venues that count: del.icio.us and technorati. They are the ones that make their folksonomic classifications publicly available and consumable. They represent two very different approaches.
Ben Hyde looks at four popular bookmarks at del.icio.us and plots how many times each is tagged with the same word. E.g, BoingBoing is tagged as “blog” 200 times and as “news” 90 times. The curve is that of a classic power law: The most frequently used tags are used waaaay more frequently than lesser-used tags.
Ben stresses that four bookmarks don’t constitute a significant sample, but wouldn’t we expect a folksonomy to assume the shape of a power law distribution?
If you think of tags as representing memes (pivotal ideas we have all agreed on) and URLs as items to be understood within that system of memes, this result is not surprising at all. Folksonomies (see here for a definition) just reflect the group consensus on how things should be classified. With things that are well understood within a group, that consensus tends to be pretty solid.
I think the interesting implications come in thinking how you should act based on this result. If you are trying to get a new idea accepted (say you are a marketer) then you should not be too discouraged if your new meme is fairing poorly initially. The question would be trend in uptake. You would also want to see how adoption was going within potentially more influential groups.
Josh Porter has asked on his blog what practical value people can get out of folksonomies, and Steve Rubel is trying to come to grips with potential marketing implications. A folksonomy is just the aggregate of tags (labels) people have applied to a resource in a shared archive. The best known example is del.icio.us, a system where people label and store their browser bookmarks on a shared web site. The tags for these bookmarks can be thought of as one-word descriptions of what the bookmark is about. The folksonomy for a particular bookmark is the collection of tags the various people who bookmarked it have applied to it. So people might tag the New York Times book review site as variously “books”, “literature”, “idiotReviews”, etc. That collection of tags is the folksonomy for that site. The word folksonomy can also be used for this same group classification process applied over many sites.
So, what's the practical value of all of this? My cut is that one of the main sources of value is in tracking the spread of memes (e.g., pivotal ideas, advertising slogans) that can be summarized in a word or short slogan. Are people picking up on a particular way of viewing the world, perhaps one that you espouse?
I recently had an email exchange with Lou Rosenfeld who started a whole controversy almost by accident about something called folksonomies. There are many definitions of what folksonomies are (this, this and this for example). Simply stated, a folksonomy is an ad hoc classification system for archival material developed on the fly by users as they enter it. One clear example is a web service called del.icio.us where people store personal web bookmarks online. Del.icio.us implements the idea of folksonomy by allowing users individually to tag each bookmark with a word or series of words that describe it. In aggregate, all of these user tags form a sort of folk taxonomy of the web sites stored, albeit a different taxonomy for each individual user. So, what's the point?
In counseling Career Consulting Physicians, I'm going to depart a bit from the gentle approach to community creation which goes something like this:
These are not bad points and in fact are a great way to start posting, but I think there is a Step 0, “Become a power consumer of syndicated content”. Well, why?
I had breakfast with Scott Moore, director of the undergraduate business program at Michigan's Ross School of Business. He's wondering how he might use social software (blogs, wikis, etc.) to enhance a class of 1000 students that he will run in a year. He was speaking to me because of my experience creating the “BIT320 Distributed Learning Blogosphere” where we had a quite successful classroom experience enhanced by an active blogging community. Put on the spot like this, I managed to come up with three keys to success that I think are worth sharing. They all have to do with fostering online interactivity and should work across many different types of social software.
I read an interesting post by Steve Rubel who was attending the Blog Business Summit over the past couple of days. He was reporting on a presentation about using blogs for emergency PR (his profession). Reading the post, I wondered what it really had to do with blogs. It seemed to me that he was really just talking about a web communications channel, of which blogging is one example. So, what's so special about blogging?
