Spiral Bound

Andrew Grumet has put together an outstanding review with key links and examples for anyone who is struggling to get their minds around what all this fuss about blogging is about. Thanks Gregor for the pointer

Snip

Weblogs are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore for those of us who spend much time reading the Web. Also known by the inscrutable nickname "blogs", weblogs are something of a hard nut to crack. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that a great deal of weblog content today is about weblogs and weblog technology. What are weblogs? What's the big deal? Why should we pay attention? We attempt to answer these questions in the essay that follows.

I rave about the value of my aggregator all the time. It's way past time I make that list of sources available. I've added a link over to the right of all the subscriptions I follow in Radio. It's a much more dynamic list than my blogroll, which I'm coming to think of as a passing and obsolete concept. I've set it up so that changes to the subscription list will flow here once a day.

These are the bright minds that contribute to my evolving view of this world we live and work in.

Downloadable Music Floodgates Opening

"Reports say EMI, one of the world's largest music companies, is about to open its entire catalog for downloading to subscribers of wippit.com. Apple's newly Windlows-friendly iTunes system will reportedly add 50,000 new songs next week, and Napster's new legit download service launches on Wednesday." [Lost Remote]

Wow, these services are popping up like weeds. I still say they need to start differentiating themselves more, with lyrics, printable CD covers, listener reviews, and the like. I'm really surprised Apple hasn't figured this out yet, because they already have such a rabid, built-in community.

Wippit's main page touts "unlimited MP3 downloads for $49 a year (or $6.50 a month) plus 20 ringtones and a promise of no spyware or adware. That's a discounted price for the moment, as the site says the cost is normally $80 per year. It's also different from the major label services because it's a P2P engine. right now they have 60,000 titles from 96 record labels, so maybe they have some indie stuff that the others don't.

I don't see any mention of DRM or copyright protection in a quick skim of the site. Maybe I'll play around with it this weekend and see. But as I noted at the A/V panel this week, these online music services are the future, and librarians should start to track how they work, if only to understand what our patrons will be using in a few years.

The latest Pew Internet & American Life report shows that the recent explosion of email spam is beginning to take its toll on the Internet world.

A nationwide survey shows that 25% of AmericaÂ’s email users say they are using email less because of spam. Within that group, most say that spam has reduced their overall use of email in a big way.

Another turn on Learning: communities vs. courses - 1, 2, 3: George Siemens summarises the discussion in Learning Ecology, Communities, and Networks. It's a great overview (and it's very good to have someone rethinking and summarising bits of distributed ideas), but I'm thinking on implementation challenges.

I wouldn't come back to my concerns that some educational goals may not work with community dynamics, this time it's about learners themselves, as "The simple fact of membership in one or seventeen networks specifies little about content of knowledge and nothing about degree of mastery" (Spike Hall). This point links the discussion about learning in a community with another stream on learning with weblogs.

Spike Hall notes that introducing weblogs as a learning tool is not about the technology, but about "passing over the deuterolearning (aka meta-learning and learning-to-learn) torch" and lack of meta-learning skills of students. He also adds that we are likely to overlook it:

I thought I might mention this because those already deep into a) weblogging / journaling, or b)research and development, as two examples, are already deep into self-directed growth and may take their own skill for granted. This taking-for-granted sets up a certain blindness to the total set of attitudes and skills that go into high levels of active and self-directed learning. And this blindness, in turn, can render the teacher/developer incapable of isolating and teaching the subskills and attitudes that are involved.

Sebastian Fiedler continues:

Though I certainly see the potential of personal Webpublishing to be turned into "a major self-uplift machine" (actually a good part of my paper for BlogTalk 2003 was trying to examine the possibility to conceptualize personal Webpublshing as a powerful tool for self-organized learning), I keep bumping into missing "subskills and attitudes" of adult learners whenever I try to integrate personal Webpublishing practices into formal course settings.

Sebastian points that it's difficult to change existing learning habits and attitudes of adults and that there is a variety of ethical questions around it. At the end his asks:

What can we really do to promote more self-teaching and self-organized learning?

Can personal Webpublishing practices support a development into this direction?

Or do we need to treat some "attitudes and sub-skills" as explicit pre-requisites for turning personal Webpublishing into a tool for personally meaningul learning?

I would add: Can we decide being a self-organised learner is a good thing for someone who is comfortable learning in other ways? It's quite a paradox: we want learners to be self-directed and this is one small thing we will decide for them... I believe that reflection and meta-learning skills are increasingly important in our days. My questions is: how do we facilitate others going there without forcing them?

Coming back to learning in communities: given the lack of structure and guidance in communities it's personal meta-learning and communication skills that make learning possible. And, as Spike Hall notes, those who have these skills tend to take them for granted and expect that everyone will learn given the opportunity to do so. I don't think so and I don't have ready an efficient and ethical roadmap of developing these skills.

Related: earlier post on Developing reflexivity.

Some hotels, restaurants and airports are offering wireless Internet access -- at no charge -- in the battle to lure customers and deliver ROI.

According to Computerworld (also their special coverage) ' free hotspots pay dividend'.

Notice this quote of a bakery/restaurant chain owner who will offer free Wi-Fi in its bakeries : "What is the ROI on a bathroom?" "the day of pay restrooms in restaurants has long since passed"

via Blue Arnaud

Considering Wi-Fi as a feature Arnaud would add something on free services here and regard it as packaged with non-free services

"Knowing a Social Security number and a mother's maiden name is pretty much all it takes to loot a U.S. bank account, often without even knowing the number of that account. Yet the real question ought not to be, "Does this person know the right identifying information?" but, "Is this person really who they say they are?" ...

"What works against us is that we have a million years of societal and biological evolution based on the concept of small tribal groups, yet only a few centuries of urban life and less than two centuries of mass transit. One characteristic of tribes is that the members know each other. So when the lady at the bank recognizes you -- really recognizes you -- it decreases to almost zero percent the likelihood that somebody can come in the bank claiming to be you and steal all your money. This isn't some clever security design, but an artifact of tribal life. You don't resent the lady at the bank for knowing you. You are flattered that she does. You don't fear that because she knows you that you are more likely to be a crime victim. Just the opposite -- we feel safer because we are known. ...

"My system is based on a registry of friends because we all participate in virtual tribes that are geographically dispersed. Every person who wants to have credit, to make a big purchase, or to board a 747 has to have a list of 10 friends -- people who can vouch for their identity and know how to test it if needed. That takes us out of the realm of the mother's maiden name, replacing it with, "What was the nickname I called you in the fourth grade?"

I am Bob, and these are my 10 friends.

They don't even have to be friends -- just people who know you. You don't have to tell them they are on your list and you can change your list as often as you like.

Imagine an aerial view of this network of friends. It is so large it could only be analyzed by a big honking computer, but there is a great deal to be learned from that analysis. People could disappear and be noticed, perhaps to be found. Deadbeat dads could be tracked, as could sexual predators. Epidemics would ripple across the surface of the model, perhaps leading to targeted anticipatory preventive care, saving lives. Guys who buy enough fertilizer to blow up a Federal office building would stand out.

Now before you can say the words "Big Brother," remember that YOU choose your list of friends so they can be people from work, from school, from the tennis club, but perhaps not from your Communist cell or from your swingers club. You can keep private what you want to keep private because the big picture is what matters here.

The system would be tied together by phone, e-mail, and Internet messaging. Ultimately, it would come to function like a much larger version of eBay's feedback system which would result in subtle pressure toward more civil behavior -- something we don't have in any practical sense today.

Maybe this system wouldn't work. You tell me. But I know that what we have right now isn't working, and I am not sure it can be made to work. The only answer that makes sense to me is to hearken back to a simpler time when these crimes just didn't' happen. And it is only through clever application of technology that this can be done.
But when we try to scale this inherent security up to urban, regional, national, and international levels, it doesn't work. We either have to accept less security or impose an artificial system intended to emulate that lady at the bank. This emulation is at the heart of every security system everywhere, yet we don't think of it in these terms."

I was noodling around trying to organize "the space" in my head and put this picture together. The x axis is the "context". IE low context is stuff like CD's and books which don't change, are worth approximately the same amount to most people and don't have much timing or personal context. The far right is very personal, very timing sensitive, high context information such as information about your current "state". Then there is everything in between. The top layer is the type of content sorted by how much context they involve. The next layer is how they are aggregated and syndicated. Below that are substrates that are currently segmented vertically, but could be unified horizontally with open standards. Anyway, just a first path. Thoughts and feedback appreciated.

UPDATE: Changed color to red and edited the examples to be brand agnostic.

Danah Boyd asks a few questions that Stuart Henshall answers with verve. My own answers to Danah... 

Danah: I’d really like to understand the excitement of social software enthusiasts. What is it about Skype that motivates you?

1. Skype engages people who believe their ears more than their eyes. Give Skype to someone in the music business. Or to a dyslexic or someone with ADD. Or to someone who listens to sports or talk radio. This is their linear, visually simple medium. Things should fit people.
2. My Skype addressbook is local. It's unmediated by a third party (unlike my AOL buddy list) and lives on the edge of the cloud, not on a server. This means my addressbook is private. It also means that software/network extensions to my addressbook can scale well and be diverse. My contacts are mine.
3. I can call anonymously. Just log out as me, log in as Mary Had A Little Lamb, and call someone. Then log out and never use that ID again. Unless they recognize my voice, I'm safe. Anonymity (or at least pseudonymity) is vital in larger communities. This assures that 911 calls are made. That whistleblowers reveal secrets. That journalists get tips. Anonymity enables individuality and civility. 
4. Skype recognizes the social importance of privacy. Not only is my data kept locally, I control my profile, I control who can see when I'm available, and my conversations are encrypted from my headset to yours. IM, especially at work, is often monitored; phone calls less so. Skype creates a more trusted room in which to talk. Privacy leads to stronger community.
5. Skype moments are exposed by the software. Those user moments are your impulses to use yellow pages, white pages, caller-ID, call waiting, and file sharing. Those moments can be perceived and aided by programmers. So you will shortly be able to leverage your existing online social networks to find a relevant stranger to call, to populate your address book, to see a thorough profile of the stranger calling you (including whom you know in common), to have a side chat explaining the purpose of the call, perhaps to charge the caller for your time, or to securely share that song you're teaching them to sing over the phone. Skype informs phone calls with everything we've learned about software and the web.
6. Skype makes calls more like SMS and IM and less like One Ringy-Dingy, Two Ringy-Dingy. Multimodal, contextual, and soon with time shifting.   

In short, Skype promises to bring everything I love about my TiVo to my phone.  

Danah: Do you think that its popularity will be limited to specific communities?

No, but some communities will come first.

• Early adopters will be computer users. Millions of us.
• As people buy smarter phones and POTS-to-Skypenet gateways arise, everyone who has a mobile will use Skype-powered services.

If Skype was just the conversation triggered by your connection in your online community, that would be nice.

But it's more.

Skype's address book and phone logs can inform community. How about if people I Skype show up higher in my friends list, or get promoted from my fans list? What if recent frequent callers in my work-related address book show up in my intranet blog's Skyperoll?

I'll always take tacit data from user behavior over expressed content when understanding social networks. For the first time, my telephony behavior becomes useful as a sociocultural informant.

Danah: My skepticism increased dramatically when i read that Skype thinks it’s better than IM clients "Because it works!" What on earth does that mean?

It works as promised. Ummm, that's novel. Exceptional, even. Especially considering that it works over dialup, with encryption, on pretty average machines. Lots of geek cred under the hood to instantly replace hundreds of billions of dollars in telephony infrastructure with a 3 minute download, a headset, and an Internet connection.

From an industrial engineering and user experience view, they slashed the distance from thinking about calling someone to talking with that person. Skype cuts the number of tasks, clicks, typing, memorization and thinking that lead to the call. If both parties have Skype, you can even Skype me in one click.

Skype also helps with discovery. Can you imagine looking for books if Amazon only took ISBN codes? Skype's lookup works well when the other party is online. And this will only get better.

About IM, when you're talking to someone, Skype lets you IM them using its own chat client. A personal backchannel, great for passing urls back and forth.   

Assuming you're running Windows, please try it. Get the feel for it. Skype me or look up someone in a far away city and just ring a stranger to say "hello, how's the weather?".

Designers often think that if you build the product, the users will come automagically and often surprised when their product is not successful. In most design processes, the product evangelist is brought in at the final stage, who promotes the product and develops evangelistic customer base. Evangelists are needed during the design phase to put in killer features and test their "wow factor". Currently, the features the alpha users like are become more important to the success of the product. Some of the alpha users, if impressed, may turn into a free evangelist for the product. Advertising, as we know is very important for the product to get known in the targeted community. But users with the ability to communicate with friends are getting more control over the fate of a product than ever before.

Bad movies are not getting their guaranteed first week earnings because word travels fast. The Hulk, Charlie's Angels failed to achieve expected earnings in the first week because of cellphone messaging!!! The matrix revolutions is now being released simultaneously all over the world. 6 a.m. in Los Angeles, 9 a.m. in New York, 2 p.m. in London, 5 p.m. in Moscow, 7:30pm Bombay and 11 p.m. in Tokyo. Cell phones, weblogs, IM, email, online groups, review sites help the words travel fast. You can't stop people from talking like Google Adsense is trying to do, but you can certainly give good things to the user to talk about.

Products need the 'wow factor' which gets them on a weblog post or makes the user recommend it to friends. Skype got into lots of blog posts and had one killer feature "better voice quality", which got 60,000 downloads in the first week. The need to evangelize skype to use it, also helped the products success. Also, blogs like Unbound spiral kept the meme alive and kept pumping new information about the product.

The first step to many persuasive techniques is to get the users attention. But, the promise made should also be satisfied after grabbing the attention. After all, it's the worth of the product that ultimately matters to the user. Lokilabs also talks about the Surprise Explain Reward principle and showing the user that Cost of learning + Risks = Benefits.

• Weblog Kitchen -Weblog Books, Who's Who
• Blogresearch - group blog.
• Blogonblog
• Kairosnews
• PhDweblogs
• EduBlogging Network

• Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker's Blogging Thoughts
  
• My paper at the 3rd International Workshop on (Virtual) Community Informatics
• My Ph.D. thesis
• Nurul's thesis (intro, thesis blog)
• The BlogTalk papers
• Stephanie Nilsson: A Brief Overview of the Linguistic Attributes of the Blogosphere (pdf)
  

Some follow-ups for Perseus weblog study

• Phil Wolff: summary and reasons for abandoned blogs
• Clay Shirky: on below-average abondonment rate of LiveJournal and writing vs. reading focus of analysis (see also comments for more explanations about LiveJournal and use of survey results)
• Oliver Wrede: publishing 'personal' vs. 'professional' life and stopping blogging
• Jim Elve: flaws, explanations of abandoned blogs
• Nick Douglas: a bit on dinamics of switching from hosting to your own sever and community
• Jim McGee: 'This is a perfect application of Sturgeon's Law - "90% of everything is crud." '

Check links to the survey at Blogdex if you want more.