Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
#Whuffie, News and Blogs
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/21/2009 - 17:21Last week, I received a copy of Tara Hunt’s new book The Whuffie Factor. By traditional marketing standards, it is everything I detest. It has an annoyingly cute and trendy title. It is about a subject I think I already know a lot about.
Too make things worse, the first paragraph inside the fly cover starts off “The book that catches the crest of Web 2.0 and shows how any business can harness its power …” If I were browsing books at a bookstore, that would probably be enough for me to put the book right back on the shelf, assuming I would have taken it off the shelf in the first place.
However, Tara Hunt sent a message out on Twitter asking for people to review the book, and because Tara has incredible whuffie and knows how to use it, I agreed to review the book and I’m glad I did.
So, let’s start off by talking about what ‘whuffie’ is. Tara writes,
The term “whuffie” was coined by Cory Doctorow, creator of the popular blog Boing Boing, to describe social capital in his futuristic science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Tara goes into detail about how social capital really works online with great examples of companies that have used whuffie effectively, as well as examples of when companies have blown it, severely damaging the whuffie.
She does a great job of explaining all of this in a way that I imagine technological troglodytes could understand and as I read through the book, I thought of all kinds of people that I think should read the book.
One good example is many of the people in the newspaper industry. There are many reasons that the newspaper industry having difficulty. However, the lack of a proper understanding of whuffie and the news industry is a compounding factor. It used to be that the local newspaper was an integral part of the local community. Everyone knew the reporters and the newspaper boys. You could talk to them and they would listen. They had a certain amount of whuffie. Yet as large companies came in trying to maximize ROI and depersonalize everyone involved with the newspapers, newspapers lost whuffie, and with that, are hemorrhaging badly.
Meanwhile, online bloggers engage in discussions and build whuffie. This helps the journalistic bloggers, but it also helps many other bloggers as well. One site that I find very interesting is EntreCard. This is a site that allows bloggers to drop cards on one another as a means of saying, “Hi, I visited your site and I like it.” It is a great way of building whuffie.
On the other hand, the folks running EntreCard appear to do everything in their power to destroy their own whuffie. This results in fairly frequent firestorms where the bloggers with the most whuffie leave, sometimes setting up their own whuffie exchange sites.
You will note that I still have EntreCard on my site, because in spite of the anti-whuffie actions of the folks running EntreCard, it is still useful for me in expanding my own whuffie. However, I now support Adgitize and CMF Ads which is where a lot of EntreCard refugees have fled.
Now, another EntreCarder, Greg Mathews, is considering setting up his own Whuffie Exchange site. So far, he is doing things right. He’s announced what he is planning to do and sought feedback and buy-in from potential users even before he brings up his new site.
So, I hope that some of my friends who are trying to salvage newspaper companies reads Tara’s book. I hope some of the folks working on sites like EntreCard also read the book, and I’m sure that over the coming days, I’ll think of more and more people that really should read Tara’s book.
#followfriday #whuffie
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/17/2009 - 08:18@missrogue @tessa_da_twit @khynes2000 @sheilamc7 @jrj08 @doughardy @tishgrier @chrismessina @kanter
Yesterday, I received my advance copy of @missrogue’s The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business
However, as I was reading it, I could not help but think about friends that should it and I decided to use this as my theme for this week’s #followfriday
@tessa_da_twit is a small business owner and political activist from a neighboring town. We’ve often talked about how to use technology to get the message out and I think she would get a lot out of this book.
@khynes2000 is my wife. She is a community organizer, an avid reader, and generally interested in what I’m interested in. She’ll probably get my copy of the book next.
@sheilamc7 is chair of the Woodbridge Board of Education. She is running for re-election, so if you live in Woodbridge, please get out and vote for Sheila and the whole Democratic slate. She’s one of the people around here that really gets using technology and social capital. I think she would really enjoy and get a lot out of this book.
@jrj08 is another Woodbridge resident and very involved in politics. She has a media background and really gets social media. I just wish she would make a little more time to Twitter.
@doughardy works for the Journal Inquirer. He’s married to @ctnewsjunkie. The two of them should read this book together. I suspect that they both get the message of #whuffie but I also suspect that Doug’s bosses have no idea. I wish Doug could find some way to get the owners of the JI to read and embrace the ideas in this book.
@tishgrier should probably read the book as well, not because she would learn anything from it. Indeed, @tishgrier is the person who probably gets #whuffie better than anyone else in I know in Western Mass. She is a great writer, would probably have her long list of things she thinks @missrogue should have focused on instead. I imagine @tishgrier and I would have a great discussion about the book.
I believe I first met @missrogue through @chrismessina. I met @chrismessina through Deanspace. He’s mentioned in the book, as is @kanter who is listed as a great example of using #whuffie to promote nonprofits.
I suspect that as I continue to read the book, I’ll think of other people that should read it or see the names of other friends in the book. When, I’m done, I write a more complete review, which is already taking shape in my mind.
Happy Social Media Easter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/12/2009 - 20:01“The Lord is risen!” We shouted this as a greeting to friends at church this morning. “The Lord is risen indeed, Hallelujah!” It was a great sermon, bringing the resurrection from two thousand years ago into the modern context. It hit the core issues of the Gospel, that all Christ has been victorious over death, and all that drags us down. If the Resurrected Christ could conquer death, He can certainly conquer our small issues, worries about health or finances, and so on.
There was also a good discussion about God’s love as a source of renewable energy. God constantly showers us with His love. We can chose to rely on old examples of God’s love, sort of like how we’ve relied on oil, or we can rely on the love of God gives to us each day and that we have an opportunity to reflect to the people around us.
I pray that each of you experience God’s love, however you understand it, and pass that on to those around you.
For us, much of God’s love is reflected in simple family activities, like coloring eggs, or an Easter Egg hunt. We colored eggs on Saturday and broadcast it on Ustream. During the egg coloring, various friends connected and chatted with us.
I also have some good pictures of the events of the day in my Easter 2009 photo set.
Ning, Elgg, Twitter, Flickr, etc
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/11/2009 - 11:12One of the mailing lists I’m on has gotten into several interesting discussions about Ning, Elgg, Twitter, Flickr and related sites. I've been busy working away on other things and quietly listening to the discussion in the background. However, I have had a little time to digest things and wanted to share my thoughts. I wrote this initially as a response to the list and have edited it to be a blog post here.
Ning: One discussion was about changes to the Ning Terms of Service that many people found offensive. As best as I can tell Ning is just as evil as Yahoo, Google, Facebook, MySpace and the rest of them. When you are essentially giving your content to someone else for their cost of providing the service, it seems to be up to the terms of service they provide about what they will do with it, and pretty much all of them are in it for a profit. It makes sense to push back at times, and this might be a time to push back at Ning, but I'm not a big Ning user, so I'm not getting active in that cause.
Elgg: Someone on the list mentioned Elgg as an open source competitor to Ning. I forgot who mentioned it, but to whomever did, thank you. I've now installed Elgg on my machine. It was a fairly simple install, at least for someone who has a VPS account and experience setting up other open source packages.
Elgg is current at version 1.5 and it acts like it. The parts that work, work very nicely and cleanly. I really like the parts that work. Other parts that they talk about that I'm interested in exploring just don't seem to be there. The OpenID client portion seems to work, but doesn't have the ability, as far as I can see, to add OpenID to an existing user. I couldn't find any way of getting FOAF to work, and it looks like it may take a while to figure out how best to change customize a theme.
It also has it's own microblogging and its connectivity to Twitter. It is pulling in Twitter feeds nicely but I haven't been able to get it to send feeds out yet.
The support community looks fairly sparse as of yet but as more people start experimenting with Elgg I expect to see the community grow.
All of that said, it looks like a fun tool to play with. Anyone who wants to play with my Elgg setup is free to join at http://elgg.smartcampaigns.com. It is a test site, and may go away abruptly. Feedback is appreciated about Elgg and ways to make the best use of it.
So far, I don't have a need to set up Elgg for any group, but I think it is a good tool to have in the toolkit.
Twitter: Another discussion was about FollowCost. I follow lots of people on Twitter and have lots of followers. I find followcost interesting, but only a very minor factor. Put simply, it gives the sum of the signal and the noise of a person's twitter stream. For some people that can be very high, and it might be because they have a lot of information. For other people it can be fairly low, but they have no useful information.
I do agree with everyone else that talks about the importance of Twitter clients. I end up using a large mix of many Twitter clients. Right now, I use PeopleBrowser as a primary client.
Flickr: Someone asked about Flickr. I use the simple aspects of Flickr a lot and have often recommended it to organizations for these aspects. It is nice to have a place to put your photos that other people will come look at. Beyond that, I use ability to mail pictures to Flickr, so when I take a picture from my cellphone, I send it to a special email address that Flickr sets up. This allows my picture to show up on Flickr right away.
On my cellphone, I can send an email to a list of people, so I send my pictures to Facebook, Flickr, Utterli and Zannel. As an aside, I do the same thing with videos, sending them to blip.tv, facebook, Utterli, Youtube and Zannel.
I also have a special account where I send a picture and text to Flickr. Flickr stores the photo on their site and the sends the picture and text to my blog as a blog post. It provides a great way to blog when you are off at some event. If your group organizes events, I strongly recommend this. You can build buzz about events as they happen.
I have added people as friends on Flickr and joined some Flickr groups, but that isn't really an important part of the discussions I'm part of.
There are a lot of different sites and services that can suck up every minute of your time. On a different list, one person mentioned Retaggr as a way to keep track of all these different sites. I'm http://www.retaggr.com/Page/ahynes1 there. It is a pretty nice site. For another similar, and very nice site, check out DandyID. I'm http://www.dandyid.org/users/ahynes1 there.
These sites can be good at helping people find all your content online and they’re probably worth looking at.
However, the key thing to come back to is, what are you trying to do anyway? How are you using social media to support your mission? For me personally, what I'm trying to do is to know as much as possible about as many different social media tools so I can help others make good use of them. So, I'm on just about every service I can find. Others have very different purposes, raising awareness about a cause, fundraising, etc. Figure out what you want to do, and then look for tools that help you do it.
Social Network Contact Management: Choosing Blogs to Read with BlogCatalog and Graphviz
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 12:48I’m always searching for the best way to find which blogs I should read today. As technology changes, so does the strategy that I use. For example, sometimes I like to check to see which blogs that I’ve subscribed to have new material. Other times, I might hop from one blog to another by following advertisements from EntreCard, CMF Ads, or Adgitize. Sometimes, I might use BlogExplosion to suggest sites I should visit. Or, I might read through the blogs of people that have visited me, as reported by MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog.
Recently, I’ve mostly been following blog advertisements and supplementing it with BlogExplosion recommendations. Yet the recent issues with EntreCard and how they handle advertisements has caused me to change that strategy for the time being. First off, many of the EntreCard ads no long lead to interesting sites, so I’m less interested in following the links. Beyond that, some EntreCard users have called for a strike to protest those changes, and I’ve adjusted my strategy for today accordingly.
With this, I thought I’d dig a little bit deeper into the social network contact management aspect of selecting blogs. I want to build up my readership by visiting sites that have recently visited me.
There are three systems that I currently use to track who has visited me. MyBlogLog is the granddaddy of recent reader lists. They provide a nice API to extract the information and I’ve done some interesting work in the past with MyBlogLog. In addition, they provide lots of information about the services that readers use, so I can go check out the Twitterstreams or Flickr photos of recent readers.
TwitterRemote also provides an interesting tool for tracking recent visitors. The problem with TwitterRemote is that they don’t currently have a nice API. I looked around, and I can fairly easily reverse engineer their widget to get a webpage that I could scrape to be able to process recent Twitter visitors. But that is a lot of work, and they might change the page layout, thereby messing up the page scraping. So, I’ve sent an email to them asking if they will create a TwitterRemote API. It would provide another nice tool.
With that, I decided today to get to know the BlogCatalog API. BlogCatalog has a recent reader list very similar to the MyBlogLog recent reader list. Their API isn’t as rich as the MyBlogLog API, but it is sufficient for some of my simpler tasks I have in mind.
So, I went out and wrote a little routine in PHP. It calls the BlogCatalog API to find out who my recent readers have been. For each recent reader, it then checks to see if they have a blog, and if so, who has been reading their blogs. This could crawl a long time and produce amounts of data so massive that it would be useless.
Instead, I put some limits on the crawling. First, I look at only the six most recent readers for any blog. Then, I look at their readers and their readers readers, and so on. Right now, I’m stopping after I go through sixty readers. Then, I produce a GraphViz chart which shows who has been reading each others blogs.
Also, in order to keep the graph from getting too large, I only show people that are both reading and being read.
Now that I have it working somewhat nicely, I’ve produced the following graph.
The first thing that jumps out at me with this version of the graph is that a lot of people are reading Forced Green, and they have a lot of people reading them, but there isn’t a lot of interaction between the different sites.
On the other side of the graph, you can see some of the community effect with sites like Random Ramblings, Daisy the Curly Cat, I Love/Hate America and The One About… interacting.
Eventually, I hope to gather information from graphs like this and other sources to come up with a nice answer to questions like, who has been reading my blog or responding to me on Twitter, Facebook and the like, that has new content on their blog that I haven’t read recently, or put more simply, whose blog should I read next.
So, how do you decide which blog to read next?
