Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
No Comment!
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/07/2012 - 20:08Last week, Dave Lucas wrote a blog post entitled Blog Comments: 7 Scenarios. It explored different reasons people leave comments and whether or not you can really tell anything about a blog by its comments. Dave dropped me an email asking for my thoughts on his blog post, and I was going to add it in a comment when I had time.
However, I've been pretty busy over the past week, and really haven't been interacting much online. I think Dave's description of common motivations for adding comments are pretty accurate, even if they are a tad cynical. While I don't participate in comments on my blog as much as I would like, I appreciate comments as a chance to hear different people's viewpoints and discuss them; pretty close to the 'comments as forum' that Dave describes.
Yet his final thought, "Comments do not make or break any blog or website" is pretty much on the mark.
I thought about this again today as the I read a post in the New Haven Independent, Time Out!, about how they are taking a sabbatical from publishing comments. It seems as if some of the trolls that have been posting obnoxious comments on other news sites have found their way to the New Haven Independent.
While there wasn't a place to comment about it on the New Haven Independent, the link to the post on the Independent's Facebook page drew quite a few comments, including close to a dozen from one person, illustrating why comments needed to be closed. He claimed that is rationale was to show that the comments would occur elsewhere, no matter what, which is true.
However, Facebook does give individuals the ability to block offensive users, so I blocked the person.
Yes, comments will take place other places. But it may be best to let them occur elsewhere on sites that have better tools for blocking spam and obnoxious users, and on sites where full time community managers can keep things on track, allowing reporters, or bloggers to do what they do best.
Why #SOPA Might not be so bad: The Law of Unintended Consequences.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/19/2012 - 18:55Yesterday, many websites, including this one, went black to protest the Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA. Today, I want to look at it from a different perspective, Why #SOPA Might not be so bad: The Law of Unintended Consequences.
One idea that had had been part of SOPA was DNS blocking. The idea being that if some site was violating copyright law, law enforcement officials could get the names block from DNS. Presumably, this would have been done through the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the registrars it accredits.
ICANN is a $60 million business headquartered in California. There have been lots of issues about how it is governed and whether it should be turned over to U.N. control.
One of the things about the Internet is that it was built to adapt to, and route around things that damage it. The DNS provision of SOPA would have encourage more people to find ways of bypassing ICANN. One alternative to ICANN is the OpenNIC project. It is actually pretty easy to change your computer to use OpenNIC.
To the extent the SOPA or related bills would block ports or IP addresses, projects like TOR could help people get around these blocks. TOR has been used when repressive regimes try to block Internet access. If the U.S. joined the community of repressive regimes trying to block Internet access, it would encourage greater innovation in the TOR project and related projects. Such efforts might also encourage people to start adopting IPv6 as another way of getting around blocking.
Then, there are the financial aspects. Blocking people from doing financial transactions with U.S. financial institutions won't stop people from doing financial transactions, it would only cause them to find new ways of doing them. For my friends that want a return to the gold standard, it might encourage people to move towards more forms on online, virtual gold.
The problem with so many of these systems ends up being how trust worthy they are. Can we trust OpenNIC or online gold traders? If the U.S. Government implements draconian measures to protect a small set of large corporations, more people may find they can trust others more than they can trust the U.S., and that might even lead towards the development of better trust models.
Ultimately, Congress' responsibility is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". SOPA and related anti-privacy acts may end up doing that through the law of unintended consequences, not by making sure that authors and inventors get paid, but by encouraging inventors to find ways of bypassing draconian laws.
Nimble, a week later
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/12/2012 - 20:42I have been using Nimble regularly for the past week. The personal version is free, which makes it well worth the price. I've received messages from Nimble's Community Manager and their Director. I'm always impressed when a community director responds to my tweets, blog posts, or other content. The message from their director was via LinkedIn and I suspect may have been automated. Nonetheless, they are doing a good job of managing online relationships and since they make a social contact relationship management system, that's a good sign.
It took a little while to get going smoothly. They had various messages about upgrading their infrastructure, which may have been part of the issue. Once things started more smoothly, the email started flowing in. Even if you don't want a CRM, it is worth it simply as a great IMAP client.
One of the issues that I run into with being online, all over the place, is that the best way to contact me has frequently changed depending on improvements in one system or another, and often important messages have gone unnoticed for extended periods. With Nimble, I can tell people that Gmail, my orient-lodge address, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are all good ways of contacting me, and I can see the emails all mixed together.
All of that said, I really haven't used it in a particularly CRM sort of way, but I don't really have a lot of needs that way, personally. It will be interesting to see if as I get more data into the CRM, my experiences and usage will change.
If you've tried Nimble, let me know your thoughts? What has worked well and what hasn't for you? Are there things you've done with it that have made it more interesting or changed the way you do business?
#RLToo
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/10/2012 - 20:43Yesterday, I heard from a friend about a talk given in Canada about "reality". An online video provided me the opportunity to listen to the talk as well. Later, I told some friends about this, and got into a few different discussions about the talk.
The key point of the talk is that reality is reality, whether or not it is mediated via internet communications technology. I really am sitting on a couch writing about the talk and others really will read this blog post about the talk, or at least I hope they will.
The starting point was to encourage people to stop talking about "in real life" as if our lives when we are communicating via the internet isn't real. For many, this may be a new idea, but it is one that I often spoke about in text based "virtual worlds" over a decade ago, and it was good to see this discussion go a bit more mainstream.
And, the discussion has continued, some of it as I spoke with friends face to face (a phrase I like much better than "in real life"), and some of it as I spoke with friends over Facebook. I haven't spoken with anyone about it over the telephone, but I think it is useful to think about talking with people over Facebook as being very similar to talking with people over the telephone. In both cases, what we are saying is converted into electrical signals which get converted back to the message at some other location.
In the talk, @awsamuels talks about understanding that just as you are a real person, communicating online, so are the people you are communicating with. She suggests finding pictures of the people you are communicating with online, and having those pictures up on our screen as you write. This will make you more empathetic.
This presents a problem for bloggers. I don't know who I am writing for. There are a few tools that I like to use which help me do this. On my sidebar, you will see a Google Friend Connect widget. It has images for 347 (at present) of the people who have joined this blog. It also shows images of those that have recently visited it. I've used tools like this for a long time. MyBlogLog was one of the first that I used, and is no more. BlogCatalog is supposed to show recent visitors, but hasn't updated over the past four months, so I'll probably take down their widget. TwitterRemote provides similar functionality, as well as the ability for people to tweet when they visit the site and BlogFrog is still providing information about recent visitors.
Like Google Friend Connect, there is also the NetworkedBlogs widget which shows people who have followed the blog, mostly through Facebook, and there is another widget showing who has interacted with the blog via Facebook.
All of these are tools to help make the real experiences online more meaningful and I hope that if you visit my blog, you'll somehow let me know. Join the blog with Google Friend Connect. Follow the blog on NetworkedBlogs. Login with TwitterRemote. Or simply leave a comment.
Help me know that my readers are real.
The Nimble Triberr on Empire Avenue
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/05/2012 - 21:13Recently, Chris Voss posted a mission on Empire Avenue encouraging people to check out his blog post about Triberr. I had read about Triberr a while ago, and at the time, it didn't sound like a good fit. However, a recent article from the folks at Ragan Communications caused me to think again. So, I watched Chris' video, and contacted him for an invite. I am now part of his tribe on Triberr.
Triberr seems like an interesting platform, especially now that the issues that Mark Schaefer talked about in his Ragan article have been addressed. I've spent a little time getting to know it, and I may use it, in part as a new style blog reader. However, it does have one major flaw, in my mind, which I hope they will address in a future upgrade.
The way Triberr works, is that you add your RSS feed to your account, and it shares it with everyone in each of your tribes. The problem is, that I write about quite an eclectic collection of topics and the tribes I'm interested in are quite eclectic. I use Drupal for my content management system, and I can give people RSS feeds based on my topics. I do the same thing with a Wordpress blog I run at work. I would really like to be able to add the RSS feed of specific topics to specific tribes. That is, Triberr should link RSS feeds to specific tribes that a user is in, instead of to all the tribes.
It may be that there is some way to do that, but I haven't found it yet.
In Chris' post, he warned about people spamming Triberr and currently, I'm scanning the posts in Chris' tribe to see which ones I really want to send out to my Twitter feed. There have been a few interesting posts and a few people have tweeted about my posts. All in all, it seems pretty good.
I have been reading each post before I tweet them and have found some interesting posts. In particular, Chris has another post about a social media customer relationship management system called Nimble. As I listened to Chris' video, I thought, this is exactly what I've been writing about and looking for for quite a while.
Fortunately, there is a free trial, so I've started using it. I'm still getting used to it, so I imagine there is a lot I'm missing, but so far, I'm really impressed. I look forward to playing with it a lot more.
However, before I do that, I figure I should get today's blog post up.
