Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Wandering through BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog, and EntreCard
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/01/2008 - 09:54Perhaps the Internet hasn’t really changed things all that much from when I was in high school over thirty years ago. Back then, the thing to do was to go down to Spring Street to hang out and see friends. There were two competing hangouts, Colonial Pizza and Pizza House. Each one attracted specific cliques. There were also places to just hang out on the street and events at the college hang out at.
Instead of hanging out with a specific clique, I would wander from one group to the next. I always felt like a bit of an outsider, an interloper, but was usually accepted, even though I might not have been told all the inner secrets of the cliques I visited.
College was much the same as I would drift from one gathering to another on the weekends. I probably came a bit closer to finding groups that I identified with, yet the pattern was the same. I found myself enjoying the works of Hermann Hesse with themes of the solitary wanderer, and one of my best friends from college often compared our relationship to that of Siddhartha and Govinda.
Some of the discussions of the past week have brought me back to these thoughts as they relate to the Internet, another recurring theme for me. The announcements of the lists of credentialed bloggers for the Democratic National Convention have riled many of my friends. It seems to many of them that felt they were rejected because they were in a clique different than the clique selected to cover the convention. As the wanderer in the group, I suggest that people try to step away from their cliques.
How many people do you know that read just DailyKos, or local progressive political blogs? How many people do you know that read just the right wing equivalents? What about the Mommy bloggers who only read other Mommy blogs? The members of Tribe.net? Salon.com? The search engine optimization folks and the make money quick online folks? The pet bloggers?
It seems like the different cliques from high school and college years ago have replicated themselves in the blogosphere.
Now, if you are a Mommy blogger or a pet blogger whose goal is simply to talk about how your little one is doing and you are happy that your friends and relatives are hearing the stories, then this post is not for you. You have found your place and it is a very good place.
Yet if you are a political blogger or a marketing blogger, I want to toss this out as a challenge to you. What are you doing to expand the circle of people listening to what you have to say?
Part of the power of the Internet is that it enables more of a discussion. How much are you reading what others have written? How are you incorporating this into your own writing? When you use tools like
BlogExplosion is set up nicely for expanding connections. You are randomly taken to different sites and have to stay at the site for at least thirty seconds to receive your credit. While your there, you might as well read the blog post, and maybe interact a little bit with the site. I like visiting sites on BlogExplosion that have EntreCard and MyBlogLog. It provides a double or triple win as I drop my EntreCard and show up in the recent readers list.
When I use MyBlogLog to explore the blogosphere, I normally follow the links of recent readers. It matches my style of wandering and often seems to put me in touch with people that wander in similar ways. I’ve learned a lot from these new friends. Sometimes, I will visit people who have added me as a friend in an effort to keep the friendships active and alive. Other times I may search for people who have been tagged as interested in a specific topic if I want to spend time within a specific set of communities.
My use of EntreCard is similar. Typically, I click on the advertisements from one blog to the next, until I finally reach a blog that I’ve already read. Sometimes I start off from the people that have recently dropped cards on me. I try to visit as many of these people as possible. I also try to visit those who have dropped the most cards on me. Sometimes, I go to the advertising section and check to see that I’ve dropped cards on the most popular. However, if I’ve followed the chains of advertisements, I usually catch these sites anyway. I like to make sure that I visit the site of whomever is advertising on my blog as well.
I’ve gathered lots of EntreCard credits and am just starting to use them for advertising. So far, I haven’t had a lot of luck with my ads. Should I advertise on the hugely popular and hence very expensive sites? Should I advertise on the less popular and less expensive sites? Should I advertise on new sites? I’ll explore different strategies.
The problem with all of these ways of visiting other sites is that it takes time. Do I take time away from Second Life? Do I spend more time in Blogexplosion or EntreCard? How do I balance the time visiting other blogs with writing for my own blog? I try to get at least one post up every day.
Even the blog posts that I write follow the wandering approach. The serious niche bloggers tell me that I have to pick a niche and write just about that niche. Yet being the wanderer that I am, one day I’ll write about politics, another day about Second Life, and then group psychology, technology, marketing, law, family stuff, or anything else that strikes my fancy. It’s not great for building community, but hopefully some of the posts build can build bridges. Perhaps it is part of my own hobo code or other marks to point fellow wanderers in helpful directions.
Well, I guess that’s my comments for this morning. Now, it is time to set off and wander a little bit more.
Twittering the Democratic Rules Committee
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/31/2008 - 10:38The predicted storm has not yet hit today in Woodbridge, CT, but we are hunkering down, and planning on following the Democratic National Rules Committee on social media. Friends are at the meeting and sending messages via Twitter. Others are using Qik to stream videos and uploading pictures to Flickr. It provides a great opportunity to talk a little bit about these new media and why I tend to think blogging may be passé.
Some of this grows out of a discussion on the Blogs United list about the Democratic National Convention credentialing process. Four years ago, I was a blogger at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. It was a frustrating time. There was this desire to live blog the event. “The crowd of delegates are really eating up Barack Obama’s keynote speech…” There was also a desire to write longer, thoughtful posts about what was going on, such as a recounting of a discussion of a veteran that had volunteered to help at the convention because of his deep respect for Sen. Kerry. These are different blogging experiences that perhaps call for different tools.
One of the tools that has emerged since the 2004 Democratic National Convention is the Microblogging rage. Twitter is the most popular, but people also use Pownce, Jaiku, BrightKite and plenty of other services.
Before I go much further with that, I should mention another trend that has emerged since 2004 which is closely linked with Microblogging, and that is life streams, or friend feeds; I’m not sure a standard term for this has emerged. A lot of different sites provide aggregated life streams and some people use feeds to make their microblogs a life stream. So, the lines get blurry.
There are two different aspects of life streams or friend feeds. First, many of us are on many different services. As well as our blogs and microblogs, we are using Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, ma.gnolia, ClipMarks, LastFM, Yelp, and many other services. Numerous tools are emerging to aggregate information from all of these services. The two most popular right now seem to be FriendFeed and LifeStream, however other sites also provide this service as part of their greater offerings and I like to use MyBlogLog for this.
The second aspect of life streams and friend feeds is that we like to see not only the aggregation of all of the stuff we’ve been doing on various services, but we also like to see the feeds of all of our friends intermingled with what we are doing. Most of the services provide this as an option, often as the default.
So, with that, if you want to get your message out, you need to start playing with Microblogs and life streams. Ideally, use something like TwitterFeed to get pointers to your blog posts showing up in Twitter. You need to get all your feeds aggregated in sites like FriendFeed, LifeStream and MyBlogLog. Ideally, the DNCC will use some of these tools as well.
So, what is going on with the Democratic Rules Committee meeting? Andy Carvin did some live streaming of the protest outside using QIK. I sure hope that there are plenty of social media people at the Democratic National Convention using QIK and ustream to send live videos from the convention. I thought it was great seeing Andy’s live, on the street interview with protestors. Andy also was sending messages back and forth with other friends there and posting links to pictures from the protest.
Several other friends are there, and I suspect there are others there that I would like to follow that I haven’t seen. This gets to another site related to Twitter that I really like, Hashtags. If you follow Hashtags on Twitter, their program will follow you and will index any post that begins with a hash mark (#). So, when I was at Computers, Freedom and Privacy, 2008, I posted twitters with #cfp08. I used #cfp08 in the title of my blog posts so they would get picked up by hashtags as well. You can see the messages about #cfp08 here. Unfortunately, this isn’t widely used yet, but it should be. However, it would be great to see messages about the rules committee at something like #dncrules and convention messages posted at #dncc2008
Yeah, there are plenty of new ways of getting the message out. Microblogging, like Twitter and friend feeds are an important new way of getting the message out. I hope people reading this think about how Twitter can work with their blogging and that the DNCC finds ways of dealing with Twitter, FriendFeed, Qik, and other new ways of getting the message out.
Crossing the Chasm without Jumping the Shark
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/24/2008 - 08:06The recent issues around Twitter have led me to ponder how companies can cross the chasm as their product appeal grows from the innovators and early adopters to bring in the early majority without jumping the shark.
There are many different issues to explore here, but given that it is Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend, and I should really be getting on the road for a camping trip, I’ll try to have a brief exploration of the issues here, and then, perhaps, explore them in more detail later on.
To me, the interesting topic to explore is how the growth affects the dynamics of the company, both with the management of the company, and the larger group of stakeholders.
#cfp08 A Human Face and Due Process Online
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/23/2008 - 07:44If I were to summarize the ‘Activism and Education Using Social Networks’ track at Computers, Freedom and Privacy yesterday, I would boil it down to putting a human face on advocacy organizations and seeking due process online. What was most interesting was that during the discussions, I watched these processes happen online.
Eric spoke about the new ACLU Blog, “because freedom can’t blog itself”. He spoke about the difficulties in working out the policies of what could get written by whom for the blog. He noted the contrast between traditional advertising, expensive, glossy, and not reaching the younger generation, and online content. He noted that sites like Facebook, MySpace and Flickr are not all that fancy in their graphical design, yet it is the user generated content and the first person perspective that is so compelling. As he spoke about this, he brought up the ACLU’s Flickr page, which to my surprise, included a picture of a good friend of mine. I quickly posted a link to the Flickr photo on my friend’s wall in Facebook. Ah yes, the power of the personal.
We broke into hands on sessions and I spoke with many different people. A neighbor, who is active in town politics and works for Yale was there and I spent some time talking with her. A friend of one of the conference organizers from Tribe was there and we talked a little bit. I showed a few people Second Life and talked about the role of Second Life in disability rights advocacy.
This led me to a fascinating discussion with Dr. Linda D. Misek-Falkoff from the United Nations and the Center for Cross-Cultural Understanding. She spoke about RatifyNow.Org, a website to support the global grassroots efforts to ratify the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She has a wonderful set of videos of people in the U.N. talking about the convention. She also understood the importance of putting a human face on large organizations. She took a quick video of me saying hello to ambassadors and activists fighting for the rights of persons with disabilities.
The afternoon led to a brainstorming session where the topic of social network service providers failing to provide adequate due process was discussed. In particular, Facebooks tendency to ban people automatically because they try to send too many messages, add too many friends, or similar activities. A friend of mine was recently banned this way, and has gotten nothing but automated responses to his requests. A few of us are talking about setting up a group to address this issue.
As this discussion was going on, I received a Twitter from Andy Carvin about Ariel Waldman’s blog post about Twitter refusing to uphold its Terms of Service. Specifically, the post centered around Twitter failing to deal with harassment issues.
At a previous session at CFP there were some great discussions around the issue of cyber-harassment and it will be a topic of one of this morning’s sessions. Around an hour later, a bug report was reported on GetSatisfaction and the blog post got Dugg. The next hour saw the article make the front page of Digg and an hour later Jason Goldman of Twitter responded,
Twitter does not get involved in these disputes between users over issues of content except in limited circumstances. Twitter is a provider of information, not a mediator. Specific physical threats, certain legal obligations, privacy breaches of specific types of information (e.g. SSN, credit cards), and misleading impersonation are some cases where we may become involved and potentially terminate an account.
This only added fuel to the fire. Evan Williams of Twitter twittered.
Note: Before joining a mob, you might want to check if everything they're saying/assuming is true.
This too, fueled anger at Twitter, already under lots of criticism for its spate of recent outages. It is worth noting that 12 other people noted on GetSatisfaction that they have the same problem, almost as many people as work for Twitter.
About three hours after this, Biz Stone, stepped in and said
The fact that so many of us can have differing opinions without having even reviewed the content we're discussing highlights the difficulty of this issue. In fact, Twitter recognizes that it is not skilled at judging content disputes between individuals. Determining the line between update and insult is not something that Twitter nor a crowd would do well.
All of this returns back to the issue of due process. The fact that so many people are so concerned about this highlights the importance of the issue. Biz states, “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content.” This harkens back to the issues of Section 230 and communications utilities not being liable for content.
Yet it misses a very important point. Twitter, like Facebook and Second Life, which have also have similar issues, is not just a communication utility. All of them are communities. They are communities dependent on privately run communication utilities. These communities lack recourse to any sort of due process.
Biz’s comment about determining the line between update an insult not being something that either Twitter nor a crowd could do well seems ill advised to me. Someone needs to make that determination. Twitter can try to do it. Twitter can encourage the crowd, the community, to join in the effort to determine the line. If that doesn’t happen, the line is likely to be repeatedly brought to the courts and to legislatures to be decided. Either that, or the community will simply move to some other communications utility which provides better recourse to due process. None of those options seem particularly good for Twitter.
The activism panel at Computers, Freedom and Privacy spent time struggling with putting a human face on organizations and in seeking due process in online communities. The ACLU seems to understand these issues very well. Let us hope that corporations like Twitter, Facebook, and Linden Lab makes some progress on this topic as well.
#cfp08 Networking
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/21/2008 - 07:44One of the important aspects of any great conference is the networking that goes on. However, this rarely gets listed in articles about conferences. For the journalistic types, it isn’t especially newsworthy. Yet it actually fits quite nicely with blogging. So, with that, let me highlight some of the people that I ran into at the conference yesterday.
The first session I went to was Mike Godwin doing his spectacular introduction to constitutional law for geeks. I took copious notes and may write up a more detailed post about that session later on. For those acquainted with Godwin’s law, the session was small enough to avoid any direct reference to Nazi’s.
Via Twitter, Jon Lebkowsky joined in. Jon has been to many CFPs in the past, but couldn’t make it this year. I first got to know Jon through Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid and have remained friends ever since. Also at Mike’s session were Nancy Scola and David Isenberg. Both of whom I’ve know for quite a while through blogging and it was great to catch up with them. Nancy introduced me to Jennifer Mercurio, Government Affairs Director of Entertainment Consumers Association. We had a good brief talk about Second Life, the Video Gamers Voter Network, and related issues, and I hope to follow up on these discussions going forward.
In the evening, there was a reception which included Jack Balkin. Jack, of course, was in constant demand, and I didn’t speak with him as much as I would have liked. However, I did have a great discussion with Konstantinos Karachalios of the European Patent Office. He will be the keynote speaker on Thursday and I look forward to hearing him then. I mentioned Epic and my experiences at UBS which seems to fit nicely with his talk. We talked a little bit about the copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution, “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”, and pondered whether the actions of the RIAA or MPAA were really promoting the progress of science and useful arts.
I also picked up ‘Scenarios for the Future” published by the European Patent Office and look forward to reading it.
As the evening wore down, I also spoke with Gavin Baker, Ben Masel, and several other people.
I’m sure there will be plenty of additional interesting networking today. As a quick comment to anyone from EntreCard, MyBlogLog, Wordless Wednesday, BlogExplosion, or other sites that bring people to my site for very quick visits, if you’ve made it this far thank you. I would also encourage you to follow the links to some of the folks I met yesterday. You might not get an EntreCard credit, but you might find some very interesting write.
