Social Networks
Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.
Interconnectivity
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/25/2007 - 19:49In the early days of computer networking, email systems weren’t interconnected very well. You might be on Prodigy, Sprintnet, Compuserve, attmail, BITNET, DECnet, uucp, X.400 or SMTP or some other email system. If you learned the magical incantations, you could manage to get a message from one network to another, sometimes traversing intermediary networks.
If you weren’t connected directly to the internet, you could send an email to an FTP email gateway to get files send to your email. More recently, people have talked about how to interconnect IM systems. They’ve looked at adding in chat rooms and even SIP based phones.
At Personal Democracy Forum, a new type of interconnectivity came up. How do we interconnect our online social networks? What might this interconnection do for us?
One early effort was FOAF, or the The Friend of a Friend project. Various people tried various things with FOAF. Tribe.net supports FOAF. Some of the early software in the Dean campaign supported FOAF. There were a few FOAF crawlers around, but none of this really got off the ground. It hasn’t proven useful for adding remote friends.
At PDF, Chris Messina brought up XFN, the Xhtml Friends Network. I’ve made changes to my support XFN. I’ve tagged my links accordingly and submitted my site to Rubhub, which is one of the few XFN tools out there that I can find. Unfortunately, Rubhub isn’t listing my site yet. So, I haven’t found anything useful from XFN yet. However it does have potential.
I went through about 25 of the social networks I’m part of and added up the links I have in all of them. The total number of links was nearly 1200. A few networks dominated my list with Facebook, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Twitter and PartyBuilder accounting for over half the links. Change.org is the one that is climbing rapidly right now, after just coming out of Beta.
Now it is worth noting that there is probably a lot of overlap in these 1200 links. It would be really interesting to see what that overlap is. Perhaps more interesting is to find where I have friends on multiple networks, but don’t know where they are on other networks. Beyond that, it would be interesting to have an amalgamated friends list, showing all my friends, which networks they are on, and a summary of all that is going on in my networks.
Can we use XFN, FOAF or other tools to better connect our social networks? What changes can we bring about by making better connections? It will be an interesting thing to explore. Until then, if you are friends of mine on one of the networks listed on the right, and on any of the other networks, but not my friend there, please give me an add. Likewise, if your not on some of these networks, and want to get started, please join up and let me know.
Follow the links
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/24/2007 - 14:49One of the things that is important about any conference is the face to face networking that goes on outside of the keynotes and panels. At Personal Democracy Forum, I received lots of different cards, links etc., and I thought it would be helpful to highlight some of them.
I was part of the Change.org beta and have been very interested in the site. They are a site where people can list nonprofits that they are interested in, encourage people to donate or take actions on behalf of the nonprofit. This week, they came out of beta. They’ve added a section for politics. Please stop by and add .
I spoke with Heather Cronk for a little bit at Personal Democracy Forum. Heather used to work with the New Organizing Institute, and has moved on to PledgeBank. PledgeBank is similar to Change.org, but they have an interesting take. People pledge to do something, if a bunch of other people pledge to do the same thing, sort of like grassroots driven matching donations on our local public broadcasting station.
PledgeBank is part of MySociety.org, which has been doing some very interesting work on eGovernance in Great Britain.
I spoke with Jo Lee for a little bit. She handed me a card for ringtones08.com. They also have a MySpace page and have started a facebook group. At RingTones08, you can upload Ringtones for the 2008 Presidential Election. I played my Howard Dean Scream Ringtone for Jo Lee and she encouraged me to upload it. I will sometime soon.
I spent a little time talking with Gwen Rose from the Vote Solar Initiative. They grew out of a bond initiative in San Francisco in 2001. They work on the state and municipal level to support solar energy projects. They have an action alert network that encourages people to contact their elected officials.
A problem that they are running into is how to find the best tools to contact members of state legislatures. I kicked around some ideas about using the grassroots to come up with better ways of contacting state legislators.
Later, I ran into Sarah Schacht from Knowledge as Power.
Knowledge as Power is a 501(c)3 aimed at providing citizens timely access to legislative information and encouraging people to contact their state legislators about issues. I spoke with Sarah about the problems that Gwen had been having and suggested that the two might want to explore ways to work together.
Other folks I ran into included Rafael DeGennaro of Read The Bill, Ruby Sinreich of lotusmedia, Liza Sabater of Culture Kitchen and Beka from The Change You Want to See.
So, if you didn’t get a chance to attend Personal Democracy Forum, at least follow the links and stop by and say hello.
Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/22/2007 - 23:58
The Innovation Invitation
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 05/21/2007 - 09:18I have always been fascinated by innovation. It is what America was built on, has helped keep America strong, and I believe is where our strength in the future lies. I’ve always been an early adopter of technology and seek to add my own innovations.
For me, and I believe for many others, that was one of the things that made the 2004 Presidential cycle so exciting. There were great innovations in the use of the Internet. What was most important about those innovations is that everyone was invited to help innovate.
At the 2006 Personal Democracy Forum, one of the great, unanswered questions was, what will be the breakthrough technological innovation of the 2008 Presidential cycle. No one had a compelling answer. At the Media in Transition conference as well as at Personal Democracy Forum this year, I found myself talking with many people about the 2008 Presidential cycle. There was a sense of disappointment that isn’t any great innovation going on.
Thinking Blogger Award
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/10/2007 - 12:06Today, I got tagged by Rod with the Thinking Blogger Award.
It is an interesting meme floating around, mostly in the MyBlogLog space. The idea is that if you are tagged with the award, you get to tag five other people with the award. These sorts of memes are the chain letters of the blogosphere.
As an illustration, from the look inside MyBlogLog, we find that they have around 50,000 users, as of May 2007. Assuming that everyone who gets tagged, tags five other people, and there is no overlap or breaking of the chain, after the sixth round, we run out of people on MyBlogLog.
I tried tracking back my Thinking Blogger Award Ancestory. I (1) was tagged by Rod (2) who was tagged by Skipper (3). Skipper was tagged by Loz (4), who was tagged by Paisley (5). Paisley was tagged by Walter (6) who was tagged by Danielle (7).
With that, we’ve gone past the 50,000 members of MyBlogLog, if everyone was in MyBlogLog, there were no breaks, etc. However, Danielle illustrates where this analysis fails. She has been tagged three times already.
Are there really 50,000 blogs that make people think? ilker yoldas started this off with the comment, Too many blogs, not enough thoughts!, and I wonder if the meme has reached the end of its usefulness. After all, if I’ve been awarded a thinking blogger award, perhaps the award has finally jumped the shark.
Perhaps some of the problem is what seems to me to be various blogging ghettos. The Thinking Blogger Award seems to be stuck in the MyBlogLog world. Political bloggers, and perhaps even non-profit bloggers are all to serious for this sort of stuff. Some of them are so ghettoized, they never read or link to anything outside of their parochial community.
So, I’m going to try and break this. I’m going to save my nominations for my next post and spend time thinking about blogs beyond the SAHM/WAHM/SEO/Pet/Knitting MyBlogLog world. I’m going to try to be a connector. Let’s see where we can go with this.
