Tagged Posts: Social_Software
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2006-03-31
Technorati Tags Development, Social_Software, tags, wordpress
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2006-03-13
Technorati Tags KM, Linux, PKM, Social_Software
Innovative wiki company Socialtext have launched group-based pricing for their hosted wiki solutions, including unlimited free wikis for groups of 5 or less. As CEO Ross Mayfield says, this is
…reflecting how the unit of value in wikis is the group that uses it…
.
I’m a big fan of Socialtext, with the help of their hosted solution I was able to get a small project group introduced to the wiki way long before we had in-house wiki facilities, and I always found them very helpful. This is a great approach to pricing that lets the power of wikis spread in the best way possible - word of mouth in small groups.
Good luck Ross!
Technorati Tags Innovation, Socialtext, Social_Software, wiki
In how to build on bubble-up folksonomies Tom Coates says:
[…] The concept is really simple - there are concepts in the world that can be loosely described as being made up of aggregations of other smaller component concepts. In such systems, if you encourage the tagging of the smallest component parts, then you can aggregate those tags up through the whole system. You get - essentially - free metadata on a whole range of other concepts […]
and goes on to play with ideas for aggregating tags on radio songs into folksonomic descriptions of aggregates of those songs (radio shows, albums) and aggregations of aggregations (a radio station, an artist’s body of work).
Reading it I was struck by a link to something I wrote about a year ago on semantic aggregation and filtering (I’m using aggregation to refer to a slightly different thing in that post) - so from that I would add to Tom’s idea the possiblity for allowing new tags to be added to describe different entities in the aggregation - e.g. directly tagging the shows as well as using tags derived from the tags applied to the songs.
Tom goes on to suggest that by using the links between these emergent tags you could lead people to new-to-them material that reflected the best example of things they may like - “best” being determined in a Wisdom-of-Crowds-like way by the station’s listeners.
The concept makes immense sense from the perspective of a broadcaster that is seeking to create new metadata about material, and to provide listeners with the most engaging experience.
From the perspective of a listener though, I’d like another layer. Alongside the “transmitter-side” aggregation of metadata from the broadcaster based on the tags submitted by their listeners, I’d like a “receiver-side” metadata aggregator that aggregates my tags across all the media I’ve ever listened to over time - and on top of that a way of comparing “my” folksonomy with “their” folksonomies so that I can find new artists or stations that I am likely to enjoy.
Technorati Tags Folksonomy, Knowledge_Management, metadata, radio, Social_Software, tags
…browser-based and thick-client.
I’ve been coming back to the use of a wiki in the work environment, again with project teams, for rapid development of specifications and management of action lists.
Two things that struck me, after spending a large chunk of the working day creating and editing stuff in a group of browser tabs. Firstly, that this is a really good way of developing a set of inter-related ideas; secondly, how it made periodic checking of my Bloglines feeds list and various email accounts less disruptive: it’s far easier and faster to Ctrl-PageDown to the next Firefox tab than it is to switch context between browser, email client and word processor. (And as you will note, implicit in that statement there is also my view that tabbed browsing is vastly more efficient than the non-tabbed variety.)
I think there may be a clue here about what needs to be done to increase the use of blogs and wikis in a corporate setting - if you look at the user patterns within browser-based tools and the more traditional thick-client set of email-wordprocesssor-spreadsheet it is much easier to switch and share within each sub-system than between them.
It’s an idea I’ve touched on before; the question remains will we see an end-to-end solution from Microsoft? Or will the independent tool vendors and the Open Source community be able to come up with something first?
Technorati Tags interface+design, Productivity, social+software, Social_Software, usability, web-based+tools, wiki
Denham Grey has been thinking about knowledge management for a long time - it looks like he has been turning his thoughts to some of the issues I touched on in Semantic Aggregation and Filtering. He writes in Social Categorisation:
The ability to develop and share a common taxonomy / classification / ontology is a very fundamental knowledge practice that leverages knowledge creation, communication, promotes meaning and enables sense-making.
Tools to do this are far and few right now but likely to be moving toward center stage in the near future…
He adds a fourth mechanism for extracting and sharing a taxonomy
The starting point for this advance may be tools to extract key concepts from free form text.
Imagine if you wrote a text, ran a key concept parser, compared the extracted concepts to your groups ontology then selected the best fit meta-tags for later search and browsing - Now that would really assist content sharing!
to which I would add another nuance - as well as deploying these tools to categorise your own text how about deploying them inside a feed aggregator with mapping rules based on the reader’s frame of reference - this way in addition to using the author’s taxonomy you could decide how to categorise a piece of content in the reader’s context.
Update: From this article via Denham’s wiki it looks like there has been a lot of work in this area already…
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management, Social_Software
Dale Pike has some interesting things to say about semantic focus as an organising principle for understanding technology – in particular for explaining how a specific aspect of some arbitrary technology helps with specific tasks. The down side of this, he observes, is that tools tend to become pigeon-holed by the application that is first used to explain them – seeing the tool in a different context might enable new uses but for many people there is a cognitive barrier set by the first mental model they have created.
He extends the thought to consider how context modifies the use we can make of specific pieces of information – as an example notes that are contributed to a topically-focused space such as a bulletin board or mailing list contrasted with the same note expressed in an individually-focused space such as a weblog. He sees syndication formats such as RSS as the connecting bridge that allows people to assemble published information into unique contextualised views that serve their specific needs.
This idea seems to be teasingly close to what I have described as projections of knowledge - each context is a map of the knowledge space projected in a particular way. Beyond the raw mechanics of content feeds the key to assembling projections/views is being able to find and select the information you want in an automatable way. The problem is to determine which concepts are “close” to each other on the map in question.
Most approaches that I have heard of use categorisation and filtering as a proxy for measuring conceptual proximity. Whether you use shared taxonomies or the more emergent “folksonomy” approach a mechanism is needed to determine which labels are close to each other within the map of choice.
I can imagine this happening in a number of ways.
- At the most basic level tools could use some shared thesaurus to identify synonomous labels.
- An enhancement would be to allow the user to view a set of available labels and identify their own associations – this could in turn be published to allow “association aggregators” to form emergent thesauri.
- Even more subtle would be to allow the user to modify the view parameters by assigning votes to the returned concepts.
I have a hunch that all of this is buildable with currently-available standards. There may be tools out there already but I suspect they are proprietary – what we need are the simple building blocks to allow a “small pieces loosely joined” solution.
Wiki page: [wiki]SemanticAggregator[/wiki]
Technorati Tags Knowledge_Management, Social_Software
Over at Headshift Suw Charman has done a great job of capturing the 11 core themes from the Blogwalk “Window Wiki“. As people reflect on the event there is discussion about how to best develop the ideas from this session and how to ensure better learning next time. Here’s my three-ha’porth, modified slightly from my own comment to that discussion:
Reflection and Memory
Memory-wise I find the “little black book” with a few key phrases or bullet points essential to remember the flow of the day.
However I’m not keen to have a formal plenary “writing it down” session; partly so as to make best use of face-to-face time; partly because I find that writing a too-detailed set of notes tends to freeze the thinking at that point rather than allow the ideas to ferment and mature over time. Ian Glendinning strikes the right chord here for me.
I do think that a reflection period at the end of each session would be a good way to surface and anchor thoughts without over-formalising.
Developing the Ideas
The converse is also true - to continue the conversations amongst a geographically-dispersed group we are going to need to write it down on blogs, wikis, emails, IM etc. etc. - perhaps that is where we will begin to express a written emergence of our thinking?
I’m beginning to think that as well as having the “seed” themes (the 11 groupings from the window) to work with it would be very helpful to have some candidate “research questions” in each of those areas to focus our output. Each question should combine a focus for the thinking with a “how could we test this in real life?”. Food for a later set of posts?
Technology
Of course we already have one target output in terms of defining the right toolset (the [bliki]IntraBliki[/bliki]).
The overwhelming majority of issues discussed on the day were around people, interactions, emotions and the psychology of blogging in business - indeed as David Wilcox notes many of these issues are those that relate to any organisational change. However I think it would be dangerous to think that there are no technology challenges left at all. In my experience unless the technology hurdle is very very low then it becomes a great hook for people to hang their “resistance to change” issues on. Anu Gupta has picked up on this by referring to this Harvard Business School article
Don’t forget that we are, by definition, a self-selected group who have been prepared to deal with the technology to get our ideas “out there”. The use of social software in the workplace will only succeed (what’s more should only succeed) if it is successful in letting people do what they need to do more easily - a means not an end.
Technorati Tags BlogWalk, Meta_Blogging, Organisations, Social_Software
The theme of Blogwalk IV was the use of social software inside the firewall.
We noted that there were certain technological barriers to be overcome before the tools were sufficiently invisible to support a wide acceptance of corporate blogging / wiki etc.
I agreed to start some work to define the requirements of the ideal internal corporate blog / wiki tool so I’ve started writing some initial user requirements in the wiki. The root of the notes is at [wiki]IntraBliki[/wiki], please join in if you are interested.
Technorati Tags BlogWalk, Organisations, Social_Software, Software_Development
Yesterday was Blogwalk IV - a very enjoyable and mind-stretching day talking with other bloggers on the theme of “How will the world of work change as a result of social software use inside the firewall”.
Thanks to the excellent “light touch” facilitation from Lilia Efimova and Johnnie Moore we covered a range of topics technical, cultural, managerial, commercial and more… (there will be more posts over the next few days as I and others get on with our agreed actions!)
Some of the other people there: (apologies if I’ve left you off)
Lee Bryant dropped in for lunch
and Matt Mower joined for dinner…
Disappointed that George Por couldn’t make it but I’m sure we will catch up again soon George!
Technorati Tags Bloggers_Meetups, BlogWalk, Organisations, Social_Software
Ton has added photos to his blogroll. I wondered if he was doing it by searching people’s FOAF files but apparently not (it was pure coincidence that he added my photo about a day after I linked it from my FOAF file)
Technorati Tags Meta_Blogging, Networks, Social_Software
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