Tag: participatory web

Ok, last Facebook post, I promise, but for Londoners, there's Poke 1.0, a 'Facebook social research symposium':

This social research symposium will allow academics who are researching the 'Facebook' social networking site to meet and exchange ideas. Researchers are welcome from the fields of sociology, media, communication & cultural studies, information science, education, politics, psychology, geography and any other sphere of 'internet research'. PhD and post-doctoral researchers are especially welcome, as are researchers considering Facebook as a potential area of research.

Common Craft have produced videos on RSS in Plain English, Social Bookmarking in Plain English, Wikis in Plain English and Social Networking in Plain English (via Groundswell)

Also worth a look, Google Code for Educators "provides teaching materials created especially for CS educators looking to enhance their courses with some of the most current computing technologies and paradigms". They say, "[w]e know that between teaching, doing research and advising students, CS educators have little time to stay on top of the most recent trends. This website is meant to help you do just that" and it looks like it might also be useful for busy professionals who want to try new technologies they don't get time to play with in their day jobs (via A Consuming Experience).

Also from A Consuming Experience, a report on a talk on "5 secrets of successful Web 2.0 businesses" at the June London Geek Dinner.

On a random note, I noticed that the BBC have added social bookmarking to their news site:

I wonder if this marks the 'mainstreaming' of social bookmarking.

I'm still catching up on news and various RSS feeds, here are just a few things that caught my eye.

These slides from a presentation on Open Source applications in archaeology are worth a look. They've included lots of screenshots, which is useful because it demonstrates that open source applications are becoming much more user-friendly.

Wired makes a compelling case for Twitter as a 'Social Sixth Sense':

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

In theory I just don't get Twitter but in practice I do read some long-running threads on various forums where people can post a quick rant about work, about their love life, or just add a random disclosure. If I know the people posting then I find those threads interesting. And I also love Facebook status updates for the same reason – they don't require a response but sometimes it's nice when they trigger one.

A post from forrester.com on lessons for content on YouTube, and by extension on 'informal' online content generally. In summary, be sincere.

But first here are a few reasons why BlendTec succeeded — reasons you ought to pay attention to before trying it yourself:

  1. It's funny. It's visually arresting. It's short. These are three qualities your videos must possess. Here's another company that also succeeded with a visually arresting video: Ray-Ban.
  2. It's authentic. These guys are geeks. Wright told me the CEO — Tom Dickson, who's featured in the video — is an engineer. It comes across. This stuff ain't slick, folks, and if it were it wouldn't work. (I love the proud and cheesy smile while he watches his company's blender reduce some object to dust.)
  3. It's original. Figure out what your unique value is. Then film it and put it up there. Don't copy Blendtec, or Ray-Ban, or Dove. This may be the hardest part.
  4. It actually connects to the value of the product. You see these videos and you can't help saying "Can that blender really do that? Maybe I should get one." And many people do. You could be a hit on YouTube with a video that doesn't connect to the value of your product, but that will help your ego a lot more than your sales.

From willitblend.com: Speaking through YouTube, blogs.forrester.com.

Sometimes I think sincerity is regarded as daggy or unsophisticated, or just too simple to work; but I suspect it's part of the reason the participatory web has taken off.

More on the F word

I was thinking about all the fuss in the cultural heritage sector about Facebook on various museum-y discussion lists at the moment, and thought perhaps the off-line equivalent would be posts saying

"I've discovered this place where lots of young people hang out, interacting with each other in a really natural way. The thing is, institutions can't go there, only individuals. But this place is full of audiences we want to reach. So how can we engage with this new-fangled 'pub' thing?".

I guess what I'm asking is, is Facebook 'fit for [our] purpose' or are we just chasing it for the same reason marketers love youth social networking sites – it's a place where a hard-to-reach demographic hang out.

With that in mind, here's what Facebook does well:

…just how intrinsic the use of Facebook is today among younger scholars – grad students and junior faculty – in their scholarship and teaching. Facebook, for now, is often the place where they work, collaborate, share, and plan. Grad students may run student projects using Facebook groups; they may communicate amongst each other in inter-institutional (multi-university) research projects; they may announce speakers and special events to their communities.

I've been enmeshed recently in increasingly agonized conferences that concern themselves with "re-thinking scholarly communication" and grappling with understanding what tools might be used to facilitate new models of peer review, or facilitate research collaboration, or teaching — and all the while – of course – it has been happening anyway, using widely available tools that provide the flexibility and leverage that scholars have been seeking.

And here's why it's relevant to the cultural heritage sector:

…regardless of the ultimate fate of Facebook, the set of characteristics that it has established – the sense of community; user control over the boundedness of openness; support for fine grained privacy controls; the ability to form ad-hoc groups with flexible administration; integration and linkage to external data resources and application spaces through a liberal and open API definition; socially promiscuous communication – these will be carried with us into future environments as expectations for online communities.

From Working in Facebook, O'Reilly rader.

There's a post on Museums and Social Networking Sites that is nicely timed given the 'should museums be on Facebook' discussions on the UK Museums Computer Group and Museum Computer Network mailing lists. I particularly liked the following:

[M]useums that venture haphazardly into the wilderness of social networking sites may end up looking stiff and frozen. Institutions need to enter these spaces with firm answers to these questions:

  • What audience(s) are we trying to reach, and why?
  • What information do we want to convey to these people?
  • What actions do we want them to take?
  • Demographically, where do these constituents congregate online?
  • Do these virtual spaces provide the tools that will allow us to circulate our message?
  • Do the sites then provide ways for users to circulate our message without too much futher effort from us–that is, do the sites allow for percolation, or will our message merely appear for a moment and then pass quickly from users' radar?

I would add, is it an appropriate space for instutitions or is it a personal space?

The post also points out one of the major problems with Facebook groups that's been irritating me for a while – they don't notify you of new content, whether as an RSS feed, Facebook notification or in email. The Groups page doesn't even order groups by those with the most recent wall or discussion posts. No wonder groups languish on Facebook – most seem to collect members easily, but hardly anyone actually posts any content on them. There are always barriers to participation on social software or reasons why more people lurk than post, but if people don't know new content has been added, they'll never respond. It's a step backwards to the world of checking to see if sites have new content – who does that now we have RSS?

And just because I like it: when xkcd and wikipedia collide.

Who's talking about you?

This article explains how you can use RSS feeds to track mentions of your company (or museum) in various blog search sites: Ego Searches and RSS.

It's a good place to start if you're not sure what people are saying about your institution, exhibitions or venues or whether they might already be creating content about you. Don't forget to search Flickr and YouTube too.

"Sharing authorship and authority: user generated content and the cultural heritage sector" online now

I've put a rough and ready version of my paper from the UK museums and the web conference session on 'The Personal Web' online at Sharing authorship and authority: user generated content and the cultural heritage sector.

User-Generated Content Sites See Exponential Growth in UK Visitors

I missed this comCast report at the time (September 2006).

Leading User-Generated Content Sites See Exponential Growth in UK Visitors During the Past Year

“Web 2.0 is clearly architected for participation, as it attempts to harness the collective intelligence of Web users,” commented Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe. “Many of the sites experiencing the fastest growth today are the ones that understand their audience’s need for expression and have made it easy for them to share pictures, upload music and video, and provide their own commentary, thus stimulating others to do the same. It is the classic network effect at work.”
…
While uniformly demonstrating strong traffic growth, UGC sites are also adept at keeping users engaged.

Is Web 2.0 user-centred design in action?

An interesting perspective from Mike Ellis and Brian Kelly at MW2007:

Trawling the Web finds the following phrases recurring around Web 2.0: “mashup”, “de-centralisation”, “non-Web like”, “user generated content”, “permission based activity”, “collaboration”, “Creative Commons” … What sits at the heart of all of these, and one of the reasons Web 2.0 has been difficult for bigger, established organisations (including museums) to embrace, is that almost all the things talked about put users and not the organisation at the centre of the equation. Organisational structures, departmental ways of naming things, the perceived ‘value’ of our assets, in fact, what the organisation has to say about itself – all are being challenged.

Web 2.0: How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing: Addressing Organisational Barriers