Here is a story from NYT about Apple's foray into the music world. Aninteresting point thta asks how they will respond when the hackers get a hold of it and mes with it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/29/arts/music/29POPL.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
Dave Winer, one of the leading lights in the blogosphere, has a piece asking Harvard Weblogs: What makes a weblog a weblog? It's an interesting piece because in addition to giving a good introduction to the different parts of blogs, he demonstrates what I think is a basic confusion over defining blogs: is it a technical thing, or is it a social one?
At one point he favors a pretty narrowly technical answer: "A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser."
But he also decides that a BBC blog, which doesn't have the technical features that he considers blog-defining, is ALSO a blog, because its contributors
are writing about their own experience. And if there's editing it hasn't interfered with the style of the writing. The personalities of the writers come through. That is the essential element of weblog writing, and almost all the other elements can be missing, and the rules can be violated, imho, as long as the voice of a person comes through, it's a weblog.
For some reason this didn't make it the first time. Sorry if it repeated. An entry from Cory at Boing Boing about game code as personal property. A lgal paper, rather l;ong, haven't read it but we might want to peruse it for our task.
---------------------------------------
Code is law in gamespace, too?
Fascinating academic paper explores the way that gamers in MMORPGs are beginning to assert property and moral rights over the digital artifacts (including their own avatars) in gamespace.
Virtual worlds - online worlds where millions of people come to interact, play, and socialize - are a new type of social order. In this Article, we examine the implications of virtual worlds for our understanding of law, and demonstrate how law affects the interests of those within the world. After providing an extensive primer on virtual worlds, including their history and function, we examine two fundamental issues in detail.
First, we focus on property, and ask whether it is possible to say that virtual world users have real world property interests in virtual objects. Adopting economic accounts that demonstrate the real world value of these objects and the exchange mechanisms for trading these objects, we show that, descriptively, these types of objects are indistinguishable from real world property interests. Further, the normative justifications for property interests in the real world apply - sometimes more strongly - in the virtual worlds.
Second, we discuss whether avatars have enforceable legal and moral rights. Avatars, the user-controlled entities that interact with virtual worlds, are a persistent extension of their human users, and users identify with them so closely that the human-avatar being can be thought of as a cyborg. We examine the issue of cyborg rights within virtual worlds and whether they may have real world significance.
Here is the link to the full paper.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID402860_code030528570.pdf?abstractid=402860
A post from Tim's blog on micro payment and iTunes. Relevant to our music media case study.
http://www.glenbrook.com/opinions/apple-itunes.html
Also in the post are links to Andrew Odlyzko (Lyn, you remember him from our ejournal work and his article on modular content) about why micropayments won't work. Haven't read that articel yet but I suspect these twoo presnet some good counter arguments.
A few statistics form a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll (if you can believe them) about how the public's trust in media is eroding. Not earth shattering news, but a few numbers quoted that might be nice to have to make the case that personal media is filling a hole. 36% believe that news organizations get the facts straight. If I have time I will look up the original story and survey.
Trust in media keeps on slipping
By Peter Johnson
USA TODAY
Public confidence in the media, already low, continues to slip. Only 36%, among the lowest in years, believe news organizations get the facts straight, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows.
Trust in the media has dropped from 54% in mid-1989 -- about the time of the fall of communism -- to a low of 32% in December 2000, during the post-election confusion over George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Low marks for the media reflect a larger societal trend today, says Todd Gitlin, a Columbia University journalism professor: ''I think you'll find almost all institutions declining in popular repute.''
A fairly steady flow of journalism scandals from the early '80s to today -- from Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke making up a story about a young heroin addict to New York Times reporter Jayson Blair's resignation May 1 after it was found that he plagiarized and fabricated stories -- probably adds to the erosion of faith in the media.
''This is a cynical time,'' Gitlin says. ''People don't need a lot of reason to become disabused of institutions.''
That lack of confidence, however, may not be tied directly to Blair, the poll suggests. The public seems generally uninterested in his saga, which tarnished the reputation of one of the world's pre-eminent publications and prompted a painful re-examination of the newspaper's practices. About two out of three people polled said they are not following the story.
Nonetheless, coverage has been so intense that it could easily damage broader opinions of the media, says Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C.
''You don't have to follow this story a lot to be troubled by it a lot,'' Felling says. ''The media can be knocked down a peg during a 10-second exchange between a bartender and a customer.''
That lack of confidence is at odds with the opinions of people who actually have been in the news. Of 262 adults who said they had been part of a story covered by the media, the perception was far more favorable: 78% found the coverage had been accurate.
''It's easier to hate a category than an individual,'' says Felling, who compares the lack of confidence to people saying they basically distrust politicians, ''but then say their representative is doing a great job.''
The poll also gives the press higher marks for correcting mistakes once discovered: 63% said newspapers are willing to print corrections when their stories contain errors. The Times published a four-page dissection of Blair's stories on May 11, detailing errors in 36 of his stories.
The survey of 1,014 adults May 19-21 has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
A short article (or abstracat) in Scientific American reports that video games are actually good for developing visual skills and "boosts attention-related skills." As they state, "Through a series of experiments, C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester determined that habitual video-game players were better able than non-players to focus on visually complex situations, keep track of multiple items at once and to process fast-changing information."
Interesting implications for next generation workforce, and next generation of daily life skills. I wonder if these type of attention-relted skills are useful in a more nomaidc culture...one where reading the digital and physical environment for signs and clues is an important practice?
May 29, 2003
Video Games Good for Visual Skills
Video games have taken a lot of heat, blamed by some for triggering violence and fostering sedentariness. Now the results of a new study suggest that all those hours spent playing Grand Theft Auto3, Halo and other action-packed games might have some positive effects. Researchers writing today in the journal Nature report that the activity boosts attention-related visual skills.
Through a series of experiments, C. Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester determined that habitual video-game players were better able than non-players to focus on visually complex situations, keep track of multiple items at once and to process fast-changing information. To rule out the possibility that their results simply reflected a tendency for gamers to be people with inherently superior visual skulls, the team subjected non-gamers to action-video-game training, in which they played Medal of Honor for an hour a day, 10 days in a row. Meanwhile, a control group was trained on Tetris, which, unlike Medal of Honor requires focusing on only a single object at a time. After that short training period, the Medal of Honor group exhibited improved visual skills.
"By forcing players to simultaneously juggle a number of varied tasks (detect new enemies, track existing enemies and avoid getting hurt, among others), action-video-game playing pushes the limits of three rather different aspects of visual attention," the authors conclude. "Although video-game playing may seem rather mindless," they add, "it is capable of radically altering visual attention processing." --Kate Wong
© 1996-2003 Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
This NYT article is a nice example of community forming around indie, garage band, music. It illustrates home production, personal authroing and creativity, swarming, and lots of other good stuff indicative of the new entertianment. I like the comparison to a cross between American Idol and a wine tasting!
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/technology/circuits/22band.html?8cir
Tim picked this up from Reuters and put it on his Blog, Due Diligence. Ringtones become another way for music mixers and downloaders to play and showcases their personal music preferences and mixes. Whie the music companies are making money, there are also comapnies providing a way for individuals to add their own music to their ringtones. I think this is the interesting part. So rather than a music clip from Sony, you get to put your ownmusic clip from your own stuff (downloaded or personally created I guess?)
"The ringtone market is also giving a little boost to the embattled music industry as it grapples with declining CD sales.
Shortened versions of songs from artists ranging from Carlos Santana to Ricky Martin are being rigged into ringtones on mobile phones, translating into big music publishing revenues, according to industry experts.
IDC Research estimates that ringtone sales were almost $17 million in 2002 and will jump to more than $400 million by 2005. Music insiders estimate music publishers will make $50 million to $70 million from licensing for ringtones in 2003.
Several big record labels are jumping on the trend. AOL Time Warner Inc.'s (NYSE:AOL - News) Warner Music signed a deal with Sprint Corp. (NYSE:FON - News) to offer a music clip subscription service in one of many joint ventures that have the industry buzzing."
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030521/column_livewire_1.html
OK, here are Lyn's notes a bit spruced up with my comments and headings. Note that the delivery date to Jean in final draft form is July 21. Yeowza! But really, I think we are OK. (pant, pant.)
The Go Game group went very well, I will focus on secondary researchand getting a couple of experts to comment.
The blogging interviews are going well too, I think we won't have to do a group since we will have good in-depth interviews with at least 3 users and there is loads of stuff on the Web.
Sims and music are the ones to focus on. Lyn is working on getting a group of users. We are currently looking for a contact at EA. May have one at Sony. For music, I will troll around the web, and ask my nerdy friends. This is one where I may come up with a few geeks to the rescue.
By the week of June 16th, we ought to have this all figures out and done, or at least in the works! The week of the 23rd we will porbably want to come together for a theme/content meeting to discuss issues.
Good luck, and remember, no one gets left behind!
MEETING, MAY 20, 2003
Timeline: July 21 we have to give this to Jean. By end of June we should be in analysis mode and starting to write and develop report.
Discussion of Entertainment Media as a form of Consumer Customization:
Progressions of complexity—or spectrums, from low to high, with each domain on each? Once you start creating your own content and context, you are creating your own reality.
Content: blogs are about appropriating and creating new content (putting ideas into context, too); and music mixing. Personalizing mass events (American Idol and fantasy sports).
Context: creating context in TSO; or could be go game in terms of using physical space in new context for my game. (personalizing/designing the physical and digital context: tso).
Reality/fiction: ARG. When you start personalizing content and context, you are playing with the boundaries of reality and fiction, and customizing what those boundaries are for you. Could also apply to blurring of physical and virtual economies in online world games. Personalizing the boundary between reality and fiction.
Individual to Social? Part of what seems so appealing is about sharing with other people. This isn’t really captured in the four shifts. Or is this a result of the four shifts? In the context of networked communications, new entertainment becomes highly social.
Categories for our Research/Data Collection
Describe the medium: what do we mean this as a medium as opposed to technology? Medium: encompasses manners and styles of expressions, codes people following when using the tech, and it’s the tools too. Taxonomy of blogs. Bloggers create the medium, Ben and Mina Trot created the technology. This is really about distinguishing between the technological description and the social and cultural description of the form of entertainment.
Enabling technologies? What are the current technologies that support blogging, music mixing, ARGs, and online games. What are the essential components?
Future Technologies: What are the emerging techno.gies (next 3-5 years, 10 years?) that are going to help shap ethe evolution of the medium? Through expert interviews (3) and secondary research.
Current practices? What are people doing, how, what’s it mean? How will these practices evolve in the future with the new technological context?
Issues and insights: (from the interviews)
a.presence
b.knowledge management
c.virtual collaboration
d.ad hoc problem solving
e.privacy and authenticity
also play around with the 4 square and add the dimension of digital space.
Implications for Work and the workplace? (Analysis)
Implications for Clients (as employers, buyers of corporate tech, design of work processes, and workspaces) (Analysis)
Primary Research
Gaming
*Experts (2 transcribed, others email): EA/Sony/Linden/Games pundit Lyn
*Users (1 group): Sims Online. Lyn
Blogs
*Experts (2 transcribed, others email): Tim/Cory/Mina Trot/Google person/Jill Morgenson/Chris Ashley Andrea
*Users (2 transcribed, others email): Craigslist? Newspaper journalism friend, teachers. Blogger.com. Andrea/Lyn
Music Mixing
*Experts (2-3): iPod/Apple/ MP3/ music industry. Alex
*Users (1 group): Craigslist. Discussion groups for major mp3 players. Andrea and Alex
ARG
*Experts (2-3): Go Game people/Steven Johnson/Cloudmakers/Confab. Andrea
*Users (1 group): Go Game group: Andrea/Lyn
Well, we have probably all read this by now (it IS a couple of days old, after all..!), but I think it's worth blogging--and it ties in with the conversation that Andrea and I had about the democratization of journalism with Tim Oren yesterday. Dan Gillmor has a nice write-up about the OhMynews news service in South Korea--an online news service of which 80% is written by citizen journalists who report on local news. Before it's posted it is scanned and edited by professional editors at the paper, which also has a print version that is mostly written by professional journalists. Think of these citizen journos with phone cameras and wireless internet....on the spot reporting by tens of thousands of folks who could be anywhere, anytime....
Well, blogging has hit the popular press with this article. Nothing too deep but interesting that it is being reported as a new "mainstream" activity:
"a once marginal activity of Internet enthusiasts that has become squarely mainstream, with an estimated three million active blogs online, according to Nick Denton, the head of Gawker Media, a blog publisher. "
I like the comment that blogs make it seem like "all your friends are reporters" and that blogs redraw the line between public and private. Another link here to presence management!
May 18, 2003
Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It
By WARREN ST. JOHN
Rick Bruner's awakening to the power of the written word came by way of a throwaway line, typed one afternoon in the cerulean glow of his I.B.M. ThinkPad.
Mr. Bruner, a 37-year-old Manhattan marketing consultant, keeps a Web log, an online diary known as a blog. After coming in for some sporting abuse from a friend who told him blogging was a waste of time, Mr. Bruner wrote in his blog that the friend "was fat and runs like a girl," adding that he was sure the friend would not be offended "because he doesn't read blogs." With a push of a button, the comment was published on Mr. Bruner's site, www.bruner.net/blog
A few days later, though, that friend's curiosity about blogs was awakened after all. He quickly found Mr. Bruner's site and was "deeply aggrieved," Mr. Bruner said. Their friendship barely survived the episode.
"It was a big wake-up call," Mr. Bruner said. "Sometimes it's good to have an editor."
Mr. Bruner's experience is typical of many who have waded into the thrilling and sometimes perilous world of blogging, a once marginal activity of Internet enthusiasts that has become squarely mainstream, with an estimated three million active blogs online, according to Nick Denton, the head of Gawker Media, a blog publisher.
While blogging journalists like Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus and Eric Alterman get a lot of attention, a vast majority of bloggers are average citizens like Mr. Bruner, who draw from their personal experiences — and often the personal experiences of relatives, friends and colleagues — to create a kind of memoir in motion that details breakups and work and family issues with sometimes startling candor.
While personal blogs have been around for years, their proliferation has caused a wrinkle in the social fabric among people in their teens, 20's and early 30's. Inundated with bloggers, they are finding that every clique now has its own Matt Drudge, someone capable of instantly turning details of their lives into saucy Internet fare.
"It's like all your friends are reporters now," said Douglas Rushkoff, a blogger and author of "Media Virus" and other books about the impact of technology on society.
In the rush to publish, many bloggers are running headlong into some of the problems conventionally published memoirists know too well: hurt feelings, newly wary friends and relatives, and the occasional inflamed employer.
"All writing is a form of negotiation between the reader and writer over what constitutes responsibility," said David Weinberger, author of "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," a book about the Internet. "Because blogs are a new form, the negotiation can easily go awry."
Mr. Weinberger said the confessional nature of many blogs had "redrawn the line between what's private and public."
Heather Armstrong, a 27-year-old Web designer from Utah whose blog is at www.dooce.com
Unfortunately for Ms. Armstrong, her brother in Seattle stumbled across her Web site that very day and alerted her parents to the entry. After that, Ms. Armstrong said, "all hell broke loose." "Next to my parents getting divorced 20 years ago," Ms. Armstrong said, "it was the worst thing that ever happened to my family. It was shocking for everyone."
Ms. Armstrong's run-in with the perils of self-publishing did not end there. She also wrote about her job and her co-workers in her blog, often hyperbolically.
When her bosses were alerted that Ms. Armstrong was writing about her office life, they fired her, she said. She is now much more careful about what she publishes in her blog, and she had a word of caution for bloggers who write furtively about others. "If you're publishing under your own name, they'll find out," she said. "I was extremely naïve."
Being found out is no deterrent for 18-year-old Trisha Allen, a blogger from Kentucky. She has been blogging for roughly a month, and spends most of her time reporting candidly on her friends and on her relationship with her boyfriend.
A recent entry reveals that the couple are not quite ready for children — though "we have had two scares" — and that Ms. Allen's preferred form of birth control is the pill, even though, she wrote, "I am starting to hate it, because it has screwed up my menstrual cycle wickedly."
"There's not a lot I won't put on there," Ms. Allen said by telephone. Ms. Allen said her mother was aware she keeps an online journal, but does not know how to find it, and added that she relied on a doctrine of security by obscurity, hoping that in the vast universe of personal Web sites known as the blogosphere, she will be able to preserve her anonymity behind all those other blogs.
Ms. Allen said her motivation for posting personal details was simple: "I love to be the center of attention."
Indeed, for many bloggers being noticed seems to be the point. John M. Grohol, a psychologist in the Boston area who has written about bloggers, said they often offered intimate details of their lives as a ploy to build readership.
"It's like, `How do I get people to read this?' " he said. "Then you want them to keep reading it. It becomes a snowball rolling downhill that becomes very rewarding for the blogger because they're getting feedback from their friends and from random folks."
Deirdre Clemente, a blogger from Brooklyn who is now a a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, frequently uses her relationships as fodder for her blog, www.deirdreclemente.com
That became an issue for a recent boyfriend of hers, a 34-year-old Manhattan hedge-fund manager who feared that having his name in the blog could compromise his business relationships.
During his eight-month stint as a nameless regular on Ms. Clemente's site, he said, "it was an odd feeling that there was a camera on me." Friends and relatives who knew about the site followed his relationship online, he said.
"On occasion my mother would send me an e-mail saying, `How was the play?' or, `Sounds like you had a nice weekend away,' " he said.
But as a literary trope, the boyfriend worked well. Ms. Clemente said she frequently received e-mail messages from strangers who followed the ups and downs of their relationship on her blog.
When the relationship ended, she said, "I had totally random people e-mailing me saying they were sad we broke up." She described the experience as "totally weird," but added, "As a writer, having anyone read your stuff is a compliment."
With so many self-publishing reporters out there, some say they feel a need to watch themselves, for fear that casual comments made to friends might make tomorrow morning's entry.
The proliferation of personal bloggers has led to a new social anxiety: the fear of getting blogged.
"It's personal etiquette meets journalistic rules," Mr. Denton, the blog publisher, said. "If you have a friend who's a blogger you have to say, `This is not for blogging.' It's the blogging equivalent of `This is off the record.' "
Jonathan Van Gieson, a 29-year-old theatrical producer from Brooklyn who sometimes writes about friends on his site, www.jonathanvangieson.com
"My close friends are used to having their lives plundered," he said.
Several good entries and links on blogging and business.
Here is a chapter about blogging as a work tools and support for knowledgde management.
Haughey, Hourihan chapter on blogging in business.
http://www.blogroots.com/chapters.blog/id/4
And here is another list of entries re. blog as KM tool, file cabinet, etc. From McGee's Musings via Ross MAyfields blog!
http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2003/05/13.html#a3220
These are very rick sites and have lots of pointers. When you find key articles or chapters (other than just flows of conversation, I think we should share them on the blog here to archive key sources.
This article about indie music publishing shows how the web and related software helps musicians create a micro, bottom up music industry. Relates to the point we were discussing with Avery about micro business and how everyone is a producer. The point of micro producers is very relevant to our music mixing media cluster that we are looking at. If people can self generate content and appropriate and mix their own content they become micro producers. Combine with webs of trust and reputation systems, the infrastructure of the web for exchange, and you have a vibrant commercial and/or market system.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0411/p13s02-almp.htm
This Blog, Many To Many is a group blog about social software (blogs, Wikis, ...) and I think one that we should put on our list of links. I couldn't do it, nor could i make the url link work. The group brings up lots of good issues about the social dimensions of group oriented software, what's new and what is not, and other insights. It reminds me that we should pull out our early work in online communities (from 1995?) and see what threads we can pull.
http://www.corante.com/many/20030401.shtml#30950
A useful summary of the status of social software by Clay Shirky. He puts blogging and its related activities and technologies into a bigger context. this is a nice overview. The theme of social softwrae was a big topic at the ET Conference and I think we should address it in our report.
"We have historically overestimated the value of network access to computers, and underestimated the value of network access to other people, so we have spent much more time on the technical rather than social problems of software used by groups. "
http://shirky.com/writings/group_politics.html
Social Software and the Politics of Groups
First published March 9, 2003 on the "Networks, Economics, and Culture" mailing list.
Subscribe to the mailing list.
Social software, software that supports group communications, includes everything from the simple CC: line in email to vast 3D game worlds like EverQuest, and it can be as undirected as a chat room, or as task-oriented as a wiki (a collaborative workspace). Because there are so many patterns of group interaction, social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities -- though it includes those things, not all group communication is business-focused or communal. One of the few commonalities in this big category is that social software is unique to the internet in a way that software for broadcast or personal communications are not.
Prior to the Web, we had hundreds of years of experience with broadcast media, from printing presses to radio and TV. Prior to email, we had hundreds of years experience with personal media -- the telegraph, the telephone. But outside the internet, we had almost nothing that supported conversation among many people at once. Conference calling was the best it got -- cumbersome, expensive, real-time only, and useless for large groups. The social tools of the internet, lightweight though most of them are, have a kind of fluidity and ease of use that the conference call never attained: compare the effortlessness of CC:ing half a dozen friend to decide on a movie, versus trying to set up a conference call to accomplish the same task.
The radical change was de-coupling groups in space and time. To get a conversation going around a conference table or campfire, you need to gather everyone in the same place at the same moment. By undoing those restrictions, the internet has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog.
The thing that makes social software behave differently than other communications tools is that groups are entities in their own right. A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation, peculiarly social effects like flaming and trolling or concerns about trust and reputation. This means that designing software for group-as-user is a problem that can't be attacked in the same way as designing a word processor or a graphics tool.
Our centuries of experience with printing presses and telegraphs have not prepared us for the design problems we face here. We have had real social software for less than forty years (dated from the Plato system), with less than a decade of general availability. We are still learning how to build and use the software-defined conference tables and campfires we're gathering around.
Old Systems, Old Assumptions
When the internet was strange and new, we concentrated on its strange new effects. Earlier generations of social software, from mailing lists to MUDs, were created when the network's population could be measured in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions, and the users were mostly young, male, and technologically savvy. In those days, we convinced ourselves that immersive 3D environments and changing our personalities as often as we changed socks would be the norm.
That period, which ended with the rise of the Web in the early 1990s, was the last time the internet was a global village, and the software built for this environment typically made three assumptions about groups: they could be of any size; anyone should be able to join them; and the freedom of the individual is more important than the goals of the community.
The network is now a global metropolis, vast and heterogeneous, and in this environment groups need protection from too-rapid growth and from being hijacked by anything from off-topic conversations to spam. The communities that thrive in this metropolitan environment violate most or all of the earlier assumptions. Instead of unlimited growth, membership, and freedom, many of the communities that have done well have bounded size or strong limits to growth, non-trivial barriers to joining or becoming a member in good standing, and enforceable community norms that constrain individual freedoms. Forums that lack any mechanism for ejecting or controlling hostile users, especially those convened around contentious topics, have often broken down under the weight of user hostile to the conversation (viz usenet groups like soc.culture.african.american.)
Social Software Encodes Political Bargains
Social interaction creates a tension between the individual and the group. This is true of all social interaction, not just online. Consider, from your own life, that moment where you become bored with a dinner party or other gathering. You lose interest in the event, and then, having decided it is not for you, a remarkable thing happens: you don't leave. For whatever reason, usually having to do with not wanting to be rude, your dedication to group norms overrides your particular boredom or frustration. This kind of tension between personal goals and group norms arises at some point in most groups.
Any system that supports groups addresses this tension by enacting a simple constitution -- a set of rules governing the relationship between individuals and the group. These constitutions usually work by encouraging or requiring certain kinds of interaction, and discouraging or forbidding others. Even the most anarchic environments, where "Do as thou wilt" is the whole of the law, are making a constitutional statement. Social software is political science in executable form.
Different constitutions encode different bargains. Slashdot's core principle, for example, is "No censorship"; anyone should be able to comment in any way on any article. Slashdot's constitution (though it is not called that) specifies only three mechanisms for handling the tension between individual freedom to post irrelevant or offensive material, and the group's desire to be able to find the interesting comments. The first is moderation, a way of convening a jury pool of members in good standing, whose function is to rank those posts by quality. The second is meta-moderation, a way of checking those moderators for bias, as a solution to the "Who will watch the watchers?" problem. And the third is karma, a way of defining who is a member in good standing. These three political concepts, lightweight as they are, allow Slashdot to grow without becoming unusable.
The network abounds with different political strategies, like Kuro5hin's distributed editorial function, LiveJournal's invitation codes, MetaFilter's closing off of user signups during population surges, Joel Spolsky's design principles for the Joel on Software forum, or the historical reactions of earlier social spaces like LambdaMOO or Habitat to constitutional crises are all ways of responding to the fantastically complex behavior of groups. The variables include different effects at different scales (imagine the conversation at a dinner for 6, 60, and 600), the engagement of the users, and the degree to which participants feel themselves to be members of a group with formal goals.
Further complicating all of this are the feedback loops created when a group changes its behavior in response to changes in software. Because of these effects, designers of social software have more in common with economists or political scientists than they do with designers of single-user software, and operators of communal resources have more in common with politicians or landlords than with operators of ordinary web sites.
Testing Group Experience
Social software has progressed far less quickly than single-user software, in part because we have a much better idea of how to improve user experience than group experience, and a much better idea of how to design interfaces than constitutions. While word processors and graphics editors have gotten significantly better over the years, the features for mailing lists are not that different from the original LISTSERV program in 1985. In fact, most of the work on mailing list software has been around making it easier to set up and administer, rather than making it easier for the group using the software to accomplish anything.
We have lots of interesting examples of social software, from the original SF-LOVERS mailing list, which ifrst appeared in 1970s and outlived all the hardware of the network it launched on, to the Wikipedia, a giant community-created encyclopedia. Despite a wealth of examples, however, we don't have many principles derived from those examples other than "No matter how much the administrators say its 'for work', people will bend communications tools to social uses" or "It sure is weird that the Wikipedia works." We have historically overestimated the value of network access to computers, and underestimated the value of network access to other people, so we have spent much more time on the technical rather than social problems of software used by groups.
One fruitful question might be "How can we test good group experience?" Over the last several years, the importance of user experience, user testing, and user feedback have become obvious, but we have very little sense of group experience, group testing, or group feedback. If a group uses software that encourages constant forking of topics, so that conversations become endless and any given conversation peters out rather than being finished, each participant might enjoy the conversation, but the software may be harming the group goal by encouraging tangents rather than focus.
If a group has a goal, how can we understand the way the software supports that goal? This is a complicated question, not least because the conditions that foster good group work, such as clear decision- making process, may well upset some of the individual participants. Most of our methods for soliciting user feedback assume, usually implicitly, that the individual's reaction to the software is the critical factor. This tilts software and interface design towards single-user assumptions, even when the software's most important user is a group.
Barriers
Another critical question: "What kind of barriers work best?" Most groups have some sort of barrier to group membership, which can be thought of as a membrane separating the group from the rest of the world. Sometimes it is as simple as the energy required to join a mailing list. Sometimes it is as complicated as getting a sponsor within the group, or acquiring a password or key. Sometimes the membrane is binary and at the edge of the group -- you're on the mailing list or not. Sometimes its gradiated and internal, as with user identity and karma on Slashdot. Given the rich history we have with such social membranes, can we draw any general conclusions about their use by analyzing successes (or failures) in existing social software?
There are thousands of other questions. Can we produce diagrams of social networks in real time, so the participants in a large group can be aware of conversational clusters as they are forming? What kind of feedback loops will this create? Will software that lets groups form with a pre-set dissolution date ("This conversation good until 08/01/2003.") help groups focus? Can we do anything to improve the online environment for brainstorming? Negotiation? Decision making? Can Paypal be integrated into group software, so that groups can raise and disperse funds in order to pursue their goals? (Even Boy Scouts do this in the real world, but it's almost unheard of online.) And so on.
The last time there was this much foment around the idea of software to be used by groups was in the late 70s, when usenet, group chat, and MUDs were all invented in the space of 18 months. Now we've got blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, Trackback, XML-over-IM and all sorts of IM- and mail-bots. We've also got a network population that's large, heterogeneous, and still growing rapidly. The conversations we can have about social software can be advanced by asking ourselves the right questions about both the software and the political bargains between users and the group that software will encode or enforce.