Category: Social Media

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Social Media

Change begins closer to home

I did want to point out that there has been a good number of really great comments attached to the Change Starts at Home post. In particular, if you’re interested in social software, inequality within weblogging, and so on, you might want to take a look.

Seth pointed out the Symposium on Social Architecture ‘do’ at Harvard come November. Before you click the link, write down all the people you think were invited to speak. If who you expected to see is who you’re seeing, then the promise of social software has not been met and it is, in effect, a failure.

Another side topic that came up in the comment thread was the impact that meeting people and becoming personal friends has on ‘open’ discourse, in an environment made up of people who have met each other, integrated in tightly with those who have not; with how we react when ‘friends’ are referenced, as compared to those we feel more objective about. This also appeared in the comment thread of a post by David Weinberger.

Either one enters an online discussion to debate the merits of whatever topic is the focus, or we enter a conversation to defend or support a friend. When we mix the two, we put those who have not met others, personally, at a disadvantage. This, also, becomes a failure in social software.

Categories
Social Media

Change starts at home

There was a conference in the UK called Our Social World that ran last week. According to the front page:

Theme:

Demonstrating to you the benefits of the new internet technologies and the benefits of opening up communications with your customers and fellow workers without email!

Who should attend:

You if you are involved in running a business, charity or education and you are interested in improving communication within your organisation and with your customers.

So it’s all about communication, and the power of the blog. How forward thinking of them. However, looking at the the list of speakers, I found no new faces, exactly one women, a great deal of whiteness, and virtually no diversity. Oh, and a woman presented the speakers. Ooo.

Demonstrate what benefits of the new internet technologies? That they’re perfect for maintaining the status quo?

After the last few weeks — last few centuries, really–we should be more acutely aware of what happens when people are grouped, and excluded by, factors such as race and economic class. Diversity isn’t just a ‘thing that people have to do’ so that people like me won’t bitch.

Doesn’t matter if those who presented are nice people, liked by a lot of folks–those that attended and presented should be asking what went wrong, and what can be done to make it better. Especially since they’re promoting this so-called ‘brave new world’.

Categories
Social Media Weblogging

I own Stuff

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Technorati has a new beta feature: blogs with authority on topics. I, of course, checked out my site on certain topics to see if I am an ‘authority’.

I am the second highest authority on photography after Tim Bray ahead of Heather Champ. A big surprise there.

I am eleven in technology, after Doc and Meg and Scoble but before Dave Sifry, himself. There’s something rather poetic about that one.

I am second in Writing after Neil Gaiman. Who is Neil Gaiman, I think to myself. Exploring, I find a post talking about the Satanic Tomato. Of course.

I also own feminist but there’s only two of us. And I own women though there are more women. Just so there’s no confusion about my position, I also own goddess. And I’m fifteenth in Politics, but third on Bush. Oh my, I could have fun with this.

But none of this matters, because I own Stuff. When you own Stuff, then you know you’ve arrived. Oh, and it helps when you know how to work with metadata.

Ooops! Hold the presses! As of this afternoon, I am 12th in Technology and Dave Sifry is now one place ahead of me. Got to keep up in this metadata crazy world.

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Social Media

A question of ethics

The discussion about sponsored links on a site has been fairly good at Phil Ringnalda’s, except for a couple of threads.

It’s late and I don’t have time tonight to link to any sites–maybe tomorrow–but there are folks who are not offended, and others who are. Rafe at r3c.org wrote:

I guess my position is that publishing those links on your site isn’t the most unethical way to earn a buck, but it is unethical. Publishing these links makes the Web a little bit worse for everybody. I guess a person could rationalize it by saying that the things that make a site a worthwhile spot to put those links in the first place adds value to the Web, and so it’s justifiable to post those links and offset some of the value being added to the Web in exchange for profit, but I still don’t like it.

Webster’s defines ethics as:

The discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation.

and

A set of moral principles or values.

Well, at least I wasn’t accused of doing evil.

Categories
Social Media

Update on the issue of links

Well, after my experiment of providing full feeds, I have found that Ice Rocket, Bloglines, BlogDigger, and Feedster are all picking up my links. Technorati has picked them haphazardly, and I’m not sure what BlogPulse looks for. Ditto with Clusty.

I had a couple of nice comments from folks at Feedster, and also a note from Blake Rhodes at IceRocket. I do hope that if these services look at one thing, it’s the importance of letting people know how to make sure they’re included in aggregation counts (as well as how to have their links picked up). A list is only as good as the data that feeds it. It would also be nice if they provide access to the data for our own interpretation. Even summary data would be helpful.

Personally, if I can get dynamic link counts from these services, I may try a run myself at randomly collecting static link counts, and try out my ‘popularity to influence’ ratio, just for grins and giggles.

Most importantly, I’ve heard from some of you about how happy you are that I’m providing full feeds. I hope that folks still continue to visit the site; otherwise, I won’t know who is reading any particular post. I especially hope that folks leave comments now and again. But I want my writing to be read, and if full feeds helps, then I’m for it. The full feeds stay.

Additionally, if you’re interested in knowing when I add photos to Flickr, you can access my photo syndication feed here. There’s also a RSS 2.0 syndication feed, and I’m assuming the Flickr folks are updating the Atom feed to the newly released 1.0 specification.

Well, that is until I release Eve 1.0. Then I’ll be using Eve 1.0 all the way.

update

Koan Brenner has been having an interesting time with Technorati and how links are accessed and valued. I think the introduction of tags into the discussion has clouded the issue, because as far as I know, tags have nothing to do with how links are accessed, stored, valued, or used in any ranking algorithm.

If they are used, then yes, Technorati has some flaws in its reasoning.

Bluntly, to folks who run these services: time to come out and tell us how outbound links are accessed and stored, and what factors could prevent them from being recorded. More, it’s time to think about full disclosure on ranking schemes. Dropping hints and tidbits in this post or another is just going to create that much more animosity.

If you are degrading links based on time, or other factors influenced by the tech people use, it’s critical that this information be disseminated. You’re basically penalizing people for not using technology in a way that you assume it should be used, and that’s a sucky way of determining ‘popularity’, ‘influence’, and, especially, ‘authority’.

As for disclosure of techniques and spamming — I’m not sure this is the same issue with weblog-related lists as it is with Google. It’s an issue, I’m just not sure it’s the same issue. This one could definitely use some more discussion.