Accept no substitutes

Category: Virtual Communities (Page 1 of 20)

Links and notes from JOMC 191.8 Virtual Communities

2006 of ibiblio

As the New Year begins I’ve been writing an annual reportish thing on my wiki. I’ve done some brief, but I hope interesting, stuff so far.

I’ve invited ibiblio contributors and staff and now you to add, expand, correct the wiki and to email me or to leave a comment here if you like with changes. Things left out may be things just not gotten to yet.

Please go ahead and have at it. Our year is also your year.

Edwards – Scoble connections

If you’ve been to any NC Blog events, you are aware of how aware of the web, social networks and blogs John Edwards is. He met with podcasters before Podcastercon, with some folks at ConvergeSouth, with others during danah boyd’s visit here this fall, etc. And those who he hasn’t met, Elizabeth Edwards has met. She is very very internet aware; her book will tell you how and why.

Now on the eve of Edwards’ probable announcement of his run for the 2008 Democratic nomination, Robert Scoble announces that he’s joining the Edwards campaign.

I’ve also heard that Matthew Gross is on the Edwards campaign.

All in all this will make for an interesting net.campaign for 2008. Who will be following Edwards onto the net?

Notes: Steve sends “John Edwards on youtube today announcing he will announce tomorrow [YouTube]” and the BBC and others have noticed that Edwards’ website accidentally had an announcement of his candidacy up already.

You are the Person of the Year

And so am I. Time chooses YOU, meaning all of us participating in media and information construction and sharing on the Internet, as their Man (now Person) of the Year.

Time begins: “Person of the Year: You — Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”

As long as we have Net Neutrality that will be true.

And JJB points us to a Chrysler advert which gets it right by getting it wrong.

Dan Gillmor points out that the correct pronoun would be US not YOU.

NOTE to pathetic PR employees working for the anti-Net Neutrality duopoly: I won’t allow your obvious spammish links and misleading comments on this blog. In fact I’m more likely to do even more pro-Net Neutrality articles in response to your postings.

CEO of Reuter’s on Citizen Journalism

Tom Glocer is CEO of Reuters and he is also a blogger. Where better for him to publish an article called “Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism” than on his blog?

The article is the text of a speech Glocer gave at “Globes Media Conference in Tel Aviv on Monday 11 December 2006.” About the talk he says: “It’s about trust in media today, taking into account the growing
popularity of blogging and all other types of citizen journalism.”

Reminds me that when I met Lobsang Wangyal, the Reuters reporter amongst exiled Tibetans, he was most interesting in talking about his newly formed Association of Tibetan Journalists. The Association’s biggest task, he told me, is preparing citizens to be journalists by educating them about strong and respected news practices — values, ethics and skills.

Glocer’s talk via Dan Gillmor and the Center for Citizen Media. Dan has his reservations about parts of the talk.

new ibiblio record over 24 million files in one day

Munch - Ashes
Thanks to Google’s Edvard Munch celebration yesterday and to the historic WebMuseum hosted on ibiblio, we handled over 24 million requests yesterday — about 10 million of those for images of Munch’s paintings.

Our Cogent link to Atlanta managed the extra requests easily without going over our limit (in the 500 mbs range). And thanks to Squid caching, our servers easily handled the load.

Overall, a great test of our new datacenter and networking arrangement with NCREN and a big success there for all of us.

Thanks to Nicholas Pioch of Netscape-AOL France for maintaining the Web Museum for almost 15 years and to Mark Harden for his contributions to the Munch area.

Monkeysphere surpassable?

Monkeysphere
Robin Dunbar proposed and some say proved that there is a physical limit to the number of individuals with whom any single person can have a stable relationship.

That number is 150 (actually 147.8). But wait there’s more.

Looking at behavior of chimps, Dumbar noticed that the “chimps belong to social groups comprising about 50 individuals, but they have only two or three grooming partners.”

Then using the same neocortex measurements and ratios on humans, Dunbar calculated the magic numbers for humans.

“The results were… ~150 for social group size, and ~12 for the more intimate clique size” [or grooming size].

So much for Top 8.

Can online social networks extend the monkeysphere in the same way writing as expanded memory?

That is, do online networks allow an individual to manage and groom relationships of a greater order?

How is this accomplished?

Kathy Sierra on “How to Build a User Community – Part 1”

Kathy Sierra gives good insights on building User Communities over on “Creating Passionate Users.” Definitely New-you-can-use.

One, of the many, take-aways: Encourage users with intermediate skills to be answerers of inquiries; not just expertly skilled users. How to do this? Kathy outlines strategies in her article and her commenters expand on those from Kathy. Much on motorcycle support vs tech support ;->

John Price Wilkin on InfoWorld podcast

John Price Wilkin of the University of Michigan Libraries talks about digitizing libraries from the Michigan view point including the beginnings of JSTOR (1994 and beyond), the Making of American grant (with Cornell) as the start of the Digital Library Federation, the Michigan Digitization Project with Google, and the Distributed Proofreaders Project with Project Gutenberg with Jon Udell of InfoWorld in Jon’s podcast.

[Disclosers: ibiblio hosts Project Gutenberg. John P. Wilkin is a member of the Louis Round Wilson Knowledge Trust.]

BBC: Virtual Pals Increasing

And not the NeoPet or Harvey or Bonzi Buddy type virtual friends, but friends you find online and then perhaps later in physical space.

BBC reports on the University of Southern California Center for the Digital Future‘s 2007 Digital Future report:

Virtual pals ‘soar in importance’

Online community members value their virtual friends

Virtual communities are as important as their real-world counterparts, many members of online communities believe.

A survey found 43% of online networkers from the US felt “as strongly” about their web community as they did about their real-world friends.

It also revealed net-users had made an average of 4.6 virtual pals this year.

The survey, from the US-based Center for the Digital Future, of 2,000 individuals forms part of a six-year study into attitudes to the web.

Each year, the University of Southern California researchers publish data tracking the changing opinions of the same American households to the internet.

On the results of their sixth report, Jeffrey Cole, director of the centre, said: “More than a decade after the portals of the worldwide web opened to the public, we are now witnessing the true emergence of the internet as the powerful personal and social phenomenon we knew it would become.”

[… see article for more]


Read the full Center for the Digital Future 2007 Report here.

CS 380 Tonight

I’m guest speaking at Jean Walsh’s and Diane Pozefsky’s combined CS 380 class this evening at 5 in 111 Carroll. I’ve put a few links etc on my wiki, we’ll be talking about innovation and intellectual property. They will have read, I hope, Chapters 1 and 8 of Eric von Hippel‘s Democratizing Innovation. I think I need to do a little intro to the four areas of intellectual property in the US – copyright and patent (in the Constitution), trade secret and trademark (in the Code) then move on to how policy can encourage or deter democratization of innovation.

I asked the class to post questions etc in the comments here.

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