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Category: Virtual Communities (Page 6 of 20)

Links and notes from JOMC 191.8 Virtual Communities

Secret Diary of Steve Jobs Vanishes

After a very funny and very snarky run up to the Mac World Wide Developers Conference today, the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs vanished from the face of the web or at least from blogspot. In place of the various images of Steve and those annoying him particularly those last few hecking him about options are the words “In Memoriam,” one post titled “RIP” and the phrase “It’s gone…”
A couple of stray and mournful comments are rustling in the wind.

New Yorker meets citizen participation Twice

First it was Stacy Schiff‘s “KNOW IT ALL – Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?” in the New Yorker’s issue of 2006-07-31. Then came Nicholas Lemann‘s “AMATEUR HOUR – Journalism without journalists” in the issue of 2006-08-07. The New Yorker sent out smart talented writers to get the real story on what’s happening on the Web.

The editors and writers thought they were covering different stories in difference issues, but really they, like the blind men fondling the elephant, were telling the same story about a part of a great beast. Schiff pounded on the side of the elephant and declared it a wall. Sturdy if trembling; what those of us who see more of the animal know is breathing and functioning. Lemann grabs the ear and declared it flimsy without strength or depth. Something this fan-like could not be a challenge to reporters and dedicated professionals.

I do wonder how Lemann could write his article and not mention Dan Gillmour’s book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, nor the Center for Citizen Journalism which is lead by Dan.

Each writer may notice that there is something bigger at play behind the rhetoric of wikipedians and their discontents, behind bloggers and the professional journalists who mutually antagonize each other. Both notice that some sort of revolution or evolution or change is underway. But both have avoided raising this up to a bigger picture, a larger context. Neither see this and more as something that is unrelenting and growing despite the various moral panics that have attended not only blogging and wikipedia but also social networking sites, eBay, Google, Google Book Project, Amazon, and soon I’m sure del.icio.us, technorati, Flickr and YouTube.

So far only terms like Web 2.0, which although I think is unavoidable as a pretty good place holder and has the endurance of a term like ironhorse or horseless carriage as opposed to telephone , are available. I’m not ready to put out a nomination for the term for the changes involved of my choice yet. Not “the former audience.” Maybe “Citizen Journalism” but that is too limited in scope to my thinking. Like “Information Highway” these terms fail to do their job in various ways and will vanish. We do need a way to describe the change, but will our children finally be the ones who give it to the next generation and to the ages or will we do it soon?

Personal note on the Wikipedia story: I was at a conference in DC this Spring and ended up sitting at the same table as Jimbo Wales and Stacy Schiff. I kept trying to remember where I had seen her name or byline. She was pleasant and very sharp and extremely observant. When I got back to my room, I realized that I had read and enjoyed a piece by her about Ben Franklin not long before in the New York Times. I had also read the reviews of her Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Vera [Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov]. I wish I had been a bit better at recall that day. I had a question or two on Franklin in the Wikipedia/Citizen Journalist/eBay/social networks context.

Jones to India (end of August)

From August 22 – 30, I’ll be in India for the first time starting out in Delhi where I’ll be a panelist at the “Owning the Future: Ideas and their role in the digital age” symposium sponsored by Red Hat India and Indian Institute of Technology, then heading up into Himachal Pradesh to Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj for a few days.

If you have any suggestions for me — what to see, what to do, what not to do, what to take, how to survive the monsoon season in the Himalayas etc, please let me know here or by email.

TeachFor.US chooses Lyceum

Adam Geller, a current Teach For America teacher, has just announced TeachFor.Us, a special instance of the ibiblio developed multi-user blogsphere Lyceum. TeachFor.Us is available to all TeachFor.US (a UNC School of Journalism grad) describes the community this way:

TeachFor.Us is a blogging community created by a current corps member for all Teach For America corps members to document their teaching experiences.

TeachFor.Us makes it easy for all corps members to have a blog without having to worry about any technical aspects. Just register (takes about 5 seconds) and start blogging immediately! Every blog in the community gets a customized web address — http://yourblog.teachfor.us.

TeachFor.Us is free for all corps members. There are no costs now, later or ever!

The TeachFor.Us first-year Big Goal is 100 active bloggers in the community.

Links:
Teach For America
Teach For American blogsphere
Lyceum the open source blogsphere
ibiblio.org developers of Lyceum

Contacts:
TeachFor.US – Adam Geller ageller AT gmail .com
Lyceum – John Bachir jjb AT ibiblio .org, Fred Stutzman fred AT ibiblio .org
ibiblio – Paul Jones jones AT unc .edu

At BarCampRDU

We’re off to a great start! Plenty of people here — over the 150 but just slightly so the spaces work well. T-shirts given out and mostly good sizes. Needed more XXLs than we guessed. Bagels on the Hill did a great job of getting up fed. The coffee makers ran into a snag, but quickly rebounded by being very resourceful.
Having brief descriptions of the sessions by the leaders was really a great idea and put people in a place to sign up readily for their sessions. That’s working very smoothly.

Nice write on of BarCampRDU on page 2 of the NandO Business Section this morning.

Started out going to the GWT session led by Ryan Cox who works at NetApp. On the Google Web Toolkit. Nice developer oriented talk with good interaction. (filled room of maybe 35 – 45). Since my brain has solidified and can’t take in new developer ideas without actually being a developers, I did the two feet thing and headed over to —

Reputation on line lead by Terrell Russell of claimid.com – this was a rousing discussion between/among about a dozen people. We wandered in the best ways over a lot of territory including identity, reputation, eBay, Amazon, of course claimid. I pitched a few books and authors — Steven Nock’s Costs of Privacy: Surveillance and Reputation in America>, Nan Lin’s Social Capital:A Theory of Social Structure and Action, Ronald Burt’s Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition, and Mark Granovetter‘s “Strength of Weak Ties” (restated here for those who wanted to write them down).

Next session — Mugshot and design-thinking – Define, Research Ideate, Prototype, Choose, Implement, Learn (DRIPCIL). More of a talk about how Mugshot.org was created, implemented and tuned. From Design thinking see DRIPCIL to a somewhat detailed talk about many of the ideas and processing specific to mugshot.org. (about 30 folks here)

Great lunch from Neomode Deli in Raleigh coordinated by Ryan Daigle and sponsored by rPath. Good conversations all around.

Tara Hunt and Chris Messina introduce us to Mozes.com an SMS listserv or as they call it “Flash organizing site.” Really it’s listserv for SMS more or less. Very nice and very easy to use.

On to Fred’s Social Networking Sites. Good discussions here. Hard for me to do an Ethan Z level of blogging this session tho. Possibly 2/3rds of the attendees are here. Talk of core values as essential. Fred pushes for a more complex mathematics than Reed’s Law states (as Reed is mostly binary — or entirely binary).
Fearless group prediction: Flickr will last because of strong core values and lots of data while MySpace could be killed quickly by a new competitor. Quality of connections is important. Flickr offers opportunity to move thanks to opening their API. Speaks in favor of MySpace and its ability to change to maintain share.
Are MySpace and FaceBook the same? No. But why? Motivations are often different. FaceBook is gated so that you must be part of an existing network such as those that have a UNC.EDU mail address. 95% of FaceBook users logon at least twice a day.
Fred on Situational Relevance. Going to college causes reforming of social networks in a new context. Lots of college students first join FaceBook in the summer before coming to school. They want to explore their new world in advance of going there.
Older folks in 30s say don’t need FaceBook in the same way. People use social networks to explore their world for their own needs.
MySpace is open to all so that it can be used for a number of uses based on content. LinkedIn doesn’t get used daily, but do people need daily interaction. Fred talks about how LinkedIn and Friendster tweeked their sites after bottoming out and sent their access back up. How? By adding content that their folks wanted. In LinkedIn they made it much easier to connect. That worked for me. I had left LinkedIn idle for a long time. Then suddenly I got a lot of link requests and I went back and updated my profile and accepted friends etc.
Craig’s List gets props as social network for serving the needs of older (than college) people.
Discussion of gated (ala FaceBook) v open (ala CraigsList). How would you make sure that someone is actually in a bounded network? Send them a letter?

At WillR‘s social activism/Kirk Ross’ Journalism futures session. About 25+ people. WillR is more interested in hyperlocalism than national activisms. What does tech add to the equation? Bit of digital divide added to the conversation. Is tech at a local level useful? Most folks have experienced positive effect of neighborhood lists and web sites. How to engage citizens? Who subscribes to the WashPost RSS feeds on their congress criter’s votes? No one.
Someone says they have a company that is creating a site to provide like services with authentication but it will have some anonymity.
Fiona talks about OrangePolitics.org a little and about how to cite and how to verify etc. GeorgeE talks about his experiences on OP etc also about the difference of filters and summaries and commentaries and full tapes/text.
Greg. All about access and personal use but also using the tools together in a wikiworld to create a game plan. Bret and WillR about long tail. A bit about agenda setting and about framing. Trust transativity discussed. Jacob says need votebook aggregators that combine say Sierra Club ratings and Christian Coallition rating.
TomZ profiles of contributors. Self and citizen created.
How to reach out to general public and give general filtering? Raleighing.com guy talks about his site and what they do to make local political issues cool.

John Edwards and bittorrent on WCHL

Just took a call from WCHL about John Edwards’ use of bittorrent. Does this make bittorrent legit? Actually didn’t need Edwards to make it legit. With OSprey, ibiblio has been using torrents legally, reliably, authoratively and accountably for a good while now. Visit the ibiblio torrent site. No, torrents are not limited to videos and music; we do software, developers’ tools, interviews, etc as well as music and video.

[yap yap yap on my part]

This will run at 5:30 on 1350 WCHL then again in the morning and later on their podcasted website.

Here it is now on from the WCHL site with this text lead-in, “Edwards takes campaign to the World Wide Web”.

Pew Report on Bloggers is Out

And with some very interesting facts about the blogging population.

Here from the Pew Internet Short Summary of “Blogging is bringing new voices to the online world” [full report and questionaire available here]

Blogging is bringing new voices to the online world

Most bloggers focus on personal experiences, not politics

7/19/2006 | ReleaseRelease

Washington, DC – The ease and appeal of blogging is inspiring a new group of writers and creators to share their voices with the world.

A new, national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology.

Related surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the blog population has grown to about 12 million American adults, or about 8% of adult internet users and that the number of blog readers has jumped to 57 million American adults, or 39% of the online population.

These are some of the key findings in a new report issued by the Pew Internet Project titled “Bloggers”:

# 54% of bloggers say that they have never published their writing or media creations anywhere else; 44% say they have published elsewhere.
# 54% of bloggers are under the age of 30.
# Women and men have statistical parity in the blogosphere, with women representing 46% of bloggers and men 54%.
# 76% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to document their personal experiences and share them with others.
# 64% of bloggers say a reason they blog is to share practical knowledge or skills with others.
# When asked to choose one main subject, 37% of bloggers say that the primary topic of their blog is “my life and experiences.”
# Other topics ran distantly behind: 11% of bloggers focus on politics and government; 7% focus on entertainment; 6% focus on sports; 5% focus on general news and current events; 5% focus on business; 4% on technology; 2% on religion, spirituality or faith; and additional smaller groups who focus on a specific hobby, a health problem or illness, or other topics.

The report, written by Senior Research Specialist Amanda Lenhart and Associate Director Susannah Fox, says that bloggers are avid consumers and creators of online content. They are also heavy users of the internet in general. Forty-four percent of bloggers have taken material they find online – like songs, text, or images – and remixed it into their own artistic creation. By comparison, just 18% of all internet users have done this. A whopping 77% of bloggers have shared something online that they created themselves, like their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos. By comparison, 26% of internet users have done this.

“Blogs are as individual as the people who keep them, but this survey shows that most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression,” said Lenhart. “Blogs make it easy to document individual experiences, share practical knowledge, or just keep in touch with friends and family.”

The Pew Internet & American Life Project deployed two strategies to interview bloggers. First, bloggers were identified in random-digit dial surveys about internet use. These respondents were called back for an in-depth survey between July 2005 and February 2006, for a final yield of 233 bloggers. Second, additional random-digit surveys were fielded between November 2005 and April 2006 to capture an up-to-date estimate of the percentage of internet users who are currently blogging. These large-scale telephone surveys yielded a sample of 7,012 adults, which included 4,753 internet users, 8% of whom are bloggers.

“Much of the public and press attention to bloggers has focused on the small number of high-traffic, A-list bloggers,” said Fox. “By asking a wide range of bloggers what they do and why they do it, we have found a different kind of story about the power of the internet to encourage creativity and community among all kinds of internet users.”

Some additional data points from the Bloggers report:

# 87% of bloggers allow comments on their blog
# 72% of bloggers post photos to their blog
# 55% of bloggers blog under a pseudonym
# 41% of bloggers say they have a blogroll or friends list on their blog
# 8% of bloggers earn money on their blog

[I’m in meetings most of the day today so’s this post will be without my comment and for future reference for me and for you]

Rice U Press to be bookless

Via Edupage:

RICE PRESS REBORN AS ONLINE ONLY

Rice University will restart its press, which was closed in 1996, as an online-only operation, publishing peer-reviewed books and monographs.

Faced with declining budgets, many libraries buy fewer books, leaving academic publishers unwilling to publish books unless they can justify the printing costs. Rice’s model does away with printing, allowing the press to publish texts not published otherwise while considerably speeding up the publishing process. Because texts will be peer-reviewed, organizers hope the reborn Rice press will be as prestigious–and as valid for tenure or promotion–as a traditional press. The press will operate through Connexions, a site that offers course materials free of charge. Separately, Connexions will also begin offering print-on-demand custom textbooks, assembled from individual modules within Connexions. The textbooks are expected to cost significantly less than comparable offerings from traditional textbook publishers.

Inside Higher Ed, 14 July 2006

Long Tail Party in NYC and JJB

I couldn’t get up to NYC for the great book party for Chris Anderson‘s Long Tail so’s JJB took my invite and represented ibiblio by doing some serious partying. CNet has the story in which JJB gets the last words:

The crowd was an enthusiastic one. “It’s beautiful,” said John Bachir, an engineer for the online information archive Ibiblio. “It’s dangerous to say that it’s the ideal of Marx, but it is the ideal of Marx. [sic] In a controlled way.”

After saying that, Bachir glanced at this reporter’s notebook and added, “Make sure you mention that I’m not a Marxist, okay?”

Mr Sugar on State of Things (WUNC)

The ever active Anton Zuiker aka Mister Sugar writes:

I’ve posted the details of tomorrow’s State of Things show on WUNC. Listen in on 91.5 FM at noon to hear a discussion about diaries, journals and blogging. I’ll be on in the third part of the show to explain how blogging is similar to and different from written diaries.

It’s a call-in show so call in with smart questions.

You can listen on the net, thanks to ibiblio, at WUNC.org and even pick up the show as a podcast or from the archives (also on ibiblio), but you can only call in if you listen whilst it’s happenin’.

Lyceum in Reference Services Review

Fred and Jeff, Stutzman and Pomerantz, have a new article “Collaborative reference work in the blogosphere.” Reference Services Review 34, No. 2 (2006): 200-212.

Abstract: Purpose This paper explores the use of blogs as a platform forproviding reference service, and discusses Lyceum, an open source software project from ibiblio.org, for this purpose.

Design/methodology/approach The following topics are explored: the evolution of libraries’ uses of blogs, the advantages of conducting the reference transaction as a collaborative effort, and the use of blogs as an environment that fosters collaboration. The argument is made that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services

Findings It is argued that blogs may be used to good effect in reference services. Lyceum, an open source blogosphere application, is discussed as an environment for blog-based reference service.

Digital Curation Grant for SILS, ibiblio, UNC Libraries

The Institute of Museum and Library Services announced the recipients of the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grants. A UNC team that includes ibiblio.org will receive over $500k in support of our project, Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum and the Carolina Digital Curation Fellowship Program.

Members in the project include:

Helen Tibbo, Principle Investigator (PI) (for School of Information and Library Science)
Cal Lee, Co-PI (for School of Information and Library Science)
Charlie Green (for ITS)
Paul Jones (for ibiblio.org and School of Information and Library Science)
Sarah Michalak (for UNC Academic Libraries)
Natasha Smith (for UNC Academic Libraries)

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