There seems to be a lot of thought being invested in understanding the dynamics of the blogging world. For many, the blogging community can be seen as an echo chamber by which ideas are repeated and re-enforced by the “walls” of the chamber. I’ve discussed this topic in a previous post, “Echo Chambers and Blogging”

That discussion led to a comment from Kevin Jones that characterized the effect more as a “wind tunnel”. This has some interesting ideas behind it when the nature of a wind tunnel is considered. A wind tunnel is a research device that allows forces (generally wind) to be applied to a model. In this regard, it could be said that the blogoshpere provides the wind via which models are tested.

More recently, Seth Finklestein commented on the subject and concluded that the effect may be seen more as a “choir”:

As a simple technical statement, cheaper communication makes it easier to form “choirs”, groups of like-minded people. There are two opposite ways in which one can go wild with this, in terms of filling column-space:

1) Utopian – The happy little blogging bears will “self-organize” into an, err, Regurgitant Pundocracy, where The People will defeat The Special Interests, as writing about one’s cat will make George Bush vulnerable (and Howard Dean president).

2) Dystopian – The dregs of society will be able to form gangs as never before, and other groups will become isolated and polarized, leading to the wholesale breakdown of commonality necessary for a functioning democratic civilization (The book Republic.com is perhaps the most well-known example of this genre).

Again, these “choirs”, groups of people coming together for a common purpose, can be positive or negative. Crucially, everyone involved is assumed to understand the purpose, and in theory is passionately committed to it (though the practice often falls short).

In contrast, an “Echo chamber” is more the illusion of many voices, but in actuality, each voice is just the same thing, a reflection of the initial statement. Most blogs and most reporters simple do echoing of authority.

Source: infoThought, “Echo Chamber vs. Choir”

The major idea here being that despite the “sense” of harmony and consensus, the actual “sound” is a blending of many distinct voices.

Personally, I think all three opinions are correct and very worthy of further consideration and investigation.

There’s been much talk lately about Orkut, especially with the latest news of its untimely demise. Amidst all this discussion, however, some individuals have raised some interesting have been some interesting points about Orkut, and SNS in general.

Tom makes note:

Still have not had time to enter the world of Flickr, and rarely visit Orkut. One thing, though, about the Orkut type of social software is, it bears no resemblance to anything I conceive of as social.

I.e., simply on a very naive level, I do not tend to think of people I know as frozen in time, forever repeating the same tired information about books, movies, tv shows, and such.

Would it not be a tad more “life-like” to make, say, a blog or something of the sort the home page for these social network thingies?

Source: commonplaces

Rebecca Blood does an excellent topology tour of the social model of Orkut and provides a list of insight into what could help to make it better. Her list includes:

1. Change the user agreement
2. Allow a graduated acquaintance scale
3. Let anyone be a fan
4. Stop promoting popularity contests
5. Allow me to delete birthday reminders
6. Give users something to do with “Friends of a Friends” besides spamming each other
7. Add “Want” and “Have” categories to user profiles and find a way to search and match them among users
8. Make all aspects of Orkut more configurable
9. Allow users to designate more than one industry on their professional profile
10. Prompt users to add keywords to Communities as they create them
11. On my home page, show which of my Communities have been updated
12. Improve your page-to-page navigation
13. Make “My Network” useful

These thirteen changes alone won’t make Orkut the ultimate in social networking. But they will make the service more useful and give it a good base for further innovation. With its integrated personal, social, and business functions, Orkut has an opportunity to outstrip it competitors—but only if its creators make smart choices that support the genuine needs of real people.

Source: Rebecca Blood, “13 Ways To Save Orkut”

danah boyd recently commented on a question she is often asked, “Which YASNS Is Best?”:

There’s an architectural lesson there… Environment matters because it draws the right people. This is why niche shit works. The biggest joke about the Internet is that the most profitable services are barely public. They address a niche market completely. One of the most unfortunate things about social software is that everyone is trying to court everyone to their service. Frankly, a far more appropriate response would be to try to figure out which users are most suited for your tool given its current state and then try to meet their needs completely. Figure out your audience. And don’t simply focus on your desired audience because the tool you created may not have met their needs… be able to shift if you find that you’ve built something far more appropriate for another group. Cause frankly? If you have, the users know it and are using it more completely there.

Source: apophenia, “Which YASNS Is Best?”

I think the lesson to be learned from all of these examples is that flexibility cannot be sacrificed for indexability. Our SNS needs to mimic our lives more closely for it to be useful.

Yesterday’s snafu was a certainly unexpected and definitely a little bit embarrassing. I’m a reasonably intelligent person and and super-nerd to boot, so I don’t generally expect to fall pray to most forms of online deception. Luckily, the organic web and it’s little darling the blogosphere are quick to react and the information was corrected quickly enough (mind you I am surprised anyone knew to tell ME!).

The problem is the lack of context for the recipient which opens the door to misinformation and deception. In this case, I believe there are two primary factors that make a “hack” or any other maligned activity possible, Incomplete Comprehension and Incomplete Evaluation.

Incomplete Comprehension

This really is a reflection on the recipient’s ability to digest the information presented to them. The other day I recieved a spoofed e-mail from some spammer that claimed to be from Citibank. They indicated that some information was required of me and that I should click the link in the message. This is not a new hoax, previously it was Ebay, PayPal, Insert Major Entity Name Here, etc. When I received the message, I immediately looked to see where the link went to. I also recall wondering how many people get caught by this — wouldn’t your average person just click on the link (assuming their SPAM filters had let this message through already)?your average.

And such is the nature of a Comprehension Hack. Lacking the domain of knowledge to discern how something “should” work, it’s easy to fall victim to a betrayal of this nature. This is, naturally, not limited to online trickery but also to a thousand other real-world scenarios, from the office to the car lot. The problem is there isn’t a solid solution beyond the tyipcal “Awareness” campaign that warns of “suspicious” behavior and provides details of previous hacks. But where does the average person find this type of information? Why aren’t there more pages like the this one at CraigsList?

Some might argue that we fight deception with education. I would argue that’s quite possible the opposite of the solution. Comprehension is too expensive and sometimes impossible. We could never assume to reach enough people to educate them on the eide subject matters that open the doors for this type of activity. Alerts are simplified and summarized — two critical traits of anything easy to understand and immediately actionable.

Alerts are already growing in importance to our lives and technologies like RSS will only make their effectiveness more pervasive. Just think, we have alerts for everything from virii (biological, computer), to missing children (Amber Alert), to terrorists (Homeland Security). Unfortunately, most of this information is hidden away and if you stopped your average person on the street you would hard pressed to get actionable information. But what about the Social Virus? Where’s the alert? How do we protect ourselves?

So we’ve got two homework items I think: 1) design a system that streamlines the creation, location and distribution of Alerts to the world audience 2) start to catalog and expose the wild social hacks that are flourishing in the wild and look more seriously at how these things are spreading. I’m interested in starting this now at socialalerts.com, who wants to help out?

Incomplete Evaluation

Whereas comprehension addresses my ability to understand the information presented to me, my evaluation of that information is often tied to the source. Information received from a suspect source is easier to dismiss than information from a reliable one. Information from a trusted, insider source is almost always evaluated.

The problem here is two-fold. On the one hand there is a compromise of your authority figure, on the other there is a corruption of context.

In terms of your authority figure, if they receive information that they deem to be true, they may report, publish or otherwise distribute that information to their audience or network. As your respect, confidence, and trust for the source increases, our tendency to accept information as factual increase. The system then cycles and the behavior is replicated, annotated, or otherwise disseminated over and over again.

In terms of the corruption of context, this is a side-effect of our delivery mechanisms. Often we are rushed or otherwise harried as we deliver new information. We have devised many ways to get this information from one place to the next, not limited to phones, voicemail, e-mail, web sites, blogs and rss. The problem arises when information is shorted or concatenated into a more digestable form. During this process, compromises are made and, often enough, the end product does not wholly convey the same meaning. RSS generators are especially responsible for this as they often generate excerpts on the fly. However, the technology alone is not to blame as it is us, the reader, that fails to investigate the information further. As Scott Allen notes in the comments of the Orkut post:

Add to that the whole RSS summary issue, and, well — I imagine that many who saw this headline in their RSS reader didn’t come read the article, so no telling how many people are going to quit using orkut simply because they didn’t investigate the story any further than a headline and a one-paragraph summary.

Source: User Comments, “Orkut.com turns out to be a master’s thesis project?”

Yesterday’s Orkut fiasco could be classified mostly as an Incomplete Evaluation. I originally read the entry on Many 2 Many and was quickly excited at the news. Trusting the authors of the site, I chose to then post my own view on the matter. As we have found out, of course, the entry I posted on was based on some information from another party. I had visited the source pointed out by Seb, however, that source was also incomplete. Only later would I find out that a very important last sentence was missing indicating the press release was meant to be humor and not real.

In many many industries and enterprises, there are a wide number of failsafes and precautions in place to prevent potentially damaging actions from occurring. In the blogging world, at least, there are far fewer constraints for the time. As Scott asks later in his comment, “So, what’s our responsibility in this sort of thing as blogger/journalists?”. I don’t know either, but responsibility is the key and it’s up to us not to be wolves.

In a very surprising turn of events, the Orkut Machine has been exposed and the wizard exposed:

Orkut.com, a popular social networking Website which has attracted the attention of the some of the Internet’s biggest names, was revealed today by its creators to be an elaborate “reality Internet” project to form the basis of a master’s thesis.

“We figured we couldn’t keep it secret much longer anyway,” said Orkut Buyukkokten, after whom the distinctive blue-colored meet-and-match site was named. “I didn’t think we could do it this long in the first place, actually.”

Source: Todd Boyle via Many 2 Many

As Orkut seems to expect, a great deal of attrition is expected as a result of everyone joining the “Circe De Orkut” under false pretenses I am very interested in finding out why people would leave, in reality. It seems that many people were quite fond of the service and saw potential in it — I’d assume Google did as well though they might not launch the “real” service just yet (wait for the backlash to end). I’m sort of curious if, now understanding the Terms of Service better, this news might not almost be an inducement to enter the fray since there’s “less” to worry about.

Of course, on the other hand, as Orkut notes, the servers are paid up till “the end of March” but if I was holding Orkut social stock, I’d say that ship was about to tank BIG TIME

Good thing I didn’t know anyone to invite me to the inaugural sailing of the Titanic Orkut ;)

UPDATE:Thanks to Andy for pointing out to me that I have been hact. This seems to be a prank that was circulating.. So yes, there is Orkut on my face ;) Damned this Internet thing.

On the way in to work this morning, I was listening to z100, one of the more popular stations here in the NYC Metro area. They were running an interesting segment on a new Reality T.V. show called “Forever Eden”. In this show, people are dropped onto a tropical resort and have a variety of “essentials” taken away from them.

In any event, the radio segment was about what things could we not live without for a week. They polled both the crew and the general public for answers. Here were the first few responses that were rattled off:

• E-mail
• Cell Phone
• Toothbrush
• Instant Messenger (AIM)
• Voicemail
• Television
• Tivo

Naturally, my ears went up when I heard this many people NEEDING technology to stay right throughout the day. More to the point, each of these tools (except maybe the toothbrush) provide us with connectivity to the world at large. E-mail, Cell Phones, Voicemail, Instant Messaging — they all connect us with a kind of immediacy that we’ll some day, if not already, look back on as trivial. Television and Tivo, however, provide more artifical proxies to the real thing and foundations for future interaction. Sure we tend to veg-out as we watch TV, but we also are learning a variety things (some of them wrong and against our will), but we’re still soaking up many different messages and seeing others interact. On the other hand, this TV content serves as topics of discussion from the water cooler, to the web log, to the bar for many days to come and provides a certain level of familiarity that can help grow or launch new relationships.

The reality is that we’re addicted to being connected — to devices that extend our reach and connection to others.

A recent round of discussion has been going on about the “echo” effect of the blogging world and other social phenomena. A great deal of this discussion spawned from the Internet efforts of the Howard Dean campaign. For anyone unsure of the implied meaning:

Echo chamber is a colloquial term used to describe a group of media outlets that tend to parrot each other’s uncritical reports on the views of a single source, or that otherwise relies on unquestioning repetition of official sources.

Source: Disinfopedia

More recently, the term has been used more and more frequently outside of the political context. For many, it has become a catchall for a “collective” thinking model — possibly even amortized self-righteousness ala “I’m right, you say the same thing, therefore I’m right (and you are too). David Weinberger comments on this:

I’m a little confused about the meme du jour, “echo chambers” — those Internet spaces where like-minded people listen only to those people who already agree with them. Here are three places I frequent that seem to fit the bill:

First, I’m on an invitation-only mailing list for moderate lefty Democrats interested in the intersection of ideology and technology. We are all committed to dumping Bush and there’s no real possibility we’re going to change our minds. Want to argue about it? Not here. We have other things to talk about.

Second, I used to participate occasionally in the Dean weblog comment boards. If you went there to argue that Bush was more deserving of our votes, people would either ignore you or brand you a troll — and then ignore you.

Third, this fall I went to a baseball game and cheered the Red Sox more loudly than if I had been the only one yelling. My bleacher mates were surprisingly unwilling to talk with me about whether the Sox were deserving of our collective support.

Are any of these really echo chambers?

Source: “Is there an echo in here?”, Salon

Last week, Joi Ito added to the mix with a commentary, “Communities and echo chambers”. The topic initiated was about group membership and a question about how well individuals materialize out of a community versus the community materializing out of the individual. Not surprisingly, this has been a problem historically (History: Fact vs. Interpretation, Publishing: Truth vs. Advertising) and it is difficult to come to any real consensus on the matter considering the contexts they must be evaluated from. As Joi states:

Shelly asks the question “What part of you, the writer, is part of a community? Where, within yourself, does community leave off and you begin?” and says, “But I guess we’re accountable to each other, and that’s the most dangerous censorship of all — it’s the censorship of the commons.” This is an interesting question that Shelley has pointed out to me and I have been thinking about. In the comments on Shelley’s blog, Doc ties it to the notion of the “echo chamber,” the effect where we’re all just talking to each other oblivious to the outside world. Many people blame the failures of the Dean campaign to this “echo chamber” and point to this “echo chamber” as a problem that is prevalent on blogs. I do see the risks, but I don’t think criticizing the existence of communities or friendships is the solution. I think that communities and friendship are the foundations of trust and love and I do not agree that an aggregate of facts and single voices are the solution to finding the “ultimate truth” in writing.

I believe that communities and the feeling of community are an essential part of the equation, but that the goal is to bridge many communities and try to expand one’s notion of community the largest possible size.

Source: Communitues and echo chambers, Joi Ito

Yesterday, both Kevin Jones and danah boyd both chimed in on the matter. Kevin provides an interesting reflection on the blogging world from an experience with a “intelligent, articulate tech industry guy”:

I’m going to be looking into the commercialization possiblities of the blogosphere, specifically the events, software and services components, so the fact that an idea is already being deconstructed before it reaches outside the inner guard world (echo chamber) is significant. Will the blogosphere be a victim of failure to launch?

[...]

So what are the commercial possibilties of the blogosphere, and will they survive excessive and continual redesign and creative meme canibalization, or maybe just creative consumption and repurposing?

Commercialization is not what bloggingt is about, but this world has demonstrated its political power. So, what are the limits and extents of its commercial power?

And in what way does asking this question taint the space as a whole? Is this like putting up a billboard in a park or could it be a step to a conscious commerce where we regain control of the economic system and create an economy that, I don’t what should I say, that we can be proud of, or in a nod to my more reflexively leftist friends, that we don’t have to feel about, that mitigates the environmental and social costs it externalizes while creating more opportunity?

“Outside the echo chamber”, Kevin Jones’ Blog

danah questions if we’ve settled on the right context for evaluating blogging as an echo chamber at all. I believe she rightly identifies that the conversations have somewhat degraded and turned into more of a contest than an analysis. As she states:

In social networks literature, there’s a concept called homophily. The basic idea is that birds of a feather stick together. There’s a good reason for this. The more we have in common with someone, the more points of context, the more capable they are of supporting us. We are more likely to gain social and emotional support from people who are awefully similar to us. Our strong ties are usually very similar to us.

One approach for considering the echo-chamber question would be to analyze the strength of relationships between bloggers. If we’re going to talk about a notion of “community,” we have to think about what the focus of the community is. Often, the focus involves activity. Some might argue that blogging is enough of an activity to link the community together. But if this were the case, there would be a random probability that any blogger would link to any other blogger. This is not the case. My hunch would be that a blogger is more likely to link to other bloggers who share multiple points of context in common. This does not mean that two people have to share political values in common, but this is a completely valid context to share. Furthermore, the more contexts two people have in common, the more likely that they will know each other. Thus, it is more likely for two like-minded bloggers to know each other than two diverse people.

Part of the problem with having this discussion surround blogging is that blogging is relatively new. Only a few years ago, there were very few bloggers. As such, i would suspect that political views were less important because the fact that the person was a blogger (a rare thing) made them interesting enough to connect to. As there are more bloggers, blogging doesn’t end up being as strong a context point as before.

Source: “echo-chambers and homophily”, danah boyd

As for me, I don’t have too strong of an opinion on the matter. As I most intuitively know, people tend to aggregate around centers that develop and promote similar conceptual models. We are often reluctant to place ourselves in a defensive position. I believe in Barabási’s “Linked” he makes note of this phenomena as it impacts “Preferential Attachment”. I’ll find an excerpt later to add to this. I also know that in terms of blogging, I have worked to inform and update as many people I can regardless of affiliation or pre-disposition — as I see value in the technology and the community. So yeah, maybe there is an echo, but it’s moving fast.

I was reading up over at danah boyd’s blog and came upon an interesting post titled “why i don’t build (right now)“. In it, danah talks about a common questions she gets regarding social software: “if you’re so smart, why don’t you do it?”. Interestingly, danah makes a very interesting observation about the differences between the academic and business worlds:

Fast moving and highly complex spaces likes YASNS and social software require iteration. No one project is going to completely “get it.” Lessons will be learned, features stabilized across different applications. I certainly have ideas for the next iteration, but to develop them means to stop paying attention to the larger picture and work on just building that next level.

Source: apophenia

Between danah’s thoughts and the commentary, a number of different ideas emerged from the discussion.

Subject Boards and Missing Protocol

In the academic domain, testing on human subjects is quite guarded and is supervised by a Human Subjects Board. Ironically enough, commercial ventures are not subject to these contstraints. Undoubtedly, this is tied to the highly opt-in nature of commerce where sign-up/membership/trial equals consent in the highest, and often hidden, ways. I’m not sure regulation here is a requirement, but the contrast is certainly interesting.

Geek to Geek

An unfortuante side-effect of “networking” software, but all software in general, is that geeks are speaking to other geeks too often than not. Currently, the tools available to the average user are not ready for public consumption. While your average geek or technophile is concerned with web standards, an ever-growing list of acronyms, and utilities and services that foster the generation and connections between those entites, the average end user could care less and is immune from the majority of the impact “doing it right versus wrong” will have in the long run. I’ve commented (1, 2, 3) on aspects of this before, one commentator made this assessment:

My biggest complaint at the moment is that in most domains we’re still building tools for geeks. Most of these YASNS systems are no exception, neither are most of the tools surrounding the blogging world.

The simplest problem to solve is naming. We’re all cute with our RSSs and FOAFs and blogosphere’s, but these are geek terms for geeks. I’m not talking about dumbing things down, I’m talking about perspective and accessability.

Source: John Poisson comment

Academic versus Business Needs

I’ve just touched on the beginnings of this topic above. It’s clear, however, that there are two driving motives which unfortunately must butt heads from time to time. Academia pursues discovery, knowledge and understanding as some of its primary goals with the intent of furthering and clarifying our current and future understanding. Business on the other hand is about leverage — converting knowledge into assets that can be utilized by an audience. Naturally, a large part of academia is bent that business is the root of all evil and betrays us on many levels. Luckily not all are short-sighted and most realize the symbiotic nature of the two camps. danah makes an excellent comment:

Don’t get me wrong – i LOVE folks who build stuff and i also realize that not all business is about corrupting people. But once software is built, one often has to choose between what is best for people and what is economically viable. There’s a different decision making process. And i agree that it is the business world that lets folks get out of building tools for other fellow geeks.

Source: zephoria comment

Personally, I think I am fairly balanced in my motives. I surely am a business person focused on creating that leverage, but the academic in me keeps me true to the human cause.

I haven’t gotten my letter yet, but someone else sent me theirs:

Dear _________:

In the next few weeks, we will be introducing changes to the system to improve site performance. If all goes according to plan, Friendster will be faster, the system will scale with the growth of the community, and you will have more choices for setting your privacy levels on Friendster.

At the bottom of this page, you must make two selections. You must select the level of exposure for your profile, and you must select the level for exchanging messages between you and other Friendsters.

These settings will be saved for you until the site improvements are introduced. However, you may change these privacy levels at any time through the Account Settings area of your Home Page. If you do not select these levels, the system will automatically default both settings to your third degree of friends (friends of friends of friends).

We hope that you are as excited about the improvements as we are. If you would like more information, please visit Help.

Thanks to everyone who has shared their feedback with us on these important issues.

Friendster

Seems some of this Privacy banter has finally made it up the food chain. I’m not sure that’s really enough for me, but I guess it’s better than nothing.

I knew this was going to happen. There have been rumblings for some time now that SNS 2.0 needs to move to the desktop and connect via P2P services. Stowe Boyd reports (with a screenshot) of a new service launched by WiredReach, Dallas-based startup that has released a very interesting new Social Networking application.

WiredReach offers a decentralized service and ensures that the owner’s identity is secure from start to finish. I COMPLETELY agree with this stance and think it’s great to see a system that implements it at this stage of the game. And don’t think this is vaporware, it seems the fellows there have been working on this since 2002 so I’m going to assume they’ve thought long and hard on the related issues.

As their site notes:

The vision of WiredReach is simple: “To connect people and keep them connected through a trusted referral network”. WiredReach is a general purpose networking tool that leverages the Internet to increase the network reach of individuals across different personal and business contexts without compromising user privacy and security. One of the challenges for effective networking is locating the right person in a given context. The other is keeping your most valuable contacts always up to date and within easy reach. WiredReach makes both of these a snap.

Source: WiredReach Product Page

Although I have many questions about the WiredReach service and, more generally, about the completeness of a pure P2P system, I want to reserve judgment until I’ve hopefully had a chance to experience it on my own. I will share a small snippet from my thoughts on “Personal Content Management” for consideration in this context:

When it comes to managing one’s own personal content, there are several simple truths that cannot be violated:

• Universal – it’s got to store everything, regardless of how free-form it is
• Unlimited – it’s got to store anything regardless of how big it is
• Uninterruptible – it’s got to be available all the time, any time, from anywhere
• Unbreakable – it’s got to be secure

There has been a growing pile of coverage on the current crop of social networking systems and software. Recently, BusinessWeek did a write up on the growing privacy concerns with these systems. As noted:

Indeed, social-networking sites find themselves in a Goldilocks-style dilemma: If they share too much information, the services become a spammers’ paradise. Share too little, and they defeat the power of social networking, where you can discover and communicate with people you may not know but with whom you share something in common. The amount of information shared has to be just right.

Source: BusinessWeek

Further, the discussion turns to the use of Peer-To-Peer networks as a potentially more secure system of networking. I am going to address some of those concerns in a future entry, but thought I would start to collate some data here now. One of the avenues that are being explored currently in the privacy realm is the value of n degree relationships and their “stickiness”. In addition, many people are questioning the widespread availability of their identities via their n degree networks and the implications for manging their own identies and reputations.

I thought it might be good to start to build up an index of the scope or reach of the various networks people are “buying” in to. This is just a few quick ones off the top of my head but it would be nice to get any feedback on how to make it bigger / better.

I’ll start to update this over the weekend and get a more formalized list in place soon. Drop me a line or comment if any other data should be represented.