I came across Judith Meskill’s recent post about BioJack, a new Wiki for biographical information. I’ve got to say I like the underlying principles but the implementation scares the heck out of me. Also, in terms of full disclosure, I’m building something that is in the same space though fundamentally different. First, here’s how the site describes itself:

…For the past couple of years, social networks like Friendster, LinkedIn and Orkut have been in the limelight of media attention as it draws Netizens into an evolving model of the World Wide Web as a network of people. Using these services, any Netizen can create a profile containing personal information and share it with friends and the public.

While the adoption of these services have been rapid, with some achieving a million users within a few months, consolidation of user profiles and networks is a growing concern. An individual’s information is scattered around in siloes, stored in locked profiles in various social networks, while others are recorded in blogs. Attempts to unify these siloed information have brought about the birth of standards such as FOAF, but the adoption of such standards by the major services have been slow.

So far, I can’t agree more. I’ve dedicated many a post here that discusses the failures of SNS 1.0 in creating a lasting imprint of the humanity of people and their relationships. I’ll certainly agree that there are too many silos of information that not only overlap but also impede the portrayal of my digital self.

Then the premise of BioJack, in my opinion, takes a turn for the worst:

The intention to create a central database of personal data has led to the creation of Biojack, a Wiki for biographical information. Built on top of MediaWiki, the same engine that runs Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia on the Net, Biojack allows any Netizen to add or edit biographical entries of themselves or other individuals, such as history figures, contemporary newsmakers or celebrities.

Biojack’s founder, Jason Banico, believes that wiki is the best model for indexing the social web. No standard profile format can capture the richness of an individual. The flexibility of a wiki can allow one to write biographical articles in prose, a list of profile entries, a collection of
links to blogs, social network profiles, FOAF files, genealogy site entries, photo albums and many others. Its flexibility will also allow it to be equally useful to a researcher in need of biographical information or to a blogger who would like to have a personal repository of profile links.

Leaving aside my general dislike for Wiki as an end-user content management model, I think this is the last place I want my information. Let’s look at some of the key issues I see at play here:

• It’s Public - If the complaint about Friendster and other sites was that they were too public, then a wiki-based version is probably the most extreme perversion of that. Most social networking services have a level of authentication that’s MANDATED. The more secure ones have controls for locking the general community out of a viewing pool. Wiki does not natively afford us this (at least none that I have ever seen).

• It’s Insecure - Hanging on the tail of that last point. There’s not a great sense of ownership. Since anyone can come and create my page for me, add whatever content they want to provide, and at the same time possibly slander the hell out of me. I call this social graffiti.

• It’s Not Granular - I’ve complained many a time that SNS 1.0 fails because of its inherent needs to index us. I think a free-form text dump fails in the other direction. Keyword searching seems to become the main method for finding people. I’ll not that, however, for the purpose of serving as a “biography” this is not such an issue.

• It’s Doubly A Burden - Having to manage an online identity across an ever-growing array of sites is certainly annoying and only serves to get worst over time. On some level, I am sure the notion is that with a wiki identity, anyone can update your records so you don’t have to (hence saving time). Of course, these aren’t facts we’re necessarily updating now are they. If people have personal space, then our identities have personal valences. These various valence levels serve to protect our often fragile egos from attack and ridicule. In English, we don’t want everyone to know everything right away and, when we do want to share, we almost always prefer to have control of that presentation. Now I have to police my profiles and my biography.

• It’s Not Scalable - So “pages” are people in a Wiki. This means that this page is mine, that is until the other Gregory Narain’s come along and want their space. Or, consider the worst case, where someone adds to my profile thinking I am someone they know — but I am not that person. So how is this mediated? Who knows.

Well those are just my gripes off the top of my head :). I still admire the project, but I wouldn’t want my info in it. I think it makes sense from the point of view of “encyclopedia” but since the creator brought Friendster and the like into the use case, I felt it important to discuss it from that point of view.

That being said, it will take me about an hour to generate a BioJack page for any user of the SparkCard if there was a demand for such a thing. One more hour, and I can import your BioJack profile into the SparkCard where you can regain control of things and secure your identity.

After this review, though, I doubt Jason Banico is gonna want to have much to do with me (though I hope he can address my concerns). Oh well, what can I do. I can’t tell a lie (on this blog anyway).

Jimmie and I seem to cover a lot of ground while consuming beer. The last few weeks we’ve been exploring a wide range of issues relating to social networking.

Last week, I saw him tinkering and next thing I know he was importing his MP3 files directly into an MT install. The interesting thing about this was that by using some simple categorization, it was possible to organize your music by genre, band, and date “acquired”. On the tail end of that discussion, I mentioned we should post the code up but we hesitated - fearing potential ramifications.

Lucky for us, MusicMobs is more daring. They’ve launched, as they call it, “a social network for music fans that allows you to share your listening habits and discover new music”. Here’s my 3 step distillation:

1. Get a Mac and install the client so it can slurp up your iTunes file (it works on Windows but it’s more work and requires the web)
2. Go to the site and check out what you’ve accomplished
3. Scavenge around and find people that like the music you like and that match your musical tastes

It’s very interesting and quite automatic, which is the most compelling feature in my opinion. I highly recommend looking into it.

Anyone who’s ever tried to coordinate a party, event, or other get-together knows how annoying it can be to get people to actually show up on time, if at all. For the person doing the planning, it’s a hassle and can end up costing a bunch. For the attendees, they’re left stranded with fewer people to talk and interact with, even worst than losing money is losing reputation.

An interesting little company has emerged providing Craigslist-like listings of events, with a twist. This new company, LinkUp, has sites across the states in the leading cities, though, as with Craigslist at first, the Californians seem to be the most progressive.

As there site reads:

Linkup Central favors reality over virtuality, real time over cybertime, and real human beings in the flesh over computer screens and typing.

The only purpose for these web sites is to help you find other human beings with whom you would like to travel on your own journey of life.

We wish you adventure, inspiration, knowledge, truth and growing wisdom on your journey.

What is most interesting about LinkUp, from my point of view, is the fuzzy reputation system that powers it. Here’s another note from the site:

Each member has a reliability rating, based on a combination of their “flake factor” and the number of times they’ve RSVP’d compared to the number of times they’ve cancelled. Your reliability rating is visible to you, and visible to the host of an event for which you have RSVP’d, but not visible to anyone else.

Your reliability rating is, in effect, your social reputation within the group. You will definitely be judged by your reliability rating, and if you don’t preserve that rating, you may find yourself excluded from some of the best events. We encourage you to carefully maintain and preserve your reliabiity rating.

We feel very strongly that this system is both necessary and ultimately helpful to everyone in the group, because we all want to have confidence in each other, and be part of a group we can all truly count on.

I think that there are numerous methods and measures of reputation available for our use. Certainly, this method might leave some room for improvement, but it definitely serves as a guideline worth factoring in during the decision-making and evaluation processes.

In general, though, it’s quite interesting to see that reputation is taking the foreground in many new ventures.

Judith Meskill ponders on the net effect of using SNS and the upcoming US political election. This year has certainly been the most active in terms of use of the Internet. She quotes Laila Weir from newsdesk.org:

”… Both the Bush and Kerry campaigns maintain websites enabling visitors to register to vote, get contacts for local media, recruit friends to join the campaign and contact undecided voters.

Volunteers are responding in droves.

As of mid-August, 82,000 volunteers had been recruited by friends through the Bush campaign’s website, said Michael Turk, the president’s e-campaign director.

He also said that supporters used the website to send 325,395 letters to newspapers, and have donated $8.7 million online.

The Kerry campaign has done even better: Almost 500,000 volunteers have signed up online and the campaign raised more than $81 million online during the primary cycle, according to a staff member.

What’s more, the Democrat’s campaign has made a specific effort to cultivate the grassroots potential of social networking websites, with their largely youthful user groups…”

Source: Social Software Weblog, “Will Online Social Networking Deliver Voters?”

If you’re not registered, and eligible, I hope you’ll get the chance to do it.

For many, when it comes to Yahoo! and SNS, the question is not how, but when the sleeping giant will awaken and unleash their next platform. Consider the simple facts about where Yahoo! stands in the SNS food chain. Yahoo! Mail is already an extremely successful web mail application. Yahoo! Personal has millions of users networking and talking to each other on a regular basis. Yahoo! Calendar and My Yahoo! provide the remainder of the PIM services.

Yahoo continues to improve it’s Personals service as well, recently adding the ability to rate and evaluate potential mates. Then there’s this brief mention:

And Yahoo, according to industry insiders, is working on a social networking service, Mingle, that it hopes to unveil this year — reportedly with the goal of driving users to its own job service, HotJobs, and other portal services. Yahoo wouldn’t comment directly on Mingle.

Source: San Jose Mercury News via Social Software Weblog

The suspense is killing me [heavy sarcasm]

There seems to be a revolving discussion about th effectiveness and utility of Wiki technology and the resultant authority. One camp is quick to point out that Wiki works and it is incredibly accurate and self-correcting, generally relying on the highly democratic nature of Wiki as its power source. The other camp is equally resistant to the Wiki forces. Many people in this camp believe that Wiki is error-prone exactly because of the open editing nature of the community and at the mercy of the flippant idealists. Others in the oppostion are opposed to the technology itself finding it either incomplete, stateless, or cumbersome.

Sean Corfield points to a Register article, “Wikipedia ‘to make universities obsolete” that discusses the pro-wiki camp’s arguments. The comments provide an interesting nugget as well in terms of what would make wiki better (quoted below):

• You need to be able to restrict who can edit the wiki to stop random destructive types causing havoc.

• You need a history of each wiki entry in case you need to go back to a previous version to check what has changed over time.

• You need to have a community of people who have a vested interest in keeping the information correct an current. Even if they don’t have the rights to edit the wiki themselves, they can notify an editor.

• It helps if the wiki is part of a site that provides some sort of a proper structure rather than a collection of random facts that are linked only by keywords. Personally I think a wiki makes an excellent compliment to a blog.

Source: corfield.org

For more reading, check out:

• Wikis In The Newsroom
• Collaborative Conundrum: Do Wikis Have a Place in the Newsroom?

A couple of months ago I read “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations” by James Surowiecki. I found the book to be an interesting look at the ability of groups of individuals to apply “private’ knowledge to situations resulting in an uncanny “intelligence”.

Today, I have come across two references to this book that are worthy of note. Wired.com runs an article about James Hong and Jim Young, founders of HotorNot.com. Interested in motivating people of all ages to participate in this year’s American presidential election, the two are putting their wallets to work. The idea is to encourage people to not only be aware but to spread the word. What struck a chord was this quote:

“Part of this is inspired by a book Jim and I both read, The Wisdom of Crowds. The basic premise is that the crowd in many cases is smarter than individuals, based on having a large diversity of people inside who make their own judgments,” Hong said. “What that means is, especially since this election is so close, the more people we can get to vote, the more likely the right answer will appear.”

Source: Wired.com, “Voter Bounty Hits Hundred Grand”

Also today, Stowe Boyd comments on Talkativeness, Influence, and Blogging. As he notes:

Why do I think these observations are relevant to blogging? First of all, blogging — when done right — is really a group discussion, if not actually a small group discussion (at least it shouldn’t be a mass market broadcast, or NASDAQ setting stock prices). Blogging is a conversation between people.

Source: GetReal, “Talkativeness and Influence”

Stowe touches on the effort required to produce compelling blog content. I’ve discussed this idea earlier when I defined the Blog Entry Archetypes. In defining the archetypes, I attempted to correlate the “success” (as measured by traffic, commentary, trackback, revenue, etc.) with the “effort” required to assemble the entry.

Stowe’s main contention alludes to an emerging belief by some that blogging will not be successful by virtue of quantity but quality. Though it’s easy enough to generate new links/content throughout a day, conversations form naturally around topics that research and explore ideas more so than those that simply map the dots.

I’d provide my own quotes from the book, but I gave away my copy immediately after I finished it.

LinkedIn is one of the new entrants into the “Million-High” Club. Membership in this club simply requires the acquisition of a million or more members to your Social Networking Software. They join the ranks of Friendster, Orkut (I think), plus a wad of the online dating sites.

From News.com:

LinkedIn, a social networking company focused on businesspeople, said it passed the million-member mark for registered users. The company credited reaching the milestone in part to the launch of its “LinkedIn for Groups” service for networking within specific organizations.

LinkedIn, based in Mountain View, Calif., is one of several Web sites and software offerings that help businesspeople meet each other and establish online connections. Other companies in the space include Matcheroo, which launched its enterprise software in January, Spoke and Ryze.

Source: News.com

Since it’s a holiday weekend and all, I thought it’d be a good time to talk
about something a little less tech and a little more sociology - social
aggregation vectors. What are the factors that gravitate us towards some and
repel us from others? Though it might seem obvious, consider the following:

• Gender
• Physical Appearance
• Religion
• Socio-Economic status
• Race
• … Stature?

As a New Yorker, I enjoy taking part in one of my favorite hobbies - people
watching. Over the years, I’ve noticed that groups of friends tend to be more or
less the same height. I got to thinking that it was about a comfortability
“threshold” if you will. I’ve found that many shorter folks I’ve talked to
either disliked or tended to distrust taller people. Further investigation
revealed that the reason for this was that the short felt a similar
aversion/prejudice from the tall. If we assume that it is easier to hang out
with those who are similar to us, would height not be one of the easiest
factors to quantify against? You can be a Republican, an introvert, an avid
Hip-Hop fan, or a Movie Star, but it is difficult to assign a hard value to
those traits and personalities. Could this be only in big cities where heights
are more varied due to the general diversity of the masses?

Of course there are exceptions to this theory and many of you might be
thinking this is absolute hogwash. Or perhaps I place more value on the issue of stature because I’m 5′5″. Either way this leads me to my next question. How important is
the context that defines a relationship in relation to the vector? Some
different contextual environments might include:

• workplace
• academic setting
• gender
• family
• internet groups
• history

Two friends might hang out together simply because they work in the same place or are working on a group project for school. A person’s gender will most
likely have an impact on the way you tend to judge his/her physical
characteristics or personality traits. Your best friend might be a whole foot
taller than you, but your common history of 23 years is the tie that binds.
Socio-economic factors might not be a factor when you’re in a cultural club.

There are an infinite number of vectors vs. context scenarios that can be
considered, some perhaps even subconscious that we may not even be aware of. It’s something we don’t think about day to day, but it’s an interesting exercise to consider why we befriend certain people and why we stray from others.

As I’ve found little documented evidence that lends credence or disproves my stature theory, I’ve put together the highly unscientific poll.

Greg, thanks for the guest blogging opportunity. Ok everyone, now rant away.

Since I started writing this blog, I’ve moved between lots of different industries and issues. A couple of months ago, the content here was aggregated into Full As A Goog, a community of readers that are more technical/programmer-oriented than anything else.

In that time, I’ve never really bothered to define what SNS is. Part of the delay has been a time constraint, the other part blurriness on defining the thing itself. Reading the Radiant Marketing blog, I came across a definition that I like:

Essentially, social software (or as they refer to it, social media) represents a new generation of tools that bring companies and users into a dynamic, ongoing conversation. They include blogs, digital stories, RSS feeds, wikis and social networks.

Source: Radiant Marketing Blog, “Social Software: What Is It?”

This is a summary of a definition from SocialMedia.biz.