A nice metaphor for the social web – ‘weaving’, where the medium is the relationship, as well as reference to Chris Locke’s notion of social networking as relationship bricolage.
I like both metaphors as they capture different things that are important about social software. Weaving is about connection and (to an extent) diversity, but also about constructing a matrix that incorporates not just people but software. I actually prefer ‘bricolage’ as it is about assembly of disparate and disconnected things, capturing the fact that they are reassembled into a new and recognisable order rather better than ‘mashup’.
Created:Thu, 07 Jun 2007 09:19:29 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1299
Posted: June 7, 2007, 3:19 am

Meetmoi is an online dating service that works via SMS – offers ‘speed-dating’ by text message for 10 minutes to those who meet in a virtual lobby, determined by post code.A neat, bottom-up idea. A sort of geocaching where people are the geocache. The idea may be transferable – isolation is a notorious problem for distance learners: if it were possible to find others nearby in near-real-time it might help a lot.In fact, though geographical collocation would be nice, even the ability to find other ‘lonely learners’ would be beneficial.
Created:Thu, 07 Jun 2007 02:57:35 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1297
Posted: June 6, 2007, 8:57 pm

That old chestnut of lack of diversity raises its ugly head again.It appears that 3M may have been losing its legendary creative edge as a result of a (successful) drive to improve efficiency through the Siz Sigma process. The new chairman, Buckley says, “Perhaps one of the mistakes that we made as a company—it’s one of the dangers of Six Sigma—is that when you value sameness more than you value creativity, I think you potentially undermine the heart and soul of a company like 3M.” His answer is to reduce the control in creative areas, getting rid of a one size fits all approach.As ever, parcellation is the key to successful innovation. We need islands in which innovation can take hold and grow, unthreatened by the grey masses.
Universities should listen.
Created:Wed, 06 Jun 2007 18:51:42 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1296
Posted: June 6, 2007, 12:51 pm

It seems that things are not going well for those who used to make money out of porn thanks to user-generated content and the likes of the worryingly named ‘Pornotube’. Interesting because the porn industry has long been the bit of seaweed stuck to the wall that tells us what the weather will be like soon for the rest of the Internet community, including those of us in education.
Created:Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:11:48 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1295
Posted: June 6, 2007, 8:11 am

Useful overview article with some nice examples on some of the issues of trust, authorisation and authentication in the context of social software.
Created:Tue, 05 Jun 2007 05:18:51 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1294
Posted: June 4, 2007, 11:18 pm

At last, someone has done what I’ve been trying to get done for years now – written a tools to liberate data from Blackboard and turn it into something useful. Free, downloadable, runs on any system.
Created:Sun, 03 Jun 2007 06:28:15 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5258&resid=1292
Posted: June 3, 2007, 12:28 am

Some fair points by Nicholas Carr, observing the importance of a balance between the top down and the bottom up, framed as a critique of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. I think he is misleading though, in a couple of important respects:
Firstly, he suggests that the crowd is only good at debugging, not creating. While it is true that someone needs to start the whole thing rolling, clustering, chunking and other forms of parcellation can enable a crowd-based system to evolve in small pieces. Carr mentions Linux as an example, but a huge amount of the success of Linux has to be attributed to the wider GNU (and other open source) applications that surround it. It is about building small pieces that can be assembled and reassembled.
Secondly, he has a naive view of the crowd. Terry Anderson and I have been talking a lot lately about different ways that crowd behaviour can be mediated and the different kinds of groups, networks and collectives that occur. No particular approach is right for all circumstances and there are many ways that crowds can be wise.The recommendations of Google are a good example: not always perfect, but often good enough to help us find the needle in the haystack.This is not debugging behaviour. This is generative: stigmergic but blended with collective wisdom and individual intelligence.Crowds can be subtle and complex beasts.
Created:Sat, 02 Jun 2007 19:44:49 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1291
Posted: June 2, 2007, 1:44 pm

Thanks to Donald Clark for pointing this one out. This is awesome. Truly awesome. Unbelievably awesome. Astonishing. Microsoft have really done something amazing and incredible here. I never thought I’d write those words. But this is the sort of thing that will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and applaud, then come back and ask for an encore. I am humbled.
Created:Fri, 01 Jun 2007 08:49:35 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1290
Posted: June 1, 2007, 2:49 am

Fantastic article by Golder & Huberman from 2005 observing patterns of tag use on del.icio.us. All of it is good, including a great discussion of various forms of ambiguity etc in tagging and the relative merits/demerits of taxonomies vs folksonomies, but the really interesting bit comes towards the end when they observe, and attempt to account for, a remarkable and stable consensus on proportions of tags used to categorise resources. They relate this to the stochastic urn model, observing that some of the stability is the result of imitation (what I have called mob behaviour) but some of it is to do with shared and presumably independently held knowledge (what I have called multitude behaviour).
Created:Thu, 31 May 2007 05:22:07 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1289
Posted: May 30, 2007, 11:22 pm

A nice collection of cognitive biases that seem very relevant to social software and social navigation in particular.
I suspect that there are ways that most of these biases could be used positively in a learning context, though whether the bad habits acquired in doing so would be more harmful than the good they might engender would have to be considered carefully!
Created:Tue, 29 May 2007 03:15:58 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1288
Posted: May 28, 2007, 9:15 pm