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Corey Reece » Blog Archive » Walled gardens no more. (A unified social network and the makings of a plan)
I met Corey at BarCamp and we got to discuss this idea. I look forward to seeing where he takes it next.
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RDU Start Up Weekend
There was a brief preliminary meeting at BarCampRDU.
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An older report. Just saving it for later: “A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts.”
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Thingology (LibraryThing’s ideas blog): Tagmash: Book tagging grows up
This is a major move forward in tagging: “In getting past words or short phrases, tagmash closes some of the gap between tagging and professional subject classifications.”
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Tagmashes from LibraryThing. Many-to-Many:
Weinberger’s take: “With tagmashes, the info that this tag is related to that one is gleaned from the fact that a human said that they were related.”
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Tame The Web: Libraries and Technology: Abstract: Modeling the role of blogging in librarianship
The abstract for Michael’s dissertation. I really look forward to reading it.
Tag: barcamp
links for 2007-07-20
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Section on useing XFN, hCard, etc. to create a portable social network. I wrote about this idea over a year ago after a discussion we had at BarCampRDU 2006.
links for 2007-07-06
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This was a great event last year. If you can make it, go. “BarCampRDU 2007 will take place August 4, 2007 at Red Hat Headquarters in Raleigh, NC – just like last year. We’re fully sponsored (thanks!) and looking forward to a great event.”
Notes from BarCampRdu,Part 3, Social networking, Social browsing, and Microformats
For sessions 3 and 4, I attended sessions focusing on social software. From the wiki, session 3 was:
Social Networks – Fred Stutzman. We’ll spend a session talking about Social Networking Websites, such as Myspace, Facebook and Linked In. We’ll look at them, figure out why people use them, and share ideas about how businesses can leverage social networks.
It was attended by what seemed like half campers. Unfortunately, I didn’t really take very many notes during Fred’s session because I was already familiar with his main ideas. There are three main aspects of his thought that he discussed:
- His Facebook research (It really is fascinating)
- Situational Relevance:
Situational Relevance in Social Networking Website
Situational Relevance and Facebook’s Summer Traffic - The Network Effect Multiplier, or, Metcalfe’s Flaw
Most of the discussion focused on situational relevance and the network effect multiplier. to get a good idea of the discussion, you might want to check out the discussion on those posts. I would also encourage you to check out my recent responses to Fred’s thought:
- Comments on “The Network Effect Multiplier, or, Metcalfe’s Flaw”
- Social networking site usage: An explanation for Facebook
Session 4 was on social bookmarking and was moderated by Chris Messina.Chris got the discussion rolling with by explaining his idea of the future of web browsing and his original vision for Flock. He also made arguments for why the future of browsing is currently being developed with Webkit applications.
However, the discussion quickly turned to a discussion of microformats. Fred Stutzman and Terrell Russell or ClaimID (identity management) discussed their implementation of OpenID (universal distributed url login). hCards (like vCards) were also discussed. I had not really understood the idea of XFN before the discussion.
XFN is a simply way to define relationships between people. For example, this is implemented in WordPress when one adds a friend. A typical blogroll implementing XFN could look like this:
<a xhref="http://jane-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://jane-blog.example.org/" rel="sweetheart date met">Jane</a> <a xhref="http://dave-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://dave-blog.example.org/" rel="friend met">Dave</a> <a xhref="http://darryl-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://darryl-blog.example.org/" rel="friend met">Darryl</a> <a xhref="http://www.metafilter.com/" mce_href="http://www.metafilter.com/" >MetaFilter</a> <a xhref="http://james-blog.example.com/" mce_href="http://james-blog.example.com/" rel="met">James Expert</a>
(example from XFN: Introduction and Examples)
It seems like a pretty straightforward evolution of social interaction through the web. It made me wonder why Facebook doesn’t implement this with all of the relationship data they hold. While it might be of limited value in their closed network, the future will (hopefully) allow exporting of data.
We discussed how all of these standards ought to interact in the future. If relationships and identity information were stored as microformats on an OpenID enabled server, it would become possible to export data from your OpenID server to a new service. This advance would make navigating between multiple social applications easier. It would also prevent the need to disclose uneccessary amounts of personal information by uploading ones address book to a new service. This move would both empower the user to take more control of their privacy while automating the more painful parts of joining a new network. My notes for this discussion read:
XFN + OpenID = portable network
XFN + hCard + Jabber + OpenID = ad hoc (open standards) social networks
These formulae certainly stay true to what Chris Messina began by describing as an “Architecture for Collaboration”.
I believe that we closed with a discussion of the privacy implications related to social browsing and microformats.
Technorati tags: barcamprdu microformats
Notes from BarCampRDU, Part 2: “Sex and the Death of Advertising”
For session 2, I attended “Sex and the Death of Advertising”. From the wiki:
My name is Martin Smith [email protected] and I learned to sell soap for P&G and candy for M&M/Mars. Selling soap was harder by the way. Sex & The Death of Advertising will discuss what we, as marketers, do when tried and true market creating strategies cease to work. What are the implications of the death of the Advertising Industrial Complex? Will new tools such as search engine marketing (SEM) eventually end up in the same tangled mess due to pressure from advertisers fleeing now unsuccessful channels such as TV, Radio and Infomercials? Is there something fundamentally different in new “pull†ad models that will prevent SEM from losing reach like television and print? We will discuss selections from The Attention Economy by Davenport and Beck, Gonzo Marketing by Christopher Locke and All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin. If you have a favorite marketing author or new marketing theory, please bring it to our discussion. Our session’s draft goal will be to brainstorm key elements of our new marketing paradigm and identify what’s next.
Martin did a good job of leading a discussion. He began with a brief introduction to his theory. Essentially traditional push advertising no longer works because people have become numb to the overabundance of messages they are exposed to. Generations raised with TV and the Web are great at blocking things out.
Another problem faced by advertising in general is what Martin demonstrated with the example of infomercials. When everyone starts using a certain method of advertising, the price for said advertising goes up while the effectiveness goes down.
After the introduction, he asked other participants to share their current experiences with advertising. We talked about Google AdWords for a little bit. During this part of the discussion, I feel that we hit upon a lot of the major points of the discussion:
- “Word of Mouth” is extremely important. Martin discussed his experience with magnetic poetry. That was a product that largely sold itself through word of mouth. Martin pointed out that what took him 5 years of marketing then could probably be accomplished in 6 months now.
- “The Long Tail“: We spent a lot of time discussing the importance of being able to reach niche markets. Why pay for AdWords if you hit the top of the rankings anyways. This also lead to a discussion of ->>
- “Purple Cows“: Is it purple enough? Am I explaining it in a purple enough way?
In addition to these major themes, the discussion covered a number of other ideas. I am going to outline a few below:
- Martin was a fan of the saying “Live by PR, Die by PR.” He used a number of examples from his career where a product was successful due to positive editorial press. For example, the magnetic poetry was picked up by the Washington Post. He also gave some examples of how bad PR, or no PR, can then destroy a brand.
- We talked about the idea of a “Free Prize Inside”. Martin pointed out how the practice of giving away web services and product trials is similar to giving away a free prize in a Cracker Jack box, in that everyone expects a certain ammount of free. A lively discussion about free trials ensued. One interesting point someone brought up was that after six months with one software trial, it was integrated into his life. It seemed that there was a general concensus that we were all at least partially in the “business of giving away”.
- Customer service is extremely important. Given the speed customers can share bad experiences, wer are only as strong as our weakest link. This is also really important because of so many products are now free that the service is what keeps customers. Furthermore, barriers for new competitors to enter are low. In a later talk on Social Browsing, we discussed how it will become easier to export settings and information from one service to another. This will make customer service event more of a defining factor.
- We discussed the importance of inventory. This related to the last point: If Amazon and its competitors both have all the books, then customer service is what sets them apart.LIBRARY ASIDE: This made me think about how libraries need to market our inventories better. Everyone at the session seemed surprised that most of the Barnes and Noble and Borders books only sell one copy a year. Libraries have much larger stocks than your typical bookstore. It was pointed out that Amazon has 11 million or so books for sale. We have over 5 million in the libraries at UNC. Of course that doesn’t count what we can interlibrary loan. We need to promote WorldCat more than we do. Open WorldCat at least should help publicise our services a little. If inventory and free are this important, then libraries should be able to perform considerably better against our competition.This discussion of book inventory also tied in well with the ideas behind Lulu.com‘s philosophy (an event sponor) and the discussions of alternative publishing at a later session (I will post on this session later).
Technorati tag: barcamprdu