The Social Wave Blog by Sheldon Chang http://www.socialwave.net/blog/ Anecdotes, thoughts, and lessons learned in my work to apply community networking technology in the real world. en Copyright 2007 Sat, 08 Dec 2007 07:32:29 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Non-Ranting Pondering on Facebook's Beacon and Facebook with a little Syrian flavor Syria is casting blame on Facebook for allowing Israeli intelligence to infiltrate their online social networks. By the way, I'm being partially sarcastic. Also, for the record, I'm not a Facebook hater. This whole Beacon incident will blow over, but it is another strike against Facebook that will make people think twice about hyping it as the future of social networking or identity on the Internet. You can get away with blunders like this when you're a garage shop operation still experimenting with novel and potentially risky ideas looking for a tech breakthrough, but when you've been rechristened as the Internet's $15 billion dollar gorilla before you've grown up, you may unpleasantly discover that half of your leash has suddenly been yanked away. Breakthroughs are made by people and organizations that are allowed to experiment and exercise their creativity without boundaries. Facebook is not yet a breakthrough and their premature fame may ultimately stunt the real potential of the company. ]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/12/nonranting_pond.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/12/nonranting_pond.shtml Community Networking Technologies Sat, 08 Dec 2007 07:32:29 -0800 Yelping Off Topic: A Sign of Social Cohesion or a Flaw in the Business Model? As the popularity of Yelp grows in the San Francisco Bay Area, I'm meeting a growing number of people who have a bit of bile for the popular reviews site that has become a social network as well. To a certain degree, it's to be expected that as your popularity grows, so will your notoriety, but the way you earn your notoriety can be more surprising than the fact that it exists. I would have thought the big issue people had with Yelp would be whether the reviews were useful or not. That is certainly one of the issues, but it's not the one that's surprising to me. Some people seem to have an emotional love or hate relationship with Yelp. If these people were all business owners, then it would be understandable. If people slam your business then, "Yelp sucks." If you're getting Yelp love, then "you love Yelp!" However, it's more complicated than that. Many of the people who are having an emotional reaction to Yelp are active online users. For one reason or another, they judge the site as either fun or obnoxious based on what its users are saying. Now, Yelp is surely not the first site where people publish biased or ridiculously exaggerated reviews. Go surf some products on Amazon.com and you'll easily see some even more offensive reviews, especially if you dare browse books on social commentary or political issues, yet I don't see anyone holding the presence of those reviews against Amazon.com as a company. Plenty of websites are mostly blather, but peple don't seem to develop a reaction to that site's name. I think part of the problem that Yelp faces is that it has succeeded just as much by being a social network as it has succeeded as a reviews site. This dual success is a blessing and a curse. The CEO of the defunct Judy's Book reviews site was reported to have admitted that one of the reasons why Yelp beat them was because Yelp was able to make its users feel more important. Leveraging social networking and other viral technologies as part of their growth strategy has worked terrifically for Yelp in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the social networking aspect may also be debasing the value of its reviews or the image of the company. Yelp encourages you to be the first to review something, review often, and be entertaining when you review. This sometimes leads to shallow, exaggerated, or potentially fabricated reviews. Whether online or in RL, there are storytellers amongst us who won't let the truth get in the way of being entertaining. It's nothing new. People naturally like to share who they are and tell their personal stories when they start to find affinity with a group of other people online. If the incidence of people interjecting irrelevant slice of my life details in Yelp reviews is any indication, there are a lot of people who have begun to feel a social connection to Yelp or a group of Yelpers. I'm also noticing that people are reviewing businesses based on their first impressions of a business. In a drive to have something to say to their audience, community, or whoever they feel they are communicating with, they go into stores, look around, and write a review based on the short experience they had there. This is not necessarily wrong, but they're just not reviews. They're posts. These behaviors are the Yelp version of the age old problem of the off-topic post that sidetracks a discussion thread away from the intended purpose of the thread's starter. As people in an online community become more and more familiar with each other, the likelihood of them bringing up tangents and following tangents increase. For a traditional online community, this is a good sign even if it is a minor problem sometimes, but for any site like Yelp that's using social networking as a strategy to grow, it can be a viral strategy that causes unintended secondary infections. The embellishments, personal stories and non-review reviews are good for the online community, but as a whole they don't make the reviews more worthwhile. A more strict editorial policy could help repair the damage, but would such policies end up alienating the very users responsible for them becoming the latest in the string of Silicon Valley dot-com darlings? A lot of reviews would surely get shot down. Some of the ones that would get deleted may even be good stimulants for more rational reviews as a community reaction. Would editorial control stiffle creativity and kill what makes the site so entertaining for a lot of people? Reviews sites featuring community published opinions and locally based anything (outside of Craigslist) have had a troublesome history as sustainable businesses. Yelp is both and it looked like a game changer to me until I noticed recently that their most valuable assets were also liabilities.They still may end up being a game changer, but there are some problems with their formula that need to be fixed first. Going the way they're going now, I don't doubt that Yelp could become a profitable entity, I just don't see them as game changers. By the way, earlier I said "perceived in-crowd" because it's ludicrous to lump all the dedicated Yelpers into a single social group. It's unfair, but it's a real problem nonetheless. Rightfully so or not, to a growing minority of people, "Yelper" is a social demographic that they have negative stereotypes about. http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/12/yelping_off_top_1.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/12/yelping_off_top_1.shtml Community Networking Technologies online communities social networking Yelp Yelpers Craigslist Sun, 02 Dec 2007 01:28:58 -0800 Social Networking is not the next Email Marketplace radio program, a guest commentator gave a one minute opinion that Social Networking is going to grow and grow and be the next big technology. I believe he said it'll be the next "email." The specifics of what was said and who it was aren't important. As all the people who missed the fuss over MySpace have now become engrossed in their new Facebook lives, there is a growing sentiment that Social Networking will eventually be significant part of everyone's life. By the way, your refrigerator will also be smart enough to realize that the RFID milk container in your refrigerator is running low and will either put another gallon on order for you or tell your PDA to remind you to pick some up without you clumsily trying to fat finger it in. So, what else is new? We've heard this before. No, I'm not pooh poohing the importance and relevance of social networking technologies to the modern world as we know it. It definitely will grow. It certainly will have a significant impact on life as we know it--some of it will be good. Some of it won't. I draw the line on saying that it will be the next big thing--a killer app on the level of email. By the way, the first time I heard that social networks were the next killer app was in 2003. Each year, it was a different champion that was supposed to lead us to the promised land. Each year, we've moved forward, but I'm not holding my breath for a promised land anytime soon for one reason. I'm not waiting for the right technology. I'm waiting for fatigue. I've enjoyed online communities since 1986. I still enjoy them, but it's not the thrill it once was. It's gotten old hat. My enthusiasm for these many to many networking technologies have waned and risen again through the years, oftentimes coinciding with a new group of people I liked to "hang with" online, but it's no accident that I don't have a MySpace page and I'm not swept up by Facebook mania (BTW, please stop Super Poking me people. I get too many email notifications as it is). We will not know the true extent of how pervasive social networking (as we know it) will be in the future until the majority of people out there say the same thing I say to myself whenever I see the latest thing: "I've seen this before somewhere. This one is better looking and has a lot more features, but it reminds me of something I used 10 years ago." Enthusiasm drives the social networking craze of today. Another word that begins with the same letter will be just as important in driving the social networking industry of tomorrow. The word is "endurance" as in the endurance of the social network user to continue to keep in touch with everyone online when it is no longer the thing he or she is looking forward to every day. Anyone can get to feel small fame in a social network, but there comes a day when you tire of never getting any fan mail or you start to see answering fan mail as a responsibility rather than a thrill.]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/12/social_networki.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/12/social_networki.shtml Community Networking Technologies Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:54:42 -0800 Social Connectivity Calculus. The Answer is not 42. It's 5. a recent study published at the British Association Festival of Science 2007 concludes that people who have many "friends" on a social networking site do not necessarily have any more friends in real life than the average person. The study concludes that factors outside of the social networking world limit the number of close friends that a person is able to keep to roughly five. It turns out that we're probably hard wired to only be able to keep a limited number of people in our inner circle because of cognitive limits. Although the social networking tools don't seem to affect the number of close relationships that a person has, they do seem to allow people to extend the number of second-tier friends that they have. After having restated all of the meaty points of the study, it might be a good time to say that one study does not make the truth and our understanding of how social networks affect us in the real world is so young that you can say that it's still in the womb. Undoubtedly, there are "friend-whore" haters out there who are dancing on their chairs upon hearing news of this study, but the study only says that social networks don't allow you to artificially expand the number of your closest relationships. It could very well be that some people could have fewer close and second tier friendships if it weren't for social networking tools. The opposite could be true too. All the time spent keeping up with ten thousand online friends may leave a person unable to maintain as many real relationships as he or she would otherwise have. At the risk of sounding obvious, I'll say that both scenarios are probably true depending on the person and the environment. I would count myself among the people who get annoyed by "friend-whores." It bugs me so much that I intentionally didn't add in friends list type of features to my site, Social Wave. It's not that I envy these people or find them petty, opportunistic, or fake. I just don't like flaky people and people who have a ridiculous number of online friends just strike me as people that wouldn't be able to depend on. Being aware of this personal bias of mine, I wonder how the number of friends that a person has online can affect their real life perception to other people. Whenever I gather together with other people who are knowledgeable in online communities and social networks, I frequently hear heavy skepticism of online measures of a person's social relevance or reputation. I repeatedly hear the belief that the most influential people in real life are often off the map online. This is hardly a new phenomenon. It takes a lot more than a secret handshake to exchange a few words with the President of the United States or even just J.D. Salinger. Sometimes you do run into online profiles for industry giants. Would the number of friends or specific representation of that person's online friends affect how you would perceive this person in real life? If you were to meet with a presidential candidate, how would your perception of this person be affected if you saw his or her profile page with only 5 friends vs. 50,000 friends? Probably, you'd rationalize that you'd be disappointed if this person only had 5 friends because in this scenario, you expect a presidential candidate to have a lot of supporters or friends. Let's take this down to a more muddy scenario. Suppose we're now talking about a doctor that you're going to see for the first time tomorrow. Are you going to be more critical of this doctor's advice if he/she had 0 friends, 5 friends, or 500+ friends? In what cases do we see it as a positive for people to have 500+ connections and in what cases do we see it as evidence of folly?]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/09/social_connecti.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/09/social_connecti.shtml Online Community in Real Life captology friend-whores social-networks Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:59:24 -0800 The New Google Way? Customer Service is what the Little People Do Update: I finally figured out what is most likely the reason for our partial blanking in Google: programmer error. The site was aborting whenever it detected a bot and Googlebot only saw a blank page anytime it tried to crawl. While I have to admit it's pretty embarassing to trace the problem back to myself, my grumblings about Google customer service still stands. They really need to do something about that.
I'm posting this while extremely frustrated. Maybe I'll regret this later, but for now, I feel my ire is entirely justified. Google may proudly declare that they're not evil, but I'm beginning to feel that they're also not "good" either. About a month ago, the socialwave.net site started vanishing from the Google index and at the time of this writing, about the only thing you can find from Social Wave in Google is this blog. My site appears to be at least partially banned from Google. Social Wave's site traffic has cratered to about 25% to 50% of its normal traffic on any given day. That's probably not as drastic as a drop that many other sites would have experienced because Social Wave is a regional site and we usually don't get massive numbers of non-local visitors, but the drop has hurt very significantly and it really hurts the small businesses and organizations who use the free services I provide to them through Social Wave to grab a tiny piece of online mindshare from their huge corporate mega-tailer competition. For some of these businesses, they have little online presence that they own outside of Social Wave. I won't deny that I probably did something that is frowned upon by Google to draw a penalty like this. The problem is that, I have no idea what it is and their webmaster's quality guidelines are hardly helpful. The best advice they have in there is to "not do anything that you would find unfair if your competitor was doing it." Roughly translated, I guess it means "do unto other as you would want others to do unto you" and we won't punish you. Upon thoroughly reviewing the entire socialwave.net site and the two affiliated Downtown portal sites (downtowncampbell.com and downtownwillowglen.org), I've found a few things that could have been identified as offenses, but none of them were done for the purposes of manipulating Page Rank or for keyword stuffing purposes. And speaking personally, I do not feel that I've been guilty of doing unto others as I would not want them to do unto me. As far as I can tell, here are the offenses that I've been guilty of. If any of these were indeed violations, I hope you can see that they're technical violations rather than gross violations intended to game search engine rankings. Technical violations shouldn't be met with a policy of silence. Anyway, all of these issues have been addressed and I hope to automagically see socialwave.net back in the Google index again within another week.. Here are the possible violations:
  • Five Hidden Words in the footer
    This isn't as bad as it sounds. Usually people use hidden words to stuff keywords. This was simply a case of stupidity and laziness. A program I was using generated a generic registration stub (that I paid money to omit) that was no longer relevant. It was hard coded so instead of hacking the code, I just put SPAN tags around it and made it the same color as the background
  • Potentially mistaken hidden links in the sidebar
    One page analyzer came back with the surprising result that I had a lot of hidden links embedded on the page. It turns out that the way the CSS was coded caused this elementary evaluation tool to think the links were a similar color to the background (not even close). Hopefully, the evaluator that Google uses is smarter than the one I used.
  • Mistaken for Link Farming?
    The main Social Wave site and the two Downtown sites have close relationships. A significant amount of Social Wave content is actually stuff intended for one of the Downtown sites. Social Wave acts as both a website and a content engine for these affiliate sites. In a few areas Social Wave and the affiliate sites refer links back and forth to each other simply because some of the content is located only on one site.
  • Link spamming?
    Most of the content on Social Wave's affiliate sites are essentially syndicated copies of stuff on Social Wave. I started putting a permalink back to the original source on Social Wave (instead of the affiliate site) because as I understand it, the permalink should go back to the most stable version of the source material.
  • JavaScript in the HTML Source
    Instead of referenced by a link to a static JavaScript file
You're either nodding your head in frustrated agreement right now because you've gone through this too or you're snickering at a total idiot who's grasping at straws. I see myself both ways because I've been making websites since Mosaic 1.0. I do a little bit of everything. I'm no domain expert, but I know enough about everything mainstream that when I do run into a problem, I know how to seek support or resources to get something handled. I usually laugh at the guy running around with his hair of fire screaming out crazy supersitious things, except this time I'm that guy. I'm not sure how I got to be the crazy guy this time, but I think it had to do with the absolute lack of customer service provided by Google. You don't contact Google, they contact you. Well, that's only figuratively true. You can try to contact them, but don't expect them to so much as provide a confirmation that they received or processed your request. They suggest that you get help from other webmasters in their Google Groups, but the problem there is that there are tons of well intentioned people there who are giving out advice that cannot be proven as valid. Some of the advice is probably at best a waste of time and possibly even counter productive. If anyone from Google runs across this, all I have to say is can you please do something to help me out? If you think I'm evil, at least tell me so in uncertain terms so I can quit this pathetic cycle of feeling like I'm praying to a deity who never talks back to me no matter how much I want to please it? This experience has allowed me to understand why some people see Google as arrogant. I thought it was simply a case of top dog envy. That's definitely part of it, but for me, it's because I feel like Google has declared itself a deity before me. The crops that I've farmed are getting washed away by the rains and when my human efforts fail to stem the waters, I'm reduced to praying to a power that may or may not be sympathetic to my troubles. It's hard to believe that a company that proudly hires the bestest (sic) and the brighterest (sic) is unable to also find some nicerest (sic) customer service reps to throw in the mix. I've had problems with Yahoo and AOL for various things too, but the difference there was that someone actually got back to me. Sure it was often 95% form letter, but the mere fact of being acknowledged breaks the hallucinatory feeling of form emailing a higher power. Customer service at other Internet companies is frustrating. Customer service at Google sucks and is mostly non-existent. ]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/08/the_google_way.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/08/the_google_way.shtml Search Engines customer service google Sat, 18 Aug 2007 21:28:28 -0800 Kids May Know Everything, but Parents are More Web Savvy Study finds In this Nielsen study, they found that teenagers were less successful at completing given tasks on a set of websites that they were asked to visit. It took them longer and they failed to complete the task more often than the parental group.
Teens were found to have poor reading skills, unsophisticated research strategies and a "dramatically" lower patience level, according to the study.
I didn't get my hands on the full study and I have no idea how rigorous its scientific design was, but nonetheless, it's a good foil for conversation. It doesn't take a psychologist to understand that a person's level of confidence does not have a direct correlation with their actual ability to perform a skill. I also remember another study that pitted kids vs. parents in performing tasks in Photoshop that came to the same conclusion as the Nielsen study mentioned above. If you know of which study I'm trying to recall, please comment or send me an email. My socialwave.net project has given me a lot of anecdotal evidence to present to this discussion. Over the course of trying to bring social networking to the unconverted in my neighborhood and my region, I've given tutorials and demos to adults of all ages. The only people who were hopeless were the ones who had some other mental block over computers that were not related to their capacity to learn. One had decided that the Internet was evil and that I was a bad person for trying to get the unconverted to try it. Another was convinced that all of her personal data would instantly get siphoned up by criminals the second she plugged in her modem. Characters who exhibited these sorts of phobias did tend to be older, but I also met one person in her 20's who had a severe distrust of technology. ]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/06/kids_may_know_e.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/06/kids_may_know_e.shtml Community Networking Technologies Thu, 07 Jun 2007 17:10:38 -0800 Online Community Unconference 2007 ocu2007]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/06/online_communit_2.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/06/online_communit_2.shtml Community Networking Technologies Thu, 07 Jun 2007 15:16:06 -0800 Social Wave 1.6 Released Backend changes to support new Social Wave portal sites Any group on socialwave.net can now have their own custom site that displays feeds of any content posted to their group on socialwave.net. For an example, see the Downtown Campbell Group and then see the DowntownCampbell.com site. Currently, any portal set-up for a SocialWave group will need to be a custom set-up done by us, but if there's any interest from people to do this themselves, I'll publish a toolkit for socialwave.net integration in the future. There are currently two socialwave.net portals (downtowncampbell.com and downtownwillowglen.org). We plan to roll out another one for the Downtown Campbell Neighborhood Association soon and are exploring group portal sites for other groups as well.

Allow Guest Posting of Topics, Events, and RSVPs

To allow the portal sites to be interactive, and also because we recognize the need to open up posting permissions on socialwave.net to stimulate more activity, we've made it possible to post to the Social Wave network by passing a CAPTCHA and email validation process. We expect regular users to also use the guest posting feature. We've had a lot of users tell us that they don't want to bother with logging in or they can't ever remember how to login. As long as people provide the same email address as their registered account, registered users can now post as guests, but have their posts linked to their account.

Post reviews, events, and topics into forums

Instead of keeping events, topics, and reviews separated, they can now all be grouped into forum categories. I expect this to improve the ease of posting for some users who get confused navigating around the site and it's also an important step to make the new RSS feeds more useful.

RSS 2.0 Feeds for all Forums and Groups

In order to better network with neighborhood blogs and websites throughout Silicon Valley, I've finally gotten around to publishing RSS feeds of forum content and group content. In some cases, forum and group content are exactly the same. As mentioned just above, the forums now contain events and reviews that can be posted directly into them and will also be reflected in the RSS feeds. There are also other notable changes that I'm not listing here. For a more complete list please view this thread: http://www.socialwave.net/topics/3396/]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/05/socialwavenet_1.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2007/05/socialwavenet_1.shtml Socialwave.net News & Notes Wed, 23 May 2007 16:45:39 -0800 Online Community Camp 2006 Online Community Camp 2006 a "mash up conference" a week ago that I felt I should write a little about since I had a rare opportunity to compare notes with a large number of people in the online community world. The format of this one day conference used audience participation to define the day's agenda. The topics that would be discussed in nine sessions (split into three times of three concurrent sessions). The day started with introductions and then everyone had a chance to propose topics for the group to vote on. I was surprised when online/offline integration of online community spaces was a key area of interest. This marks a sea change in general perception of online communities for me. There seems to be more and more people who are asking the question of how do we break from the mantra of using the Internet as a space for ideas to a space for real life where geography is as real a factor as gravity in the limits of possibility. I attended the session for online/offline integration and left it a little disappointed, but I have to admit that I was probably expecting too much. It seemed very clear to me from the hesitant nature of the discussion that while there's more and more interest in information services that are hybrid integrations of online and offline services, there are few real success stories to learn from aside from online dating. Aside from online dating, most of the suggestions for successful models of online/offline services were events & activity promotion type of services, but the group didn't think that an online service whose primary goal was to help people find out what they could be doing in person as a genuine model of a hybrid online/offline service. For more than two years, I've been running and promoting Social Wave, a project that I engineered from the ground up to be a hybrid online/offline service. I should have had a lot to say and a lot of insight to share, but I came up mostly empty when someone asked if anyone could cite a true online/offline online community business model that wasn't an online dating site. Of course, such a question would seem almost staged as a way for me to introduce my project, but I held back because during the session, I came to realize the online/offline model of Social Wave had some short circuits that are tempering the successes we've had with it. Some of these short circuits are well within our control and many of them will get addressed in the next release due out soon. The rest may be in the hands of fate. These negative factors don't just affect Social Wave, but any service aiming to be a true online/offline model of service. I've identified three key factors. The first is technological and the other two are social.
  1. Insufficient Wi-Fi Access: Anyone who owns a cell phone will probably complain about spotty coverage and they're complaining about a technology that has already "arrived." Needless to say, the availability of public access Wi-Fi is nowhere near that of cell phone coverage. By definition, a hybrid online/offline service would be meant to be used as a part of daily life and your ideal online/offline user is not likely to be someone who spends daily life online all the time.
  2. Online/Offline Hybrid Communities Are Different: The things that has amazed me the most with my adventures with Social Wave is how much harder it has been for me to get activity going on it. I've been in online communities since 1986 and I'm no stranger to the techniques for stimulating participation in an online forum, but everything that I've worked to success before in the past has failed to perform as expected.
  3. A Different Digital Divide:
    4. Arguably, the culture of self-promotion is an integral part of social technologies as they exist today. There are a lot of people who are fluent with using computers who don't have the kind of digital attitude of marketing yourself and your ideas. It may be because they simply don't get it or it might simply be because they don't have time or see the value in putting in the effort to create the kind of online profile that will get them, their organizations, or their work noticed. I notice this the most when I work with small businesses, almost all of which are deficient in marketing attitude.
The technological issue will probably take care of itself with due time, but it's going to be anyone's guess how we address the two social problems. The answers to them, I don't expect to see anytime soon, but I'm glad to see that people are starting to focus attention on bringing some of the virtual world back into the physical world.]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2006/06/online_communit_1.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2006/06/online_communit_1.shtml Community Networking Technologies Thu, 01 Jun 2006 10:14:53 -0800 Peer Reviewed Study Finds Wikipedia on par with Britannica CNN.com - Journal: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica - Dec 15, 2005 Is Encyclopedia Brittanica about to lose its shorts for the second time in a decade? A recent article in the Journal Nature suggests that this is certainly in the realm of possibility. The article compared scientific entries in Wikipedia against matching entries in Brittanica and found that Brittanica's advantage was minimal. In the book, Blown to Bits, authors Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster write about how Brittanica mistakenly believed that their status as the gold standard of reference books would make them untouchable for years to come. This assumption would prove costly when the real reason for their sales was disrupted by technology. The average Brittanica customer wasn't buying their volumes because they had a keen understanding of Brittanica's quality standards. They were buying it out of a perceived need to provide an extensive reference source for their children. Parental guilt about not providing enough for their children was a key part of the purchasing decision of many of Brittanica's customers and Microsoft Encarta negated their most powerful selling point. It wasn't because Encarta was a great product. It didn't even compare against Brittanica. It was actually a digital reprint of the laughable Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia on CD-ROM, but it provided enough of a resource to keep the fourth graders of the world pumping out one page history reports so that many parents didn't even get a chance to feel guilty. Quite suddenly, Brittanica found itself in financial trouble and flat footed even before the greatest disruptive technology of the modern era would come into full bloom. We weren't even in the Internet age when this happened. This was the mid-nineties and it was the CD-ROM format rather than Microsoft or the Encarta product that dethroned Britannica. They learned the valuable lesson that availability can trump quality. Not long later, Time-Warner would be guilty of the same arrogance and ignorance when America Online played the part of their Encarta by disrupting their power hold on the magazine industry. No respectable magazine or paper wanted to put their content online in those days, so AOL had to settle for second rate publishers who were willing to gamble. The results were similar. Once people had access to information, most don't seem to notice or care that it's not the best information they could have gotten. Most of the time you just need to know the basics and a lengthy volume could even be a hindrance. I haven't been following the fortunes of Brittanica, but I assume that they figured out a way of maintaining their relevance even if they lost the power position they once held so tightly. These days, I barely hear their name and I only started hearing about them again since Wikipedia has been in the news. Apparently forgetting what their dismissal of Encarta brought them over a decade ago, Brittanica was on the airwaves on NPR a few weeks ago. A representative from the company was berating Wikipedia as a poor alternative of a reference source. Other publishers were also taking shots at Wikipedia. Some of the criticisms thrown at Wikipedia recently are justified, especially in light of the John Seigenthaler as a phony Kennedy assasin scandal, but critics need to be careful about downplaying the potential of collaborative sources like Wikipedia. Anyone basing their criticisms on Wikipedia's methodology rather than the state of its overall quality needs to take a crash course in recent history. It may be ready to repeat itself even before it had a chance to be written and Brittanica could be one of the key victims again. I hope I don't sound like I'm getting carried away because the study that compared Brittanica articles to Wikipedia was by no means an exhaustive study and nobody in their right mind will tell you that Wikipedia can even be compared to Brittanica when the entire range of subject matter is considered. The article in the Journal Nature is just one article and the ONLY one that I know of so far, but it certainly suggests that the methodology that produces the articles on Wikipedia may be more relevant than any publishing power wants to admit. Wikipedia's success is no pop culture fluke. It has a long way to go, but if their methodology works, we may be a technological innovation or two away from unlocking the full potential of Wikipedia and other collaborative information sources. Before I end this entry, I want to back away from all this praise I'm putting on Wikipedia and say that a lot of forces had to come together for Wikipedia to enjoy it's run of fame and infamy recently. Wikipedia did not invent online collaboration nor did they invent the wiki and five years from now, Wikipedia itself could be just a stepping stone to a more evolved open source encyclopedia. The next big disruption in media may not be too far around the corner and current untouchables like reference sources and scholarly journals may want to take notice sooner rather than later. ]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/12/peer_reviewed_s.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/12/peer_reviewed_s.shtml Community Networking Technologies Fri, 16 Dec 2005 03:28:10 -0800 Will Google Base Eat Craigslist's Lunch? Google Base Beta was officially released today. It's stated to be a big public database that's an experiment in enabling the open sourcing of information. I haven't had a chance to take a good look at it, but I think this could be huge huge huge. The open source movement has been a powerful force in creating pieces of public domain intellectual capital for public and private good, but it has always lacked a unified channel to feed information through. Google Base is expected to eventually feed into the main search engine and also help drive their local search features. THAT is what I find most interesting about this experiment. It would be like unifying the strengths of Craigslist with the Google search engine. As I said before, this could be bad news for Craiglist. Craigslist has evolved into more of an enormous community information kiosk rather than a community of its own. You want to find out about things going on around the community you won't be able to search for it effectively through Google, but if you're not a daily Craigslist addict, you may have difficulty finding it there. As a community, it would be hard to draw people away from Craigslist, but as a service, you just have to come up with a better service and Google Base may be on its way of subverting Craigslist's core value proposition. Everyone knows Craigslist, but only a small percentage of those people use it regularly. I've noticed this indirectly in how we've tried to promote Social Wave in our community. We use Craigslist to help us broadcast Social Wave events to a wider audience. This worked amazingly for about a couple of months. Each cross post to Craigslist brought us upwards of a thousand visitors and up to a few dozen new members per week. The pace of this success quickly hit a speed bump and today we're lucky to even get one new member out of cross posting to Craigslist. What's interesting is that we still get a lot of visitors coming over from Craigslist. This suggests to me that people are still reading what we've posted over there, but either they no longer find it as compelling or we're just reaching the same audience over and over again and many of those people are already Social Wave members. Even though we've intentionally limited the reach of Social Wave to the Silicon Valley region, there's enough people here (~ 1 million) that effects of broadcasting information to a public backbone shouldn't hit such the dramatic plateau that we've experienced. I'm eager to see what Google Base can do for Social Wave because while only a small percentage of people who know about Craigslist actually uses it with any regularity, just about anyone with an Internet connection uses Google at least a few times a week. By the way, I'm not rooting against Craigslist. Craigslist is still the incumbent and has a lot going for it, but Craigslist as it exists today is not on as solid of a footing as many people think it is. If Google Base succeeds, I believe we're either going to see Craigslist continue to expand and become more complex than the Craigslist that we've gotten used to, or it could back down to its roots as a service that's more focused and relevant on the local community. If the majority of would be casual Craigslist posters ended up going to Google Base, it would leave Craigslist with a legion of very devoted users who would be freed from the thousands of short timers who invade their community for a few days and leave only until the next time they have a need to fulfill. The question of "What do I need for myself TODAY" is not a great modus operandi to build a community around. With these people thinned out, it would create a better community experience for people who actually are tapping into Craigslist as their community connection. The growth engine of Craigslist would be stunted, but the qualities that helped its rise to stardom could end up thriving better than before. http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/11/google_base_cou.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/11/google_base_cou.shtml Online Community in Real Life Craigslist Google Google Base online classifieds Wed, 16 Nov 2005 18:20:30 -0800 Free Wi-Fi Access in Mountain View Brought to you by Google The Palo Alto Daily News reported today that the city of Mountain View approved a plan to allow Google to provide free city wide Wi Fi access throughout their city. Under the plan, Google will install Wi-Fi antennas on 350 telephone poles throughout Mountain View. There wasn't any mention on timeframe of when this would happen. A bunch of American cities are on the record with their intentions of going wireless. That list includes Philadelphia and San Francisco. Already there are a lot of smaller neighborhood based efforts, but none of those are purely funded through private means and I don't believe any of those services have materialized yet. Philadelphia was first to announce their plans, but quickly ended up in court when the local Internet ISP sued them to protect their business line. Personally, I think going completely wireless in a small suburban city is a much more interesting experiment than doing it in a more metropolitan area. There's enough going on and enough channels for word to get around in a major city, but in the smaller cities that have equivalent amenities to a larger counterpart, they can do everything they can to recreate the big city on a more personal scale, but they don't have (and don't want) the population density that's so important in the "vibe" of most cities. Can widespread wireless access enable a small city to copy not only the structure, but also the "vibe" that creates life in the communities of that city? http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/11/free_wifi_acces.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/11/free_wifi_acces.shtml Online Community in Real Life Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:50:53 -0800 Google Base May be a Paradigm Shift in Online Communities Google Blogoscope and New Google Blog. ]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/10/google_base_may.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/10/google_base_may.shtml Community Networking Technologies Societal Effects of the Internet Wed, 26 Oct 2005 23:01:32 -0800 Online community Social Wave celebrates one-year anniversary (Campbell Reporter 8/10/05) Online community Social Wave celebrates one-year anniversary Campbell Reporter - Aug 10, 2005]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/08/online_communit.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/08/online_communit.shtml Socialwave.net News & Notes Wed, 10 Aug 2005 22:13:51 -0800 Small Town Outdoor Movies a Throwback to the Days of Social Cinema Sundown Cinema, a movie series of classic films shown outdoors in a parking lot in Downtown Campbell. Last week's movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) was teamed up with Social Wave's one year anniversary party resulting in a record turnout for the weekly Sundown Cinema events. Over 400 people came out to watch a movie outdoors where they had to bring their own chairs, tough out a gravel parking lot, put up with charging motorbikes every twenty minutes, and deal with numerous other viewing annoyances. There's no actual "screen" for the movie to be shown on. The movie is projected onto the pock marked yellowish wall of a building using a standard laptop video projector connected to a DVD changer owned by the producer of the events. Needless to say, the excellent viewing experience isn't the reason why this small town movie series with no budget is producing viewership worthy of a small multiplex. Its success is even more surprising in light of a recent poll from the Associated Press showing that the majority of Americans go to the movies once or zero times a year. What's happening here? Why is this word of mouth affair continuing to grow against reason? I personally believe that it's growing because it's offering a taste of something that's harder and harder to get in American cities. Sundown Cinema is a throwback to the days when movies were a more social experience and single screen theaters were an anchor of community life. As the event has grown in popularity, it is no longer just about the movie, but it's about the communal experience. Although the communal nature of the Sundown Cinema series have been building with each screening, it really became obvious when we paired it with Social Wave's anniversary party. Before the movie, kids played with other kids, people were talking to the people sitting next to them, and throughout the crowd you could see people sharing candy and snacks with their neighbors. When was the last time you were at a movie and the person next to you asked if you'd like some chocolate? Even more remarkably, the demographics of Sundown Cinema is widely spread across all age ranges capable of enduring an evening sitting outside on lawn chairs. Despite all the market testing and social engineering that goes into the production of Hollywood blockbusters (and the theaters themselves), American cinema has been in a steady state of decline in the past two years. Could it be that in the age where corporations take no chances and every decision is market researched to death, that we've engineered the soul out of the moviegoing experience? Of course, I'd be hasty and foolish to say that the reason why Americans are shunning new releases is because they can't meet their neighbors at the movies anymore, but I do want to shine a light on how our highly researched world may be producing experiences in which any single consumer experience is technically flawless, but completely repulsive when considered as a collection of experiences. Perhaps there's something intangible in the imperfect experience that many of us are secretly after. We may not like noise distractions when we're trying to watch a movie, but against the simple charm of sharing candy with the adult next to you, it's an easily forgiven annoyance. We want cushioned high back chairs, but may be willing to settle for a lawn chair if it means having a more genuine experience in which we go home satisfied even if we didn't like the movie. Here's to the continued success of Sundown Cinema, a perfectly flawed perfect experience ]]> http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/08/small_town_outd.shtml http://www.socialwave.net/blog/archives/2005/08/small_town_outd.shtml Online Community in Real Life Mon, 01 Aug 2005 03:48:39 -0800