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Social Software social software Everyone’s an Author: Wikis and Blogs Wikis and blogs are two kinds of social software that are centered on authorship. Wikis allow some groups of people (ranging from a limited set of members to anyone with access to the web) to edit the web pages that make up a website. They also provide ways to discuss the pages as a separate process from altering them, and ways to compare different versions of the page over time. Wikis are especially useful for collaborative writing and knowledge sharing, with Wikipedia (www.wikipedia. org) being one of the best known examples. For local examples of wikis, check out http://wiki.williams.edu (an official college wiki) and http://wso.williams.edu/wiki/ index.php/Main_Page (a student run wiki about all things Williams). A number of Blackboard courses also use wikis as a framework for student collaboration. With wikis, the content organization is arbitrary (but usually topical and hierarchical) and it’s owned by the entire community; every member of the community has as much right to alter the content as any other member (though practically speaking there’s usually a core group of the most active members which act as moderators). Blogs are a way for one or more authors to publish things organized primarily by time, and for the readers and author to discuss what’s posted. People read and write blogs for a variety of reasons, ranging from keeping in touch with far flung friends, to learning and talking about particular subjects, to keeping up on the cutting edge of news. In blogs, unlike wikis, some limited set of people are the authors, and the content usually is ordered chronologically. Everyone else is the audience - the audience interacts with each other and the authors, but the core publications belong (intellectually, if not legally) to the authors. Blogs are especially good for getting people to write and for getting people to connect with the author or authors. Wikis Blogs http://en.wikipedia.org/ http://wordpress.com http://wso.williams.edu/wiki/ http://technorati.com http://wiki.williams.edu http://livejournal.com http://globalvoicesonline.org http://ephblog.com http://blogs.williams.edu brought to you by the Office for Information Technology social software Finding information There are 100,000+ new blogs per day, and the new ones plus all the existing ones produce more than 700,000 posts every day. A typical search in Google easily returns 40+ millions hits. Most major and many minor news papers have an online presence, and that’s true around the world. Mailing lists, forums, chat logs, and more provide all kinds of potentially useful and interesting information, if only you could find it. That’s where participatory news and social bookmarking come in. They both work by harnessing collective intelligence to organize and filter the web. In participatory news anyone can link to an article and anyone else can vote the article up or down (and, of course, they can also discuss the article - in fact, the discussions are often more interesting than the original article!). In social bookmarking a user can bookmark a site in their shared, online list and simultaneously tag it with descriptive words or phrases. Other people can then see what sites get bookmarked the most and what terms people have used to describe them. Why is this important? Because it works! Consistently, participatory news sites identify and present breaking news stories faster, and often in greater depth, than the traditional news media. Social bookmarking is similarly powerful - a simple Google search might return 40 million hits, most of which are chaff. A similar search on del.icio.us might return 1500 hits, all of which are good sites, and all of which have additional tags and comments to help you narrow them down to the one you need. Participatory News Social Bookmarking http://www.reddit.com http://ma.gnolia.com http://www.boingboing.net http://del.icio.us http://www. newsvine.com http://www. digg.com http://www. slashdot.org http://www. hugg.com brought to you by the Office for Information Technology social software Beyond Text: Photos, Videos, and More Ten years ago the web meant web pages, primarily text with some associated images. Today the web is rich with media and information of all sorts, and social software is a vital part of that. These new media give people even more ways to communicate and connect, and more things to talk about and share. Here are some social software sites that go beyond the written word. youtube.com YouTube lets people post short movies and videos, and allows viewers to discuss them and share them. Communities build around particular topics. People do their own news casts, or video blogs (vblog), or silly movies, or whatever. They contribute to and participate in the larger culture of the web. flickr.com Flickr is a vast community centered around digital pictures, with sub-groups devoted to all manner of specific interests and activitied (e.g. 5-frame stories). As an added bonus, through support of the Creative Commons licensing schemes Flickr provides a very easy way for people to let others use their photos. slideshare.com Slideshare allows people to share slide show (power point) presentations. Like many social software tools, it’s useful in its own right (e.g. put your powerpoint on slideshare and then you can show it any where you can see a web page). It also shares the usual social software features of discussion, tagging, rating (explicit and implicit), and user identities. swivel.com Moving beyond specific media, swivel lets people share and use arbitrary sets of data. Curious about the number of Deaths on Mt Everest over time? The number of approved FISA applications? Unemployment in Australia? You can find the data and the charts at swivel, and you also get the people talking about it. brought to you by the Office for Information Technology social software Social Software The web is like a great city where anything and everything can be found somewhere, but it’s so vast that you only really know your immediate neighborhood and a few of the biggest landmarks. In a real city you might ask your friends, neighbors, and co-workers for advice, assistance, and introductions in the parts of the city they know best, and in the process you develop a social network and become involved in various communities. Social software brings that experience and process to the web. It’s about making connections to the people behind the information and becoming a participant in the web rather than just a user. It’s as ubiquitous among the net generation as the phone was among earlier generations. Social software covers a wide range of technologies and practices, but all aspects share a common theme. Whether it’s participating in the vast Wikipedia project, sharing photos with a few friends on Flickr, reading the lastest on Slashdot, participating in a blog, or establishing an online identity and presence in MySpace, social software is all about communications and relationships between people. Where a city has libraries, coffeehouses, lecture halls, movies, clubs, parks, neighborhoods, and all the other things that make it a vibrant, living place, the web has social software. Being There: Presence and Networking It’s all about you and your friends. These sites let you create an online identity and link to your friends, http://www.facebook.com thus building virtual communities. If you consider the http://www myspace.com web as a place rather than a tool or a technology, then sites like facebook and myspace provide both http://www.friendster.com a place to go and a way to be there. While many http://www.linkedin.com other social software services have some related or underlying functionality, (photo sharing, news, journaling, etc.), networking sites are dedicated purely to social interactions and relations. Often there’s and over-arching flavor or tendency to the site (business, music, school, etc.), but really they’re about who you are and who you know. Social networking sites are the coffeehouses, water coolers, and nightclubs of the web. brought to you by the Office for Information Technology social software Some Further Reading / Viewing A peer-reviewed academic journal about the net culture and impacts of technology: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_3/ An interesting blog entry about social networking: http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2006/06/social-networking-five-sites-you-need.html An article/review about social bookmarking sites: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html The wikipedia entry on citizen journalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism Some video clips and productions about Iraq: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=iraq&search=Search Some pictures of, in, or about the Berkshires: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=berkshires%20MA&w=all Bryan Alexander’s presentation on Web 2.0 for education: http://www.slideshare.net/BryanAlexander/social-software-in-education-an-early- 2007-overview-20863/ (it’s also well worth looking at the rest of his presentations: http://www.slideshare.net/BryanAlexander) brought to you by the Office for Information Technology.
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