sign in sign up
<<
Home , Social software

Social Software

If you use the web just as a library or shopping mall you’re missing most of what, or more the point who, is out there. The web has become like a great city where anything and everything can be found somewhere out there, 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 not only find what you’re look- ing for you also develop a and become involved in various .

Social software does that for the web. Social software is about making connections to the people behind the information and becoming a participant in the web rather than just a user. It’s no longer new, and it’s as ubiquitous among the net generation as the phone was among earlier generations.

Building across the Net

TechFest 06 the by to you brought Technology Office for Information Social Software

Wikis and are two kinds of social software that are centered on authorship. wikipedia.org .williams.edu 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 sepa- rate process from altering them, and ways to compare different versions of the page over time. Wikis are es- pecially useful for collaborative writing, with Wikipe- dia (www.wikipedia.org) being one of the best known examples. 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 learn- ing and talking about particular subject to keeping up Blogs on the cutting edge of news. Blogger.com Ownership and organization of the content are the EphBlog.com biggest distinguishing features between blogs and wikis. globalvoicesonline.org With blogs, some limited set of people are the authors and the content is ordered chronologically. Everyone else is the audience - the audience interacts with each other and the authors, but the core publication belongs (intellectually, if not legally) to the authors. With wikis, the content organization is arbitrary (but usually topi- cal and hierarchical) and it’s owned by the entire com- munity; 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).

Building Community across the Net TechFest 06 newsvine.com News Related slashdot.org technorati.com digg.com Technology Related boingboing.net reddit.com General Participatory News hour. Add to that the traditional news media web sites, for an account articles new 29,000 day,around a authors articles 700,000 Weblog day. every blogs new 70,000 about are Technorati.com,to there According those blogs,buthow doyou findthegoodstuff? be an enormous amount of information out there in all Alternatively, it? read come must there that knowyou to anyone get you do how but it, say to new a ed You have something important to say, and you’ve start finding anaudience and information Finding Sites: News Participatory isting article elsewhere. Everyone else who comes across one of these sites and write an article, or point to an ex to go can web the on Anyone work:Here’s they how ontheweb areof whatarticles ofhighinterest. analytic power of real human readers to build an index and attention the harness sites news Participatory ers. read blog regularare people, million 50 around users, of study,11% Internet Pew the to according day, webevery the onto pushed being information but of amount the process Nobodycan sites. news patory art is the new crop of sites collectively known as partici The solution is still evolving, but the current state of the rately assesstherelevance andinterest ofanarticle. can’taccu it and real-time, approaching anything in sites doesn’tweb it to is, changes Google of track keep as good As Google. for even overwhelming, becomes plus the online e-zines, and the amount of information - - - - - brought to you by the Office for Information Technology Social Software

this article or pointer votes up or down on whether they found it relevant. The articles are then presented ma.gnolia.com in order, those with the most votes first. New visitors del.icio.us to the site always see the highest-ranked sites, and can add their own filters to the list, so they can find the Online collections of bookmarks highest-ranked technology articles, for example, or ar- supplemented with popularity ticles on international relations. ratings and positioned by time. Exploring often starts here. In addition, participatory news sites allow readers to comment on the articles that they read. Often, the comments are richer and more informed than the orig- inal article. And, of course, you can comment on the comments.

Social Networking Why is this important? Because it works! Consistently, .com participatory news sites identify and present breaking news stories faster, and often in greater depth, than .com the traditional news media. Participatory news sites It’s all about you. And your have tens of thousands of articles to choose from each friends. These pages assist in hour, drawing from hundreds of thousands of differ- creating online profiles and al- ent authors representing an enormously diverse set of lowing you to link between them skills and coming from all walks of life. The articles and your friends. that make it to their “front pages” tend to be ones you want to read.

The technology is still evolving, and quickly. New techniques base rankings on a combination of factors, such as professional editors, number of views, public Photoblogging votes, and number of incoming links. Sites using flickr.com combined ranking factors tend to keep higher-quality articles over a longer period of time. Social networking Not a verbose person? What sites allow people to post their bookmarks online, and started out as an online photo then analyze the trends across everyone’s bookmarks to repository turned into a new work out what people are interested in. blogging medium.

Building Community across the Net

TechFest 06 the by to you brought Technology Office for Information