Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I’m a couple weeks late in commenting on the post where Joel explains why he doesn’t let people comment on his posts:

When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.

I tend to agree with Clay Shirky’s response, which Joel mentioned, where he says:

…the sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale. If you are operating below that scale, comments can be quite good, in a way not replicable in any ‘everyone post to their own blog’.

As I wrote in what I know about blogging:

Having comments is a good sign. It means that the blogger is trying to start a conversation, and is interested in more than just hearing themselves speak. One of the great achievements a blogger can attain in my eyes is to be the seed around which a community forms.

When a blogger is starting out, comments are wonderful. They indicate that people are reading, and that people care enough about what they’re saying to respond. That’s obviously not an issue for somebody like Joel, who’s got hundreds of thousands of readers. But for those of us that are nowhere near the A-list, comments are a great way to see what our readers are thinking.

I also disagree with Joel’s contention that all comments should be placed on one’s own blog, rather than with the post in question. I much prefer seeing all the discussion on the post in one place, rather than trying to follow a conversational thread all over the Internet. I’m also more likely to contribute to the conversation via a comment. I often leave paragraph length comments on other blogs that I would never post to my own blog, because setting the context for my reply would be annoying, and I don’t feel the paragraph response deserves its own post.

The usefulness of comments depends on whether one is looking to create a conversation or a community with one’s blog. If so, making it easy to continue the conversation is essential - that means keeping all the comments in one place, not scattered across the web, and not requiring registration to post a comment. On the other hand, if one is blogging to express oneself, perhaps comments are not appropriate because they might create an environment where one feels uncomfortable saying what one wants. I personally love getting comments - comments have spurred some of the best posts I have done on this blog, as the commenter extended my ideas into new and interesting directions.

Separating the comments from the post also makes it impossible for those who arrive at a post much later (as often happens in Google-world) to see what has already been suggested. For instance, if I post a question asking for advice about a topic, I’d prefer not to be getting emails two years later saying “Did you think of X?” when X was suggested by the first responder. When I was using blogging software that did not support comments, I actually had a year where I asked people to comment over on my LiveJournal, and it was a mess. I regret not being able to go back and easily associate the comments with the posts.

That being said, Shirky’s point that scale matters is a good one. Once the audience size reaches a certain point, the community experiences what he calls The Tragedy of the Conversational Commons, where the temptation to hijack the audience for one’s own purposes overcome normal communitarian tendencies. Preventing such hijacking requires immense resources - think of the security present at sporting events and how it’s ineffectual at preventing streakers.

At small scales, one can manage such antisocial tendencies by careful curation of comments. I obviously remove all spam comments with the help of the Akismet plugin for Wordpress, which intercepts hundreds of spam comments a day. I haven’t had to remove any “real” comments, but if a discussion degenerated into flaming and personal attacks, I would have no hesitation in deleting those comments.

I find it interesting that the appropriate comment policy flip-flops when the blog reaches a certain scale. The behavior feels like that described by Inside the Tornado, where the perfect strategy for one business development phase is a disaster in the next one. When a blog is small and struggling to gain an audience, engaging the audience and providing them a voice is essential in building a community of readers. At some point, the blog goes through a phase transition where no amount of curation can keep up with the chaos of the audience rampaging through the conversational commons, and at that point, comments become a detriment.

Issues like this make social software very difficult to write. The appropriate behaviors in one situation don’t match the appropriate behaviors in another, and social software is not currently able to handle such nuances. Perhaps the software tools have to change between the small scale of bloggers like me and the A-list bloggers like Joel. The designers of such software also have to identify what people are trying to do with the software, which will be difficult since the reasons people have for blogging are as varied as the bloggers. I’m enjoying watching as these social software tools evolve, in addition to being co-opted and adapted, to meet the needs of people.

Amazon link

This book is based on the idea that complex organized behavior can emerge out of simple atomic behavior. In physics, simple atoms interact with each other and generate complex behavior like temperature. Such models were never thought to be applicable to humans because people are too complicated and have free will. Buchanan collects work being done by “social physicists” to show that macroscopic human behavior, with hundreds of people interacting, can be modeled by “social atoms” following simple behaviors.

One aspect which made it difficult to construct such models of human behavior is that people learn. Atoms may blindly have the same response every time when presented with a certain situation, but if a response doesn’t work, people will try a different one. We can now use computers to model people’s learning behavior, and see the dynamic equilibrium that results.

For instance, he cites a paper by Brian Arthur discussing the “bar problem”. Arthur liked to go to the El Farol bar near the Santa Fe Institute on Thursday evenings when the Irish musician Gerry Carty played there. But about half the time that he went, the bar was too crowded for him to enjoy the music. So he started guessing when other people wouldn’t be going to try to plan his visits. He realized that others must be doing the same thing.

Being an economist, he decided to model the behavior of attendees. Some attendees would guess that if it were crowded the week before, it wouldn’t be crowded the next week. Others would feel that it would stay crowded. In either case, though, if a strategy weren’t working, people would abandon it and try a different strategy. And when he plotted the results of what bar attendance would look like, it fluctuated wildly around the maximum bar capacity. Why? If somebody hit on a strategy that works for letting them attend when the bar was uncrowded, other people would eventually try that strategy, which would make the bar crowded on those nights, making that winning strategy now a poor strategy. There is no stable equilibrium with “atoms” that learn. Unsurprisingly, the same model approximates the behavior of the stock market, another domain where any successful strategy is immediately copied to the point of no longer being useful.

Another “social atom” model that I really liked was one of a world where there are atoms of four colors: red, blue, green and yellow. When those atoms interact, they can adopt one of four strategies: cooperate with everybody, cooperate with nobody, cooperate with atoms of the same color, cooperate with atoms of different colors. The colors provide no evolutionary advantage whatsoever - they are just an easily identifiable way to tell atoms apart. What happens in a population of randomly colored atoms each starting with a randomly chosen strategy?

Surprisingly, atoms that only cooperate with their own color soon grow to dominate the population. The atoms self-segregate into neighborhoods of like color, and atoms that cooperate with all colors are taken advantage of by all sides before being squeezed out. Axelrod and Hammond call it The Evolution of Ethnocentric Behavior. The atoms in the model have very simple behaviors, and yet generate a result that looks suspiciously like racism. Coincidence?

One last model that I liked took a look at wealth distribution. It started with a population of atoms that each had the same amount of money. The atoms had to preserve a certain amount of money (equivalent to rent and food), and were allowed to invest the rest. Like all investments, the investment was risky, with a chance of losing the money invested, but provided significant returns if successful.

The population ended up with the distribution of wealth we see in the world where a small minority controlled the vast majority of the wealth. The model did not include skill in picking investments or any sort of ability by the wealthy to protect their investments by lobbying, so those weren’t factors. Buchanan explains it as being a result of the power of compound interest, or as the paper authors Bouchaud and Mezard called it, wealth condensation. An atom gets lucky and is successful in their first few investments. Now they can risk a much greater proportion of their wealth in investment because their basic needs are satisfied. Because they risk more money, they gain even more when they are successful, and in a large enough population, somebody gets lucky enough times to end up with all the wealth.

I highly recommend this book. It’s a quick read, but it’s thought provoking. These simple models fascinate me with their ability to generate results that look like people in the aggregate. The models don’t “prove” anything, but it’s instructive to realize that such results as racism or wealth inequality may have nothing to do with people being “evil” or “greedy” - they may simply be a byproduct of people learning successful adaptations within the system. And if such models can be used to predict the behavior of people in the aggregate, is social physics the beginning of Asimov’s psychohistory?

My social network would be considered poor by traditional standards, where more connections are better. Yet my network is powerful because I know connectors. I only know a few people in nextNY, but I know Charlie O’Donnell who knows everybody else. I’ve met a few people through likemind, but I’m friends with Noah Brier, one of the people who started it.

My network is structured differently than the connectors, who have direct links to hundreds of people. But I’m only one link away from the people in their networks. Last year, I called this quality being a social butterfly, but after finding the social network analysis page mentioned in that post, I like the term “boundary spanner”.

Thinking about my network got me thinking about the networks that each of the different networkers would have. The rolodex networker will have a broad but shallow network with very weak links. The connector will also have a network with many direct links but because of their personality, those links will be stronger. I have fewer direct links, but those links are entrances into other networks (I should note that I was not motivated by expanding my network, but by meeting new and interesting people, who tend to know other interesting people).

One of the limitations on the structure of personal networks is that social networks require maintenance or they fade away. We get together with our friends, we attend networking events, we drop people emails or postcards to let them know we’re thinking of them, etc. And that network maintenance takes time and effort.

How people choose to spend their “social maintenance budget” determines what kind of network they will have. Some will spend a few minutes with many people, shaking hands at happy hours and the like, creating a large network with weak links. Others will spend more time with fewer people, creating a smaller network with stronger links. Then there are the more typical mixed networks: strong ties with family and a few friends, weaker ties with coworkers, weak ties with folks at the gym or the bar, etc.

You can increase the size of your “social maintenance budget”, but that requires sacrificing something else in life. You only have so many hours in the day and so much energy. The agenda networkers who are seeking funding might be out every night looking for investors, but at the cost of time with friends and family.

Alas, networking is not an even playing field. Some people are naturally charismatic and memorable e.g. the connectors. They can get far more out of their “social maintenance budget” because they require less time with people to maintain a strong connection. Those of who us with wallflower personalities have to work harder to maintain a similar number of connections, so we have fewer connections. Different people, different types of networks.

So think about where you’re spending your time and social energy:

• Relaxing with friends and family?
• Pursuing business opportunities?
• At work with coworkers?

If you don’t have the network that you’d like, assess your personality type and choose the type of networking most appropriate. Because I’m not an extroverted connector, I have to concentrate on fewer connections so I need to make those connections count. If I’m going to spend my “social maintenance budget” on expanding my network, I need to find those connectors to get the greatest return.

P.S. Boy, that last sentence sounds really Machiavellian. In reality, I’m more likely to meet connectors because two introverts rarely start conversations with each other. And once I’m in a conversation, I can build connections with the people that reach out. But my larger point remains - in a world of limited time and energy, I have to make choices, so these posts are my way of thinking through the implications of those choices.

You convinced me. I think I was just cranky on Wednesday evening because I’d been up until 2am finishing a paper the night before, worked all day, gone to three hours of class, and then wrote that blog post. So consider this a giant retraction and flip-flop on the last post.

Christy brought up the great example of Instructables as an example of amateur hobbyists banding together and helping each other. I forgot that media such as the Internet, in addition to making us more aware of “world-class” talents, also gives amateurs a way to find each other, which is far more empowering. “Hey, if they can do that, I can do that too!” When we are only presented with the finished glitzy product as often happens in mass media like TV and magazines, it can be discouraging, and that had been the point I made last time. But social software like Instructables help us see the process, and provide a support structure for people starting for the first time.

The Internet has all sorts of great examples of this once I started thinking about it. NaNoWriMo provides the same role for would-be novelists, giving them structure, encouragement, and guidance on how to achieve their goals. I know several people who have completed novels during NaNoWriMo that would not have done so without that site existing.

I mentioned a few other examples in my post on community, such as Chris Heuer starting up the Social Media Club, which basically started with him deciding to pull together an unconference alternative to Web 2.0, posting about it in a couple places, and now it’s spun into an organization with meetings in several cities around the world. likemind is another example - Piers and Noah wanted to have coffee together six months ago, posted about it on their blogs, and now it’s a monthly get-together in 14 cities, with about 50 people showing up to the last likemind in New York.

Another factors contributing to the rise of the amateur is the democratization of technology. You used to have to invest thousands of dollars in purchasing sound editing software. Now you just buy a Mac and use GarageBand. If you are interested in photography, you don’t need access to a darkroom and tons of film, you just need a decent digital camera and Adobe Photoshop. The wonders of Moore’s law and other virtuous circles of technology are reducing the price of increasingly powerful tools so that they are affordable to somebody goofing around in their spare time.

My own blogging experience should have tipped me off. While I continue to blog mostly for myself, as a way of recording ideas as I think of them, it is truly humbling and inspiring to find that other people are reading what I have to say and take it seriously enough to respond, as evidenced by the several comments on that last post. I’ve gotten emails from around the world from people who read my blog and wanted to offer feedback. Being able to garner feedback early on is a great help to the amateur, because it’s easy to get discouraged (although based on the responses to the last post, that may be a personal hangup of mine which is probably related to Po Bronson’s article).

Now I just need to take Wes’s advice from the comments and figure out what I truly love doing, that I would continue doing even without positive feedback.

It’s interesting how wishing sometimes makes it so on the Internet. Or at least how enough people are thinking along the same lines that ideas pop up in multiple places last month.

A few months ago, I went to a Social Media Club meeting, and came back musing about feedback karma, where it “would be a really validating thing to have a site where people came by whatever you were doing and offered encouragement.” I suggested having to comment on other people’s work to get your own reviewed, and things like that.

And apparently that site debuted at the NY Tech Meetup this week - it’s called Urbis. Check this out:
—–
The Creative Review Engine

1. Receive as much as you give using the Urbis credit system. Earn credits by reviewing people and spend credits when receiving reviews. Learn more about credits.
2. Choose whether you want supportive reviews from people you know (in-network) or unbiased reviews from strangers (out-of-network)
3. Qualify what kind of people you allow to review your work by specifying age range, location, talent, experience, and more. (coming soon)
4. Hold members accountable for reviews that don’t meet the high standards of the Urbis review guidelines.
5. Understand the value of the reviews you receive by viewing Reviewer stats.
6. Receive ratings (algoratings) that are weighted to provide a true reflection of the community’s opinion of your work.
—–

Cool stuff. Now if I could only take some of my ideas and do something with them. Inspiration, perspiration and all that.

One of my long-time obsessions is trying to understand community. What makes a community work? How do communities form? Why do people fit in some communities and not others?

It’s probably obvious that a large part of this obsession is me feeling like an oddly shaped Tetris piece in the social world. I try spinning around and rotating and never quite manage to fit into place. I mostly make it work, but there are always holes in comprehension and understanding.

I should preface this commentary with the note that every time I have tried to start a community, I’ve failed. So perhaps my thoughts on the subject are useless. I think there are a variety of reasons why they have failed, though, and I’m going to explore a few of those here.

One of them is not providing a clear enough purpose. The community must provide some benefit to people, or they’ll drop out. I think this is particularly noticeable around blogs. People with tightly focused blogs gather an audience and create a community of commenters. I’m thinking of Kathy Sierra and her message of “Creating Passionate Users” as an example. One of my failures as a blogger is that I’m relentlessly self-involved and therefore provide little value here to anybody else (except perhaps my friends who want to know what I’m thinking). I’d like to create a community of people who want to talk about this sort of stuff, but I haven’t figured out how and where to have that conversation. Should it be a blog? An email list? A salon? It’s tricky.

Speaking of Kathy Sierra, passion is a key component to community as well. It has to mean something to somebody. There needs to be a person who keeps on pushing and making things happen. There are all sorts of great examples of this among my acquaintances, from Chris Heuer of BrainJams and Social Media Club, to the Squid Labs boys creating an open source hardware movement, to Charlie O’Donnell starting up nextNY because he wanted to meet more young tech-oriented folks in the city. I’ve definitely failed to provide that sort of impetus the couple times I’ve tried to start things. I get frustrated and lose interest, instead of continuing to persevere. I need to get over the idea that I have One True Calling; I should take what I’m doing today, push it as far as it can go and see what happens (this is Jofish’s theory of serial expertise). Yet another thing to work on.

Another difficulty with getting a community going is getting people to participate. It’s easy when somebody does all the work, and others just have to show up. But for a true community to develop, there needs to be input from lots of people. Charlie posts to the nextNY list every now and then reminding people that anybody can organize an event. Chris Heuer is traveling all over to get Social Media Clubs seeded, but finding local hosts for each one to keep them going without him. It takes one person or small group to get a community going with perseverance, but it only really takes off when others join in. Getting that sort of acceptance and buy-in from the participants depends on providing value and creating excitement.

As a side note, I think this is where really good workplaces stand out. They create real communities where all employees participate in the direction of the business and empowered to do what they think is necessary. Most businesses tend towards a hierarchical community, where the CEO makes a decision and it trickles down to the worker. Those tend to feel like “just a job”. I like the places where it feels like a participative community, where everybody can chime in with an opinion. Not everybody will, of course - a 90% lurker percentage is typical - but it’s nice to have the option.

Another element of community formation is that it has to matter to the community members. This is somewhat related to the first point of having a clearly defined purpose, but if the community purpose doesn’t matter to me, then I’m not going to participate. The year that I was social chair of the chamber chorale at Stanford, I tried to put together a bunch of social activities, such as weekly get-togethers at the coffee house. Each week, it was the same three grad students who showed up - the undergrads’ existing busy social lives obviated the need for chorus social activities. It mattered to us grad students as we did not have that kind of social network at Stanford, but we weren’t a large enough base to make it work.

The same holds true in a business setting, where a company may feel that it’s vital to file a TPS report, but it’s hard to convince me that it matters. But if the company has a mission that actually excites people, that’s a totally different story. And the purpose doesn’t necessarily have to be serious, either - I’ve participated in online communities such as alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer and MUDs which were long-standing communities centered around totally inconsequential things.

I think I’ve listed some necessary ingredients to creating a community. I’m not sure they’re sufficient. But getting all these thoughts down may help me next time I try to start something up. It may not help me find communities that fit me, but that’s another problem. I’ll ponder more about that in another post.

Somebody posted on the Social Media Club New York list a couple days ago, asking why people share. Sharing is a big component of social media and of all Web 2.0 companies, and companies are basically assuming that it’s human nature to share. From open source to Web 2.0 to the Attention Economy, our world is moving towards a model built on the foundation of sharing. The gift economy is starting to flourish, from people blogging relentlessly, to posting their videos on YouTube or their music on MySpace, to freecycling.

So this guy asked why sharing is so prevalent. It’s a critical assumption for these new businesses. Yet for decades, economists have treated people as self-interest maximizing machines - what is the advantage of sharing? People posted several interesting answers on the list, from self-expression to showing off information gathering skills to seeking and identifying like-minded people. But, as usual, I have to get my own ideas in.

The answer I posted on the list, social capital, was undoubtedly influenced by what I was discussing previously. In other words, we share things to build up our standing within our community. We may never cash out that capital, but it’s nice to be in a situation where we feel like we could. My thought experiment to demonstrate the importance of social capital to sharing was to imagine sharing with somebody you will never meet again. There’s no incentive to do so (it’s like the transactional exchange in that respect). Most of us ignore panhandlers on the street, but we would gladly lend or give money to our friends. What’s the difference? I would contend it is that we’re likely to see our friends again, thus there is social capital to be gained.

Social capital does have an element of selfishness. Our brains have evolved to keep track of social favors (as the ultimatum game suggests), and if I do favors for others, then they owe me. I can hoard that social capital and collect favors to use as leverage when needed.

I tend towards that model myself. I like helping other people out, and I hate asking for help. I think it may have something to do with the perceived power differential - the helper is more powerful/skillful/knowledgeable than the helpee. I hate admitting that somebody else knows more than me, so I tend not to ask for favors. Learning to be less arrogant would probably be a good thing, but that’s another story. On a positive note, though, that tendency means I tend to have a plethora of social capital to work with.

Another interesting aspect of social capital is that it does not have to be a direct exchange. This is the “Pay It Forward” or karma concept - that even if I don’t directly get paid back, good things will happen. For instance, I’ve always been open to my friends crashing with me; even if I don’t crash at their place in return, creating a culture of crashing means I can have crash space in lots of places around the country.

I think one of the reasons why we have evolved to keep track of things like social capital is precisely this building of a web of connective bonds. This is how community is formed. Even if A hasn’t done something specifically for B, B may know C for whom A did a favor, and be more favorably inclined towards A as a result. I think community is dependent on this sort of round-robin of social capital. If the community provides nothing to its members, then it’s not a community - it’s just a group of people. This is something I’ve struggled with in the past when failing to build communities - if the community provides no value and doesn’t solve anybody’s problems, then it will not persist. More on this in another post after I think about it some more.

Going back to more mundane examples of sharing, one great reason to share in the Web 2.0 world is for publicity. As Cory Doctorow commented after making his book available for free downloads, “my problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity”. He ended up selling more books because people had passed around the free downloads than he would have if he had been paranoid about privacy. Jonathan Coulton, a musician, makes a similar argument for giving his music away. Heck, I post on this blog partially in the hopes that people will find it and find my ideas interesting.

It’s interesting that a lot of reasons for sharing ultimately lead back to self-interest, from hoarding of social capital to greater publicity. Does self-interest really drive everything? It reminds me a bit of Mancur Olson’s book Power and Prosperity where he derives the evolution of governments from the single hypothesis of self-interest. On the flip side, the gift economy has a long history, as described in a great book called The Gift, by Lewis Hyde which studies the phenomenon from a cultural point of view.

I don’t really have a point here. I wrote most of this post a couple evenings ago, but couldn’t think of a way to tie it all together. After simmering for a couple days, I still don’t have a coherent thesis, but I’m going to post anyway. I think sharing is an interesting topic. I especially think it’s interesting in light of how it is becoming prevalent on the net via peer-to-peer networking, blogging, free downloads, etc. I also think it’s interesting in its contribution to community formation. So, yeah.

Last month’s initial meeting of the New York chapter of the Social Media Club went well enough that they had a second meeting last night. As previously noted, Social Media Club is one of the things that BrainJams is doing now. It’s still in the formative stages, and it’s unclear what it’s for and what it’s meant to achieve, and the founders Chris Heuer and Howard Greenstein are looking for input. Yes, that’s right, Social Media Club is itself an experiment in social media.

So, what is social media? That was the first question asked, and there were a whole variety of answers. One person asked “What media is not social?” A good question. Media is all about communication and connecting people. For instance, somebody asked whether if he and his friend both read the New York Times, and then they have a conversation about what they read in the paper, does that make the NYT social media? One of the other attendees, David Berkowitz, apparently disagrees.

I tossed out the idea that social media may have to do with community building. Somebody had pointed out the importance of building relationships - that social media involves identity and reputation, even if it is pseudonymous. I picked up on that and commented about the importance of relationships and reputation in building a community. You can’t have a community with truly anonymous members because there is no accountability and it will degenerate into the tragedy of the commons.

It also relates back to the first example - if there is a community of New York Times readers, then I might argue that while the NYT may not reflect that community, it is a necessary element of the community’s construction. And I think there is a surprising amount that can be done with media even without the direct acknowledgment of the media creators. Henry Jenkins’s book on Convergence Culture (which I’m still only halfway through) is all about re-appropriating media through tropes like fan fiction and fan boards.

My one journey into uber-fan-hood illustrates the power of such communities. When I was a grad student, Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit the airwaves. This was the first TV show I watched religiously. I only knew a couple other people that watched it, but fortunately the Internet was there to save the day. I quickly became an active member of the alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer community, where I co-wrote the original FAQ. We fleshed out theories about the show’s mythology, kept better track of the show’s continuity than the writers, etc. There’s definitely an element of “social media” in there, but I’m at somewhat of a loss as to where it is. Is it contained only on the newsgroup? Well, the newsgroup wouldn’t exist without the show. Which part is the social media? It gets messy.

Moving on, we started talking about disclosure and how that applies to social media. A San Francisco get-together had proposed three T’s of social media: Truth, Transparency and Trust. One of the proposals of the SF chapter was that people could self-select to hold themselves to such standards by affixing a badge created by Social Media Club to their sites. Somebody asked why bloggers should even aspire to such qualities and how that could be policed. Bloggers aren’t journalists, and therefore should not try to hold themselves to the same standards.

I think I picked up on that later by suggesting my idealistic world where people actually have some level of media literacy. In other words, if we can’t fix the source (and I don’t think we can or should), then we should try to fix the receiver. We need to teach people that they can not uncritically accept everything that they see or read. In some ways, the plethora of viewpoints out there being made apparent in the blogosphere may drive us into media literacy whether we like it or not. If the same facts are getting twisted one way on one website, and another elsewhere, choosing which to believe may force people to think about what other issues are involved, whether the writers may have hidden interests, etc. Or they could just retreat into their own personal blogosphere, but I hope not.

One other thought I had during the discussion was that we may start treating media sources like we treat other people. In the real world, there are people I trust, people I’ll listen to skeptically, and people who I will just ignore. Why shouldn’t the same thing be true of my media sources? We’ll find media sources that we like, either because they are trustworthy, or possibly because they have a consistent bias (one of the reasons I like The Economist is that their bias is obvious and consistent). Other media sources we’ll check in on occasionally to see what’s going on, but treat the information we get from there as being gossip-level at best. I’m not quite sure how to relate this idea back to social media yet (a Friendster for media sources perhaps?) but I like the direction.

Those are all the thoughts I can remember off the top of my head. Afterwards, several of us went out to dinner and continued a lovely conversation for a couple more hours. It turned out many of us were Bay Area ex-pats, and the get-together reminded us of similar get-togethers back in the Bay. One of my goals is to find more such communities here in New York; fortunately, Social Media Club may turn out to be one of them.

Technorati tags: socialmediaclub socialmediaclubnyc

I went to the Social Media Club meeting this evening here in New York. I’m astonished and inspired by how far this has come in a year. This started rolling last year at the Web 2.1 unconference, and continued with a BrainJam a couple months later. Now Chris Heuer is jetting around (he just flew in from London) talking to people about this stuff.

As usual, I was more of an observer than a participant. At the beginning, when everybody else was introducing themselves as being from PR agencies or non-profit organizations or various wire services, I said “I represent only myself”, which was true, but funny. But once the discussion got started, I jumped in with a couple observations and felt like I contributed.

One idea that Chris mentioned was “adopt-a-blogger”, where experienced bloggers could take a neophyte under their (virtual) wing and teach them how to use the tool, and more importantly, give them encouragement. He said that even just having somebody poke a beginning blogger every week or two to say “Hey, haven’t seen anything new from you recently!” might be enough to get new bloggers into the habit. And it’s true - I totally get warm fuzzies from comments, and even just knowing a couple people are out there reading makes a big difference (thanks Beemer and Jofish and Seppo and Batman!).

I was thinking about this during the meeting, and tying it into my thoughts on the psychological principles of consistency where we try to live up to our public statements of ourselves and thinking that it would be a really validating thing to have a site where people came by whatever you were doing and offered encouragement. It would be similar to the principle behind Team in Training, where it’s much easier to do this ridiculous training when there’s somebody else there doing it with you.

In this case, people would post goals or writing or pictures or whatever they wanted encouragement on. Users would have to post a certain number of comments on other people’s work (with the software offering pointers towards less trafficked work) before their own work would be published for comment. It would have a couple interesting effects I think; one, it would expose people to a lot of work they were not previously aware of, and two, it would provide a venue for feedback. I suppose it would be easy to game the system, where you just write pro forma comments to get one’s own work posted, but there could be mechanisms for dealing with that (e.g. EBay type ratings where people give certain raters a thumbs down for being useless (which is not the same as being negative)).

Anyway. It’s a thought. I wanted to jot it down before it disappeared. I’ve got a few more posts I’ll try to develop at some point. In my copious free time. Yeah.

Technorati tag: socialmediaclub

Jofish wrote me at the end of last week:

i like that i have had four different communications of varying degrees of privacy from you in the last few days: nehrlich.com blog posts, lj blog posts, email to a handful of people and individual emails. wow. it’s almost like this whole electronic medium lets you… control and mediate your identity!

I thought this was an excellent observation. I like what it implies about the future of social software. It’s not about having just one piece of software that mediates our social identity, it’s about having a constellation or ecosystem of software that we can choose among, depending on the message and privacy and identity. Given that we have multiple social identities, it makes sense that I would communicate differently when using different mechanisms with varying degrees of privacy.

In the real world, we use these sorts of tools effortlessly because we have so much experience with them - Jofish later commented that the real world equivalents of the four electronic levels he observed would be a public talk, a workshop session, a dinner conversation and a private conversation. We all have absorbed the different meanings that each of those communication media imply, such that if I tell you something in a private conversation, it is probably not meant to be public, but if I say it in a public talk, it obviously is. As I’ve observed before, we’re still learning those cues in the electronic media world.

One nifty thing is that in the electronic world, those cues are often made explicit. Sometimes it is unclear what the intended scope of information is in the real world - if I’m sitting around with friends and tell a story, is it only meant for those friends, or is it just a story I tell in public? In electronic media, because the audience knows I have a variety of publishing methods available to me, the choice of media indicates the preferred scope explicitly. If I put it on my public blog, you know you can point anybody to it. If I put it in an email to a few people, you know it’s probably close friends only. So because I can use any or all of the media, my choice of media is a cue as to the appropriate context for further discussion.

But this only works if I have a choice of electronic communication media. In the days of email, you could create some of these artifacts with mailing lists vs. selected friends vs. individual emails, but the scope was limited compared to the vast array of options available in real life. But with the growing number of electronic media options, it’s becoming more of an option. I can express different aspects of my identity on my blog, LiveJournal, IM, MySpace, email, Friendster, LinkedIn, orkut, etc. And that multiplicity of options lets us manage our identities with a greater specificity than we sometimes can offline, where there’s always the possibility of mixed social contexts.

I also think this is why social software will continue to stagnate as long as companies expect me to run my entire life through their software. One piece of software is not going to allow me enough articulation of identity to be sufficient. So we will need to come up with open standards that allow the various pieces of social software to interact with each other in ways that let us manage our identities with the precision that we desire. The FOAF project is one effort along these lines - I suppose I should really read up on them.