Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I spent last weekend up in Boston hanging out with TEPs, most of whom were younger folks that had joined TEP years after I had left Boston. And yet I felt reasonably at home with them. I continue to be fascinated by these questions of what makes a community and how community is linked to identity, and had some more thoughts on the subject while riding the bus back to New York.

I’ve rejected the idea that shared experience alone makes a community. Going to high school together, going to work together, living in the same building - all of these create some sort of connection, but it’s not enough for a community to thrive. There has to be a combination of selection and commitment to create a community out of shared experience. But what if the shared experience involves elements of both selection and commitment?

Sharing a rite of passage may be enough to create a community. As Seth Godin points out in his book The Dip, there are challenges in life that we have to push through in order to reap the benefits on the other side. He calls such challenges “The Dip”, but one could also call them rites of passage. Regardless of the name, such experiences create a meaningful shared experience to those who have survived them, because survivors share a level of commitment (to have pushed through The Dip), and a level of selection (only certain people can make it through a given Dip). And given my theory that those two elements add up to community, it makes sense that such rites of passage are used in all sorts of communities. Let’s take some examples:

• Tribes used to have rites of passage that required bloodshed. Similarly, fraternities have their hazing rituals. To survive such rituals required commitment and served as a means of selection that every community member had shared.
• Lawyers have the bar exam. Two lawyers may have gone to law school at different universities, take the bar exam in different states, but still be able to share memories of their law school classes and their experiences of frustration and trepidation when taking the bar.
• Grad students have the grad school experiences of TA’ing, studying for and passing the quals, then the years of loneliness and craziness of research and writing the thesis.
• MIT students have, well, MIT. MIT students share similar experiences of having stayed up all night studying and hard classes such as junior lab, unified, or 6.170.
• TEP had experiences like Rush (when we got about 3 hours of sleep a night for a week while identifying and recruiting the freshmen that we liked), Work Week, and just the general grind of classes as above.

I like this theory because it explains why I feel that instant communities have little or no value. Because there is no Dip, no rite of passage, there’s nothing that has created shared experiences, the stories that define the community. Rooting for a sports team by putting on a baseball cap has no meaning - there’s no commitment or selection process that can ground a community. But rooting for a sports team your whole life, and being able to share experiences of heartbreaking losses and thrilling victories, creates a bond that can form the basis of a community.

Such shared experiences of the rituals necessary to become a community member have the result of creating those community members in a certain image. Phil Agre once wrote a piece where he observed that the point of grad school isn’t to write a thesis - it’s to turn the grad student into a full-fledged member of the academic field. These rites of passage use the elements of selection and commitment to forge community applicants into community members by giving them a community of identity.

Such shared experiences are also why I can feel so comfortable around people that I’ve barely met, as often happens with TEPs. They are all the same people - even though the names have changed, the stories they tell and the experiences they have had remain the same.

I’ll have to play around with these ideas of selection and commitment creating community some more. I think there may be some interesting stuff here. We’ll see if I have time to develop any thoughts with classes starting tonight, though.

As usual, good comments on my last post that you should read.

Anca picked up on my last point that one might be able to design the direction a community takes by designing the media interaction spaces for that community. But before trying to design something, I think it’s useful to observe my current and former communities and see how their media usage influenced their structure and interaction.

Community: TEP
Media spaces: Email lists, real world gatherings
Comments: TEP’s been using a couple email lists since before I was a freshman, and those email lists provide a level of background connection to the greater TEP community of alumni and friends of the house. As an alum who doesn’t live in Boston, I often only know the undergrads that post to the mailing lists - the others are invisible to me until I go visit. The TEP community is also obviously supplemented by regular gatherings. It’s unclear whether the mailing lists would be able to bind the community together if our community was not based in a living group so that many of us lived together at one point or another.

Community: nextNY
Media spaces: Email list, real world, wiki
Comments: The main interaction space of the nextNY community is the email list, but Nate Westheimer observes that nextNY is valuable as a social network because it spawns real world interactions. Charlie points out in a comment that the email list functions effectively because the community feels a sense of ownership in the list, and I don’t think that community ownership would exist without the regular reinforcement of actually meeting other people on the nextNY list, as people aren’t “real” when you only know them online.

Community: Ultimate frisbee games
Media spaces: Real world, sometimes email
Comments: Playing ultimate frisbee, both here in New York and back in San Francisco, is primarily centered on the real world interaction of, well, playing frisbee. We use email lists, but primarily for the purpose of organizing when people are going to be playing frisbee (somebody’s been posting about non-frisbee stuff to the NYC ultimate list and getting flamed for it). It’s interesting because the community is so focused on playing frisbee that I have spent hours in people’s company without learning their last name or where they work - I only know which throws they prefer and what routes they run on the field. I had similar experiences with singing in the chorus or playing volleyball in grad school.

Community: alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer
Media spaces: Usenet
Comments: I spent a couple years posting on alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer - I even co-wrote the first FAQ for the group. Because the community had a tight focus like ultimate frisbee, I learned how other atbvs posters thought without knowing anything about their lives. Because the interaction was purely electronic, I had no idea what these people looked like or did for a living, but we could still have endless discussions about the characters and writing on the show.

This list makes clear that communities with a tight focus can function as single purpose communities. I have several “ultimate friends” who I know nothing about other than I like hanging out with them on the field. A friend of mine used the phrase “party friend” yesterday to indicate somebody they liked hanging out with but wouldn’t depend on if they needed help. I guess that’s a reminder that friendships and social connections don’t have to be all-encompassing - one can interact happily in a limited domain without ever desiring to expand the interaction beyond that domain.

The other thing about the list is that it reinforces Nate Westheimer’s point that social software needs to “affect my offline life”. My strongest communities are the ones which either grew out of or are augmented by real life interactions. Purely online community interactions seem more fragile - when I dropped out of alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer or out of playing MUDs, nobody reached out to me and asked where I’d gone.

I’m curious what other people’s communities look like and how you think the media used to communicate affects the interactions of those communities. I don’t know if we can come up with any sort of general observations, but I think it’d be interesting nevertheless. I’d be particularly interested about experiences with wikis, as I’ve never been part of a community that used one effectively - is anybody out there a Wikipedian?

I had a minor epiphany last week after my friend Jocelyn posted a quote from our conversation at dinner on my Facebook wall. For those of you not on Facebook, the wall is a single-threaded discussion board, where people can write comments to you that are visible to others. One of the reasons I didn’t “get” Facebook was that observing something like the wall from outside a community was meaningless. The comments were disjointed and without context, and I didn’t see how they were interesting… until I got one myself. Jocelyn’s comment preserved our conversation in a more substantial form, but it will only have meaning to those of us who were at dinner - it requires knowledge of a separate context to make sense of the comment.

This is part of a larger trend in society to expand our conversations and communities across multiple forms of media. This post is informed by having read the Transmedia Storytelling chapter of Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins, where he describes The Matrix as follows:

The Matrix is entertainment for the age of media convergence, integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium. The Wachowski brothers played the transmedia game very well, putting out the original film first to stimulate interest, offering up a few Web comics to sustain the hard-core fan’s hunger for more information, launching the anime in anticipation of the second film, releasing the computer game alongside it to surf the publicity, bringing the whole cycle to a conclusion with The Matrix Revolutions, and then turning the whole mythology over to the players of the massively multiplayer online game. Each step along the way built on what has come before, while offering new points of entry.

What Jocelyn’s wall post made me realize is that conversations in general can no longer “be contained within a single medium”. We have so many options for expressing ourselves, and for having conversations with our friends, that restricting ourselves to a single medium no longer makes sense. We might start a conversation by phone, follow up by email, use instant messaging to arrange a meeting, have a conversation in person, and recap the conversation in Facebook.

One possible disadvantage of such transmedia conversations is that it requires carrying our context with us. I can’t depend on the media to give me cues about how the conversation has developed when the conversation has spanned across several forms of media. So when I get a text message on my phone, I have to remember what I was last talking to this person about, and figure out the frame of context myself, whereas on the phone I could ask for clarification, or in email, my previous email might often be quoted. This may be a generational thing, though, as I think that younger generations growing up in a world of transmedia will have less difficulty with keeping track of their various contexts, as they will not know a world where it could be otherwise.

A similar constraint on these conversations is the lack of traceability and history. I really like email because I can use quoting of an incoming message to frame my reply, and keep a stored digital copy of what was said for future reference. I often get frustrated when looking at an old email that refers to an IM or an offline conversation because I can’t reconstruct what triggered the reference - the conversation that was part of my context at the time is long since forgotten and I have no way of recovering it. I can see advantages to this form of built-in information decay, but I also think we will lose our history. I can’t imagine future historians being able to track their subject’s thoughts and conversations in the way they could fifty years ago by reading their subject’s letters, as so much context will be lost.

Another disadvantage is that these conversations are impenetrable to outsiders. They don’t make sense from outside the community, because only the community is following the conversation across all media (one might call it “media hopping” in analogy to frequency hopping). This may be an advantage in some ways, especially for teenagers trying to develop and assert a new identity without interference from their parents and community, but it makes the barrier to entry into the community higher. One has to earn the trust of everybody in the community to get included in the conversation. Otherwise, one suffers from the experience we’ve all had where somebody says “Don’t you remember what they said? Oh, right, you weren’t there.” where “there” can be a place, a mailing list, a web-based discussion board, an IM chat room, a friends-locked LiveJournal post, etc.

Understanding the transmedia nature of the conversations helps because it makes me realize that it’s not that I’m “old” in not “getting” a new medium, it’s that I’m not part of a community conversation using that medium. New communities are springing up around each form of social media, and many communities are spanning across several media. Having a surfeit of media options provides people with more options for expressing themselves. People that like to write essays can have a blog, people that express themselves through pictures have Flickr, people who think in one-liners have Twitter, people that represent themselves through their networks have LinkedIn or Facebook, etc. And communities can integrate all of these to express themselves. Much like I might represent myself by a particular combination of fields, a community might define itself by the media it uses to trace its connections.

Of course, the next step is to think about how one might try to design the form a community will take by the media used to maintain it (e.g. mailing list vs. web discussion board vs. closed Facebook group), but I’ll leave that to someone smarter than myself.

Why does anybody use social software? I talked about some possible uses in my last post about affordances, but there’s more going on.

Grant McCracken wrote a great post about how social networks work where he describes the concept of “phatic communication”, which he describes as “communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content.” What does the communication convey? That a connection exists and that it is still present. As Grant puts it:

When I use Twitter or Facebook to say that I am entertaining my cat, no one, I’m pretty sure, gives a good God damn that I am entertaining my cat. But they are reminded that they have someone called Grant McCracken in their network. … There is a “superorganic” concept of the network at work here, according to which every small moment of phatic communications so reverberates that we are briefly and tinyly reminded of our larger network and social connections.

This concept resonates with my own experience with LiveJournal. I’m sure that nobody else is interested in reading my friends page because the updates of those people are only meaningful to me because I know them. It’s a reminder that these people exist, that I am friends with them, and that I could get in contact with them if I wanted. The offline equivalent of this maintenance of social connections is the Christmas card, where we send out a card to all of our friends just to say “I’m here, I’m okay, I’m still your friend”.

The other interesting thing about LiveJournal is that it provides me with an ambient awareness of my friends’ lives that I would not otherwise have. The things that we record in our journals are rarely important things. I don’t feel compelled to call up my friends and tell them about any of the things I blog. But because updates scroll past on my Friends page, I know what’s going on with my people in a way that would have been completely invisible ten years ago. In an amusing side effect, when I see somebody in real life whose journal or blog I follow, I sometimes don’t have anything to say to them immediately because we can’t break the ice with the half hour of conversation catching up with what we’ve been doing.

One consequence of this ambient awareness of my social network is that it requires much less work on my part to stay connected to my network. Another recent McCracken post asks what the new Dunbar number is. The Dunbar number is a postulated limit on how many social relationships people can track - one formulation explains it as the number of people you’d feel comfortable getting a drink with if you ran into them at a bar. The canonical Dunbar number is 150, but that may have been a result of the effort it took to maintain social relationships, as Robin Dunbar’s work grew out of the study of primates and the use of grooming to maintain relationships.

What if the Dunbar number was limited to 150 because there were only so many one-to-one connections one could maintain through the media of phone calls and letters? The effort required to keep up with all of my friends individually via the phone would be overwhelming - it would take all weekend. But LiveJournal and blogs let me maintain those social connections without much effort, allowing me to maintain connections that I undoubtedly would have dropped in a pre-Internet age. Because I can hold on to more connections, I wonder if my Dunbar number is greater than it would have been without such tools.

Another advantage of the low maintenance necessary to maintain social connections is that it enables me to access latent resources. LinkedIn demonstrates this power for the specific purpose of getting jobs, building on Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties” work. But it works in many other contexts as well. One of my friends might post about a problem they’re facing at work, and I can read it and put them in touch with somebody who might be useful in solving that problem. They would not have known about my resource, and would not have thought to ask me specifically, but these social networks make it easy to query one’s network and find such resources.

Reviewing these uses of social networks answers the question of why I don’t “get” Facebook yet. So far there’s no close friends on my Facebook network who I don’t keep track of via other media, such as reading their blogs or their LiveJournals. Therefore the ambient awareness of my other Facebook friends doesn’t mean that much to me. And while I could leverage the larger network of Facebook for latent resources, I don’t yet feel comfortable making those sorts of requests of people I don’t know well.

I also dislike the minimal information content transmitted via Facebook status messages or Twitter messages. I’ve been spoiled by blog posts where I can read more about what is going on in my friends’ minds. I want more than just a one sentence update. Perhaps the one sentence update might allow me to track more people, but as I discussed in designing my social network, I prefer a smaller but stronger set of connections.

Okay, four posts about social software is enough. I’m ready for a new topic now. I think next week will be thoughts on media.

Following up on my last post, let’s spend some time discussing what makes certain social software sites easier to adopt than others. I’ve written about technology affordances before, but I think the affordances of a given social software site have a huge impact on its adoption. We’ll start by analyzing why I found LiveJournal so easy to adopt.

I started using LiveJournal because I wanted to read the posts that my friends had “locked” so that only their LiveJournal friends could read them. I figured I would create a free account, get accepted as a friend to those people, and that would be it. But as I started using it, I discovered more and more ways in which to use it.

LiveJournal made it easy for me to keep track of all the people whose LiveJournal posts I wanted to read. Instead of having to go to each individual person’s page, as I had been doing, I could just go to my Friends page, and get a list of what my friends have been up to organized neatly into reverse chronological order. To expand my network was also trivial. When I clicked on a person’s name, it took me to their LiveJournal profile which listed all of their friends, making it easy for me to find other people I knew.

LiveJournal gets several other details right in helping me figure out what to do. For instance, if you look at the Friends page, on the left side, it shows me my main options: Recent Entries, Archive, Friends, User Info, My Website. There are other options in various menus, but the primary ones make it clear that LiveJournal is for writing my own posts, and for reading my friends’ posts. Also, LiveJournal allows me to jump into a comment thread wherever I feel comfortable, which reduces the anxiety of public “speaking”.

Making things easy is vital in getting me to do something. Blogging software is a great example. When I first started my web page back in 1994, I had a section devoted to ramblings. I only posted every few months, though, because the cognitive overhead of having to create a new HTML file every time I wanted to say something was too much. It’s not hard to create a file, but it meant that I was doing something other than trying to write my thoughts. Once I switched to blosxom, it was slightly easier because I just had to create a text file, but when I switched to Wordpress and could start blogging with one click, things got much easier.

Good software should make it obvious what I should do first, and make it straightforward for me to accomplish something useful. LiveJournal has all sorts of things that I don’t use, like communities and tiered permissions, but that’s okay because I still get value out of it from the things I started using from the beginning. Wordpress is unbelievably customizable, but I was able to start putting up posts quickly, and only look into customization when I want to try something new.

I mentioned in my last post that I couldn’t figure out what to do on Facebook. Now that Jofish friended me and has given me some tips, I can see there was a bootstrapping issue, as none of the people I had friended were using Facebook extensively, so I had no examples of how one might use it. Facebook also suffered because I did not (and still don’t) have a compelling reason to use it, as contrasted with other new technologies:

• With LiveJournal, I wanted to read my friends’ locked posts.
• With Wordpress, I wanted a better blogging system with comments and trackbacks.
• With RSS, I wanted to keep up with dozens of irregularly updated blogs.

I’m still not quite sure what the compelling reason might be for using Facebook, although Jofish’s comment that it’s “a tool to communicate with/between late teens/early twenty somethings in or recently graduated from college” is probably closest.

Twitter is another technology I’m not sure I see the case for yet. Twitter’s big moment this year was at SXSW, where it seemed like everybody started using it. The conference setting was a perfect scenario for Twitter, as everybody wanted to know where everybody else was, so the quick updates to an always accessible communications channel enabled swarming behavior. And it seemed like there was a tipping point as enough people used it that everybody started using it because everybody else was using it. I’m still skeptical of its use in normal life, but examples like Charlie using Twitter to meet up for dinner may convince me eventually.

So what characteristics does social software need to make it easy to adopt?

• There needs to be a compelling reason to use it. I listed a few above, but there has to be a goal that convinces me it’s worth investing the time to figure out how to use it.
• The easier it is to accomplish the goal, the better. If the learning investment is lower, the reason doesn’t have to be as compelling.
• Make my friends’ actions visible and copyable. In new environments, we learn by imitating others. If I can’t see what others are doing, I’ll probably do nothing.
• Make it useful even if not all of my friends use it. If the first step in making it useful is getting all of my friends on board, I’m never going to invest the effort. I think Dodgeball suffers from this problem.
• I’m sure there are others - what are your suggestions?

P.S. Unsurprisingly, these points reflect the design principles I espoused in my Ambidextrous article.

A couple weeks ago, we had a discussion over on the nextNY mailing list about how to use social networking software such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. What was interesting to me about the conversation was how it broke down generationally - us older folks were struggling to figure out what we were supposed to do with these sites. Charlie O’Donnell suggested that for older people there was nothing to do - we have settled into our lives and already have our social networks in place, whereas younger people use such software to expand their networks while they sort out their social identity. That makes sense, but I think there’s more going on here.

For one thing, when one grows up with a technology, it is part of the environment rather than “technology”. It reminds me of McLuhan’s quote that “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.” and Douglas Adams’s take on technology adoption. People use media and technology in different ways when they consider it the natural order of things. These “new” social network sites aren’t new to the kids using them; the sites are seen as just another way to talk to one’s friends.

The expertise with which such sites are used by these newcomers is partially a result of being embedded in a community. They aren’t reading help files to figure out what to do. They see what their friends are doing, copy and adapt what they find useful, and learn as they go. The site does not stand alone, but instead demonstrates the social life of information. Those of us who are the first of our communities to explore a site have a more difficult time, as we have to figure out usage patterns from scratch.

The churn of technology also contributes to lowered adoption rates by older people. I’ve been on the Internet since 1990 and have spent time with email, mailing lists, MUDs, instant messaging, discussion boards, web pages, Usenet, blogs, RSS, LiveJournal, etc. Several of these technologies have been superceded by later ones. Having been through several such cycles, I’m less likely to invest in learning a new technology until it has moved past the hype stage into mainstream adoption. Somebody new to the scene is more likely to believe that the new thing is world-changing.

Part of the churn of technology is because each new generation seeks to differentiate itself from the one before. Baby Boomers adopted rock music and television and created the beginnings of the car culture with their efforts to escape their parents’ influence. My generation thrilled at the ability to escape from our hometowns by talking to people around the world via the Internet. Now kids see their parents using email, so they think email is for old people and use texting or Facebook messaging instead.

Learning a new technology can often mean giving up an old one. Because of the time I have spent mastering various media technologies and integrating them into my life, I am loath to give them up even if better technologies now exist. For instance, I resisted buying a DVR for years because I was convinced my VCR was good enough. Meanwhile, people entering this environment can choose the technologies that best fit their lives without considering sunk costs, much like developing countries are now skipping wired telephone networks and going straight to cell phones.

As Charlie observed, those of us with established careers and social networks have less time and desire to experiment with new technologies and integrate them into our lives. So we reject them in favor of technologies with which we are already comfortable. Charlie describes how bloggers are rejecting Facebook after using it in a unrealistic way based on their experience with blogging. They didn’t take the time to go “native”; without a community in which to observe how others were using the technology, they failed to find a use for it.

The mix of technology and community is an intoxicating one for me - I’ve been fascinated by how virtual communities form and use technology since I first logged into a MUD in 1990. With more experience, I realized that the technology matters less than the community in the process of technology adoption. A technology without an associated community withers away. A technology that can be adapted to serve communities (like Twitter) will thrive.

We’re in a time of great innovation in social software. The technology to create social networking applications is available to anyone, either through building it with open source software on a hosted server, or through sites like Ning. While I’m no longer one of the early adopters, I am watching them closely to see how new technologies are being used by those communities, so that I can adopt them later myself.

P.S. Having said all that, I still don’t “get” Facebook. Anybody want to give me a tour of how they use it?

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.

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.

Several of my friends at LiveJournal considered the permanent account sale recently, trying to decide whether to pay to make their account permanent. The ones who did often framed it to themselves as their way of saying thanks for a service that they have used extensively. I eventually decided against the permanent account, as I’m not convinced I’ll be using LJ in 6-7 years. But I did sign up for a paid account earlier this year, despite not using the paid member features, as my way of saying thanks.

I’m trying to find ways to support the services I like on the Internet because I can afford to now. I donate to Questionable Content regularly, I finally paid for TextPad, I’m an ESPN.com “Insider”, etc. Of the six books I reviewed in my nonfiction roundup, I bought three of them because they were written by bloggers that I read. Even if I didn’t like the books, I felt that buying their book and increasing their Amazon rankings was a way of saying thanks for all of the free content I have enjoyed. Buying CDs or T-shirts at concerts is a similar tactic.

I wonder how many people are like me, though. How many people pay for a service that they can get for free? Will enough of the audience donate for free content to continue to thrive?

Then again, y’all convinced me that people will generate content purely for the satisfaction they get from the act of creation. There are motivations other than money, or I wouldn’t spend hours each week blogging. So maybe creating a culture of compensation doesn’t matter.

And even for those who are motivated by money, the best route may not be donations or subscriptions, but ad revenue. The creator of the ludicrously addictive Desktop Tower Defense game is apparently making close to $10,000 a month from Google ads.

I feel that I have the obligation to acknowledge the value of content I like. I’d feel terrible if somebody whose work I enjoyed stopped doing it because they were not being sufficiently rewarded. There are different ways I try to do this.

• Direct monetary compensation as discussed above, in the form of donations or buying swag.
• “Google juice” in the form of links to web pages I find valuable. Not that I have much link power, but every little bit helps, and with AdSense, higher PageRank translates into money.
• Sometimes all I do is write an email to the person thanking them for their work - I still get a thrill from every such email I get, so I hope the same is true for others.

I’m not sure where culture is going, but I hope it’s moving in a direction where people donate to the things they like, creating an opportunity for more people to make a living at activities that they enjoy rather than having to work day jobs to support their creative outlets. It makes me feel good to donate to people whose work I appreciate, especially when it’s completely voluntary on my part. I have no idea how the economics work out, but the idea of giving away content for free and then depending on donations appeals to me as a test of the collective culture of humanity.

P.S. Speaking of donations, I really appreciate the person who bought a cell phone via my Amazon associate link. Thanks! It made me so happy that I moved the link up the sidebar just now to be more obvious

Two different commenters have now said that my conception of “The Guy” was what Malcolm Gladwell dubbed a Maven in The Tipping Point. That didn’t feel right to me, so I went back and re-read the “Law of the Few” chapter where Gladwell describes Mavens to see if I could figure out why I thought “The Guy” and the Maven weren’t the same thing.

I feel like the Maven is more of a personality type. Mavens are the kind of people who read Consumer Reports, who compulsively figure out schemes to save money.

Alpert launched into a complicated story of how to make the best use of coupons in renting videos at Blockbuster. Then he stopped himself, as if he realized what he was saying, and burst out laughing. “Look, you can save a whole dollar! In a year’s time I could probably save enough for a whole bottle of wine!”

Mavens love telling you about the deals they have found, and the great products they have discovered. But I don’t think it’s something they limit to one area - they treat everything in their life like this. They’ll tell you about the great deal they got at a hotel or at the grocery store - they are overflowing with information. But it’s a resource to be tapped in a transactional exchange, when I need to know something. When I’m buying a stereo or a car, I might consult a Maven for their input, but then I don’t continue to compulsively check back on the latest prices or the newest releases.

So how does “The Guy” differ? I think anybody can become “The Guy” - it’s not a personality trait. It’s a choice to become the nexus of knowledge on a particular subject.

In one sense, “The Guy” is like the Maven, in that he is the person to whom others go to get a question answered. But I think it’s different in that “The Guy” engenders the formation of a community. It’s not a one-time transaction, but a continuing interaction.

Another difference is that I view “The Guy” as being a leader for their issue and for the associated community. Mavens aren’t really leaders - as Gladwell says, “Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know.” They will help you out, but it’s not really about you - it’s about their joy in mastering their domain. Consulting them is like consulting any specialist, whether a database expert or a physicist - they are happy to talk at length about their domain but have no real interests outside of it. Great people to have on your team, but not the people you want in charge.

What’s odd is that being “The Guy” requires an amalgam of all three of Gladwell’s personality types. It takes the domain expertise of the Maven to earn respect, the social wherewithal of the Connector to generate a community in that domain, and the Salesman to convince people of the importance of that domain and community. So there are definite overlaps between what Gladwell is saying and what I’m trying to say. He’s describing the skills which are necessary for something to “tip”, and I’m describing the person who aspires to make that happen. Something like that, at least.