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 […]
Category: socialsoftware
Generations of social software
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 […]
Blog comments and community
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 […]
The Social Atom, by Mark Buchanan
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 […]
Designing your social network
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 […]
The Rise of the Amateur
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 […]
Urbis
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 […]
Thoughts on Community
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 […]
Sharing
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 […]
Social Media Club
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 […]
