Surfaced here for a bit today, and for the foreseeable future I’m probably going to limit posts to ‘progress reports’ and calls-for-mental-participation around the project I’m working on.

The ethnography came back mid-Jan, and inspired the guys on the design team to come up with some new ideas which have suceeded to glue things together nicely. As well as the primary research, the analysis and synthesis the ethnographers did should stand us in good stead for a couple of release cycles yet. A good investment.

We’ve had a preliminary concept sign-off/review which went well. End of our concept stage is Monday. Lots of stuff to work out before then, as our product manager said, we’ve shone the torch around the room pretty well, but we need to striplight the place.

However, I’m at last comfortable that that we’ve got the “parti”: the driving, organising idea behind the thing.

Of course, this might all be proved to be complete rubbish once we put the paper-prototypes in front of people, but it’s great to have an idea that resonates with everyone on the team, that they ‘get’, and that they can generate their own stuff based upon.

I’m always happier on a project if we get to a good, grokkable parti, because even if it’s not the panacea you think it might be when you come up with it, then it will still drive the work along nicely, and lets you examine user research/testing critically, just as it should itself be revisited critically in the light of that feedback.

Other great thing about the work right now as a result of the research and the concept becoming more solid is the way in which it lets you view previous work in computer-mediated commmunication by academia or the commercial world with a more critical eye. Nico, our product manager brought our attention in the design team to “The Coordinator”, and its authors’ notions of ‘conversations for possibility’ and ‘conversations for action’.

Reading around and about this 15 year old design was revealing.

“In 1986, a six month study was done with Pacific Bell. The study was not successful – no one used the system.  Many subjects claimed that the system was fine, but that there was too much structure, and not enough flexibility.”
– Josh Introne, Brandeis University

Arrrgh! The Procrustean Bed of social software! I think the framework and models we’ve gotten too based on the ethnography balances flexiblity and ‘conversations for possibilty’, or maybe “spaces for half-formed thoughts” with the more teleological tools and processes.

The challenge of the project now is to marry this to a user-experience that lowers the barriers to participation sufficiently.

More soon

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Oh… and I’m sure I’m using the term wrongly but, anyway: zero bubble.

or Keep It Simple, Software Socialists! Tom outlines how he and the team who developed UpMyStreet Conversations approached the project:

“The process of developing the UI and functionality of the sites (which, along with Dan Burzynski and Dorian McFarland, has been one of my major responsibilities) has presented some particularly interesting challenges. Throughout the process my main aspiration was to make it almost so obvious to use that people completely ceased to notice how novel it was. This involved paring down the message board functionality to its simplest core and concentrating on fully understanding the very distinct issues that a geographically-organised board might engender.”

» Plasticbag.org: On the Guardian and UpMyStreet Conversations…

http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/pointer/patterns.html

[via IASlash]

Browsing blogs, I’ve often had what I call the “glittering cave moment”; when I leave the dowdy, familiar surrounds of my blog-neighbourhood and get taken by the hand (or link) by someone I trust into a new and sparkling world of scary new knowledge, opinions, thoughts and views. That bridging moment has a tangible excitement to it.

My biggest “glittering cave moment” was last year’s ETCON, when I realised the fun that was happening in the techcave, as opposed to where I was. Another huge one was when I discovered the parallel universe of LiveJournal.

Worth remembering bridges happen at divides: they are erected over chasms, canyons, torrents.

This post at greaterdemocracy.org by Adina Levin explores what happens if the systems you navigate tend to keep you in your cave.

Noted socialnetwork analyst Valdis Krebs has been discovering the lack of bubble-bridges at Amazon:

“There’s a set of books that seem to represent “left-wing” readers, with titles by Chomsky and Michael Moore and Tom Friedman. And there’s a parallel set of books that seem to represent “right-wing” interests, with books by writers including Ann Coulter and Patrick Buchanan.

The clusters of recommendations seemed to be mutually exclusive. Only one book appeared on recommendation lists in both clusters: What Went Wrong, a book by Bernard Lewis about Middle East history.”

I believe that’s what’s being illustrated in the lovely, lucid accompanying diagram [above, reminds me superficially of this by Stewart]. Mr. Krebs goes on to say:

“The challenge is to create *bridges* so that diverse information and ideas can be exchanged (not just via hollering and arguing).”

As I mentioned before, one of the things we’re finding from our ethnographic study of people working to change their civic environment, is how successful people or organisations often shift from being adversaries to allies, and how important and how delicate those bridging moments are in achieving this in real-life.

We have a “charrette” tomorrow to try and figure out some alternatives to encourage and manage this online.

Tricky.

Dumb un-thought-through ideas I have lodged in my head: I’m thinking some kind of compass of links or opinions that give you a panorama view of those associated with issues you’re concerning yourself with. In my mind it looks like the variations tool in Photoshop meets politicalcompass.org. You know, where you have your original picture in the middle and then are shown variants which are more yellow, more cyan, more magenta, etc.

Or maybe some kind of implementation of the ‘publish my friends on my page’ feature that LiveJournal has, except you publish contrarian or adversarial views – not a lot different from having comments turned-on on your blog perhaps! 😉

Some kind of functionality to facilitate “hand-shaking” and create common-ground to establish cooperation within are going to be important. Turn-taking is going to be important. Also, some kind of auto-glossary commonground, where you can discover whether you are talking about the same thing just from different view points and share/merge the langauge you’ve been using [XFML/Taxomita involved somehow?]. Tools to widen “the circle of empathy” as Steven Pinker puts it: Telempathics

Very glad we have some models from real-life research to start from. Going to dig out everything Meatball and Valdis Krebs have to offer.

Any other pointers?

» Greaterdemocracy.org: Is the “Daily Me” at the doorstep?

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Side-question to self: must read in-depth and figure how does this relate to ShellyBurningbird’s great recent run of posts on the matter of connections between one’s commonplace books and “the commons”

In the pub last night Matt Webb and myself discussed this subject area: it’s fuzziness and our frustrations with it. The best and most useful definition I have that we got to was:

“Social software = software that’s better because there’s people there”

[e.g. amazon, google, ebay, slashdot, and at a larger scale: the blogosphere and the web as a whole]

Ross Mayfield [who’s blog is a definite find for designers considering social software] has this as an attractive and useful definition of Social Software:

“Social Software adapts to its environment, instead of requiring its environment to adapt to software.”

Seems to me there’s a lot of cross-over with the discussions and thoughts in the experience-design blogosphere about ‘adaptive design’ of the last couple of months.

At the moment, it seems to me, the discussion of social software is massively technocentric, seat’n’screen-centric, expert-user-centric; possibly as an innocent result of those in it’s vanguard. For a real great leap forward IMHO, we need to cross the streams of social software and smartmobs with adaptive design. Expand and map the discussion from:

software-that’s-better-cos-there’s-people-there

to

places-that-are better-for-people-cos-there’s-software-there;

and in both cases have the emphasis on people. I really want the time to try to expand on this, but I’m not counting on it.

“Person most likely”? = Fabio Sergio

Tanya Pixelcharmer has a great linkful post about power-laws, the web, citation-analysis and, ascending-meme-of-the month: “the trouble with Google”:

“So, ultimately the thing that makes Google so great, is also it’s major flaw — weighting pages in favor of highly trafficked sites, or weighting in favor of sites that are pointed to by highly trafficked sites. Therefore a search on the word �Dao� will give you the article “The Dao of Web Design” at A List Apart before those that discuss it�s original meaning. So, Google suffers from the power law distribution that links obey when looked at over the entire web.”

Blogs maybe rendering Google bankrupt, but perhaps the problem is not with Google and pagerank, but with who blogs at the moment. Can’t find that much on a blogger demographic or blogging demographic other than pollyanna-ish ‘everyone’s a blogger’ puff-pieces in old media. My guess is that Chris Gulker’s piece in The Independent is rather closer to the sub-demographic, who instead of deadjournalling about Slipknot are gaming Google with their linkmachines.

“‘We’ are nerds, geeks, dweebs, technorati and, in this case, bloggers, a group of about 50, mostly male, mostly middle-aged and largely under-employed or unemployed inhabitants of Silicon Valley”

Nothing wrong with this of course… and I love reading that stuff, but while the googlebot is learning from such a limited set of time-rich, high-link-worth individuals, then you’re going to run into the problems Tanya describes. I also don’t think it’s that much of a showstopper of a problem. In the blogging, tech and digital design community we may tend to ask more tech, design or abstract questions which are not answered outside of the blogosphere, and therefore there is little surprise that the mirror of pagerank is held up against us. “Real-world” queries are still answered happily and with heterogeneity by Google. For example, this morning a friend asked me if there were puffins on Skomer Island and google helped me answer with one click (the answer is “yes”)

I’m not suggesting we immediately drop B52-fulls of free simputers all over the world in order to make the GoogleTruth more inclusive, but what about channelling some Vannevar Bush, and making like the Memex. I’m sure we all have this committed to memory by now:

” Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

And of course his notion of many memex linked by ‘trails’:

“There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”

As I perhaps naively see it [and if there was one post destined to get me flames it might be this one], there is a current skew of those who are creating their own Memex and, particularly those who are blazing trails between them. I’ve talked before about lowering barriers to entry being one of the most important factors for me in creating social software – and re-reading Bush’s 1945 tubthumper makes me think of one key area that might get us a high blogbang-for-buck.

What about a flavour of blog creation software aimed at academics, professors, researchers – specialised templates, tailored language and interface, easy-to-intergrate with college intranets, easier to publish to the web from within an internal net, tied to citation management software, directories and search tools.

Alongside this, pioneer blogging-academics to come up with a best-practice approach for those wanting to start out, a creative-commons style license for academic bloggers which builds an ‘everyone-wins’ academic-commons and also an approach for colleges to map blogging to traditional measures of academic success such as publishing and citation.

If we could find ways for the collected, collegiate building and crucially linking of the global academic memex to the quality of the blogosphere, where the link-loam gets deeper by the day, then pretty soon if you searched for Dao you’d get something by the chair of comparative religion and philosophy rather than a webdesigner in an aeron chair.

has accounted for a major dip in productivity in our office. Unlike previous social network building apps like sixdegrees or ryse there is something about it which is incredibly compelling.

Is it:

• The ease of use of the well-considered IA and user-interface?
• The photos?
• The “privacy of the mall” feeling of a private public place that you feel confidence in?
• The fact it’s not dressed up in “personal-productivity” speak and is just obviouslly about reinforcing and discovering social ties, and, ahem… dating?

Or all of the above. Go and explore it, using the beta code: “coke”. I’d be very interested in anyone’s views/criticisms.

» Friendster.com

After banging on about HiptopNation endlessly, it would be remiss of me not to mention Fotolog.

From Fotolog’s excellent, inspiring FAQ:

“IS A FOTOLOG LIKE A BLOG/WEBLOG?
Sorta. Blogs are generally a lot of words with a few images. Fotologs are a lot of images with a few words. Fotolog is Blogger for people that don’t write well. If a picture tells a thousand words, then doing Fotolog makes you very prolific. Some say that the web is “a writing medium” — we say that the Blogging revolution isn’t necessarily about the writing — it’s about personal, continual publishing irrespective of whether it’s publishing words or images.”

The digital divide isn’t just about access to computers and the internet; it’s about, on one level, being literate, and on another being able to think systemically, algorithmically, creatively.

At last night’s Advance for Design London meeting – ‘adaptive design’ was debated in many contexts, including how to make things so people can remake them (cf. ‘wombling’: here, here and here). Ann Light‘s presentation hit upon the gulf between those who are consumers-users and those who are creator-users [I can’t find her slides online yet – lots of good discussion about Lego was had… more later].

While there’s a debate to be had about that being ‘a good thing’, visually-oriented personal publishing is clearly starting to create bridges across these divides. We’re all unlearning what we have learnt: to be good consumers as creation gets easier, more attractive, more personal and more powerful.

Don’t know about you, but I think it would be great to have everyone over here, on this side, with the Morlocks. We have a way to go to get back to the future. What’s that whoosh? It’s the sound of the barriers to personal expression sliding away a little more…

I thought, somewhat flippantly, a while back:

Could a group of full of non-human, artificial participants be distinguished from a group of humans participating in a mailing list or group message board.

If you joined a mailing list full of sufficiently-advanced bots, how long would it take you to tell the difference, if you could at all?

In social situations, are we more easily fooled?

Stewart’s diagrams showing overlaps of social networks in the GNE are beautifully reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s “Tensegrity” structures.

They also bring home the messy, nuanced and subtle nature of human social relations, and the attendent difficulty of recreating/augmenting them in a media where the ‘experience design[ed]’ is sometimes little more than “one page of paper after another slapping you in the face on a windy street” [© Jessica Helfand]

A hunch of mine is that successful social-software will seem messy like a meatball to plan, resource, design and build, but will have the beauty and poise of Bucky’s tensegrity structures when it happens…