Class 9: Internet continued…

Administration Getting very near the end! Unlock wikis for comments Nov 11 – objectivity/media Nov 18 – course wrapup/summary – Internet meme presentations in labs Nov 25 – final test (no labs)

SLATES (McAfee) Search Linking Authorship Tagging Extensions Signals McAfee, A.P (2006). Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. Sloan Management Review, 47(3),

Another take (Carr) Carr, A. (2007). Designing for Sustainable Conversations. InteractionCamp

Wikis Collaborative writing and editing of material Wikipedia as gold standard, but also effective for more localized communities of practice (e.g., TorCamp conferences) Other examples?

Blogs Webpage driven by content management system for ease of use/updating Cheap platform for personal and group expression Blogs within blogs develop and contribute new talent - e.g., DailyKos user journals Communities of interest build through link exchanges, trackbacks Examples?

Microblogging Short, informal info bursts - similar to texting Twitter - what are you doing right now (140 characters or less) – invention of tiny URLs to allow for info sharing Facebook status updates

Web-based Forums A resuscitation of BBS and Usenet Communities of interest built around particular topics, areas of interest Example: Craigslist: “don’t be evil” approach, similar to Google - community of trust, simple functional interface, paid ads in major markets (mostly for quality control, and at user’s request)

Social Networking Building communities of friends by school, community, interests, etc. Builds FOAF networks Shared profiles with some privacy restrictions (e.g., keeping phone, IM to friend networks) Examples?

Examples: Orkut and Facebook Orkut (Google experiment) - FOAF spam and a strange Brazilian takeover - now kind of useless if you don’t speak Portuguese. Facebook - Ivy league roots, now broader audience Facebook news feed - all actions of friends relayed - privacy concerns? Facebook API - acceleration of services (and junk) Google OpenSocial - Orkut and others to share common API Has Facebook peaked?

RSS Feeds Information feeds to create push vs. pull relationshiop to media Feed aggregators (browser, online or application) collect new information feeds in one location Increasingly mashed up with other services (e.g., Yahoo! Pipes)

Folksonomies Collaborative tagging and categorization of materials Tags and categories develop organically through community input Opposite direction from taxonomy – top-down, enforced control (e.g., Library of Congress) Use in TorCamp conferences

Collaborative Favourites/Bookmarks Shared items/pages of interest Services such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Fark, (too) many others become ways of tracking commonly bookmarked items Del.icio.us tagging and its benefits

Collaborative Calendaring E.g., Facebook’s event calendar – events both you and your friends are interested in Shared calendaring services (mostly based on iCal standards…)

Photo sharing Sharing of photo albums, often with annotations, notes Control of publication - publication to friends only or wide publication Flickr, Picassa, (too?) many others Local example: BubbleShare

Video Sharing User-driven shared video services like YouTube, Vimeo, others? (Increasingly) amateur content - some with surprisingly sizeable audiences Exposure driven by user rankings Easily leveraged by blogs/wikis as embedded media, easily shared

File Sharing Peer-to-peer networks to trade files (all legal ones, I’m sure…) Distributed bandwidth allows for transfer without vulnerable central nodes (e.g., torrents) Community effect - learning about files shared by others

Podcasting Downloadable audio or video broadcasts, related (but not necessarily tied) to popularlity of iPod Itunes integration - a central repository for podcast feeds, but there are others

(Some) Games Which games? Multiplayer games - building of community around game actions, especially games that require group interaction to succeed Examples?

IM? Is instant messaging really 2.0? To some extent, it adheres to SLATES, but the community is generally very insular – isn’t really 2.0 for the same reason

Elitist Return? Net Neutrality Is some information more important? Should it get priority access to “the tubes?” Tiered access - who controls it? To what good purpose? How?

Tiered access Internet 2, Can*net 4, private internal networks Sheridan’s iChat server and other university bandwidth issues (e.g., YouTube filtering!) Commercial censorship - Telus vs. union, Shaw vs. VoIP, AOL vs. anti-AOL consumer sites, US Military vs. progressive blogs, Google and Yahoo! in China, RIAA/file trading - others?

A Critical Take Winner and mythinformation - technology adherents take to near mythical descriptions of how technology will change the world See also Noble - Religion of Technology - designers themselves speak in terms of highly spiritual terms (creation, transcendence, inevitable utopia)

Four Myths People are lacking information Information is knowledge Knowledge is power Information access = equitable and democratic social power

Do we really lack information? Many argue opposite - we’re drowning, and we are losing the ability to make associations and connections as a result Ex: 500-channel universe, academic journal explosion - little common ground, little opportunity for full analysis

Information = Knowledge? Sheer quantity of information may lead to information overload and destruction of knowledge Perceived knowledge vs. actionable and understood knowledge 9/11 example - information regarding terror cells existed but was scattered, uncoordinated - it didn’t make sense

Public Medium and Voice Internet can increase public voice - e.g., consumer forums, political discussion Discussion can become more base, ridiculous - signal/noise issues (e.g., Tweets in news shows – relevance?) But Internet as group/conversation medium has great potential – global, ubiquitous, fast and cheap Internet may be revolutionary (Shirky)

Knowledge = Power? Knowledge available at the right time and context to people with the power and resources to act upon it might equal power Knowledge itself might leave you powerless - and frustratingly so - e.g., blogosphere and politics (e.g., Deaniacs and Paultards)

Information = Democracy? Capacity for self-governance isn’t just information- based Most people are simply not interested in all the relevant information Direct democracy can be dangerous, even asinine - e.g., Stockwell “Doris” Day example from 22 Minutes)