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Content Tagged with Kellan-Elliot-Mcrea + community

Excellent, pragmatic, Christopher Alexander style patterns for building online community. With really cute graphic.

“…it should take energy and thought to push issues upstream due to the associated costs of having to deal with them once they are propagated… when you optimise something you always do so at the expense of something else.” - Bill de hOra

“Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. … Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care.” - Danah Boyd

Stone Cottage pointed to a great post by Rick Skrenta, CEO of Topix (and mad mind behind NewHoo/DMOZ for those who can remember back that far) on the Topix re-launch.

Lot of really interesting stuff about identifying a brand’s core value and putting it into practice. But also a phenomenal laundry for a problem that has stumped a lot of us, how to make a local news site succeed. Including:

• Anthropomorphize our existing technology into the roboblogger. This was a brilliant idea from one of our lead engineers. It simultaneously solves three problems:

  1. Booting up a new city — you need posting activity to draw the first editors. The roboblogger would give us that. But he is shy and gets out of the way if humans show up and take over a page.
  2. If the community editors go on vacation, the roboblogger can step back in and take over while they’re gone.
  3. People know when a robot is editing the page vs. a human. His profile icon is a picture of a little tin-can robot. His handle is ‘roboblogger’.
  No more confusion.

A project has to already have value to draw a valuable volunteer base, this is the classic and yet fundamentally hard problem with boot strapping all local sites. But as soon as you have volunteers your contract with them is to rain attention and love down upon their contributions. roboblogger is a really neat hack to handle the delicate balance of a site’s lifecycle and mix community and data mining techniques in social software. Looking forward to watching it play out.

Deeply disturbing, and upsetting. (And some part of me is selfish enough to be sad that I won’t be seeing her this week, as she is a consistently wonderful speaker)

A: I wasn’t aware there was a difference between the two…I realized long ago that cutting back on the latter, rendered the former banal.

First congrats to the Obvious kids (assuming any of you survived your wild bacchanalia of vegetarian and raw foods last night), you’ve made the big time!

You’ve got a Kathy Sierra graph named after you!

And she is talking about Continuous Partial Attention, which is also fascinating. But I think she is wrong about Brain 2.0 not being here yet.

Brain 2.0

I know my own brain is addicted to stimuli: flashing lights, amusing concepts, spinning tops, sugar, caffeine, loud noises, human connections, etc. Note the lack of “fascinating and important new information” in that list.

Unbolding and Broken Promises

That’s why email and feed readers can be so distracting, they slip past our intellectual safe guards by promising us “important and timely information”, but really we go to the trough hoping for stimuli, something to keep the howling 2 year hold cum crack fiend brains of ours from going into withdrawal.

And they don’t deliver. 99% of email is boring, 92% of RSS is boring.

Bad mornings are the ones where I sit at home compulsively unbolding things hoping that somewhere in there there will be the gem of connection and stimuli that gets me out the door.

So we have an activity which consumes a huge amount of time, and delivers low grade rewards intermittently.

Twitter

And thats where Twitter comes in. I have Twitter going to be IM (the excellent Adium). Messages appear at the top left of my screen almost in my peripheral vision, and fade away quickly with no intervention needed (thank you Growl), a quick squirt of connection without requiring agency.

IM is supposed to be asynchronous, but at that the same time you need someone to occasionally make “eye contact” with you to know you aren’t howling in the void, and Twit provides that, its stream of updates providing presence, and occasional directed response.

MySpace Hating

Social software as monolithic web destinations is going to go away over the next 5 years (with the exception of course of certain photo sharing sites). Right now tools like MySpace are structured around the very adolescent desire to make friendship and community a public and performative act, with everyone else piling on due to the network effect. Adults for the most part, don’t need, don’t want, and don’t have time to participate in the continuos and elaborate preening rituals. We’ll want tools that allow us to build tight knit groups, with low cost communication, asynchronous connection, and social discovery. They might look something like Twitter.