jill/txt

Inspired by NRKbeta’s analysis of this I went ahead and applied for a beta user account for Dagbladet’s new debate profiles. Dagbladet is one of Norway’s biggest newspapers and has a very active user community - perhaps communities would be a better word. Most (or all?) of their articles are open for comments, but often the comment threads fill up fast with trolls, or just with people wanting to vent the same venom (women suck and I’m outraged that my ex-wife makes me pay child support) again and again. As a way of combatting this, Dagbladet is experimenting with giving registered “real name” users priority in debate, so registered users show up first in comment threads, and with a nice icon and link to their profile. Of course I signed up.

The way Dagbladet provides context for debaters is pretty cool. Yes, they want full names, and encourage you to upload a photo. More interestingly, they connect your Dagbladet account to other parts of your online identity. So when someone clicks on my name in the comment thread of a newspaper article, they’ll see my profile page at Dagbladet, which includes not only my comments on that site but also my Twitter posts and posts to my blog. That’s a pretty good way of grounding me, of giving me a context. And it also means that I’m less likely to want to act like an idiot and attack people in debates on Dagbladet - because it’ll all be visibly part of my “self” online. It’d be as silly as acting like an idiot in real life. Sure, some people still do that, but it has social repurcussions.

Here’s where you sign up for a beta account. I got my email after a couple of days.

I gave a talk for local librarians on Wednesday, which ended up being about the idea that the age of print was but a short blip in the history of human culture, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, as Tom Pettitt and others have called it (see this PDF for Pettitt’s paper on the topic at MIT5), and that we’re now in the post-parenthetical period. I love the Gutenberg Parenthesis concept - it seems such a great way of explaining the changes we’re going through. But the librarians did point out some problems - for instance, why did copyright appear so late in the age of print if it’s one of the defining features of the Gutenberg Parenthesis? Ibsen didn’t actually own copyright to his own works at the end of the nineteenth century - his publisher did, though. And did I realise that early printers used to travel around from village to village and set up their portable printers and publish small runs of whatever people wanted? Well, no, I hadn’t. Well, the librarian continued, the “authority” and mass-media quality of print wasn’t an issue until Richelieu decided that the state needed more information about its citizens and suddenly required all printed material to be sent to the government - and this idea that print should be controlled by the government quickly spread to other countries. Isn’t that a great example, by the way, of how technology and culture/society are interdependent?

I think these objections merely show that the transitional periods are extremely long, and that norms and expectations based on a previous technology carry over far past the extinction of that technology. That’s why copyright extends and even increases in today’s world, despite its being largely unsuitable for today’s technology and communication.

Having thought about this all Wednesday, Thursday’s lecture to my web design students ended up circling around the same issues - and all the links and so on are summarised in the class blog [Update Sept ‘09 - Oops - a teaching assistent deleted THE WHOLE BLOG for that class so that link won’t work and all my notes are lost. GRRR!]

I enjoyed my First Tuesday Bergen experience yesterday. Interesting people at dinner beforehand, and the two other presenters gave very engaging talks from a business point of view - Rune Røsten (long-time Norwegian blog enthusiast who ran the blogs and more at Dagbladet before going to Nettby last year) talking about Nettby, the biggest Norwegian social network site at the moment (Spray Date and Blink no longer rule, though Facebook arguably has more Norwegian users), and Kjetil Manheim talking more generally about community and social sites and how businesses should think about using them - hey, his slides are already on Slideshare, cool.

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As the voice from academia I started by talking about strong and weak links, as Granovetter theorised them in the 70s, and went on to talk about how some social network sites, like LinkedIn, primarily try to help us use and develop our weak ties, whereas others, like dating sites, are more about finding new friends and contacts. Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook has become a social site where all sorts of networks are mixed - I have contacts there ranging from acquaintances from high school, students I had three semesters ago, neighbours, colleagues I met once at a conference, through to colleagues I see or talk with regularly and close friends and family. The collision of networks is one of the problems with sites like these, as “boyd’s law”, formulated by Cory Doctorow expresses: “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” According to Doctorow, that’s one of the reasons social networking sites only tend to last for a couple of years - once there are enough people in your “network” that you don’t want to have contact with you’ll move to another site. I then told boyd and Heer’s story about the teacher whose students found her Burning Man style profile on Friendster (PDF, and noted that services like Spock and Open Social are making these kinds of collision more and more likely, even when we try to keep our networks separate. danah boyd’s post yesterday was great as a round-up: Tim O’Reilly’s argument that this kind of openness is a kind of vaccination against the foolish belief that we can be private online (”We have a moral responsibility to eliminate “security by obscurity” so that people aren’t shocked when they are suddenly exposed.”) vs. danah’s argument that that’s all very well if you’re privileged, as tech geeks in Silicon Valley are, but if you’re not in a position of power - say, if you’re a teenager, or a dissident in a dictatorship, or queer in an oppressed society, or a whistle blower - that vaccination may damage you badly, or even get you killed.

Like Jess, I find watching this map where wikipedia edits rather fascinating. Look how these edits pop up almost as fast as they happen. This is the same principle as the World as a Blog map*, of course, both visualisations being splendid ways of letting us see how we’re collaborating, now, in a sense, across vast distances.

I actually imagined that Wikipedia edits were more frequent than this map suggests, just as I found the World as a Blog’s reporting of blog posts surprisingly sparse. Indeed, the Wikipedia’s Recent Changes page shows more than 50 changes made just in the last minute. Clearly the WikipediaVision map leaves out a fair bit of the world, but even considering that, they must be using some algorithm that leaves out most edits in their visualisation. I wonder why?

*Which seems no longer to work?

Robert Scoble has about 5000 Facebook friends and was using a script to get a “map” of all his Facebook network and data so he could move it to a different platform. He writes in his blog: “I am working with a company to move my social graph to other places.” Facebook responded by disabling his account, because he was, as Scoble quotes their email, “viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script”, and because, “This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.”

Now I can actually see why you’d NOT want automated scripts sucking up info about us off Facebook. I intend the information on my profile to be read by my human friends, not collected by computers and repurposed for unknown projects. Scoble seems to have been scraping information off his social network on Facebook for a fair reason, though: so that he can re-implement his social network on a different service. The information is, after all, his. Or rather, it belongs to him and his friends - and I’m one of his Facebook friends. So it sounds as though his script was saving information off my profile, too, for instance. I wouldn’t be OK with someone taking that information, much of which is only viewable to my friends, and reposting it on another website.

I don’t really know what Scoble was intending to do with the data. Probably his intents are entirely benign. He clearly sees this as an issue of data portability and of owning your own data.
But whose data is it really? The individual user’s - in this case Scoble’s? Only a tiny fraction of the data on Scoble’s “social graph” was actually created by Scoble himself. Facebook’s? Well, legally, yes, because that’s how they’ve written their terms of use. The reasonable conclusion, in my opinion, is that it should belong to the people who shared their information. Scoble’s “social graph” on Facebook belongs not only to Scoble, but to all 5000 of Scoble’s friends. And how on earth can you really get permission to copy and reuse the data from all these people?

It’s certainly very convenient for Facebook that protecting their users’ privacy fits simultaneously allows them to stop anybody from moving their data to another service.

Update Jan 4: Scoble’s been readmitted to Facebook.

Update Jan 8: Thomas Otter has posted a very interesting blog post describing how Scoble’s actions were in violation of European privacy laws.

Cory Doctorow on on why social networking sites like Facebook don’t grow forever:

For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.

(..) The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

So we probably don’t have to worry too much about Facebook taking over the Internet….

If you’re interested in social network sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and the like, you’ll want to have a look at the special issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication that just came out, edited by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison. Here is the table of contents, from danah’s announcement on Many2Many.

JCMC Special Theme Issue on “Social Network Sites”
Guest Editors: danah boyd and Nicole Ellison
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/

• “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship” by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison
• “Signals in Social Supernets” by Judith Donath
• “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances” by Hugo Liu
• “Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites” by Eszter Hargittai
• “Cying for Me, Cying for Us: Relational Dialectics in a Korean Social Network Site” by Kyung-Hee Kim and Haejin Yun
• “Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com” by Dara Byrne
• “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball” by Lee Humphreys
• “Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube” by Patricia Lange

Frogloop (”Catalyzing Expertise in Non-Profit Online Communications”) think you can. They even offer a tool for calculating exactly how much return your ten hours a week in Facebook will give - assuming you’re a non-profit running a campaign solely intended to bring in donations, anyway. The number of variables is frightening, but still one-dimensional - surely the value of social networks goes way beyond simply collecting dollars and cents, kroner and øre?

(This screenshot only shows the top of the calculator - trust me, you’ve got to look for yourself, the level of detail is astounding.)

Espen Andersen noted the new O’Reilly book Programming Collective Intelligence, by Toby Segaran, which looks really interesting. In an excellent blog post discussing the book, Tim O’Reilly writes about the importance of what users implicitly contribute to the web, rather than just looking at the photos and videos blog posts and Facebook profiles that are explicitly contributed.

No one would characterize Google as a “user generated content” company, yet they are clearly at the very heart of Web 2.0. That’s why I prefer the phrase “harnessing collective intelligence” as the touchstone of the revolution. A link is user-generated content, but PageRank is a technique for extracting intelligence from that content. So is Flickr’s “interestingness” algorithm, or Amazon’s “people who bought this product also bought…”, Last.Fm’s algorithms for “similar artist radio”, ebay’s reputation system, and Google’s AdSense.

This is a book explaining the practical sides of actually using this information - it “teaches algorithms and techniques for extracting meaning from data, including user data”, O’Reilly writes. For instance, it explains that you might be able “to determine if there are groups of blogs that frequently write about similar subjects or write in similar styles” by “by clustering blogs based on word frequencies”, and that this “could be very useful in searching, cataloging, and discovering the huge number of blogs that are currently online.” It then proceeds to tell you exactly how to do this by “downloading the [RSS] feeds from a set of blogs, extracting the text from the entries, and creating a table of word frequencies.”

And the way they’ve set up the online table of contents, with extracts from each subchapter, is a thing of beauty. The bit about finding word clusters in blogs is from Chapter 3, in the sub-section “Word Vectors”.

A great example of how to explain something that can be kind of elusive in very simple terms: Social networking sites in one minute forty-five seconds:

Found via the Public Speaking Blog’s post on “How To Create A Technical Presentation That Makes Steve Job Green With Envy”.

Facebook now has an open API, which means that anyone can build a small application that a Facebook user can add to their Facebook interface and that uses their connections. TechPresident reports that Barack Obama is the first politician to make use of this in their Obama application, so of course I signed up to see how it works. And sure, I support Obama, I think - my coming in-laws (only eight days till the wedding!) are Chicago Democrats, and Obama’s done a good job as Senator for Illinois for years. My coming brother-in-law even had him as a law school professor. So I’ve heard a lot of good things about Obama, though admittedly I’m neither American nor extremely well-versed in US politics. I mean, I haven’t even considered, say, John Edwards’ politics, I’ve just decided I want a woman or an African American as president of the United States. But anyway, that’s good enough reason to try out the first political Facebook application, don’t ya think?

When I signed up, this is what Facebook said:

So immediately it leverages the main currency of Facebook: your friends. I had no idea I had a friend in an early state - turns out Michael Faris, whom I know from his blog Farism, is in an early state. [Note for non-Americans: early states are the first states to vote in the primaries, where everyone registered as a Democrat gets to vote about whether Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards or someone else gets to be the Democrat’s presidential candidate. And the same for the Republicans. The early states pretty much decide the whole primaries as other tend to follow their lead.] Poor Michael, I bet he’ll be getting lots of nagging comments from people who want him to vote Obama…

There’s a prewritten message for me that’s all ready to go if I click the “Message Michael about Obama” button:

Hey,

Since you’re from Iowa, you’re probably hearing a lot about the presidential race these days. But I just wanted to tell you how much I support Barack Obama. You should take a second to check out the Iowa campaign’s website: http://iowa.barackobama.com

I also just added the Obama application to my Facebook profile. If you want, you can add it to your profile too by clicking here: http://facebook.barackobama.com

Talk to you soon,

Jill

What else does the application do? Well, my friends will all see that I added “Obama”. I see Obama added to my “Applications” menu, and if I click that link, I get a page telling me about my one friend in an early state and showing recent news and videos from the campaign.And reading about it, it looks as though it might automatically post news about Obama to my profile, which all my friends would then see in their feeds from all their friends.

I’m going to leave the application in for a few days to see what it does before maybe removing it. It’s an interesting concept - and it’ll be interesting to see whether this works because it’s first and therefore cool. I’m thinking that Facebook could easily become sort of littered by way too many such applications.

Facebook is now the 9th most popular website in Norway, and the group “Vi støtter Kadra” has 12,436 members, and there are more members every time I reload my browser. Kadra Yusef is a young Norwegian-Somalian woman who helped expose the way imans in Norway worked to promulgate female circumcision. Last Thursday night she was beaten unconscious by eight men in Oslo. I discovered the group because I saw my friends were joining it, and I assume that’s how most people have found it. 12,443 members. I’ve not seen any other social software hit this kind of critical mass in Norway before. 12,445 members. Fascinating.

This blog post includes a link to the PDF report of a UK survey on what web 2.0 software and sites people really use - from Myspace, Flickr and blogging to World of Warcraft. A lot more people blog than play World of Warcraft. (via Magnus Enger)

Several people have been writing about my concept of feral hypertext in the last few days (Beth Kantor, Tags/Network/Narrative, a discussion in English 518’s Course Blog (taught by Chutry) - or see Technorati’s up-to-date list), so I thought I should provide a brief description of what I mean by it, for those who don’t want to read an 8000 word PDF. Though of course, I recommend the full paper! Here’s my slideshow from the talk I gave (fonts a bit weird and notes missing, but still), followed by a quick resumé of my argument.

I proposed the term in a paper I gave at Hypertext 2005domestication of technology, that is, the way technology is becoming an everyday, safe tool for homes and businesses. I propose seeing hypertext (and the web) from the exact opposite perspective. Hypertext is a technology that was bred in captivity (i.e. in research labs), and it was intended to be used as an intimate technology, for private individuals. It started off by being tame, and it was expressly intended to help tame our overloads of information. You see this in early researcher’s focus on standardisation, typologies and various methods of disciplining links. This never really worked. Throughout the nineties, researchers anguished about the difficulties of disciplining links. They talked about being “lost in hyperspace”, about the lack of closure, about how to use breadcrumbs and guides to help users feel confident that they know exactly where they were in the confusion of links everywhere. The semantic web may be the last grand project to attempt to discipline hypertext. Research was all about keeping hypertext under control, keeping it disciplined.

Fortunately it didn’t work. Hypertext broke free and went feral, just as rabbits in Australia. We know today that we can’t discipline links. We can, however, be quite happy with a messy network of information, conversations and ideas that will never be fully under our control. We just have to give up our ideas that we can discipline it from above in an all-encompassing way. What does appear to work is decentralised organisation that matches the feral nature of the hypertext itself: folksonomies, tagging, and just accepting that the streams of information are endless and that we will never and need never try to read everything.

Feral species are glorious in their success, but they can be disastrous. Those who still think we should try to control hypertext (the web, blogs, social software) might want to combat feral hypertext as we’ve fought feral rabbits in Australia: myxomytosis, the rabbit proof fence (ban Facebook from universities! No Myspace in libraries! Block blogs in China!) but it’s not going to work. Fortunately, unlike feral rabbits, feral hypertext isn’t going to destroy us - so long as we accept that top-down control is a thing of the past.

The full paper has lots more details: Feral Hypertext: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control (PDF)

I’ve been exploring Facebook recently, after Ina invited me to join, and it really does have some intriguing aspects - it seems to merge many things from many other social sites. Of course I’m the ONLY “faculty member” on it from my university, but what do you expect. Today I noticed this sorting of “stories”, which I found oddly fascinating. It makes me want to click and read about this person’s “network stories” and “relationship stories” - the first includes such dull statements as “X joined the Uni. Bergen network”, the second, well, most of my friends seem not to have “relationship stories” in Facebook, but I have a single relationship story: “Jill is listed as engaged.” It would be much more interesting reading the relationship stories of somone a little more flighty. “Status stories” are pretty dull, I have to say. “Jill is at work.” “Jill is at home.” “Jill is at work.”

While each of these events is not really a narrative in itself, their presentation in consecutive order, with dates, certainly sets up an implied causality or at least sequence - if “The king died, then the queen died of grief” is a minimal narrative (events, sequence, causality), then Facebook stories put together certainly might be. Although they require a different sort of interpretation than a conventional narrative does.

I assume somebody’s written a Facebook fiction, yeah? Or is there hardly any point in fictionalising something already this intriguing?