CCT 205: Digital Innovation and Cultural Transformation

Lecture 2: Blogs, Wikis and You

Administrivia

• Schedule will change to meet guest speaker needs and incorporate new ones (e.g., Bob Topping - now on 3/13 vs 3/27)

• Learning journal questions will be on guest speaker days, but also a couple of others (including today) so you can miss two if you need to.

Congratulations!

• You are Person of the Year for 2006, according to Time Magazine

• Trite, yes, but emergence of Web 2.0 over last few years is quite dramatic, might realize the promise of the Internet, and probably scares a lot of mainstream players

Web 2.0 Characteristics

• Community-based and community-building

• Leveraging power of social networks

• Data creation/manipulation by users

• Dynamic data management systems, page creation, embedded web services via new frameworks (e.g., AJAX, Ruby on Rails, etc.)

• Democratic, open-source generally (with open APIs for hacks and new tools at times)

• What qualifies? What doesn’t? Brainstorm, report back later…

Web 2.0 Attitudes

• Power and scalability to attract large audience (power in numbers)

• Ease of use

• Open vs. constrained or filtered architecture

• Self-organization is key - at least a small cadre of self-appointed organizers, not elected or decreed but simply bubble to top

Example: BlogHer

• Blogs emerged out of tech community - still predominately male space

• BlogHer founders - let’s fix this by doing something proactively - in their words, a “do-ocracy”

• created a portal to link women bloggers, build community among women writers, and enhance the reach of their voices

• Also links to local community f2f events

Example: BarCamp

• Foo/Bar Camp roots in SF• Organic spreading of model to other cities• Self-organizing, self-financing, self-hosted

through BarCamp wikis• Enterprise BarCamp this past weekend;

other BarCamps to follow• If You are indeed Person of the Year, You

should probably go to, participate and/or organize one.

SLATES

• Search

• Links

• Authoring

• Tags

• Extensions

• Signals Source: McAfee, A.P. (2006). Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, MIT

Sloan Management Review, Spring, 21-28.

Search

• Search itself nothing special - basic implementations of search have been around for decades now

• Intelligence in searching more the point - increasing recall and precision by leveraging…

Links

• Links themselves not all that important - but the pattern of them certainly is

• Google’s PageRank system - an iterative, matrix-based analysis of what links to what to gauge collectively determined relevance

• Search on relevance allows for more perceived precision in results

Authoring

• We are essentially creative beings - information workers in particular

• Creativity is being rewarded (tacit labour vs. transactional or transformative - Johnson et al., 2005)

• Authorship, identity and narrative construction supported - individually (e.g., blogs) or collectively (e.g., wikis) in many media (e.g., YouTube celebrities)

• Johnson, B.C., Manyika, J.M. & Yee, L.A. (2005). The next revolution in interactions. McKinsey Quarterly, 4, 21-33.

Tags and Tagging

• Tags - classifying keywords• Taxonomy - formal, centralized classification

scheme (e.g., biology, LoC)• Folksonomy - classification based on collective

dispersed wisdom of users• Folksonomy structures emerge ground-up and

generally work (e.g., Flickr photos, Technorati for blogs, del.icio.us for bookmarks, interests in Facebook)

Extensions

• Folksonomies are messy - intelligent guides and thesauri can help, as do social cues

• Semantic web - attempts to create intelligent emergent ontologies

• Social recommendation - e.g., e-commerce solutions that suggest titles based on data (Amazon, iTunes, upcoming.org)

• Popularity ranking - e.g., digg.com story ranking• Probably a lot of work remains to be done here…

Signals

• Awareness and compilation technologies to manage information and information overload

• RSS feeds - information bits routed to aggregators to filter information and represent it in one spot (a bit easier than seeing if your favourite 150 blogs have been updated today)

Example: CCT205 Wikispace

• Search: local search (using this is a good idea); iterative ToC and global/local navigation

• Links: easy ability to link within/outside Wiki• Authoring: privileges and rewards student

participation and co-creation• Tagging: actually does exist (could be better)• Extensions - future versions, would be nice.• Signals - RSS feeds of favorite pages, now

awareness of co-editing (finally!)

Example: Facebook

• Search: search for existing/past contacts - minimal results until they confirm

• Links: wall-to-wall, links among groups• Authoring: strong identity construction, but also

notes• Tagging: categorization of interests• Extensions: group recommendations, FOAF

networks• Signals: email relay, and definitely news feed (I

learn too much about you at times…)

Examples?

• Already mentioned a few - others you use?

• What doesn’t qualify?

Wikinomics (will it work?)

• Economy based on openness, peering, sharing and global participation - will it work?

• Traditional media are adapting (as they always do…)

• Likely concludes in hybrid, with many smaller 2.0 units going under, and some mainstream media becoming increasingly irrelevant, but more an evolutionary change in the end

Learning Journal Q1

• If you were to organize a BarCamp, what would the general topic area be? Why?

• Who would you enlist to participate/co-organize? Where would it be?

• What would you hope participants would leave the Camp knowing/doing?

Next Week

• Starting investigation of course text (Chs. 3-5)

• Perhaps a couple of KMDI students to fill in guest spots in February

• Labs tonight - wiki tips, group signup, mashup intro