Social Web

A theory of digital objects

"Digital objects are marked by a limited set of variable yet generic attributes such as editability, interactivity, openness and distributedness. As digital objects diffuse throughout the institutional fabric, these attributes and the information–based operations and procedures out of which they are sustained install themselves at the heart of social practice. The entities and processes that constitute the stuff of social practice are thereby rendered increasingly unstable and transfigurable, producing a context of experience in which the certainties of recurring and recognizable objects are on the wane. These claims are supported with reference to 1) the elusive identity of digital documents and the problems of authentication/preservation of records such an identity posits and 2) the operations of search engines and the effects digital search has on the content of the documents it retrieves." (Jannis Kallinikos, Aleksi Aaltonen, and Attila Marton ~ First Monday Volume 15, Number 6)

Posted on June 08, 2010 | Permalink

Physical Place and CyberPlace: The Rise of Personalized Networking

"Computer networks are social networks. Social affordances of computer supported social networks--broader bandwidth, wireless portability, globalized connectivity, personalization--are fostering the movement from door-to-door and place-to-place communities to person-to-person and role-to-role communities. People connect in social networks rather than in communal groups. In-person and computer-mediated communication are integrated in communities characterized by personalized networking." (Barry Wellman 2001)

Posted on April 21, 2010 | Permalink

Mobile Internet Will Soon Overtake Fixed Internet

"And what does Mary Meeker see in her crystal ball this year? Two overwhelming trends that will affect consumers, the hardware/infrastructure industry and the commercial potential of the web: mobile and social networking." (Mathew Ingram - GigaCom)

Posted on April 13, 2010 | Permalink

How social media is changing the face of enterprise applications

"User resistance can be a big contributor to IT project failure and a lot of this comes down to a poor user experience of dated, clunky user interfaces. In order to get people using business applications, you have to make interacting and engaging with them more satisfying." (Daily Mirror)

Posted on February 19, 2010 | Permalink

The Synaptic Web

"The purpose of this document is to present a straw man overview of emerging trends on the next generation web. We encourage participation and conversation about these proposals so that we, as participants in this ecosystem, can come to a communal understanding our current and emerging opportunities for the web." (Khris Loux, Eric Blantz, and Chris Saad) - courtesy of ruurdpriester

Posted on February 08, 2010 | Permalink

Workshop on Search and Social Media

"It is my pleasure to report on the 3rd Annual Workshop on Search in Social Media, a gathering of information retrieval and social media researchers and practitioners in an area that has captured the interest of computer scientists, social scientists, and even the broader public." (Daniel Tunkelang)

Posted on February 04, 2010 | Permalink

Explain IA

"In this contest, you are invited to explain information architecture. What is it? Why is it important? What does it mean to you? Some folks may offer a definition in 140 characters or less, while others will use this opportunity to tell a story (using text, pictures, audio, and/or video) about their relationship to IA." (Peter Morville)

Posted on January 12, 2010 | Permalink

Attention is the fundamental literacy

"Life online is not solitary. It's social. When I tag and bookmark a Website, a video, an image, I make my decisions visible to others. I take advantage of similar knowledge curation undertaken by others when I start learning a topic by exploring bookmarks, find an image to communicate an idea by searching for a tag. Knowledge sharing and collective action involve collaborative literacies." (Howard Rheingold - EDGE)

Posted on January 11, 2010 | Permalink

Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre

"What is Web 2.0 storytelling? As the phrase suggests, it is the telling of stories using Web 2.0 tools, technologies, and strategies. Since the name is fairly recent (and not yet widely used), it may not bear out as the best term for this trend. Another name may emerge, one better suited to describing this narrative domain. However, the term seems to have met with quiet acknowledgment to date, so it may serve as a useful one going forward. To further define the term, we should begin by explaining what we mean by its first part: Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly coined Web 2.0 in 2004,1 but the label remains difficult to acceptably define. For our present discussion, we will identify two essential features that are useful in distinguishing Web 2.0 projects and platforms from the rest of the web: microcontent and social media." (Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine - EDUCAUSE) - courtesy of wolfnoeding

Posted on January 07, 2010 | Permalink

5 Steps to Building Social Experiences

"The constraints that recessions impose; on budgets and on time can help us focus more sharply on what matters most, and sharpen our methods and skills to make us more competitive and better at what we do." (Erin Malone - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on December 25, 2009 | Permalink

Otlet's Models of the World: A Historical Knowledge Space Lab

"I would like to draw attention to the scientific models of the Belgian information pioneer Paul Otlet who albeit that they are standing in positivist and Modernist tradition can still be relevant for mechanical and manual modelling of science within the Semantic Web and Web 2.0." (Charles van den Heuvel - Modelling Science)

Posted on December 16, 2009 | Permalink

Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media

"As of late, we've been talking a lot about content streams, streams of information. This metaphor is powerful. The idea is that you're living inside the stream: adding to it, consuming it, redirecting it. The stream metaphor is about reaching flow. It's also about restructuring the ways in which information flows in modern society. (...) If we're not careful, we're going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity." (Danah Boyd)

Posted on November 18, 2009 | Permalink

I Have an Idea! Forums for Design Conversations and Negotiations

"Working together in a group to produce a creative outcome is difficult - don't let anyone tell you it's not. Let me share a memory with you - from my Performance Theatre and Community class." (Traci Lepore - UXmatters)

Posted on November 16, 2009 | Permalink

Social and Experience Design: Inspired Ideas, Practical Outcomes (IDEA 2009 Day 1)

"IDEA2009 had the world’s foremost thinkers and practitioners converge on Toronto’s MaRS Convention Center to share the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways people’s lives and systems are converging to affect society. Listen and learn from experts in a variety of fields as we all continue the exploration of Social Experience Design." (Jeff Parks - Boxes and Arrows) - courtesy of jjursa

Posted on November 13, 2009 | Permalink

Co-creation through generative design thinking

"Co-creation is not just the next new thing in marketing. It is an alternative way of seeing and being in the world. Existing and thriving in the emerging co-creative landscapes will require the creation and application of new tools, methods and methodologies for connecting, innovating, making, telling and sharing. These generative tools must be useful and usable for all types of people. Generative design thinking provides a design language for all of us, designers as well as non-designers, to use in provoking the imagination, stimulating ideation, stirring the emotions, discovering unmet needs and facilitating embodiments of future possibilities. Examples of this generative design language in action, from projects ranging from consumer product and service development to the planning and architecture of new healthcare campuses, will be shared." (Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders - IASDR09)

Posted on October 30, 2009 | Permalink

Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience

By Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - "This book presents a family of social web design principles and interaction patterns that we have observed and codified, thus capturing user-experience best practices and emerging social web customs for web 2.0 practitioners." (About the authors)

Posted on October 20, 2009 | Permalink

Elements of a Networked Urbanism

"Over the past several years, we’ve watched as a very wide variety of objects and surfaces familiar from everyday life have been reimagined as networked information-gathering, -processing, -storage and -display resources. Why should cities be any different? What happens to urban form and metropolitan experience under such circumstances? What are the implications for us, as designers, consumers and as citizens?" (Adam Greenfield - dConstruct)

Posted on September 22, 2009 | Permalink

Understanding the Experience of Social Network Sites

"This past year social media, and social network sites in particular, have reached new heights of popularity and adoption. It is no longer unusual for clients to request that designers “add Facebook” to their respective sites, mainly for the purpose of increased engagement and community building for their brand as a part of a greater social marketing strategy." (Alla Zollers - Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on September 21, 2009 | Permalink

NING: Agile Experience Design

Integrating the Agile and Experience Design Practices - "Our goal is to explore, evolve, and empower the emergent discipline that fuses Agile Software Development with User Experience Design." - courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Posted on September 21, 2009 | Permalink

(Preso) Designing Social Interfaces: 5 steps, 5 principles, 5 anti-patterns

"In this presentation we share a family of social web design principles and interaction patterns to help user experience designers and strategists grapple with the social dimensions of their products and services. The family of patterns, principles, and practices provides a framework and starting point for the conceptual modeling of any interactive digital social experience." (Erin Malone & Christian Crumlish)

Posted on September 18, 2009 | Permalink

Participatory Design

"As I've read more about the history of PD it seems to be focused almost exclusively on the development of digital computing systems. I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising given the time period; in some ways it seems more akin to HCI than service design. But while the techniques don't always seem to be a match for the problems service designers encounter many of the principles still seem to resonate." (Design for Service)

Posted on September 14, 2009 | Permalink

Social Media Outsourcing Can Be Risky

"Hosting a company's content and services on 3rd-party social networking sites involves both tactical risks (lower usability) and strategic risks (less user loyalty)." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on September 08, 2009 | Permalink

Defining Social Media Settings

"UX professionals must now take up a new design challenge. We must address the changing needs for social media and facilitate users’ taking better advantage of everything social media has to offer." (Junaid Asad - UXmatters)

Posted on September 07, 2009 | Permalink

Twitter Postings: Iterative Design

"We made a timeline message more punchy, credible, and viral through 5 rounds of redesign." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on August 24, 2009 | Permalink

Preso: Designing for Social Traction

"Here is the slide deck from a talk I gave last week at Delve, a two-day masterclass held in Brooklyn, NY. The talk is in three parts, with each part focusing on a specific problem in software. Each problem is a major hurdle in what I call the usage lifecycle, or the stages people go through as they use and adopt software over time. These three hurdles come directly out of the work I do with clients…I’ve been focusing almost exclusively on these specific problems…I hope the slides help you focus on them as well." (Joshua Porter - Bokardo)

Posted on August 12, 2009 | Permalink

Social Networking on Intranets

"Community features are spreading from 'Web 2.0' to 'Enterprise 2.0'. Research across 14 companies found that many are making productive use of social intranet features." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on August 04, 2009 | Permalink

Wolfram|Alpha: The Use Cases

"If Web 2.0 was about creating data (user generated content, to use the most familiar term for this), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Wolfram|Alpha is premised on using and computing data." (Richard MacManus - ReadWriteWeb)

Posted on July 06, 2009 | Permalink

The Social Buzz: Designing User Experiences for Social Media

"The emergence and rise of social media [1] have been nothing less than phenomenal. In the perennial battle between patterns of intellect and patterns of society, the rapidly spreading influence of social media has initiated the most significant shift toward dominance of intellect [2] in recent times. A groundswell [3] has unmistakably occurred. Social media’s rise has induced a paradigm shift and changed the way the common man perceives the Internet immensely. Social networking is now the number one reason people get online. [4] Getting the world out of the socioeconomic rut it was in required something of this magnitude to come along." (Junaid Asad - UXmatters)

Posted on June 23, 2009 | Permalink

Jakob Nielsen Critiques Twitter

"The growth in social media can become a major drain on the economy unless people learn how to be in control of their time instead of allowing external updates to be in the driver's seat." - (Rebecca Reisner - BusinessWeek) courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted on May 13, 2009 | Permalink

The Wisdom of Community

"A defining element of any WOC system is that the more participants it has, the better it gets. Discussion systems and chat rooms fall apart when too many voices get involved. If your community feature gets worse the more people use it, it's not a WOC system." - (Derek Powazek - A List Apart 283)

Posted on May 07, 2009 | Permalink

Navigating the blogosphere: Towards a genre-based typology of weblogs

"The personal weblog is a continuously evolving genre of online communication in which bloggers and readers create diverse social spaces for conversation and self–expression. This article addresses a conceptual gap in the literature, namely how to distinguish the personal weblog from other types of weblogs. The author develops a typological framework for classification of weblogs in three dimensions: content, directionality, and style, and uses the typological space to propose a working definition of the personal weblog and discuss it as a distinct sub–genre." - (Stine Lomborg - FirstMonday 14.5)

Posted on April 30, 2009 | Permalink

The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras

"Today's social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products." - (Jeremiah Owyang)

Posted on April 29, 2009 | Permalink

The next Web of open, linked data

Tim Berners-Lee on TED 2009 - "Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together." - (TED Blog)

Posted on March 13, 2009 | Permalink

Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?

"My talk today is about social media. I'm going to begin by dissecting this silly term and then we'll get down and dirty with how social media is being used." - (Danah Boyd)

Posted on March 10, 2009 | Permalink

Six ways to make Web 2.0 work

"Technologies known collectively as Web 2.0 have spread widely among consumers over the past five years. Social-networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, now attract more than 100 million visitors a month. As the popularity of Web 2.0 has grown, companies have noted the intense consumer engagement and creativity surrounding these technologies. Many organizations, keen to harness Web 2.0 internally, are experimenting with the tools or deploying them on a trial basis." - (Michael Chui, Andy Miller, and Roger P. Roberts - The McKinsey Quaterly) - courtesy of shuggie

Posted on February 19, 2009 | Permalink

Design matters, like never before

"In a world changing faster than at any other time in human history, a dynamic and critical analysis of what is 'good' design could not be more urgently required. Whilst new communication technologies are offering revolutionary platforms for mass collaboration and opportunities to democratically converse within a global community (1), simultaneously the world faces unprecedented environmental, social, and economic crises (2). Are designers really capitalising on social media platforms and collaborative opportunities? What do these democratic shifts and global challenges mean, and what future role do they offer to the designer, writer and critic?" (Kate Andrews - on Social Design)

Posted on January 29, 2009 | Permalink

Taken Out of Context

"As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices - gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens' engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices - self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society." (Danah Boyd - apophenia)

Posted on January 19, 2009 | Permalink

Key differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

"Web 2.0 is a buzzword introduced in 2003–04 which is commonly used to encompass various novel phenomena on the World Wide Web. Although largely a marketing term, some of the key attributes associated with Web 2.0 include the growth of social networks, bi–directional communication, various 'glue' technologies, and significant diversity in content types. We are not aware of a technical comparison between Web 1.0 and 2.0. While most of Web 2.0 runs on the same substrate as 1.0, there are some key differences. We capture those differences and their implications for technical work in this paper. Our goal is to identify the primary differences leading to the properties of interest in 2.0 to be characterized. We identify novel challenges due to the different structures of Web 2.0 sites, richer methods of user interaction, new technologies, and fundamentally different philosophy. Although a significant amount of past work can be reapplied, some critical thinking is needed for the networking community to analyze the challenges of this new and rapidly evolving environment." (Graham Cormode and Balachander Krishnamurthy - First Monday 13.6)

Posted on June 09, 2008 | Permalink

Co-creation and the new landscapes of design 

"Designers have been moving increasingly closer to the future users of what they design and the next new thing in the changing landscape of design research has become co-designing with your users. But co-designing is actually not new at all, having taken distinctly different paths in the US and in Europe. The evolution in design research from a user-centered approach to co-designing is changing the roles of the designer, the researcher and the person formerly known as the 'user'. The implications of this shift for the education of designers and researchers are enormous. The evolution in design research from a user-centered approach to co-designing is changing the landscape of design practice as well, creating new domains of collective creativity. It is hoped that this evolution will support a transformation toward more sustainable ways of living in the future." (Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers)

Posted on April 11, 2008 | Permalink

The Network in the Garden 

CHI 2008 Awarded Best Paper - "History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet, we know little about how rural communities use modern technologies, so we lack knowledge on how to design for them. To address this gap, our empirical paper investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. Using a dataset collected from a broadly popular social network site, we analyze users’ profiles, 340,000 online friendships and 200,000 interpersonal messages. Using social capital theory, we predict differences between rural and urban users and find strong evidence supporting our hypotheses. Namely, rural people articulate far fewer friends online, and those friends live much closer to home. Our results also indicate that the groups have substantially different gender distributions and use privacy features differently. We conclude by discussing design implications drawn from our findings; most importantly, designers should reconsider the binary friend-or-not model to allow for incremental trust-building." (Eric Gilbert et al.)

Posted on April 09, 2008 | Permalink

The Trouble With Web 2.0

"Web 2.0 technology and design patterns have been a large success in the World Wide Web - but will they also work in the environment of a large enterprise? Large Enterprises are jumping on the hype, announcing their own implementation projects. Alexander Wilms looks in-depth at some issues and challenges corporations might face." (Alexander Wilms - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on February 14, 2008 | Permalink

Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life

"(...) when people engage with technology, amazing things happen. The magic isn't the technology. It's the stories and connections, the sharing and ideas. It's the way these technologies serve people's lives. More importantly, it's the way technologies serve the lives of 'everyday people', not just technologists." (Danah Boyd - O'Reilly ETech 2007)

Posted on February 08, 2008 | Permalink

Avenue A | Razorfish wiki

"(...) we're going to start talking about the redesign process here on the blog. We think it might be fun and educational to share the decision making and get some feedback too. Here's a presentation that should tell you a lot about the current state of the wiki. It describes the wiki in detail and includes screenshots and usage numbers. Let us know what you think needs changing the most." (The Workplace)

Posted on September 12, 2007 | Permalink

Social Networks And Group Formation

"Humans suffer from information overload; there's much more information on any given subject than a person is able to access. As a result, people are forced to depend upon each other for knowledge. Know-who information rather than know-what, know-how or know-why information has become most crucial. It involves knowing who has the needed information and being able to reach that person." (Shiv Singh - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on September 06, 2007 | Permalink

What is Enterprise 2.0?

"This wonderful slide deck explains what enterprise 2.0 is. It's useful for the executive who's trying to understand these new trends. " (The Workplace Blog)

Posted on August 22, 2007 | Permalink

2Collab beta

"2collab is a social bookmarking site where you can store and organize your favorite internet resources – such as blogs, websites, research articles, and more. Then, in private or public groups you can decide to share your bookmarks with others – stimulating debate and discussion. Members of groups can evaluate these resources (by rating bookmarks, tagging and adding comments), or add their own bookmarks. You can browse public groups and bookmarks, but must register (your name and email address) to access the full functionality – such as creating groups, adding comments, and adding bookmarks." (Elsevier)

Posted on August 17, 2007 | Permalink

Web 2.0: What Is It Really?

"To truly do Web 2.0, you must do something that absolutely can not be done without the Web. It's as simple as that." (Sean Carton - clickz) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted on March 06, 2007 | Permalink

European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: Proceedings

"The ECSCW conference proceedings are published by Springer (until 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers), with the exception of ECSCW'89. All past proceedings are made available on-line, free of charge." (About ECSCW)

Posted on October 02, 2006 | Permalink

A Web 2.0 Tour for the Enterprise

"It's a mistake to think Web 2.0 is all about the technology, but it's also a mistake to dismiss the technology. The architecture of participation is baked into the architecture of the software." (Shiv Singh - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on August 24, 2006 | Permalink

Proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Wikis

"The symposium proceedings also include abstracts for the keynote talks, panels, workshops, and demonstrations to provide a record of the whole of the symposium as well as an interview with Angela Beesley, the opening keynoter, on the topic of her talk." (WikiSym 2006)

Posted on August 24, 2006 | Permalink

The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information we Consume

"To date, one of the main aims of the World Wide Web has been to provide users with information. In addition to private homepages, large professional information providers, including news services, companies, and other organisations have set up web-sites. With the development and advance of recent technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasting and file sharing this model is challenged and community-driven services are gaining influence rapidly. These new paradigms obliterate the clear distinction between information providers and consumers." (Josef Kolbitsch and Hermann Maurer - Journal of Universal Computer Science 12.2)

Posted on July 24, 2006 | Permalink

How and Why Wikipedia Works

"This article presents an interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. All three are leading Wikipedia practitioners in the English, German, and Japanese Wikipedias and related projects. The interview focuses on how Wikipedia works and why these three practitioners believe it will keep working." (Dirk Riehle)

Posted on July 23, 2006 | Permalink

Proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis

"The 2005 International Symposium on Wikis brings together wiki researchers, implementers, and users for the first time. The goal of the symposium is to find a voice for the community. The symposium has a rigorously reviewed research paper track as well as plenty of space for practitioner reports, demonstrations, and discussions" (WikiSym 2005)

Posted on July 13, 2006 | Permalink