The Power of Social Software - Online Communies - Web 2.0.

The power of social applications comes not just from their easy publishing and management of the content, but the social networks of readers and writers. Understanding the power of personal publishing through social applications is not accomplished by conceptualizing them as huge documentation repositories; it is their ability to support ever-expanding networked connections in the mega conversations on the Internet or in an organization. In thousands of groups across the blogosphere, communities are defined through the memes they create, not a specific virtual location, a "conversational mess," as Tom Coates describes it, enabled by permalinks, RSS, and trackbacks." Read more...

Blogs

Blogs: A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web (it can be private or public). The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in chronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominantly. From the WSJ, Businessweek, Fortune and countless other publications - Blogs - corporate or personal are influencing more people. ...more info.
New - Seth Godin's "who's there" - pdf download on blogs - free!

NYT article about the fact that one in six Americans now reads blogs, based on the Behaviors of the Blogosphere (PDF) report from comScore Networks.

Enterprise Blogs

Enterprise Blogs - Enterprise Blogs are a collection of blogs that are tied together using a shared content repository. Enterpise Blogs provide greater security, functionality, and taxonomies (structured vocabularies) as well as folksonomies (unstructured). Enterprise blogs serve multiple purposes such as: knowledge and idea management, PR, marketing and customer interactions, as well as providing an informal platform for people to collaborate across the organization. Enterprise Blogs should have an internal bookmarking and tagging system similar to del.icio.us. for users to find, discover, and share internal and external information. Enterprise blogs should have an internal work-flow process and be able to support static and dynamic pages/posts, forums, wikis, and podcasts, as well as multiple methods for organizing content (posts, pages, groups, sections, books, and content type and terms).

Enterprise blogs or enterprise blogging platforms (comparison of systems). Enterprise blogs should have all of these features and functions:

• user administration,
• advanced and group publishing, revision control with rollback,
• security for publishing internally (inside the organization) and externally (what the public sees and commnets on)
• workflow management, multi-threaded discussion capabilities within blogs, wikis, forums, group chat
• private messaging,
• trackbacks on all external posts
• auto discovery of internal links
• full wysiwyg (WIZ-zee-wig) editor for posts and comments (configurable)
• news aggregation on topic and keyword,
• metadata functions with controlled (taxonomies) vocabularies
• tagged - folksonomies (internal and external)
• hooks and links (API's) to 3rd party services (del.icio.us, technorati, flickr, et al). These API's are important to weed through - recommendation engine - the "conversational mess" to find and discover ideas that are revelant to your task at hand.
• XML/RSS publishing for content sharing purposes.
• Granular permissions and role based privilegeson all posts for view/edit/change functions
• Forums - Archives - Surveys - Polls - Webforms
• Support for a diverse range of projects, from simple blogs and wikis to large community-driven meeting places with hundreds of blogs and e-commerce.

Ross Mayfield has an interesting post from the Collaborative Technologies Conference in NYC that covers ideas from Thomas Malone, author of "The Future of Work". ("Intel Scenario: internal market for manufacturing capacity. Plant managers sell futures for producs they could produce at specific times in the future, Sales people trade it to be able to sell to external customers, prices fluctuate as knowledge of supply and demand changes, prices determine which products actually get produced in the factories and who gets to sell them. Could this let them produce faster, cheaper and better matched to demand? Enable greater profitability and innovation?" ...read more about Malone.

Taxonomy and Tagging - I like my taxonomy clean and orderly and my tags soupy and varied.

Taxonomy - Folksonomy - Tagging: Are methods to classify and categorize information. Check out del.icio.us for an example of social tagging or broad folksonomies. Ideascape supports all three methods as well as both hierarchical and relational classification using a robust taxonomy based on your vocabulary. Users can use any combination of structured or unstructured methods to find and use information.

Follow this great discussion on tagging and folksonomy from Bokardo web blog.

What's a Tag?

1. Think of a tag as a simple category name. People can categorize their posts, photos, and links with any tag(s) that makes sense.
2. People are also using tags to describe what an object is about - aboutness.
3. more info and discussion...

"Tags are one of the more subtle - albeit massively disruptive - elements of Internet 2.0 or social software (I prefer User-Friendly Web). However, I suspect Technorati's Live 8 tag page will be a very good demonstration...

...of why they are so powerful. Think millions of people from all around the world writing a book on-the-fly about an event as it happens. Just watch the story of the day emerge..." modern marketing

What is a TagCloud?

TagClouds are a visual display of tags that depict, by size, the popularity of a given tag/term with the largest being the most popular. Clicking on the tags link will display a list excerpts from posts based on the selected tag keyword. TagClouds are created automatically from tags and published on your site so others can easily find and discover information. Ideascape supports individual and group TagClouds as well as internal ones and external ones - del.icio.us tags. For more info see... Tagclouds and cultural changes and Clay Shirky Dynamic Growth of Tag Clouds

How do you trust tags? Wuffie baby.

Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" tells a gripping, fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation from today's technical realities. This is the sort of book that captures and defines the spirit of a turning point in human history when our tools remake ourselves and our world. The story is about a population that doesn't have any need for money. Instead, what they aspire to is "Whuffie", which serves some of the functions of currency, but is much closer to such concepts as "the approval of your peers" or "respect" - think open source software communities. In other words, wuffie is your digital credibility.

Social Bookmarking

" Feedback, Motivation and Collectivity in a Social Bookmarking System" by Ericka Menchen. "Abstract: Social bookmarking systems let users store, classify and share their bookmarks online. They are global grassroots classification systems. Classification is a basic mental process that determines how we see (or ignore) the world. The first social bookmarking system was del.icio.us which came online in late 2003. I performed a pilot study of a survey of del.icio.us users focusing on feedback, motivation, and collectivity. The paper linked below is an abbreviated version of a term paper submitted for a graduate methods course in communication this past spring term. I plan to continue researching this topic for my master’s thesis over the coming year." You can read the presentation on watch it as a QuickTime movie on Ericka's site.

Blogosphere

The interconnected realm of blogs. Stories - conversations are said to ''gain traction" in the blogosphere when numerous bloggers comment on them, and link to one another's comments. (Yes, the blogosphere can feel a bit insular and self-referential at times.) Sites like Bloglines.com and Technorati.com maintain lists of blog posts. Read more here...

Attention Stream

A relatively new concept, an attention stream gathers all the content that shares the same tag, regardless of where it lives on the Internet, and presents it on the same page. For an event like Supernova, that might include photos and blog entries that have been tagged ''Supernova." It provides an impressionistic picture of what people are thinking and talking about, as well as what they're taking snapshots of. See my post on Accidental Magic.

Filters

They will be necessary to help sort through the mess of choices that the long tail presents. Professional critics are filters, but so is the NetFlix.com commendation service, software that suggests movies you might enjoy, based on how you've rated movies you've already seen. Friends and family members might also be filters, pointing you to content they think you'll be interested in. Future versions of TiVo, for instance, might let you designate a friend who'd help fill your set-top box with the best foreign films or cooking shows. See my post on Missed Opportunities?

XML

XML - Extensible Markup Language is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere. ...more info.

Attention.xml

Attention.xml - Steve Gilmore, on attention.xml "An xml feed that describes the usage patterns of reading XML or RSS information. All of this is about the second order of magnitude of RSS information routing that's going to occur as people switch over from a Web-based or browser-based model to an RSS reader or consumption pattern." Listen to the podcast.

RSS

RSS - Really Simple Syndication is an XML-based format for content distribution. Ideascape offers several RSS feeds for use in news readers and Web logs (blogs). These feeds include headlines, summaries and links back to your content. ...more info.

Search engines love RSS feeds which means your content has immediate and broad exposure on the Net! Staffers and others blog about company and product news from your site using Ideascape. They also link to other blogs, and encourage links to theirs. Those relationships in the blogosphere drive Google search results -- and, so, orders.

RSS Readers: Idescape has a built-in RSS reader and aggregator. You can read and scan RSS feeds for keywords, such as your company name, offerings, news, ideas, etc., as well as categorize them based on your descriptions. You can add feeds lly from the any Web site by clicking on the "Subscribe" or the "XML" orange button next to the feed.

RSS Readers: Ideascape has a built in RSS aggregator. Click on syndication for an example. RSS feeds are set for sources (news sites and blogs) and categories. Users can set the timing of each feed down to an hour or up to a month.

Trackbacks

Trackbacks were designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, "This is something you may be interested in." To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B. ...more info.

Wikis

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly. ...more info. An example of the biggest wiki, wikipedia.

Podcasting

Podcast: Podcasting is making audio files (most commonly in mp3 format) online in a way that allows software to automatically download the files for listening at the user's convenience. ...more info.

Roadcasting

Roadcasting: A new type of radio - Roadcasting. Roadcasting is collaborative, mobile radio. "It is a system, currently in prototype state, that allows anyone to have their own radio station, broadcasted among wirelessly capable devices, some in cars, in an ad-hoc wireless network. The system can become aware of individual preferences and is able to choose songs and podcasts that people want to hear, on their own devices and car stereos and in devices and car stereos around them." read more...