Assume that John Seigenthaler gets what he wants from his criticism of Wikipedia.  He very well may gain congressional hearings on anonymity.  Purportedly in comments to a post by Larry Sanger that begs the question, his intent is to have the private sector regulate anonymity on the net.

The way he described it, you could shift the burden by changing the law so that Internet Service Providers would evaluate the plaintiff’s
evidence, and decide themselves whether revealing the customer’s
identity might be appropriate. If the decision is yes, at that point
the ISP notifies the customer, who is given the opportunity to initiate
legal proceedings to enjoin the ISP from revealing his identity.

Given the consolidation of telecom, this would empower a handful of ISPs, as in 5, to be judge and jury for revealing identity.  Anonymity is a critical facet of society, and it’s value is more than whistle-blowing.  I wouldn’t call it a right, but would call it a feature of the virtual and real worlds (we don’t walk around with name-tags).  Regardless of how you value anonymity, you should agree that this would:

1. create undue costs for ISPs,
2. privatize governance and enforcement,
3. create undue legal costs for consumers, which
4. could lead to infringements on civil liberties, because
5. customers would be guilty until proven innocent.

Now, if the ISP or legal action revealed the libelous party it would resolve Seigenthaler’s complaint against Wikipedia. 

Beyond this attempt to weaken anonymity on the Net, Wikipedia’s open nature is also under attack.  Adam Curry edited podcasting history in his favor.  Big deal.  It’s a wiki, just edit it if you disagree and let the community’s practice work over time.

Consider regulating against graffiti.  You have two options:

• Guard every wall in town to prevent the infraction from occurring
• Paint over infractions and enforce the law by chasing down perpetrators

The former is not just prohibitively expensive, it kills creativity and culture.  The later is the status quo and generally works, especially where communities flourish.

So what would have Wikipedia do?  Lock down contributions through a fact checking process with rigid policy?  Or let people contribute, leverage revision history and let the group revert infractions.

Social media is disruptive.  The role of regulation significantly impacts how society will manage transition.  Today much of media is regulated through complaints (e.g. indecency).  It only takes one horror story for us to loose freedom of anonymous speech.  The easiest and most dangerous way to curb social media is to have it conform to mainstream models.

UPDATE: Cnet has a pretty good article on the liability reform sought by Seigenthaler, the first argument I made.  Mitch Ratcliffe takes issue with my second argument, about how a wiki works and how best to regulate it.  Mitch, you keep trying to fit Wikipedia into your model of how an encyclopedia should be instead of recognizing how it is different.  A print version of Wikipedia should have an editorial process bolted on to emergent practice, as it is a comparable product, frozen in time.  But instead, the evolving nature of Wikipedia needs to be recognized and celebrated for what it is.  Help people understand what it is, not what it is not.

Comments accepted over here.

Larry Sanger, in regards to John Seigenthaler’s criticism of Wikipedia:

I have long worried that something like this would happen—from the very start of Wikipedia, in fact. Last year I wrote a paper, “Why Collaborative Free Works Should Be Protected by the Law” (here’s another copy). When Seigenthaler interviewed me for his column, I sent him a copy of the paper and he agreed that it was prophetic. It is directly relevant to the part of Seigenthaler’s column that says: “And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research—but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects. Congress has enabled them and protects them.” That was a part of Seigenthaler’s column that bothered me: what exactly does Seigenthaler want Congress to do?

If a knowledge worker has the organization’s information in a social context at their finger tips, and the organization is sufficiently connected to tap experts and form groups instantly to resolve exceptions — is there a role for business process as we know it?

Post continues over here…

I’ve been thinking a lot about how anti-MySpace propaganda has been rooted in the culture of fear. Given that youth play a critical, but different, role in social software, i suspect that folks might be interested in how MySpace is getting perceived as a scary, scary place.

Growing up in a culture of fear: from Columbine to banning of MySpace looks at how mainstream media is inciting moral panic around youth participation in public spaces. The article is framed around the ban of MySpace in certain schools. MySpace blamed for alienated youth’s threats follows up on this, looking specifically at how Columbine-esque situations are still not being addressed for their core problem: youth alienation. Instead, we’re still blaming the technology.

“I think, partly because of the personality types who become programmers… I don’t know what it is exactly… a lot of programmers, seem to me to think that the whole point of social software is to replace the social with the software. Which is not really what you want to do, right? Social Software should exist to empower us to be human… to interact… in all the normal ways that humans do.”

Via a correction in danah’s comments

A slew of social software startups have arisen as of late, and while we don’t cover the news here, it’s a good time to be a culture critic.

Ning — Social Apps

Ning is the latest entry into the social applications space, aiming to be the mother of all social software. Aiming to be a platform from the get go is a tough haul, the prize is admirable, but most platforms start as apps first. I’ve never heard someone utter the words “killer platform.” As a result, the applications are relatively shallow and they are competing against decentralized open source application publishing.

Since I used them as an example of stealth as an old school model, it turns out they are located a block away from my office and I have met a bunch of great people there. So let me offer this more constructive take away. Today Ning fosters transient micro communities with only pivots to bind them. When the first class node is an app, as opposed to a profile, group or other object that centers on people, you have to construct an overlay of sorts to enable group forming across networks. In other words, object-centered sociality is currently isolated, which limits network effects. On the upside, the information architecture does a decent job handling underlying complexity, their terms of service are well done and they are leveraging standard languages instead of seeking lock-in.

One sentence suggestion: Focus less on the apps and more on the social.

Flock — Social Browser

Flock is aiming to be the browser that we always wanted. Yes, it’s more of an alpha than a beta, and after you start playing with it you want more. For Innovators, we already do all this stuff with well groomed bookmarklets and personal hacks. For Early Adopters, it’s not quite there yet.

Maybe that’s the point. It’s an open source play that is releasing early and often. If the Innovators build upon it (and from what I understand, like Greasemonkey and RonR, it’s like being a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for developers) it may fulfill the needs of a more active mainstream. Today the blogging client and favorites features are too shallow to move me off of Firefox, bookmarklets and Etco/1001. There are two almost hidden features that demonstrates synergy (cough) between modalities:

• Search auto-completes with the breadcrumbs you leave behind. It’s not social search, but could be a perfect compliment to Yahoo (which points to both the Biz Dev challenge that will really enhance the product and is their core revenue stream — but also the potential exits as the browser war heats up).
• When you add a favorite, if the page has a feed, you can go back to see what’s new from the source.

Aggregation may be the modality (compared to Browse, Search and Author) that could blossom, as it needs better interaction design, there is a lot of demand to bring reading and writing together and the client gives you offline capabilities. I’m starting to speculate here, but that’s the exciting thing about Flock, it makes you speculate to the point you want to engage.

One sentence suggestion: Focus on interaction between modalities and services, manage for quality and get busy with Biz Dev (I can’t believe that’s a job title again).

Wink — Social Search

Wink is a nice Social Search play that incorporates user tagging and ranking to provide recommended results and block spam. My favorite feature, of course, is the ability to create a concept around a query that is an unstructured wiki page. If the concept exists as a pagename within Wikipedia, it populates it with that page and offers related concepts based upon the content. I’m not sure that Wikipedia eats Google, but there is higher quality metadata available and a great way to augment the user experience. Wink is a small startup with lot of promise, but has the inherent challenges of vertical search play (how to attract users, is Google ad revenue enough, and the portals are not acquiring).

One sentence suggestion: Bake into blogspace.

Memeorandum — Social Aggregator

Okay, this one may not be social yet. But Memorandum is starting to solve a problem for me, where to go for a dashboard view of blogs and MSM with the ability to drill down into conversations. I’m not sure that it has the accuracy yet that Google News does for the top two stories, but this is an invaluable dimension to get me out of my subscribed echo chamber.

One sentence suggestion: Let me filter using my social network, even if it’s uploading my subscriptions.

Sphere — Blog Search

I’d agree with John Battelle that Sphere offers a good incremental improvement over existing blog search engines, but others have already extended to advanced tagging and feed features that make it more useful for bloggers. It is relatively spam free and speedy, but we will have to see how it scales.

One sentence suggestion: Differentiate beyond core search for blog reader utility.

Rollyo — Personalized Search

Rollyo’s roll your own search engine is more than a great tag line. Letting people build their own search with a strong identity has utility for the creator and users may benefit from those that bubble up. But there is something missing here, something more socialized than personalized.

One sentence suggestion: Give searchers as well as creators a way to intertwingle for greater engagement.

Various folks have been asking me about my Friendster publications and i thought i’d do a simple round-up for anyone who is trying to learn about Friendster. Below are directly relevant papers and their abstracts (or a brief excerpt); full citations can be found on my papers page. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.

“None of this is Real: Networked Participation in Friendster” by danah boyd - currently in review (email for a copy), ethnographic analysis of Friendster, Fakesters, and digital social play

Excerpt from introduction: Using ethnographic and observational data, this paper analyzes the emergence of Friendster, looking at the structural aspects that affected participation in early adopter populations. How did Friendster become a topic of conversation amongst disparate communities? What form does participation take and how does it evolve as people join? How do people negotiate awkward social situations and collapsed social contexts? What is the role of play in the development of norms? How do people recalibrate social structure? By incorporating social networks in a community site, Friendster introduces a mechanism for juxtaposing global and proximate social contexts. It is this juxtaposition that is at the root of many new forms of social software, from social bookmarking services like del.icio.us to photo sharing services like Flickr. Capturing proximate social contexts and pre-existing social networks are core to the development of these new technologies. Friendster is not an answer to the network question, but an experiment in capture and exposure of proximate relations in a global Internet environment. While Friendster is not nearly now as popular as in its heyday, the lessons learned through people’s exploration of it are increasingly critical to the development of new social technologies. As a case study, this paper seeks to reveal those lessons in a manner useful to future development.

Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster by danah boyd and Jeffrey Heer - 2006 HICSS paper on how Friendster Profiles become sites of conversation

Abstract: Profiles have become a common mechanism for presenting one’s identity online. With the popularity of online social networking services such as Friendster.com, Profiles have been extended to include explicitly social information such as articulated “Friend” relationships and Testimonials. With such Profiles, users do not just depict themselves, but help shape the representation of others on the system. In this paper, we will discuss how the performance of social identity and relationships shifted the Profile from being a static representation of self to a communicative body in conversation with the other represented bodies. We draw on data gathered through ethnography and reaffirmed through data collection and visualization to analyze the communicative aspects of Profiles within the Friendster service. We focus on the role of Profiles in context creation and interpretation, negotiating unknown audiences, and initiating conversations. Additionally, we explore the shift from conversation to static representation, as active Profiles fossilize into recorded traces.

Vizster: Visualizing Online Social Networks by Jeffrey Heer and danah boyd - a 2005 InfoVis paper about visualizing Friendster data (including arguments about using visualization in ethnography and recognizing the value of play in visualization)

Recent years have witnessed the dramatic popularity of online social networking services, in which millions of members publicly articulate mutual “friendship” relations. Guided by ethnographic research of these online communities, we have designed and implemented a visualization system for playful end-user exploration and navigation of large-scale online social networks. Our design builds upon familiar node-link network layouts to contribute techniques for exploring connectivity in large graph structures, supporting visual search and analysis, and automatically identifying and visualizing community structures. Both public installation and controlled studies of the system provide evidence of the system’s usability, capacity for facilidiscovery, and potential for fun and engaged social activity.

Public Displays of Connection by Judith Donath and danah boyd - a 2004 BT Journal article on how people publicly perform their social relations

Abstract: Participants in social network sites create self-descriptive profiles that include their links to other members, creating a visible network of connections — the ostensible purpose of these sites is to use this network to make friends, dates, and business connections. In this paper we explore the social implications of the public display of one’s social network. Why do people display their social connections in everyday life, and why do they do so in these networking sites? What do people learn about another’s identity through the signal of network display? How does this display facilitate connections, and how does it change the costs and benefits of making and brokering such connections compared to traditional means? The paper includes several design recommendations for future networking sites.

Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networks by danah boyd - a 2004 short CHI paper staking out what Friendster is.

Abstract: This paper presents ethnographic fieldwork on Friendster, an online dating site utilizing social networks to encourage friend-of-friend connections. I discuss how Friendster applies social theory, how users react to the site, and the tensions that emerge between creator and users when the latter fails to conform to the expectations of the former. By offering this ethnographic piece as an example, I suggest how the HCI community should consider the co-evolution of the social community and the underlying technology.

Social verbs in online gaming are gestures that do not change the meaning of a object. When someone’s WoW Mage waves to your Paladin, you choose how object’s meaning will change because of the gesture. Language is power, just as an emoticon can get your out of trouble for telling a borderline joke.

I’m paying particular attention to verbs these days as they seem to have greater meaning than nouns, especially places (which are non-persistent; persistence is vested in objects that take actions). The reason I keep coming back to my WoW research (cough) isn’t because of the virtual world, but what I do with a group.

Beyond this gesture, the extended entry riffs on attention management, pull vs. push, marketing strategy and ownership of identity.

I’ve been meaning to blog about a simply great article in the NY Times, Meet the Life Hackers, as I am a fan of the interruption tax, but I keep getting interrupted.

When [Gloria] Mark [from UCI] crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, “far worse than I could ever have imagined.” Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically. Yet while interruptions are annoying, Mark’s study also revealed their flip side: they are often crucial to office work…

Focusing on the cost of interruption is one of the better design principles, not just for productivity applications, but all those social software apps clamoring for attention. The answer is not automation, but using the social network as a filter and pushing things down to asynchronous modalities.

My 11 minutes are almost up. Really, it’s a great read, and for now I’ll point you towards Jon Udell…

Cast aside the anti-hype rhetoric, and keep in mind it is an argument not of fact or policy, but value, and you will find Nicolas Carr’s post on the amorality of Web 2.0 has a salient point — that social software is on an inevitable march of disruption. Commoditization wrought by commons based peer production does enable the triumph of the amateur over the professional. But this does not portend the destruction of mainstream media, only it’s reformation.

Yes, the economics favor the bottom-up. This allows the creation of an alternative we have never had before. A choice. But media selection theory holds that old media simply doesn’t die. Carr’s very desire to retain professional media as his selection is one consumer’s proof point.

The underlying economics of MSM must change, and it will, through creative destruction and unfortunately the loss of many jobs in the transitionary period. Think of social media as a fork in social software, or a third party movement in politics. Unfulfilled demand is self-fullfilled by a new grassroots consituency. New and previously unrepresented constituencies are forming fast as the cost of personal publishing and group forming trend towards zero. But the mainstream gradually co-opts these experiments and movements as their own to stay in power. Today MSM is experimenting with social media in areas where the cost structure previously prevented them to access the market, such as hyperlocal media. To say that mainstream media will not leverage the tools and co-opt the culture of the amateur smacks of technological determinism.

But this is an argument about values, so it’s important to highlight what values needs to diffuse from professional to amateur. Dan Gillmor’s mission to pass on ethical standards from journalists to citizen media is case in point. The former audience is about to go through media training on a massive scale, all in all a good thing, but there is much we can do to pass on practices.

Carr provides a healthy contrarian perspective for the blogosphere. Perhaps by claiming amorality he makes us think, and is advancing our values.

Where I have to take issue on fact is with his post on Wikipedia. I won’t repeat the dead, tired and defeated arguments on quality, so let’s center on fact:

Now, there’s a way around this “collective mediocrity” trap. You can abandon democracy and impose centralized control over the output. That’s one of the things that separates open-source software projects from wikis; they incorporate a rigorous quality-control filter to weed out the crap before it pollutes the product. If Wikipedia wants to achieve it’s goal of being “authoritative,” I think it will have to abandon its current structure, admit that “collective intelligence” makes a pretty buzzphrase but a poor organizational model, and define and impose some kind of hierarchical power structure. But that, of course, would raise a whole other dilemma: Is a wiki still a wiki if it isn’t a pure democracy? Can some wikipedians be more equal than others?

Open source software and Wikipedia are both driven by commons-based peer production. How they differ, and the reason software development requires rigorous quality-control, is that code has dependencies. Writing code is vertical information assembly, while contributions to a wiki is horizontal information assembly. Wikipedia does have quality control and an organiztional model, but it isn’t a feature embodied in code, it is embodied in the group. I know of no goal of being authoritative, but the group voice that emerges on a page with enough edits (not time) represents a social authority that provides choice for the media literate. Carr could create a Wikipedia page to help define what “pure democracy” is to help him answer his rhetorical question — but a wiki is just a tool, and Wikipedia is an exceptional community using it.

Keep in mind that most wiki use is behind the firewall where there is an organizational hierarchy and norms in place. There it taps into similar economics, without the great debates on social truth, and for the competitive advantage of firms.

Back to values, when you tap into the renewable resource of people in mass collaboration, allocated against the scarcity of time, driven by social signals — is this not of greater benefit for social and economic welfare than the disruption that created mainstream media in the first place? I’m glad we agree with Carr on the facts of the disruption. If we can get past the misunderstanding that there is a value difference, we could maybe focus on the right policies that will help us in years to come.

In the grand tradition of bar camp, web 2.01, and other creative, self-organizing tech events comes Seattle’s first Mind Camp. It will be held from noon on Saturday, November 5th through noon the following day.

Take a look at the sidebar to see the people already committed to being there—Chris Pirillo & Ponzi Indharasophang, Julie & Ted Leung, Beth Goza & Phil Torrone, Nancy White, Shelly Farnham…

(did you notice all the cool women on that list? w00t!)

Registration is open (and free), but the event is capped at 150—so act fast if you’re planning to attend.

See you there, I hope!

I’ve been planning to post an announcement here about an upcoming event in Seattle, but kept forgetting. (Well, that, and I tend to be reluctant to self-promote, but the organizers kept asking…) As a result, this is rather short notice.

This Wednesday night, I’ll be one of the panelists at an MIT Enterprise Forum dinner event titled “Two Degrees of Separation - How Social Network Technology is Connecting Us for Money, Jobs, and Love. It will take place at the Bellevue Hyatt. Doors open at 5:30, and there will be dinner and a chance to network with other attendees before the panel itself.

I’ll be joined on the podium by Konstantin Guericke, co-founder of LinkedIn, Bill Bryant, CEO of Mobile Operandi, and our moderator Mike Flynn, publisher of the Puget Sound Business Journal.

You can register online or at the door—the $40 price includes dinner, of course.

If you’re in the area, it would be lovely to see you there. Be sure to come say “hi”—it’s always nice to meet people who actually read the blog. :)