Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Monday, May 05, 2003In Smarter, Simpler, Social Lee Bryant surveys social software, social capital, emergence, network analysis, weblogging, and complex adaptive systems. All are topics near and dear to my heart and mind, but two paragraphs, in particular, stand out (emphasis added):
A greater problem, however, is that although we can build very effective communication and online interaction tools to support existing communities, and occasionally a new virtual community might even coalesce around these tools, we cannot generally create a community with software. In Meg Pickard’s words: "If I wanted to start up a standing-on-one-leg-in-the-rain community, would you join? Not unless you were already interested in standing on one leg..." In the real world, communities sometimes come together around a river, a road, some shops or in a business perhaps even a fire escape where smokers gather; but artificially created physical communities, like 1960’s housing projects, are less likely to stimulate the same generative communal interaction, despite the best intentions of the planners.
Instead of imposing centralised one-size-fits-all software and then using a combination of coercion and marketing to encourage people to use it, we should be building smaller, more modular and adaptable software services around the very people who will use them, and they should be simple to use, ideally transparent to the user. If we are to exploit the potential of online communication to develop social capital in networks and organisations, then these online applications should aim to augment our social interaction and support our connections with others rather than replace them. In addition to building large, structured online environments where people come together to work, share knowledge and communicate, we need to equip users with the tools required to interact on their own terms, and allow the emergent properties of highly-connected social networks to come into play.
The truth speaks loudly to me, a chastened community planner.
Duncan Work responds to questions that others and I have raised about the Global Trust Exchange.
Thank you, Mitch Hobish, for pointing to the blurb on BlogMatcher from Netsurfer Digest:
BlogMatcher finds blogs that appear to be similar to a blog you supply it with. The comparison engine works on the principle that two blogs that link to the same sites share some sort of topical commonality. You put in the URL of the reference blog you want to match, and BlogMatcher does the rest. It applies a scoring formula to the links that blogs have in common - links share among many blogs have a lower score than more uncommon links. The results are a list of blogs that, in most cases, appear to discuss similar topics to the reference blog. This is not unlike the page rank algorithm used by Google, but probably simpler, and limited to the 12,706 or so blogs in the database at press time.