CCT 205: Digital Innovation and Cultural Transformation

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

CCT 205: Digital Innovation and Cultural Transformation