Curiouser and Curiouser! on social-software

Metadata is a social thing

Tue, 22 Apr 2003 18:07:04 +0100

Not so easy?.

As requested, David Sifry reviews Easy News Topics 1.0.

The upside:

As a format, ENT is easy to understand, easy for application developers to implement, and pretty easy to parse. Kudos to Matt and Paolo for coming up with a design that is simple but extensible.

The downside isn't so easily excerpted. Read the link for more.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Without wishing to seem oversensitive I think it is fair to say that David's issues are not with ENT per se, but with the idea of people cataloguing their own items with meta data. His problems are social and the same argument could be made about RSS1.0 and mod_taxo.

David reflects upon what happened to meta data in web pages and wonders if the same thing won't come about here too. Here is how I responded in a comment on David's blog:

Thanks for the comment. I think you're broadly right that there will be a capacity for abuse here but it scales differently.

When Google was indexing billions of pages the metadata became meaningless even without the abuse. However with RSS I think the game is different.

I'm subscribed to 108 feeds right now. I add perhaps 1 a week on average. But I trust that the authors of those feeds would use topics reliably or not at all.

Any application I have that can understand my subscription list can usefully utilize those topics whatever I think about anyone else.

In a social software context somone else might trust my confidence in the indexing of those feeds. Etc...

I think we can find ways of making this work. I also think that automatic annotation of feeds with topics is another possibility.

To pick an example from my head. Syndic8 could have a topic engine that creates an annotated feed for every feed they monitor. If you trust Syndic8 you could use that feed instead and get the benefit of their indexing. And so on.

Cast off your discreteness

Thu, 01 May 2003 18:58:39 +0100

A note about blogs. I just posted this in a private space, but thought it was worth reposting here:

Some of us are seeing weblogs as an early step in the evolution of the web (or, some say, a revolution in the way the web is used), and the general label for the stuff we're talking about is "social software." Social software supports group forming, an activity that wasn't necessarily in the heads of the folks who created the first blog systems as simple content management, emphasizing individual publication. Blogs are evolving, though, as nodes in social networks, and bloggers are drawn to group-forming activities and software developments that emphasize the connections as well as the nodes. It's possible to see blogs as a bunch of discrete publications that order random posts in reverse chronological order, but you get away from that pretty quickly when you get into the space and se what people are actually doing with their weblogs.
Discuss A note about blogs [weblogsky]

Interesting. The work that Paolo and I are doing is about elevating blogs from their discreteness and into a world of connections made through topics!

Getting linked in

Fri, 06 Jun 2003 17:10:24 +0100

I didn't get LinkedIn until today (can anyone tell me how to find the URL for my profile?) I was already a member of Ecademy (which I don't use much) and Ryze so why join another of these things? I basically joined because Marc Canter sent me an invite, looked around for a bit (it looked intimidatingly confusing) and then left. I don't think i've been back since.

Today I had a reason to go back and the experience has made me see LinkedIn in a new light. I've been trying to make contact with someone without much success. I was speaking to Ross about it and he suggested he could help, could I send a message via LinkedIn?

I found the person I wanted to make contact with, who is connected through Ross. I created a message and when I submitted it, I was shown the path from me, via Ross (intermediate steps hidden) to the target. I added a note for Ross and sent it off. He then has the opportunity to approve or reject it & add his own comments before passing it on.

Actually using this process I see a value that wasn't apparent to me when I simply thought about it after first joining. I shall definitely be looking into LinkedIn a bit more closely.

My thanks to Ross for pulling me in & holding my head under the water!

Relationships are multi-valent

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 09:17:35 +0100

Granularities of relationships.

September 14, 2003

Codifying Relationships
- Posted by Liz Lawley at 2:22 PM

One of the problems that plagues the YASNSes (as Clay calls the growing number of social networking systems) is how to define or codify relationships.

On the one hand, trying to make all relationships equal and bidirectional, as Friendster and LinkedIn currently do, is clearly problematic. As I wrote on Joi Itos LinkedIn wiki page:

Id also like to be able to differentiate between (at the minimum) two types of contactsthose whom Im willing to receive referrals from, and those whom Im willing to have make referrals on my behalf. There are far more in the first category than the second. Im more than happy, for example, to have Meg Hourihan or Anil Dash send someone to me. But since I dont have extensive working relationships with either one, Im not sure Id want them to be the first line of introduction for me to someone elsefor that, Id be more comfortable with someone like Joi or Clay Shirky or someone Ive worked more closely with.

But today I was playing with a pre-alpha version of a new system that does in fact allow me to define types of relationships, and as others have pointed out, that has its own set of problems. In the system I was looking at, I was given the following options:

I am a close friend of this person
I am a friend of this person
I am an acquaintance of this person
I know this person (by reputation)
I know this person (in passing)
I am related to this person
I would like to know this person

I was trying to categorize my relationship to another system user, a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Ive met the person at a party, and had a brief conversation, but I have no idea if the person remembers me. Id like to get to know the person better. SoI might be an acquaintance, I do know the person in passing, I definitely know the person by reputation, and I would like to know this person better. What do I choose? (I ended up giving up, btw, and not choosing anything.)

This is where David Weinbergers concerns about making the implicit explicit become most relevant for me. Relationships are complicated. Expressing them algorithmically is terrifically difficult. Reducing the complexity takes something important way from the relationship. And forcing users into these choices without a clear and compelling payoff for doing so (payoff for the users, that isclearly the marketers and demographers get a payoff!) seems doomed to failure. [Many-to-Many]

Marc's response to Liz's post............

My bet is that there WILL be a way to algorithmically express dynamic - changing relationships. Afterall - that's what real life is.

Dynamic, adaptive user experiences are where it's at.

I also bet that this new system Liz is talking about will be able to handle OTHER kinds of challenges presented to the social networking world - like "why would I want someone to link to my FOAF file?" or "what I show to a stranger should be different than what I show to a close friend."

I also have it from a very good source, that this un-named new pre-alpha system will attempt to grapple perhaps the BIGGEST challenge of them all: "how do we inter-connect and share social networks BETWEEN disparate social networks"? You have to imagine aggregating people together, but if 'someone' could do it - that would be totally cool.

[Marc's Voice]

I've thought about this a little and I think the problem here is that the current approaches only tackle half the problem.

It is reasonable to expect that being able to define a relationship in more accurate terms than the simple "friend" is a good thing. Yet in Liz' case the increase in granularity lead to hieghtened indecision and ultimately an inability to make a choice. We know granularity is important, yet further increasing it will lead to more indecision, not less.

My take is that the missing piece is a recognition that relationships are multi-valent. From such a viewpoint statements like:

I know this person (by reputation)
I would like to know this person

do not define a relationship, but name some of it's many characteristics. Being able to choose many of these statements (and you could expand the list of statements considerably) allows you to provide depth and, where necessary, inconsistency to how you view the relationship at that time.

Building collaborative culture

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 07:08:22 +0000

Collaborative Business Culture.
In a collaborative business culture, people work effectively together as a community, guided by a common purpose. Trust is swift and open and honest discussions are the way of working together. In this culture, members respect each other, value their differences and are open to the ideas of each other. Members listen to each other and believe that strength, resilience and progress come from the diversity of people working together rather than the monolith of the corporate ego.

These communities often share a common vision, one that is not always shared with business leaders. However, it is important for business leaders to support this new knowledge-led culture where conversations are for sharing and learning, and working is about doing things better next time. Without the support of business leaders, even the best technologies will not allow for a collaborative culture.

So how do we shape this culture - after all, we cannot create a new culture overnight. All that business can do, therefore, is provide the necessary tools and infrastructure to support this new way of working.

We can start by ensuring that there is a commitment from the top that permits the changes in the business environment that will allow this new culture to flourish. Such commitments will also need to include the provision of an infrastructure, a collaborative tool and a place for people to discuss, meet and get-together in person or in a virtual way. We identify business communities that share a common goal and assure support for a community leader and facilitator, providing ongoing commitment and interest in those common goals. This process is repeated and over again with other communities, and waiting as other new communities form spontaneously. This process also needs to be supported by learning in three key areas; becoming a community leader and facilitator, working with collaborative tools and building a community case.
[Torben Anderson: Alpha Virtual Working and Collaboration]

Something I am thinking about, more and more often, is the organisational tools to help K-Collector customers make the leap from a technology solution to a business solution. Experience has taught us that it's not enough to simply give them funky software and expect them to know what to do next.

Here is the beginnings of advice to collaboration/community software purchasers:

Try to understand, as far as possible, what you expect from online communities. If possible, be aware of existing communities (both formal and informal) operating in your business, their structure, and their value.
Communities are like flower beds -- nobody wants to see them until they bloom. Try to find natural community leaders, people motivated to make the community a success and who will hold things together (after the initial flurry of interest is over) until the community actually delivers for it's membership.
Learn/Find tools to recognize new and important communities emerging in your business. Have a model for recycling communities and letting them die with dignity.
Learn to get the best out of the tools. Pick a tool which will help grow the kind of communities that you want to build (not all tools are equal). Make sure you pick a vendor you trust and who you think are on a similar trajectory to you. Are they responsive? Do they understand what you're doing?
Human encouragement is your best weapon.
Expect change.

More, much more, in due course...

More on #kmtalk and IRC integration

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 17:58:47 +0100

A couple more visitors to #kmtalk. First there was the author of Your Guess Is As Good as Mine (Jonathan Smith?). Also Terry Frazier and Rick Klau stopped by. Terry demonstrated his l33t skills by signing in using his Treo 600 (using upIRC).

Anyone and everyone who is interested in knowledge management, communities of practice, collaboration, wiki, social networks and other related topics is welcome to stop by. Right now I am interested in how IRC can be linked to other tools (including K-Collector of course).

For example might it be useful to link K-Collector topics (e.g. Knowledge Management) to IRC channels? For example topics like Knowledge Management, K-Logs, Knowledge Organisation, Knowledge Economy, Collaboration, Commercial blogging, ... could all be linked to the #kmtalk IRC channel. Topics about different subjects could be linked to other channels.

The idea is that people viewing the web topic could see who was talking in the channel (want to join in?) and recent traffic in the channel (have something to add?) Could this be a useful application?

Getting Real with Stowe

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 21:46:17 +0100

Had a first chat with Stowe Boyd this evening. Enjoyed it very much despite some troubles with Skype (poor voice quality in one direction or another at various points) which we augmented with IM. We talked about K-Collector, IRC, Wiki, Sense making, Cynefin, social tools and how KM is suffering from fatigue. Thanks Stowe!

Presenting People Centred Knowledge Management at the CiG

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 18:16:24 +0100

On Tuesday night I did my first proper speakers gig, giving a 20 minutes presentation of People Centred Knowledge Management (PCKM) to members of the City Information Group (I'll link to their event page when it's been updated). I had a great time doing the event and I've had some positive feedback - I hope everyone there got something out of it. My thanks to the organizers Jackie, Genevieve and Nick.

Web version of the presentatin. (Should work in all browsers, but you know PowerPoint)
PDF version of the presentation here. (447K)
Speakers notes (This will give you a better idea of what I said).

I'd like to express my thanks to Paolo, Phil, David, and Suw who were all invaluable in helping me to get prepared. I think it really paid off.

Update: It occurs to me that really you don't get very much from my slides. The presentation was a lot about me talking, waving my arms and hopping up and down. You don't get that from PowerPoint. Next time I'd like to be able to webcast the presentation. Anyone have any advice about that sort of thing?

Social network software frenzy

Wed, 12 May 2004 07:33:14 +0100

Social Networking Services Meta List.
I have marked all new updates to this list, since 01 May 2004, with an asterisk (*).

The transition of this list to a parking place in the right hand column is still in the planning stage. It is still my desire to set up a wiki space associated with the ongoing discussion of this list, along with a topical news aggregation system for details related to each service.

Comments, appropriate links, and recommendations for additions and deletions are welcomeas always.

business networking sites

Affinity Engines, Business Parc, The Conneck, Contact Network, Corporate Alumni, ecademy, eConozco, Eliyon, EntreMate, Friendly Favors, GoingProfessional, Growth Company, Im Not From Here, InterAction, ITmob, ItsNotWhatYouKnow, Join Network PLUS, LLC, Konnects, LinkedIn, Link Silicon Valley, matcheroo, Mediabistro, Monster Networking, NetMiner, Netmodular Community, Networking For Professionals, Online Business Networking Resource, Open Business Club (openBC), OrderGenerator, Point Relevance, Polypol, PowerMingle, RealContacts, ReferNet, Reunion, Ryze, SelectMinds, Shortcut, Silicon Valley Pipeline, Spoke Software, Sullivan Executive Networking Community, Tacit - ActiveNet, TENG, Visible Path, WisdomBuilder, Zerendipity Networks.

common interest networking sites
ANTfriender, ArtistNow!, Bigcampus.net, BookCrossing, Buzznet, Classmates.com, Collegester, Community Zero, Company of Friends, DeanSpace, Delphi Forums, Digital Squeeze, Downelink, Foodsters, FunHi, GamersGlue, Globe Alive, gradFinder, HRTS - Hollywood Radio & Television Society, Meet Me at HOT or NOT?, Netplaya Burning Man Community, Neurona, PayDemocracy, quad5*, Schoolster, SongBuddy, Talk City, Thefacebook, TheSquare, threedegrees, UpMyStreet.

dating sites
AfroRomance, americansingles.com, Amigos.com, AsiaFriendFinder, Berkzter, BlackPlanet.com, Cherish, collegeluv.com, Country Singles, Cupid.com, Date.com, Dating.dk*, eHarmony, Equally Yoked, FriendFinder, Gay Christian Dating*, Gay Jewish Dating*, Gay Military M4M*, GermanFriendFinder, hotsaints, IndianFriendFinder, jdate.com, Lavalife, LDS Singles Mingle*, LDS Singles Network, LDS Singles SingleSaints*, Love.com, M4M Seniors*, Match.com, meetic*, MyEMatch, Overweight Date, Passion.com, POP! PeopleOnPage, PlanetOut Partners, Inc., RateOrDate, RedDate.com, Relationship Exchange, SeniorFriendFinder, Single Seniors*, Swappster, TrueBeginnings, uDate.com, Vegetarian singles, webdate, Yahoo! Personals.

face-to-face meeting facilitation sites
8minuteDating, Evite, First Tuesday, The Lunch Club NYC, MeetUp, MixerMixer, Netparty, new-in-town, Social Circles, WhizSpark.

friend networking sites
Backwash, Breedster, BuddyBridge, Chia Friend, ChosenNet*,Christianster, Click2Friends, easeek, eFriendsnet, enCentra, everyonesconnected, FriendFan.com, Friendity, Friend MAP, Friendoo, friendsbay.de, Friends of Friends, Friends Reunited, Friendset, Friendster, Friend Surfer, Friendzy, Gruuve, HeiYou, hi5, hipstir, Huminity, HummingBoard, The Impersonals, iSocialite*, Korea Data House, LDS LinkUp*, LianQu, linkyourfriends, Living Directory, Metails, mrNeighborhood, Myspace.com, NetFriendships, Neurofriends, orkut, PalJunction, peeps nation, qpengyou, Ringo, saywhatz, Tickle by Emode, ticqle, Tribe.net, UUFriends, Wallop, WiW, WorldShine, YeeYoo, YOYO, zenetwork, Zerodegrees.

pet networking sites
Backwash for Pets, Dogster, HAMSTERster, KissyKat, Neopets.

social networking plus and/or edge cases
Blogpod, BuddyZoo, del.icio.us, dodgeball, Dude Check This Out!, Eurekster!, eventSherpa, Expressions, Findapix, Flickr, fonetango, Fotolog.net, Funchain.com, Gush, HelloWorld, Home Exchange, HomeLink, Intervac, JournURL, KnowMates, LiveJournal, MixedNutz.net, Mooble, M-Tone, Multiply, Nioki, The Opinion Exchange, Palbook, PeopleAggregator, Plink, RepCheck, SmallPlanet, Small World Project, SocialCanvas, Social Grid, Squiby, StumbleUpon, TXTParty, Upcoming.org, WiredReach, Yafro Moblog, Zdarmanet, Zopto.

[The Social Software Weblog]

Gads, where did they all come from!?!

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium

Wed, 19 May 2004 07:27:36 +0100

Yesterday at various times around the world we held an IRC chat in the #kmtalk channel to get started organising an event in London in July (July 12th it now transpires). The working title is 'Social Tools for Enterprises' and the event is aimed to be a practical get go for CxO's in Enterprises as to how social tools & methods can help them with problems like insufficient collaboration, low innovation and unmanaged risk.

This first session was really a chance to ensure that everyone had a similar vision of what we want to achieve and to get some vital details like the date sorted. Over the next couple of days we'll be working on the programme and there is another chat planned for Friday (details will be on the wiki soon).

Everyone with an interest is welcome to join the next IRC chat and get involved.

Show me the value

Wed, 19 May 2004 12:01:46 +0100

Met with Torben Anderson yesterday for a very agreeable drink in his local pub. We chatted about how social tools (people tools and software tools) are going to be important in making knowledge management more valuable to organisations. Torben has a great philosophy about keeping projects practical and delivering client value quickly - this is very much in tune with our own people centred approach.

STES#1 transcript available

Wed, 19 May 2004 18:32:13 +0100

I've just posted the outcomes & transcript of the first online meeting for the Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium. I think I have everyone's permission for this (it would have been so much easier if I'd got it while we were all online).

The second meeting will be on Friday at 9am PST, 12pm EST, 5pm BST, 6pm CET and will be held in #kmtalk and #kmbackchat. Trying to do everything in one channel proved challenging. Next time we are going to try and use two channels and see how that goes.

Getting my head shifted

Tue, 25 May 2004 09:29:09 +0100

Had a very nice lunch with Lee Bryant of HeadShift yesterday. We met in #kmtalk talking about the Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium I am helping to create.. Headshift are based in Butlers wharf, right on the river, which is a great setting for a meet up.

Over spinach & ricotta parcels and some Staropramen we chatted about: social software, the challenges facing organisation and employees, the central importantance of people at all stages of collaborative/KM projects, the roles of blognets, projects they are working on, FOAF (esp. how we need to be careful with what we infer from the data), metavalues, LinkedIn, Dave Snowden, K-Collector, ENT 1.0, BlogTalk 2.0, the BlogWalkers, Vienna, services vs. products, and a host of other topics.

I look forward to talking to Lee & co. again in the near future.

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium in London

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 12:24:14 +0100

Now that we have the agenda sorted I am happy to announce the 1st, London,

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium

which Evectors is organising ably supported by KM Cluster and a group of the usual suspects (see the Wiki for details). We think this is a great opportunity to start showing people that social tools (both people tools and software tools) are ready for prime time and deliver bottom line benefits to enterprises.

The event will be held on Monday 12th July at the Bloomsbury Square Training Centre. We've got a great list of people leading sessions which we hope will be a bit different to the usual chalk & talk conference fare. We really want a conversation to emerge from this event which will help to enlighten people interested in social tools but unsure how to put them to best use in their own contexts.

So we have:

Stowe Boyd - Corante Research & A Working Model
Lee Bryant - Headshift
Prof. Marc Eisenstadt - Knowledge Media Institue
David Gurteen - Gurteen Knowledge
Euan Semple - BBC
Phil Wolff. - A Klog Apart & BlogCount

Paolo and I will also be there.

I think it has the potential to be a great event and a great day I hope that you will come and join us. Please tell all your friends!

Cybaea star over STES

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 21:26:31 +0100

Was chatting with Allan Engelhardt of Cybaea in #kmtalk about promoting the Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium and he not only had the great idea of registering some Google Adwords but went ahead and paid to do it. You're a gentleman and a scholar sir! Many thanks.

STES writeup on Social Software Weblog

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 13:54:18 +0100

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium in London.
I was IM chatting with Matt Mower recently and he reminded me that the Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium (STES) is coming up very soon (Monday, July 12, 2004) and so I promised that I would blog a reminder.

Yesterday in my tip jar I received another reminder from Allan to blog about the STES and so here is an endorsement in Allans words:

Matt Mower has just announced an Early Bird Discount for people who register before July 1, 2004. The agenda with speakers is available on the Symposium web site and it looks like it will be a cracking event. Top thought leaders and expert practitioners from the business, consulting and academic worlds will introduce social tools in the context of how they can be used within large organisations and demonstrate the positive changes they can effect. Register now.

If you will be in or around London in the July 12th timeframethis is a NOT TO BE MISSED event!

The presenters include:

Stowe BoydReady for the Enterprise?

Euan SempleWorking In A Wired World

Marc EisenstadtKnowledge Workers: Maps, Enhanced Presence, Instant Messaging

Phil WolffUnderstanding the Payback: A workshop to create Aha! Moments

David GurteenSocial Software Cafe

Dont forget to register before July 1, 2004 to catch the early bird discount. (:=
[The Social Software Weblog]

Great write up, thanks Judith, and thanks for making the Social Software Weblog such a great resource (just compiling the meta list is a job in itself!)

You've also highlighted a snafu on my part. Lee Bryant doesn't appear on the programme (although he is on the Wiki). I'm fixing that up (with apologies to Lee for any confusion caused.)

Over the next couple of days I'll be adding more in-depth on the programme. We've got some great sessions planned and I want everyone to know about it!

Getting creative: five social tools to give you an edge!

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 23:33:29 +0100

Tomorrow I'm speaking at the Gurteen Knowledge Conference. My topic is:

Getting Creative: Five social tools to give you an edge!

My aim is to establish the link between creativity and social networks, and then to show how tools like blogs, wikis, instant messaging and topics can be combined to help build a culture of creativity.

This is only my second speaking engagement. Wish me luck!

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 22:15:06 +0100

In BlogTalk 2.0 Thomas & crew have, once again, brought together a lot of interesting people & wherever possible conversations are flourishing as evidenced by tonights get together. It was good to meet Phil again after a year and to meet Mikel for the first time, especially as his talk prompted lots of interesting ideas we might look at for K-Collector. After a day where I had felt very tired and jaded I found the atmosphere quite reviving.

I had the pleasure of dining with Paolo, Mark Bernstein, Stephanie Hendrick, and Therese Örnberg. Mark gave a very interesting keynote this morning which provoked lots of questions for me. Stephanie & Therese gave, I think, the most stylish presentation of the day (including an amusing near-death audioblog to end) and their discussion of presence and spaces was stimulating. From my perspective a happy coincidence that we all ended up together. We had an interesting discussion about a range of topics spanning language, blogging, literary discourse, topics, flame wars, comments & trackbacks, software tools and how you build them, tinderbox, Dave Allen, and test first development.

Taking antibiotics means I cannot drink alchohol so my opinions whilst maybe better formed were far less robust than usual & I was open to colonization ;-) I got persuaded that comments are bad and that even trackback requires considerable architectural revision to work properly. Mark's suggestion of making trackback default to being private (i.e. you get a file of trackbacks and you decide what, if anything, to do with them) seems to be a good one. I think this can be assisted by some sort of intelligent filtering of trackback contents & authorship to help you decide about those you do & don't want to handle. I think emulating the LinkedIn FOAFOAFOAFOAF network model could be useful in this regard.

Also, based on comments by Stephanie and Mark, I have finally concluded that I must do something in K-Collector for the Lilia's and Jim McGee's of this world who used (and maybe still cling to) liveTopics. I think that part of my problem has been misunderstanding where they are coming from. liveTopics, for me, was a stepping stone towards a larger vision which, at that time, I couldn't achieve. But for them it was actually what they were looking for. No wonder then that I've had a hard time convincing them that K-Collector is better.

I haven't quite worked out the answer yet but I think it may be as simple as offering some kind of discriminator where you can choose whether K-Collector should default to showing you only your own work, or the work of the community as a whole. We may even have enough smarts in the database to do this without requiring additional work but I'll have to get some clear space (i.e. after STES) to think this through properly.

Comments last stand

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 19:32:40 +0000

Euan and I have just had a healthy disagreement over the value of comments.

I would summarize Euans point of view as being that of the enabler. He sees comments as an integral part of creating communication around his weblog and ideas:

I've written 1354 posts on my blog and had 2118 comments. Anything that makes that less likely is negative IMHO

I would summarize my own point of view as being not contrary to the aims, only the means. I don't get nearly as many comments as Euan (probably about 10%) so perhaps I am less convinced of their value. But I would like more people to comment on what I write. I often try to write provactively in the hope that it will spur some kind of conversation or debate. My curse, I guess, is that I am either preaching to the choir or seen as a blowhard.

Nevertheless my beef with comments boils down to:

the wrong ownership model. If I leave a comment on your blog you own the comment. It is in your space and appears (or disappears) at your discretion. At the same time this lack of ownership leads, I think, to a sense of disassociation between you as the writer and the comment (and it's impact)
the wrong attribution model. Even if I don't comment anonymously I can't really be sure that someone who leaves a comment as you, is you and nor can anyone else. If it's on your blog, I can be sure.
the wrong social model. If people know where to go to find out what you're saying then it's likely you will have that in mind when you say stuff. Being a consistent asshole will make you the billboard of your own buffoonery

In a sense I am contending that comments are like email. We often say things in email that we would never say face-to-face because we are detached from the meaning and the human being at the other end. By placing our comments in a self-context we may be subconsciously encouraged to think more deeply about what we are saying and it's likely impact.

Euan raised the concern that disabling comments necessarily means people with a blog will be left out. To this I would answer that the solution is most likely technical and here I think CoComment, whilst they may be addressing the right problem, are not being radical enough. Leaving a comment on most blogs these days is a sign-up type process. So why not have someone sign up with a comment-log service.

I envisage a comment-log as a blogging lite service which just acts as an aggregator for an individuals comments. A kind of "blog this" system where instead of leaving a comment I end up writing a post to my comment-log with it automatically formatting the response post and linking to the original post.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on social-software

Metadata is a social thing

Cast off your discreteness

Getting linked in

Relationships are multi-valent

September 14, 2003

Codifying Relationships - Posted by Liz Lawley at 2:22 PM

Building collaborative culture

More on #kmtalk and IRC integration

Getting Real with Stowe

Presenting People Centred Knowledge Management at the CiG

Social network software frenzy

business networking sites

common interest networking sites

dating sites

face-to-face meeting facilitation sites

friend networking sites

pet networking sites

social networking plus and/or edge cases

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium

Show me the value

STES#1 transcript available

Getting my head shifted

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium in London

Cybaea star over STES

STES writeup on Social Software Weblog

Getting creative: five social tools to give you an edge!

Comments last stand

Codifying Relationships
- Posted by Liz Lawley at 2:22 PM

social networking plus and/or edge cases