Koowall

Koowall is a new online site that I like. I'm in love with the idea of online collaboration. As it turns out reality is quite different from my imagination of it. For example I think wikis are wonderful for collaboration, but over the years I haven't been successful in convincing anyone or any group to contribute to a wiki I've made--I've made plenty. I'm not sure what creeps people out about wikis.

As sort of a negative example of how collaboration is hard to master, I'd point to my bad habit of "blogging" on other people's blogs in their comments. I'm not too hard on myself about that because I think we're all trying to figure out what sorts of customs make sense for online communication. And I'm surely not alone in wanting to collaborate online.

A friend asked me a while back what the easiest way was to put up some links and resources to a workshop she was presenting. I told her that Tumblr and Posterous were super easy. I was pretty sure that was true, but at the time I hadn't actually used either of them. So I tried them out just to make sure.

Tumblr uses a Dashboard, which is a little like the newsfeed at Facebook and a little like the Twitter feed. I thought to get a handle about what Tumblr was like I needed to have a Tumblr blog and subscribe to a few Tumblr blogs to see what it's about. Without thinking much I thought to post three links. Setting up a blog is incredibly easy, at least if you don't try to customize things. Honeslty in fifteen minutes I'd set up a blog and provided my first three links. Here's a link to my blog Three Good Links.

My blog is solo, but my experience of Tumblr is through the dashboard so the experience of Tumblr feels quite social and collaborative. Part of the success of it as a platform is how easy it is to control your space. I don't have to contend with jerks like me leaving long and ponderous comments on my blog. But another reason it's so successful is it provides easy ways to engage with other Tumblrs through the dashboard.

At Facebook, well, I'll use myself as an example, I put up some political stuff. As it turns out people disagree. It's funny how strongly I react when someone disagrees with me on my Facebook page: fiercely. There are lots of places online where fierce arguments are appropriate. For example arguments in Facebook groups might be quite acceptable, and arguments on Twitter seem so to. Of course everywhere arguments are acceptable only to a point. But I don't think I'm alone in not wanting arguments to go on too long on my Facebook page. Part of the reason for that is what I put up is something of a personal profile. People can look at my links, find them interesting or boring, still it's something of a profile of me that I want to maintain a higher degree of control than in other settings. Tumblr makes this sort of control pretty easy without shutting down channels for communication.

Koowall is more than a social bookmarking site, but it has that capacity. They call it a "Collective Jamming platform." I think it has that potential. When I first found the site I contributed to a few Koowalls and made a few Koowalls myself. I tried to choose subjects for the Koowalls I made that were of general interest so others might contribute to them. Musical genres seemed a safe bet. The first widget is Soul Music, I think you may be able to click the arrows to see more of the wall. (Update Yes indeed, you can scroll on the wall by clicking the arrows. And clicking on "Shout Here" will take you to the site.

I love soul music. While I have posted mostly older songs, I had it in mind that younger people would post Neo-Soul. At least that was what I was hoping. The trouble with the platform is that in most cases people seem to treat the Koowalls as the possession of someone--that the Soul Music Koowall is mine. The good manners was the opposite problem from what I expected. I expected the walls might be like certain telephone poles which get plastered with every damn thing and with a slight intention of vandalism.

The Koowalls that show collaboration from many people seem mostly ones from conferences. I've seen pictures where the Koowalls are being projected on to real walls in physical space where people are congregating. That's very cool.

I made a Koowall that seemed silly enough that I thought it would engage some collaborators. I named it Creative Hairstyles. It seems to have garnered so little attention to have disappeared. But it still can be found by searching "hairstyles."







My Monster Music Blog wall has had a couple of posts by others and is up front and easy to find. But I'm not sure what will spark mass collaboration there. Perhaps when more people sign up that will happen. I anticipate that when people do start posting on walls, when the spark light a fire, then there will be some epic battles of wills. I don't really look forward to that, but think the social rules for online sites mostly come about from an organic process where a few people testing the limits are important.

Tumblr isn't perfect. There's Spam, which I'll hasten to offer Tumblr does address. But it is impressive how the developers embedded a few technical barriers to keep bickering to a minimum.

The social aspects of online social networking sites are not simple. It's nice to see that various approaches to making online social engagement possible. I think Koowall has some kinks, but is a useful new tool.

Social Networks

It's really worth checking out xkcd.com for the whole map in all of its glorious detail. Furthermore at the site, right at the top is a link to the 2007 version as well as a link to Ethan Bloch's update of his map. xkcd.com even has a big poster of the map for sale (only $20) at the site.

Image permission:cc 2.5

The 27th Comrade left a comment on my last post and I want to bring a snippet of that up with his advice:

However, I give only one piece of advice to those I give a damn about: fuck social networks. I have grown to be really, really suspicious of anything that seeks to define my life in terms of … algorithms. Bad. The necessary end of a World gone mad, and very bad also.

From Comrade 27 and my online banter I suspect he knows most of the time I'm too stupid to take his advice. I hope that he knows that I try to consider it. He's got a knack for getting to the nub of things. So I take very seriously the warning that there are dangers in having our lives defined by algorithms.

Online today I saw a warning, or a bit of unsolicited advice: "Don't talk what you don't know." It wasn't even directed at me, but at time similar warnings have been and I always chaff. It seems that one of the ways I can come to know something is by talking. Even the discomfort of talking sometimes seems useful.

It seems very likely that sorts of currencies of online social relationships will become more common. All the various schemes already existing seem very interesting and there are many. Some of these schemes are an attempt to provide a visible measure of trust, for example eBay's reputation system. Many more deal with reputation of participants within particular online groupings.

One point to be made is that there are many different systems in part because there are many different contexts. A reputation as a Haskel programmer is quite different from knowledge of celebrity gossip so the sites for programmers and gossips are different. It's quite possible for one person to know a lot about both, and could easily flow into the norms of the different sites.

Having slept on last night's post the part that seemed so nonsensical was a vague vision of some sort of currency which in some way aggregated social currency people might have garnered across many sites. It doesn't make sense because notions of reputation are particular. What difference does it make on a Haskel board whether or not you are admired for knowledge of celebrity gossip? Clearly the answer is, Not much. Still I think some sort of aggregate currency has appeal.

Programmers and gossips is just a silly example of what is a complicated set of problems are out there, not just for creating some sort of Whuffie currency, but for all sorts of issues which emerge when people are active online. So perhaps the example sheds a little light on the problem The 27th Comrade has with "anything that seeks to define my life in terms of … algorithms."

The big news today in the social Web scene was Facebook rolling out changes to the Web site. I'm eager to read and listen to what people have to say about this. Zuckerberg had this to say:

"What we're trying to do here is build a social platform. That's very different from building a social application. The difference between building a social application and building a social platform is when you're building an application you're building it for one use case." A platform, meanwhile, can handle anything.

The difference between "social application" and "platform" points to a difference I'm not very clear about and certainly didn't make plain in yesterday's post.

I envision many, many schemes to show something about our social capital online. Some of them will bear some likeness to Whuffie, or a social currency. Almost by definition those will depend on a context for most of their value; that is value within particular social networks. These it seems are akin to Zuckerberg's social applications.

Now it isn't at all clear exactly what I want as far as something bigger goes, but it seems something like a platform which brings together various Whuffie currencies. Comrade 27 suspicion about this is well placed. The dangers and disadvantages are obvious.

Another problem with my inchoate ideas is using a metaphor of money. One of the qualities of money is how agnostic it can be; to by bread or poison no matter. Money entails choice for good or ill.

I enjoy reading My Song In The Trench, the 27th Comrade's blog. He knows theology and I don't. He's been nice enough in my overlong comments on his posts not to point that out to me. Although I'm agnostic I like his theological excursions and other posts because issues of ethics, morality and honor come up. These are subjects dear to my heart and issues which seem to me embedded in the topic of Whuffie and social capital.

I've gone on too long as it is so I'll leave with a few links. First to and old post by Ethan Zuckerman where he explores the pleasures and perils of Cyber Utopianism. Second to philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah at BigThink where he discusses some of the ideas he's written about in his new book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. I am perhaps too little suspicious about dangers inherent in online social networks and that's not very smart. On the other hand I see great potential for online social networks and commons based peer production to create something good.

I talk about what I don't know in the hopes of learning to know better.

Inchoate Ideas

It's autumn here in western Pennsylvania. The picture of Zinnias is from years past, but there still are some bright Zinnias blooming in the garden. I once let it slip that Zinnias are my favorite flower in front of a friend. In truth my favorite flowers are probably what's blooming in the garden that I most recently noticed. For two seasons now my friend has given me packets of of Zinnias from Johnny's Selected Seeds. Johnny's sells some Zinnia seeds from the great German plant breeder Benary. The seeds are expensive but both my friend and I agree they are simply the best Zinnias we've grown. The Zinnias in the picture are not Benary Giants, still the great color and cheerfulness comes through. Oh, I miss summer already.

The problem with most of my ideas is they are not very fully formed. A good example of that is Bazungu Bucks. I printed out 100 Bazungu Bucks and it turned out I couldn't give them away. In theory my giving a Bazungu Buck away meant that it could be claimed for an hour of my time. But people seemed to understand that in accepting a Bazungu Buck was somehow a claim on their time. They understood the idea of a small economy premised on giving time that in some yet to be determined way was supposed to jump start a time-based currency of in a particular Ugandan community. They wanted nothing to do with it. Surely not because they had animus toward me or the community in Uganda, but rather because they didn't want any promise of their time hanging over them. The promise of my time in exchange for Bazungu Bucks they might accumulate wasn't worth the potential of getting suck into spending their time on something not important to them.

That's ancient history now and I should add that my friends did contribute real dollars to the Ugandan community. But the kernel of the idea was to find a way of sharing time in service of making things that matter to us happen. Real dollars do that well, but are scarce. Our time is scare too, but we often have some to spare. Still what comes out loud and clear is people value their time very highly. And that's as it should be.

That makes it all the more remarkable that so much really cool stuff gets made with the voluntary contribution of people's time, things like Wikipedia, blogs, and the fantastic free and open source software that's available today. I'm stuck on the idea that making data about each of our commons based peer production more visible to us and to others has great potential to encourage doing more great things.

I'm really loving my new computer with Ubuntu as its operating system. One of the very cool features is what is essentially an App Store. It's a program that makes it easy to find and install, as well as uninstall, software. One of the best things about running Linux is a wealth of free software available. I'm using the Lucid Linx version of Ubuntu. In a few days the new version 10.10 Maverick Meerkat will be released. At Platform Wars Phil Jones asked:

Why shouldn't Ubuntu's Synaptic package manager / package store count the number of people who are using each package? Or allow people to vote for packages that they find good / useful?

Ah, well there's no question in my mind both are desirable because it fits with my inchoate idea of making peer production data more visible.

According to the Wikipedia article on the Ubuntu Software Center the Maverick Meerkat OS will allow users to rate software and to see others ratings. I suspect that he knew that when he posted, I did not. so I wrote some gibberish comment. It's bad form to blog at other's blog, a lesson I seem to be very slow to learn. And the great thing is there's basically no hurdle to making a blog of ones own. So I've got this blog and can try to flesh ideas out here.

Now there's nothing really new about ratings, for example SourceForge has been doing it for as long as I can remember. But there are a couple of points to be made. User ratings are a way of establishing reputation and trust online. Thousands of Web sites have some method of doing this. So the first point is that lots of data about reputation is already collected. The second point is a bit more hazy. Facebook collects all sorts of reputation data by way of their Like button. Developers can add them to their sites. I'm not a developer. I don't quite understand all of it, except that it's advantageous to Facebook.

Anyhow there's this economy that's being created on the basis of lots of us spending a bare minimum of time to press a button that says "Like." Our time may be valuable but we hardly notice that brief moment. I don't absolutely begrudge Facebook profiting from my likes, after all each take but a moment. But I am keen to have some way to get and give some of this reputation value that Facebook and others already have ways to capitalize on. My being able to use some of the credit I get for my online production to spend on encouraging others to produce does not diminishes the value for Facebook.

If I've hit "like" 100 times on my niece's posts why shouldn't my neice be able to see a running tally of my likes about her stuff? And likewise that I might see data of where I'm putting my likes? The data is already being collected, it just isn't visible to us in an aggregated form.

I don't look for something like this to happen at Facebook anytime soon. But I'm not alone in seeing the value in having a currency which is based upon social capital displayed online.

Whuffie is a funny sounding word coined by Cory Doctorow in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for a reputation currency. Tara Hunt popularized the word in her book The Whuffie Factor where she explores the value of social networks in the business world. So Whuffie is commonly used word for this sort of currency I'd like to see.

The Whuffie Bank is an organization which trying to make the value of our social networks at Twitter and Facebook a currency. I haven't delved into it much, but the sad part is that with whatever algorithm used the result is I have zero whuffie. I want my whuffie, so basically I'm mad at the Whuffie Bank. No not really, but my lack of any whuffie means the Whuffie Bank is of no use to me at least now.

American Express has partnered with FourSquare for a social currency app for iPhones. Frankly this platform seems to have all the creepy aspects of Facebook "Like" and very limited upside for users so far as I can see. My vision is poor because I don't have a cell phone and hardly ever go anywhere so Foursquare isn't something I use. Nonetheless, both the Whuffie Bank and Foursquare's Social Currency rather point in the direction of something I want.

What I would like is a way that I could bring together measures of reputation gained from the various Web sites which I frequent that already collect it in one way or another. There are a couple of big problems that make this hard. First, places like Facebook don't provide users with easy tallies of our likes, that is, many Web sites collect data but don't share it with users. The second problem is that at sites having some sort of visible reputation system, all the various systems are different.

The Whuffie Bank is a non-profit organization and that's probably the most appealing approach to a repository of social capital data to me. But as evidenced by American Express building a platform for social currency, big companies will compete in this field. I might be terribly wrong about this, but it seems to me that the organization or corporation that is allows users to join social capital data from the most sites will be the platform with the greatest adoption.

With my really hazy thinking, I've thought that Microsoft with more than a billion people regularly using their products is in an excellent position to make a big splash on the social Web. A Microsoft platform for social currency could be that.

Microsoft seems so committed competing against free they appear incapable of seeing value on the table that other companies like Google, Facebook and even American Express are rushing to grab. I'm not so keen on this rush to grab value on the table in the first place, but I'm bemused that Microsoft doesn't even try. Oh maybe Bing is an attempt, I don't know because I've not found a good reason to use it.

So my very inchoate idea is a currency which in some way represents my value in online social networks. I want something I can earn and ways then to spend towards ends I think worthwhile.

Further Ruminations about Social Networks.

I know my posts are bad when even I won't read them! The last post I did wasn't coming together and instead of just sitting on it and thinking some more, I clicked "publish." Socioeconomics is not new, but I was quite impressed with the point in the video A City Made of Waste that the important thing to pay attention to was the "layering of its socio-economic procedures." I was curious to explore this notion of "layering of socio-economic procedures" and online social networks. I quickly got lost in the weeds.

I'm probably not going to do any better tonight than I did the last time, but I still want to try to think a bit more (aloud) about the relationship of online social life and economic activity.

I put forth the incident of a PR executive's Twitter posting which insulted his client. I think it's just a given that when people are putting up a lot of content online, some where along the line some of that content is going to be embarrassing.

At my age I know teens and folks in their twenties who I remember well as babies. They've grown up using the Internet. As far as what I put up on the Internet, for the longest time I figured hardly anyone I knew would see any of it. That assumption no longer holds much water thanks primarily to Facebook. Not only do I get updates from teens and twenty-somethings I know in my newsfeeds, I'm in theirs. My name is very common, so I don't turn up high on searches. But now with the newsfeeds, I provide regular search terms which substantially improve the results, if someone wants to find out more.

I don't go snooping around my young friends and relatives online content (much). Many of them have 500+ friends. I realize that for them the higher potential for embarrassment is not something I will find in their content, but that something goofy I put up will be seen by friends of friends of friends. Since I didn't seek them out to friend me, I have to conclude they must have calculated the risk and found it acceptable. Needless to say I know young people who haven't friended me. Had I grown up online like they have, I'm not sure that I would be one to friend my uncles and friends of my parents!

When I was that age, the last thing I wanted was for my parents to know what I was really doing. Some things never really change that much. Anthropologist danah boyd observes how young people use the Web to engage with friends outside of adult supervision. It's amused me having access to feeds at Facebook how hilarious the Urban Dictionary is now. Like Wikepedia the Urban Dictionary is a wiki, but translating slang is tricky business. Attempting to decode youthful argot using the Urban Dictionary seems to yield a greater chance of misunderstanding than understanding. Anyhow, young people have ways of avoiding discovery on the Web. but they also seem to understand better than people my age the upsides of sharing online, even with clueless old folk like me.

Recently an Internet friend sent me an IM. He'd just gotten back from a frustrating trip and needed to vent. Years ago when he was a teen we chatted frequently, now now so much. In this conversation almost in passing he mentioned an email I sent to him way back when a friend of his was killed in an automobile accident. It amazed me that he said he still had the email! Sure we've got some history, but both now and then I was just some guy on the Internet. Yet, somehow I'd managed to say approximately the right thing at approximately the right time for him. I think this is simply an example of something that's commonplace now.

Young people often have lots of friends in their online social networks. A lot of the correspondence is chatter with a good dose of teasing. Still, when there is a need, friends respond. Being on the receiving end of attention is important, but just as significant is the responding. People my age miss how good and responsible young people are towards their online friends.

At Seed Magazine there's a salon between Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and James Fowler. Folwler's work on social networks and happiness got a lot of attention in the popular press. In the Seed Salon piece he points out how new it is that so many of us are aware via online social networks of friends of friends of friends. He notes there are two general ways to react:

You can think about it in one of two ways. If you think that you are tied to all these people that you don't know and have never met, yet they are going to have an influence on you, you might just feel like, "Geez, I have no free will. I might as well just give up. I am just a piece of flotsam on the sea, floating up and down with the movements of everybody on the network."

But the other way to react is to take responsibility for all those people because they are also influenced by you. I have noticed that it has been easier for me to lose weight now, for example. And when I am walking home from the bus stop, I make sure to put on my favorite song. Because I know now that if I enter my house in a crummy mood, I'm not just going to make my son unhappy and my wife unhappy; I'm going to make my son's friend and my wife's mother unhappy. There are going to be all sorts of indirect, unintended consequences of my behavior, which makes me feel that I should take more responsibility.

For young people, and for people who spend a lot of time online, the umbrage over the PR executive's Twitter message seemed overblown. Being responsible feels less about the faux pas and more about doing something good when you can.

In my last post I also mentioned Micheal Arrington being spat upon at the DLD Conference and Jason Calacanis description of IAS--"Internet Asperger's Syndrome." What Arrington and Calacanis are talking about is something different from the Twitter flap. In some ways it seems what they are talking about is something that happens to people who become widely read like they are. But in another way what they are talking about is common and often called cyber-bullying.

There's quite a lot to this. I brought up the shutting down of Omidyar.net and the ups and downs of Tribe.net and connected it to what Arrington and Calacanis talked about in their posts. Phil Jones pushed back in the comments saying about Tribe:

I don't remember seeing any bullying or overt threatening behaviour there.

He's right, at least from my experience at Tribe too. Omidyar.net was an online social network of do-gooders. While I am not quite so quick to say that bullying wasn't going on there, bullying is far too simple a description for very much more nuanced goings on. I have often thought that Omidyar.net would make a great research study of the social dynamics of social networks. Lots of what happens in online social networks isn't obvious, and requires careful research to really understand. Needless to say I haven't done the research.

Calacanis concludes:

"[H]ow we treat each other does matter. It matters because, without empathy, our lives are shallow, self-centered and meaningless."

That's an important observation. Empathy is a huge topic in it's own right. But my thoughts turned in a different direction as I wrote. I knew going down that path would take a bit of time, so I simply published what I had already written.

I've written more than a reasonable length for a blog post already today. So I'll just put sketch out a little towards what I was thinking about. Zbigniew Lukasiak is a really smart guy. He's thought about the decay of online social networks for a long time. Zbigniew has been looking to devise algorithms in the software to make such decay less likely. When I've read some of what he's had to say about it, generally my response has been something very much along the lines of Calacanis's point that we've got to learn to be nicer to each other. But Calacanis's observation didn't seem enough after reading his excellent essay. That lack, and the image of "layering of socio-economic procedures" from the video gave me a glimmer that there's a lot more to the way Zbigniew has been addressing the problem than I've been comprehending.

To finish up this post I want to point to a few links. Last summer I stumbled upon an essay by Gotthard Gunther, Number and Logos: Unforgettable Hours with Warren St. McCulloch. Knowing me even a little, it's obvious there is so much I don't understand. I don't know much about logic. I don't know so much about the problems of logic, merely that there are some. For example, I know that Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica opened important philosophical questions and controversies, but I don't know much about them. More simply I know that timeless logic often becomes self-contradictory when trying to map circular or more complicated sequences of cause and effect. Since circuits are fundamental to electronics and computing, I know that the trouble with logic bothers computer sciences. Alas, yet again I know little about electronics or computer science. I don't really understand Gunther's essay, but it excited me because it seemed to be pointing to new approaches to logic which address some of the problems with classical logic.

The Web site with Gotthard Gunther's essay was put up by Rudolf Kaeher who also has ThinkArt Lab. I'm not sure how, but I'd stumbled upon ThinkArt Lab a few times before reading Gunther's essay and had never known what to make of it.

Remembering how I get to sites isn't always easy, nor is my memory always right. Rarely is the way to a Web site straight forward, generally it involves some sort of pincer movement. I think that I kept arriving at ThinkArt Lab via Paul Ryan, for example this page on Peirce and Work. The funny thing is I don't understand Ryan very well, and he doesn't link to ThinkArt. I was just using searches to try to make the questions I was asking clearer.

If I remember correctly, I landed at one of Kaeher's blogs Rudy's Diamond Strategies with search terms I came up with from reading Paul Ryan and about Charles Sanders Peirce. From Rudy's Diamond Strategies, I linked to another of his blogs The Chinese Challenge. As I had stumbled upon ThinkARt Lab before all of this searching from different directions and ending up there makes me think it's a good idea for me to look around and try to understand why it is I keep discovering the place.

The really big problem is I don't have a very good head for figures. It's a rather general deficit, which includes not being able to follow symbolic notation very well. So the Kaehr's work is very difficult for me to understand. Even with my very rudimentary ability to understand, the work is really, really fascinating.

Before the problems that come up in online social networks seemed to me social problems. I think about social problems in terms of psychology, sociology, political science, etc. Turn again to the discussion between Albert-László Barabási and James Fowler. Fowler is a political scientist studying social and biological links, and Barabási is a physicist who uses mathematics to study networks on the Web. My ideas about the boundaries of academic disciplines are old fashioned. Kaehr's work on polycontextural logics has much to say about how computer scientist design online social networks, but it also reveals something about what it is for people to be social.

Valdis Krebs blogs at TNT--The Network Thinker as well at Network Weaving blog. Here's what they say about the Network Weaving blog:

A social network blog about the creation of robust & vibrant economic and community networks... using network mapping, weaving and leadership development.

Math-challenged as I am, that blog seems like I'd have a better chance understanding than the former. That's probably true.

Participating on social networks makes certain problems visible; issues like bullying and seeing a picture of Michael Phelps with a bong to his mouth. There's some formal and rigorous thinking coming out of the study of online social networks that I'm only dimly becoming aware of. What's less apparent is that formal thinking would have something to offer about such issues. I'm becoming convinced such formal thinking will change how I think about online social networks. I'm not sure how, that's what I'm trying to learn more about.

Social Networks

I've been online for less than ten years, but it's a big part of my life now. When I first got online I was impressed by how the id, ego, and superego were all well represented. That's still the case, I guess it just goes to show that the Internet is a human phenomenon and not machine.

I notice that I haven't posted here since August 11 of this year. I wonder if it matters? And to answer my own question it does to me, I think. Part of what's kept me from posting is I've been engaging recently in some social networks which are new to me.

Early in September Omidyar.net shuttered its doors. I had been an active participant there for just under a year, but found it a very empowering network. Over the three years or so Omidyar.net was open to the general public something like 20,000 people had signed up and by the time of its closing about 500 were active and regular users.

These numbers seem incredibly small in comparison to sites like MySpace and Facebook. I'm no social software intellectual, but it seems to me that the site is something worth some academic study--maybe my thinking so is good evidence of why I'm not an academic. But the site offered such a rich platform for collaboration, and while there was something of a learning curve involved, Omidyar.net was a highly collaborative space. It's the quality of the participation there that I found so significant.

Since it closed all the active users have gone on to populate other platforms. So it's rather interesting to me to see where some of my fellow collaborators have gone and also to see how they interact on different platforms.

It's gotten me to look around and join new sites as well. I'm not entirely a stranger to social networking sites, although I don't really use them too effectively. I had joined MySpace a while back, primarily because I thought it would be a place to get band information, and to keep track of social organizations important to me. But I've found it of limited usefulness. I was really interested to watch over their shoulders a couple of years ago when a niece and nephew came to visit. They were really into it.

Zbigniew Lukasiak made a observation about Facebook today:

I am a bit disapointed about Facebook - it notifies me about all kinds of events involving my friends - but somehow I can't find a way to monitor for new posts in groups I have joined. For me having meaningful conversations is the absolute number one feature of social web sites and I don't see much point in using Facebook when it does not make it easy for me.

The point about meaningful conversations is very much something I expect in social networks, but making a site responsive to that is easier said than done.

As soon as Facebook was open to the general public positive remarks about the place were common among the people I know online. As it turned out something that made it popular; i.e., discovering all sorts of people they know face to face, just wasn't the case for me. Most of my friends avoid the Internet, and certainly avoid social networking sites.

One slightly crass way of describing Omidyar.net is to say it was a social network for do-gooders. Don't laugh, there are several really rich platforms in this niche. One of those platforms I joined around the time Omidyar.net was closing is Razoo. I like Razoo. Something that Razoo does that I like very much is offer Web feeds for many of the pages. But but among the list of things about the site I'm not so happy about is that navigation is time consuming.

Back to Facebook, I didn't arrive there with a bunch of friends. So at the beginning there really wasn't much reason to check in on the site for. Previously I had signed up for Netvibes, but hadn't used it. Then I saw that I could install a Facebook module, or widget at Netvibes.

Netvibes allows users to make a sort of homepage where you can aggregate all sorts of content from the Web and add a bunch of cool widgets. So for example, I have a widget for Facebook, Gmail, my Flickr Feed, my delicious bookmarks, The New York Times and some other stuff on one page. It's great I can check in and at a glance see any new activity. Netvibes also allows tabs where you can draw in content on new pages which can be named an organized as you like. So that feature seemed a very good way of handling some of the content at Razoo, for example I've subscribed to all the blogs at Razoo I want to follow.

There are some small glitches, not so much with Netvibes, but the way feeds are updated at Razoo. Also at Razoo, the really important information I want is when discussion threads have been updated. Unfortunately, discussion threads are not syndicated, and Razoo doesn't alert members when discussion threads are updated. The only way I can follow the discussions is to actually go to the pages where they originated to see if there's been any activity.

A couple of days ago I was astounded to read at Scoblizer that Orkut is the Google service with the most page views a day.

I was curious so I signed up and started looking around Orkut. I also opened up Bebo which I had joined because I thought it might be a place to publish some stuff I wrote a while ago, and just to top off the list I finally joined hi5 which I'd avoided in the past because the recruitment seemed Spamy. Spending some time rummaging around these sites was fun, but I don't think I'll use them much. Orkut amazed me because there are a lot of Indian users and also a lot of Brazilian users and that struck me as such an interesting mashup. I don't really have the stats, but when I say "a lot" I really mean it, some of the fan sites there have over 300,000 members!

I'm a friendly guy, and like making friends, but I'm 51, soon to be 52. The discussions are what I value the most. With these three sites there are many boundaries to cross, and I think perhaps the boundary of age is the largest obstacle for making these social networks important to me.

Back before the 2004 elections Black Planet used to have some lively discussion boards and I used to participate on a few. BP changed the discussion format around and so I found myself never going there. And in fact BP sent me notice that without activity my profile would be deleted. I assumed it had been because I never saw any notice in my email, but then rather suddenly activity reappeared there. Much of it was Spam, but not all of the Spam seemed without value. Some of it offered a window into issues and events important to African Americans.

Very occasionally I get friendship notes. I responded to one recently in what I thought was an honest way and gave my Yahoo email. So I got a Yahoo chat message. After a little chatting the woman really reamed me out for being at BP if I wasn't interested in dating. Maybe she's right, I just didn't think I was putting myself out there that way.

In my usual rambling way I've managed to use too many words to say two little. So just a couple more quick observations. First of all looking at pictures at Orkut, Bebo and hi5, I saw so many beautiful young people, so many pictures of best friends together, and pictures of favorite nieces and nephews, mothers and dads. At Orkut it was so interesting to see groups with Indians and Pakistanis, Syrians and Iranians. The joy of living, the loving families and friends, the birthday cakes, all of what makes us happy as people is on display.

Looking at all the pictures of real people all over the globe the last few days as I've explored a few social networks new to me, one thought rings clear: There are no smart bombs.

John F. Kennedy spoke:

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.

Among the political bogs I read is Col. Patrick Lang's Sic Semper Tyrannis 2007. I admire Col. Lang and appreciate very much his realistic military appraisals and the lively and enlightened conversation at his blog. But if on balance I appreciate his blog, there's always a sticking point when he calls people like me imbeciles.

I know that modern warfare is conducted against populations not armies. So for example perhaps there are as many as five million Iraqis displaced by the American war on Iraq. Population estimates are over 26 million, so that's almost one in five Iraqis.

Col. Lang has been outspoken against a wider war in the Middle East. I hope smarter people than I are paying attention to what he says. But there is a gulf between Col. Lang and me. I understand that securing peace requires a well-ordered military. I value his service and the service of all those in serving and have served. I also believe those who work to make peace are engaged in a noble enterprise and are hardly imbeciles. Making peace is something all of us should be engaged in.

Second, October 15th is Blog Action Day. Bloggers around the world will write to draw attention to the environment. I plan to participate and hope you will too.