judith meskill - soc.media.rocks

I am off to Carnegie Hall this evening to see Caetano Veloso - the first 'non-classical' artist to be asked to present a 'perspectives series' at Carnegie Hall.
Of Caetano Veloso, David Byrne shared this:
 
"Caetano's work gives one a sense of a world in which there are nodes of common intellectual and sensual pleasures here and there scattered around the globe - a network of "others" who connect to one another and to us but who at the same time articulate something unique to their place of origin."
 
On The Social Software Weblog at Weblogs, Inc. I have been running a 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'Elevator Pitch' Competition. The entries are all in and the judging begins. I cannot help but substitute "Weblogging" for "Caetano's work" in the above quote - now that would be a "Perfect Pitch"... (-:=

This evening, while researching material to contribute to The Social Software Weblog over at Weblogs, Inc., I stumbled upon a Forbes article - on 'Social Entrepreneurship' at the World Economic Forum. The theme of this year's forum (which is ending tomorrow, January 24, 2004, in Davos, Switzerland) is 'Partnering for Security and Prosperity.'
In the Forbes article Michael Freedman writes:
 
"A buzzword at this year's World Economic Forum is "social entrepreneurialism," a fuzzy term that has had some concrete benefits. The idea, says William Drayton, a graduate of Yale Law School and a former McKinsey consultant, is to seek out entrepreneurial individuals and encourage them to use their skills to help others, particularly the extremely poor and isolated. Indeed, as the group explains on its website: "Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or to teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry."
 
In a recent post - social (software) entrepreneurs?... - I posed the question, "Who are the 'Social Entrepreneurs' of the 'Social Software' movement?"
Dina Mehta offered Rajesh Jain of E M E R G I C; Valdis Krebs nominated June Holley of ACEnet; J.C. Winnie offers Joi Ito of Neoteny; and Flemming Funch, on his Ming the Mechanic weblog, offers himself.
The World Economic Forum chose 30 Tech Pioneers for 2004 and is celebrating their "Social Entrepreneurialism" at the event being held in Davos, Switzerland.
This left me pondering: Do we have an innovative 'Social Software' solution that would 'qualify' for the 'Selection Process' set out by the World Economic Forum for next year's 'Tech Pioneers' category? Who is the 'Social Software' pioneer who can take us there?

To the The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com.... See you there... (^:

DCMilitary.com :: Officials find illegal file sharers at Myer, McNair by Chris Walz, Pentagram staff writer
 
...Peer-to-peer file sharing programs, such as KaZaA and LimeWire, continue to plague computer systems inside the Fort Myer Military Community and Arlington National Cemetery. The National Capital Region Directorate of Information Management recently evaluated the computer network and discovered approximately 424 computers contained peer-to-peer programs banned by Army regulations. ... the music industry could sue the Army. ... file sharing programs are a major liability because "Army employees are using Army equipment" to steal copyrighted material.
Information Management is trying to solve the problem as quickly as possible. The directorate is preparing to install an Intrusion Prevention System, which will recognize and forbid such network traffic. The system will isolate the computer downloading or uploading copyrighted material and then administrators will report the offender to commanders for disciplinary action...

While performing a 'social software' search last evening, I found a paper that was written five years ago on 'business' and 'social' entrepreneurship.
 
J. Gregory Dees published this paper, on Social Entrepreneurship, for The Stanford Business School's Center for Social Innovation. At that time he was the Entrepreneur in Residence, Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Miriam and Peter Haas Centennial Professor in Public Service, Graduate School of Business Stanford University. Currently Professor Dees is with Duke's Fuqua School of Business.
In this paper Professor Dees gives a brief history of the evolving definition of 'entrepreneur':
 
early 19th century French Economist, Jean-Baptiste Say: "The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield."
early 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter: "the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production." They can do this in many ways: "by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on."
Peter Drucker: "the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity." Dees goes on to interpret Drucker's definition as: "Entrepreneurs have a mind-set that sees the possibilities rather than the problems created by change."
Howard H. Stevenson, a leading theorist of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, defines the heart of entrepreneurial management as "the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled."
Professor Dees - borrowing "the notions of value creation from Say, innovation and change agents from Schumpeter, pursuit of opportunity from Drucker, and resourcefulness from Stevenson" - asserts that 'social entrepreneurs' play the role of change agents by:
 
* Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value), * Recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission,
* Engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning,
* Acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand, and
* Exhibiting a heightened sense of accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created.
In conclusion Dees states:
 
"Social entrepreneurship describes a set of behaviors that are exceptional. These behaviors should be encouraged and rewarded in those who have the capabilities and temperament for this kind of work. We could use many more of them. Should everyone aspire to be a social entrepreneur? No. Not every social sector leader is well suited to being entrepreneurial. The same is true in business. Not every business leader is an entrepreneur in the sense that Say, Schumpeter, Drucker, and Stevenson had in mind. While we might wish for more entrepreneurial behavior in both sectors, society has a need for different leadership types and styles. Social entrepreneurs are one special breed of leader, and they should be recognized as such. This definition preserves their distinctive status and assures that social entrepreneurship is not treated lightly. We need social entrepreneurs to help us find new avenues toward social improvement as we enter the next century."
 
Based on Professor Dees definitions, both borrowed and advanced, of 'Social Entrepreneurship' - Who do you think are the 'Social Entrepreneurs' of the 'Social Software' movement?

e-consultancy.com :: Nielsen-NetRatings - How The Internet Has Changed Our Life
...Amazon Despite some wild predictions, books themselves are much the same now as they were five years ago. But Amazon earns a place on this list for the way it sells them - Amazon, and other successful e-commerce ventures like lastminute.com, have pioneered personalised selling, and sell hundreds of thousands of items through customised newsletters and recommendations schemes.
What's next? This kind of "Social Software" is likely to become more sophisticated, so interactivity will be an even bigger selling point and sales driver than it is now.

Friends Reunited If there's one site that changed the perception of the Internet in the UK, it's Friends Reunited. The Internet was suddenly no longer a geek's playground - normal people used it too, and not just any normal people: the people who you went to school with. The hugely successful formula has been used in most other countries too, and may be said to have paved the way for the wider acceptance of online dating and matchmaking services.

What's next? The idea of meeting people through the Internet is mainstream now and likely to stay that way...

and so i wish for you this holiday
a heightened sense of all that lights your fire
for passion is the thing that, come what may,
will help to manifest your deep desire.
 
so thank you for your praise of my tech prose
and in your heart please know that all you share
comes back to you and often overflows
with that for which your heart has steadfast care.
 
and as we find that 'sense in action' counts
with blogs and wikis in a 'socialtext' we'll see that interest in our action mounts
as we with knowledge fill our 'social decks.'
 
twas lilia inspired here this prose to 'actionable cohorts' - this 'sense' flows...
©2003 judith meskill

Vive le Canada : Online communities : distributed creativty by Flick Harrison
...I'm currently taking part in an online conference, Eyebeam, which discusses distributed creativity, digital communities and networks. With reference to the arts specifically, but it's about the political implications of non-owned info / art and avoiding systems of control or disruptions. My section is 'Digital Karma: Innovations in Ethics'. Sound interesting? Check out:
An Online Forum Presented by Eyebeam and Still Water @ UMaine Nov 12-Dec 19, 2003

Artists are organizing impromptu street actions by mobile phone, musicians are repurposing peer-to-peer applications for artistic ends, and programmers are distributing electronic toolkits to help artists leap from code to creation.

Distributed Creativity, Eyebeam's sixth annual online forum, investigates new paradigms for artmaking that take advantage of mobile and distributed technologies such as WiFi, Weblogs, Wikis rich Internet applications, voice over IP and social software.

Forum co-hosts, panelists and public participants from around the world, including Creative Commons, DATA, Fibreculture and Rhizome will discuss the artistic, legal, technical and social dynamics of creative networks small and large.

[Apparently, the results will be published in a book eventually]...

Danah Boyd speaks out on Friendster, social behaviors, online environments, and social architectures.
 
Mentioned in this article, in order of appearance:
 
danah boyd, Friendster, connected selves, Joi Ito, Sixdegrees, Jonathan Abrams, Burning Man, Pretendsters, Fakesters, Sarah Tuttle, Intel Research Anthropologist, Genevieve Bell, Tribe.net, Mark Pincus, Peter Lyman, and SIMS: School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley.
The New York Times :: Decoding the New Cues in Online Society By MICHAEL ERARD
 
...quote... A SOCIOLOGIST among geeks and a geek among sociologists, Danah Boyd has 278 friends who link her to 1.1 million others.
 
So says Friendster.com, whose millions of members have transformed it from a dating site into a free-for-all of connectedness where new social rules are born of necessity. A 25-year-old graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Boyd studies Friendster, hovering above the fray with a Web log called Connected Selves (www .zephoria.org/snt) and interviewing Friendster users. Her irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors.
 
"She's definitely a Pied Piper for a bunch of different people," said Joichi Ito, a high-tech venture capitalist who lives in Tokyo. "At the same time she, as an academic, is able to articulate what is going on in a way that the people building the tools rarely understand or can articulate."
 
Ms. Boyd explained Friendster this way: "It allows you to purposely say who the people in your world are and to allow them to see each other, through a connection of you." An individual registered at Friendster has a home page with photos, a brief profile and photos of people to whom they have agreed to link. That person can then browse his or her network or search it for dates or activity partners.
 
Ms. Boyd says that the real world has a set of properties, which she calls architectures. With its deceptively simple set of features, her thinking goes, Friendster bends or replaces all of the real-world architectures.
 
For instance, when two people speak to each other, they assume their conversation is fleeting, but e-mail and instant messaging, by making that conversation persistent, offer a new architecture. When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other's social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how...
...end quote...

This 1997 paper - that I cite below - was 'news' to me, and I am including it here for my 'social software notes'. The author, Robert Rockwell, died suddenly in 1998. Rob was an anthropologist, 'social software' advocate, and co-founder and chief scientist for blaxxun technologies.
An Infrastructure for Social Software by Robert Rockwell, Blaxxun - 1997.
 
...In the physical world, complex social interactions are usually made manageable by facilities, rules, and service providers that guide and support the participants. Consider what goes on at trade fairs, legislative hearings, conferences, and in shopping malls. People must get from one place to another, meeting rooms must be allocated, agendas prepared and results published, and the general logistics must be managed concerning who deals with whom--and where, when, and how those interactions take place. In situations where the facilities are inadequate or the rules are not codified, the services of tour guides and administrative assistants, brokers and agents, couriers, and consultants may supply the missing social structures.
In a virtual world (as the DVE applications themselves are often called), this kind of logistical support must be supplied by software. As the range of DVE applications expands, they will need software support of a kind rarely envisioned by previous generations of programmers. A new breed of programs is required: social software.
 
The overriding point of social software is not simulation but conversation. Its applications are not substitutes for real-world interaction, but extensions of it. Its "worlds" are not virtual in the customary sense; they are real media for meeting others on-line. Designers of social software are less concerned with how well their on-screen objects mimic real-world objects than with how well they connect their users to each other.
 
Simulation environments can be thought of as being like the "preview" mode of a word-processor, designed to match the look of a printed document. Social environments, by comparison, are like hypertext, opening up avenues of communication that were unforeseen in the media that preceded them...

OfficialSpin :: Former IEQ investment, BiblioTech, copies its way into history
...London, England -- (OfficialSpin.com) -- 18/11/03 -- According to a website operated by Bibliotech Limited, OfficeMaster is their property - reference is made on the website to "TM" and BiblioTech say: "OFFICEMASTER" is owned and operated by Bibliotech Ltd." They say that "Officemaster is a leading, web-based, mobile office solution that combines a full suite of social software applications. With a focus on communication and collaboration, OFFICEMASTER allows each company to work effectively, both internally and with its customers and partners in an online business environment."
One problem though... OFFICEMaster is a UK registered word only (WO) trademark No. 2161786, owned by LSC Group Limited of Tamworth Staffordshire. LSC Group applied for their WO trademark on 21 March 1998. However on 6 July 1998 BiblioTech registered the domain name - officemaster.co.uk - then on 8 July 1998 BiblioTech registered another domain name - officemaster.net. LSC Group was granted a registered trademark on 30 April 1999, but that hasn't stopped BiblioTech from pursuing their own use or claiming that they own the trademark.
LSC Group's trademark is in Class 9, described as follows: computer programmes for the recordal, storage, indexing, retrieval, viewing, amending and printing of documents..."And so it seems that BiblioTech's use is a clear infringement of LSC Group's Mark...

[there are two news stories in this post.]
 
Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: Tickle Inc. Consolidates Social Networking Market With Acquisition
...SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Tickle Inc., formerly Emode, Inc., today announced the acquisition of Ringo, Inc., the third largest social networking company in the market. The acquisition integrates Ringo's robust feature set and more than 350,000 members with Tickle's newly-launched social networking services. The combined membership of more than one million consumers further solidifies Tickle's ten week-old social networking service as the number two player in the market. In a separate release, the company also announced today the appointment of industry veteran Samir Arora as chairman of the board and its name change to Tickle Inc. "We are thrilled to be joining forces with one of the only other social networking sites that has viral growth and a rare team of people who are both technically excellent and understand the human side of the technology," said James Currier, founder and CEO of Tickle Inc. "Ringo's unparalleled feature set and groundbreaking technology will add more social networking power to our overall business and help us extend the incredible growth we've experienced so far. This move is the first step in a focused expansion strategy for Tickle."
Since its founding four years ago, Tickle has provided viral content such as self-discovery, matchmaking and social networking services to build a critical mass of over 16 million members. According to comScore Media Metrix, Tickle recently broke into the Top 50 most trafficked Web sites and was shown to be the number two Internet destination in the women's category -- currently, more than 65 percent of the company's members are women. Tickle has a solid revenue model with a majority of revenues coming from consumer subscriptions and a smaller portion from top-tier advertisers -- resulting in six consecutive quarters of profitable growth. "We were approached by many companies, but ultimately we decided that Tickle had the most compelling vision for how social networking interacts with the rest of the Internet," said Michael Birch, co-founder and president of Ringo. "Tickle remains one of the most viral companies I've seen after many years in this industry, and I was excited to join the team and see where the power of our combined forces would take us."
Launched in early 2003, Ringo has built a significant offering that has grown virally and attracted a strong, diverse community of active users. Based in Walnut Creek, Calif., the company and its founders -- Michael Birch, Paul Birch and Morgan Sowden -- have been developing viral online applications for over four years and were most recently named by Spin magazine as "the next Friendster." The technology behind the service, Ringo's rapid application development environment, was specifically designed to develop and launch community applications quickly and seamlessly. Through the acquisition, Tickle further strengthens its reach into women, religious groups and music fans and will have access to Ringo's industry-leading, robust features set, including popular services such as blogs, events, forums, polls, calendaring and classified listings.
The acquisition of Ringo is a cash and stock deal, effective immediately. Key members of the Ringo team will join Tickle's product and engineering groups in San Francisco to accelerate the development of the Tickle social networking service.
 
Keywords: IAC, Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Match.com, Personals, Classmates, Friendster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder, Monster... Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: FaceTime's Instant Messaging Customer Leadership Tapped by COMDEX
...FOSTER CITY, Calif., Nov. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Furthering its leadership as the premier provider of security, management and control solutions for instant messaging (IM) and other forms of real-time communications in the enterprise, FaceTime Communications today announced its CEO, Glen D. Vondrick, will lead a discussion at COMDEX entitled, "Instantaneous Online Communications: Instant Messaging, Presence and Blogging." The session will be held Thursday, November 20 at 11:30 a.m. as part of COMDEX's Digital Enterprise Conference. FaceTime is widely recognized as an industry pioneer whose multi-network IM business applications enable enterprises to safely embrace the real-time presence capabilities of AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, IBM, Jabber, Reuters and other networks in a myriad of critical business functions. At COMDEX, Mr. Vondrick will present several FaceTime customer case studies that demonstrate how IM security and management solutions can be used by fast-paced organizations to enhance such critical business functions as customer service, community collaborative workflow, regulatory compliance reporting, and IT management and security...

Sequoia Capital ''Links In'' with $4.7 Million Investment
...MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 12, 2003--LinkedIn, the premier provider of professional networking tools for hiring managers, job seekers and professional service providers, today announced that it has secured Series A financing of $4.7 million. The investment was led by Sequoia Capital, the venture investors behind well-known Internet brands such as Yahoo!, Google and PayPal. Sequoia Capital is also an investor in Plaxo, the leading contact updating tool.
Through the real-world business successes of its users, LinkedIn has demonstrated that even established executives increase their business effectiveness and career success by using a referral-based professional networking tool. LinkedIn not only enables professionals to discover inside connections they never knew they had, but also allows them to receive referrals to deal makers, hiring mangers and other highly sought-after executives through the people they already know and trust.
 
Sequoia Capital's investment underscores the significant business opportunity involved in re-engineering several large and existing markets. For example, employers and employees will spend nearly $8 billion this year to find each other through the Internet, classifieds and recruiting firms. While online job boards have become popular, they rarely work for job seekers, and hiring managers are overwhelmed with resumes and "cold" emails from strangers. LinkedIn is the only tool that mirrors the most successful process for finding a job and hiring employees and contractors: it allows both job seekers and hiring managers to find each other through referrals from their real-world connections.
 
"The business potential for social software is quite limited. In contrast, LinkedIn is squarely focused on trusted business referrals, which is how business gets done and for which real money gets spent every day and all over the world," said Mark Kvamme, partner at Sequoia Capital. "LinkedIn provides both patented and effective technology that has the power to transform hiring--very much in the way PayPal re-engineered the transfer of money and Google dramatically increased the utility of the Internet for individual consumers and professionals." Kvamme is joining LinkedIn's board of directors.
 
LinkedIn's management team is led by CEO Reid Hoffman, who co-founded SocialNet in 1997 and was most recently the executive vice president of PayPal. "We are very pleased with the rapid adoption of LinkedIn among hiring managers, venture capitalists and executives from public companies in a broad set of industries," said Hoffman. "It is particularly gratifying to see that it took less than two months for LinkedIn to help hiring managers not only reach top talent through referrals, but also interview and hire them." ... TheFeature :: Mobile, Social, and Trustworthy? By Howard Rheingold
 
...What if you could say to your mobile media, some time in the near future: "I'm in this airport for the next hour and a half. Is there another engineer from my company, member of my sorority, hometown neighbor, relative, or colleague in the vicinity who wants to have a cup of coffee and kill some time?" or "I'm driving to the office in five minutes. Who along my route is going exactly where I'm going right now, and is guaranteed by someone I trust to be trustworthy?" or "Which of the strangers on this train shares more than three friends in our address books?" The problem is not computing power or wireless capability, but a software and social challenge. The social challenge has to do with what you have to disclose to strangers about yourself in order to find like-minded strangers and win their trust without compromising your privacy, and conversely, what you need to know about nearby strangers in order to trust them. The software challenge is to use computing and communication capabilities to negotiate possible compatibilities on an ad-hoc, peer-to-peer basis, without bothering the users too much -- if your people-finder beeps at you every fifteen seconds, you aren't going to use it for long. The social challenge is trying to quantify such ineffable notions as affinity and reputation in a manner computing devices can use.
A group of researchers at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories' Information Dynamics Lab, Bernardo Huberman, Stephen Sorkin, and Josh Tyler, have produced a working model of a Nokia 3650 phone that runs a Symbian C program that does not attempt to solve the reputation problem, but does allow people within bluetooth range of each other to discover if they have the same preferences without revealing them to each other. "Just what you need for the phenomenon of discovering in real space if you have a community," Huberman noted when he told me about their recent work. This video narrated by Sorkin, demonstrates how nearby phones negotiate possible affinities in the geographic vicinity by testing for similar attributes such as common address book entries or any other specified attributes...

From Stuart Henshall's Blog:
...Someone just worked out how to get a lot of hits! Or was this really the lazyweb in action. Thanks to Chris Heathcote inspired by Tom Smith " I invoke the LazyWeb to make me a "Am I Social Software or Not" site... ." When I read Peter Merholz comments on Epinions last week this was not the result I expected. Now someone just needs to post the Epinions review to close the loop...
Stuart is 'the blogosphere' according to the "Am I Social Software or Not" site, and I am:
 

Curious about what Microsoft Research is tinkering with in the Social Networking Analysis and Social Software arenas? Check out the Microsoft Social Computing Group. Many interesting projects listed here.
I found this site when I was doing research on a paper I am writing on "Personal Knowledge Mapping" and came across a reference to their Personal Map project.
Wonder why there's no mention of Wallop on this Social Computing projects page? [last seen at Faculty Summit 2003, (scroll down to "Booth 25")]
ps: Regarding Social Software, you might also want to visit Denham Grey's SocialSoftware section of his KmWiki for some great links.