Social Media - Jon Lebkowsky

Mumbai via social media

Though I spent Thanksgiving on a plane of existence where the concept of “news” just didn’t make sense, I did occasionally check in with my own slice of Twitter, and saw an interesting mashup of I’m-too-stuffed-to-live posts and ongoing Mumbai coverage and commentary. The same loose coalition that supported online repsonses to the Southeast Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina quickly set up “Mumbai Help” to coordinate information, including helpful phone numbers an information about the injured and deceased. CNN has an article about the social media response, noting that “social media sites like Twitter were inundated with a huge volume of messages.” The quote a Twitter user who said “Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.” CNN notes a down side to the social media response, noting that “a vast number of the posts on Twitter amounted to unsubstantiated rumors and wild inaccuracies.”

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

“During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured – ranging up to 1,000.”

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.

In the next paragraph, CNN notes that most tweets “were sourced from mainstream media.”

On the other hand, I see a tweet from Mrinal Wadhwa that says “mainstream Indian media has been absolutely Irresposible during this whole episode.” I suspect that in some locales the best information available was crowdsourced, mostly via Twitter. You can see for yourself – relevant Twitter posts have the #mumbai hashtag and are viewable via Twitter search. (While I wrote that last sentence, there were 18 new posts.)

Hossein Derakshan arrested?

According to Global Voices Advocacy, the active and highly visible Iranian blogger Hossein Derakshan (aka Hoder) has been arrested in Tehran and “is being investigated on suspicion of espionage for the state of Israel.” No posts on Hoder’s blog since October. Hoder’s been active in shining a light on other similar arrests. GV notes that the arrest hasn’t been confirmed by other news sources.

DemComm

In my last post, I mentioned that I was one of a group of online community professionals who were attempting to help the Kerry campaign in 2004. Sanford Dickert, who brought us together, has posted his own account.

The team began to work on the plan – and, through the hard work of the people on the team, we had the initial draft that Jock shows on the Greater Democracy post by the self-imposed deadline. The challenge we had was, at that time – the campaign was focusing on fundraising, staffing up and the insanity behind building up for the coming Convention.

But it should be clear – that DemComm was another skunk-works project: no one in the senior staff (with the possible exception of the Dir of Internet) knew about DemComm. We all knew that the goal was to prepare a proposal for the campaign that would be guidance for development – and help in supporting Cam’s community solution. Cam’s proposal (which I think is still one of the better ideas the campaign generated at the time – combining the best parts of threaded discussions, forums AND blogging) – was not accepted due to cost concerns and potential political liabilities (“What if someone said something on a Kerry Community blog that was racist or anti-American? Even though it came from an outside user, it still is a Kerry-branded site…”) So, while we had some of the best people working on DemComm, the challenge was – as a priority, the community effort had a very different focus.

It’s part of a longer piece by Sanford, who I met at the Digital Democracy Teach-In we helped O’Reilly organize in 2004. I had been engaged in trying to corral the social technology and social media experts who had been involved in the various progressive campaigns that season, to find ways that we could work together to build stronger progressive networks. This led to the creation of an “activist technology” group and a very effective workshop Dan Robinson and I put together, and Jerry Michalski moderated, the day after SXSW Interactive ended in 2005. It also led to a sustained connection with Sanford and other collaborators he brought together with similar intentions. I think that, long-term, our efforts and commitment have paid off. I’ve been less involved in politics this season because I’ve been focused on creating a new business, because I’m more interested in supporting multipartisan grassroots efforts than candidate campaigns, and quite a bit because I think capable people are using the tools much more effectively in 2008… as Exley’s piece confirms. For more on the 2004 accelerated evolution of political technology, check out Extreme Democracy, a book Mitch Ratcliffe and I co-edited.

Zack Exley on “The New Organizers”

Zack Exley, who rejected ~~a proposed plan~~ a meeting to discuss a proposed plan for community-centric organizing offered to the Kerry campaign in 2004, writes at the Huffington Post about the Obama campaign’s success in incorporating the “netroots.”

The “New Organizers” have succeeded in building what many netroots-oriented campaigners have been dreaming about for a decade. Other recent attempts have failed because they were either so “top-down” and/or poorly-managed that they choked volunteer leadership and enthusiasm; or because they were so dogmatically fixated on pure peer-to-peer or “bottom-up” organizing that they rejected basic management, accountability and planning. The architects and builders of the Obama field campaign, on the other hand, have undogmatically mixed timeless traditions and discipline of good organizing with new technologies of decentralization and self-organization….Win or lose, “The New Organizers” have already transformed thousands of communities—and revolutionized the way organizing itself will be understood and practiced for at least the next generation.

Obama’s people are extending the uses of technology documented in Extreme Democracy The Kerry campaign had an opportunity to go there in April 2004, but opted for a completely top-down approach, though a group of volunteers with experience in online commmunity, including Howard Rheingold, Nanci Meng, Tex Coate, Cameron Barrett, Jock Gill, Nancy White, Bob Jacobson, Aldon Hynes, Jerry Michalski and myself offered community organizing plans that could have been implemented with minimal overhead, leveraging technology and volunteers. Jock Gill wrote about this in 2006 at Greater Democracy. Jock posts text from the plan in comments.

Not faulting Zack, who was coming to the Kerry campaign from Moveon.org, an email-based organization brilliant at coordinating activist campaigns, but never effective using social technology to organize the “netroots.” We had been meeting with the Kerry campaign when he came on board and chose not to pursue the netroots approach, working instead with the moveon style of fundraising he knew best, under very real pressure to raise money for the campaign, leaving little time and mindshare for grassroots organizing, the effectiveness of which was iffy in the short term. What we were offering was risky in that it would have taken longer to build effectively, however if we had started then, there would have been a much stronger network of communities committed to the Democratic party, and Obama could arguably have grown his network better and faster. And it’s not that the netroots didn’t organize. Howard Dean continued working his networks to become the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and a very effective netroots emerged through Daily Kos and other progressive hubs.

And the Obama campaign really understood the power of the technology, not just to support fundraising, but to organize effective networks and communities in support of their candidate. I suspect there’s a whole powerful Obama network that you don’t really see because of this focus on building support from the ground up rather than through more visible mass media. It will be very interesting to see the effect of this organizing on the November elections.

Additional note: I’ve been discussing the netroots in a two-week interview with Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox, authors of Netroots Rising, in a public conversation on the WELL.

Social media for breakfast

Cross-posted from Social Web Strategies:

Peter Kim, who describes himself as a traditional marketing professional, gave an interesting talk at this morning’s Social Media Breakfast. He says at his site that he’s working on an enterprise social technology company, along with Kate Niederhoffer, who was also at the SMB, and my pal Doug Rushkoff, who’s “not from around here.” I’m mulling this over: he says he’s a traditional marketer but he’s helping build a social tech company, so there might be a contradiction here, especially given his talk, wherein he questioned whether social media really works for marketing. Actually, he led by questioning whether negative social media experiences (like fake blogs) had any impact on companies like Wal-Mart and Comcast… it’s not like their stock went south based on blogosphere or videosphere bad buzz. I pointed out, though, that the companies had done far worse without taking a huge hit. It’s a complicated world, and social media makes it even more so.

Another question Kim was asking was whether companies could scale their use of social media so that it could make a difference for them in a positive way, as part of their marketing efforts. Why are companies still spending three million on superbowl ads if social media can be effective? As always happens with new forms of media, at least early on the new doesn’t replace the old, it’s just another way of communicating. I think most of us who’ve been at this for quite a while suspect we’re seeing a revolution, the new converged media will be truly transformative, more and more so over time. I suspect Peter Kim sees that more clearly than he let on.

The talk got me thinking. Social media is complex, it’s niche, it’s political, it involves all sorts of personalities and personal quirks; user generated content requires monitoring or moderation or some kind of oversight, so there’s very real and possibly expensive social overhead. Some companies are jumping in and others are interested, but a social web strategy requires a lot of thought, and perception from new angles, flexing new brain muscles you didn’t know you had as you think your way into it. And you can’t own it in the same way you could own a top-down marketing campaign. In a sense, it owns you, and requires that you be authentic…

My friend Mike Chapman said at one point that “there are no rules. When you try to put rules around it, you break it.”

The Future of Affinity: Living Networks with Social Software

“The Future of Affinity: Living Networks with Social Software” was a presentation delivered by Jon Lebkowsky to the CenTex Chapter of the World Future Society in November 2004.

Thanks for inviting me. This is a huge subject, and I’ve tried to prepare an overview with some history, a sense of what’s happening now, and thoughts about trends.

There are thousands of people thinking about and working on social software and they’re all very smart, so every day brings new thoughts and new developments. This talk should give you at least a sense of what’s happening.

The Internet is a social phenomenon. It’s a communications environment that flows in many directions at once. The character of tools and applications built for use online is that they are interactive. Those of you who have computers that have persistent, always-on connection to the Internet: think how your experience and use of your computer differs from the experience and use of a standalone computer in the past, one that was not connected to others. Think how your relationships have changed since you got that persistent connection.

The killer apps for the Internet have all been about talking and sharing. We share artifacts that are formed from data, and those artifacts are exactly replicable and can be fixed in various media – a new reality that has rendered our concept of intellectual property obsolete. It’s also changed the way we think about social relationships.

Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, p. 15: “The Internet was deliberately designed by hackers to be an innovation commons , a laboratory for collaboratively creating better technologies. They knew that some community of hackers in the future would know more about networks than the original creators, so the designers of the Internet took care to avoid technical obstacles to future innovation. The creation of the Internet was a community enterprise, and the media that the original hackers created were meant to support communities of creators. To this end, several of the most essential software programs that make the Internet possible are not owned by any commercial enterprise – a hybrid of intellectual property and public good, invented by hackers.”

Rheingold emphasizes the collaborative and community aspects of the early development of the Internet because that had a lot to do with decisions about its structure. It was built for collaboration, for community. Since then, more than anything, the Internet has been a tool for community and for social engagement.

A few key technologies have evolved to make today’s Internet what it is:

The Internet itself, which we call a network, but that’s wrong: it’s a network of networks, where they can form new kinds of relationships to each other, and as Michael Schrage has said, New kinds of relationships between networks create new kinds of relationships between people.

Email – the first killer app, it was a defining technology, especially when email distribution lists found common usage.

File Transfer Protocol – the original file sharing, though how would you know where the files were located?

WAIS (Wide Area Information System) – an early way to find documents on the Internet.

Archie – search system for files available via FTP

Gopher – menu-driven system for document retrieval.

Veronica – search system for gopher

Usenet – distributed newsgroups that became public conversations

Online forums – asynchronous interactive discussions similar to bbs systems

Chat – realtime interactive discussions

Instant messaging – applications that support one-to-one realtime messaging; some IM software supports chat sessions for a limited number of users. IM was originally just social, but is finding more an more business use.

World Wide Web – a system for publishing online including support for text and graphics as well as page description

Content management systems – sophisticated systems for publishing web pages

Search engines – increasingly sophisticated systems for finding data on the web.

Weblogs – simple content management systems for personal (and sometimes professional) online publishing.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – machine-readable format for syndicating weblog and other content for aggregation by web sites and “news reader” applications

Wikis – text-based collaborative workspaces

P2p systems – decentralized systems for sharing files

BitTorrent – a system that supports the efficient sharing of very large files, e.g. music and video files.

If you look at the prevailing trends in the evolution of Internet technology, they’re not ecommerce or publishing, though both are important if not necessarily as profitable as we expected during the madness er, the 90s.

The prevailing trends are what I mentioned earlier: more talking and more sharing. Ultimately it’s about relationships, and those relationships can be represented conceptually as networks: social networks, where people are nodes in the networks and their relationships are the connecting links.

Earlier today I ran across quotes from Michael Schrage, in “The Relationship Revolution” (for Merrill Lynch), where he makes an excellent point about the social uses of technology:

“To say that the Internet is about ‘information’ is a bit like saying that ‘cooking’ is about oven temperatures; it’s technically accurate but fundamentally untrue.”

“A dispassionate assessment of the impact of digital technologies on popular culture, financial markets, health care, telecommunications, transportation and organizational management yields a simple observation: The biggest impact these technologies have had, and will have, is on relationships between people and between organizations.”

The traditional economics and established markets for human relationships are yielding to new cost/benefit equations enabled by new media. The coin to this new realm isn’t data and information; it’s the value and priority that people place on the quantity and quality of their relationships.”

What are the latest trends relevant to social software?

The growing presence and impact of weblogs (blogs), and the evolution of the weblog from a tool for publishing to a platform for conversation and knowledge-sharing. (Trackback)

The appearance of sites like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn that give visibility into social networks, your own and others’. These sites can support ad hoc group-forming and collaboration. Expect to see this kind of technology integrated with other technologies for targeted niches. That’s where they really belong. (Brazilians on Orkut)

Sites for sharing home-grown multimedia: sounds, images, and video. E.g. flickr.

More and better technologies for conveying and evaluating reputation (called reputation management). Examples: Slashdot, Ebay. When you’re building tools to support affinity relationships, trust is key. Reputation management helps establish trust before you know much about the other person.

Standards for conveying personal information, like FOAF, a protocol that allows you to store and selectively share your personal data. Ideally you should own and control data that’s about you.

Combinations of modular tools like weblogs, Wikis, chats, conference calls or voice over IP to get sophisticated environments for meetings as well as for sustained communication. These will have a relatively light footprint, as opposed to heavier ‘one size fits all’ tools.

There’s also the impact of wireless, which brings the possibility of increasing mobility into the mix. Wireless Future project for IC2: If we consider that the web puts the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, then wireless devices that access the web put all that knowledge in the palm of our hand, and we can take it wherever we go. More relevant: It puts the visibility and management of our relationships in the palm of our hand, and supports our ability to sustain computer-mediated collaboration wherever we go.

There is a trend away from proprietary applications, toward Open Source solutions. It’s important to understand the meaning of this trend: it’s about transparency. Proprietary solutions are “black boxes,” and you have no choice but to run them as they were built. There is an increasing demand by knowledgeable users to know how software is built, and to have access to modify the code that controls what the software does. And Open Source is generally supported by communities of programmers in collaborative relationships, like the early developers of the Internet Rheingold mentions in that quote from Smart Mobs. To that extent open source is always social software, because it is a product of social process.

We hear a lot about “knowledge management,” where the idea is to manage, retrieve, and make sense of knowledge stored in documents. Is that really knowledge? I think knowledge is not just information, but information plus process – and if knowledge is dynamic, its management has to address more than its static form. I think some of the tools we’ve discussed tonight will point toward ways to share an manage knowledge in dynamic computer-mediated environments. Challenging, but promising.

So I’ve given you an overview of social software, and how it supports various forms of affinity relationships. I’m sure I’ve missed a lot, for instance we could spend another whole evening talking about political applications of social technology. Thanks again for having me, and I’d be glad to take questions now.