judith meskill's knowledge notes...

where did all my 'social software' posts go?...

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

you can sell anything on ebay...

Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: The voice of the valley economy

BAYVILLE, N.J., Jan. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- InterMedia Inc. (DE), the creators
and owners of RateOrDate.com, announced today that they have listed their
website RateOrDate for sale on eBay. The owner and CEO of
InterMedia Inc., Jay Gould, recently expanded the company by creating a sister
company SocialTree Inc., which will focus their efforts on the recent and
highly financed online social networking industry.

enterprise grade social networking...

Today in eWeek, Matt Hicks questions: Are Enterprises Ready for Social Networking?

Stowe Boyd says: "There's no place more evident than in sales that who you know is more important than what you know."

"Sales and business-development groups are heavy users of sales force automation systems, which already track ROI and deal flow metrics. Companies who first use social networking in a coordinated way should have little trouble tracking the impact that the technology has on the number of deals or time it takes to make a deal," Boyd said.

Social Networking software mentioned in this article:

Spoke Software, Visible Path, Zerodegrees, and LinkedIn.

what is your 'love quotient'...

Stacey Snow-Clarke reporting for 'The Business Journal of Tampa Bay' - 'Local couple to launch dating site' - writes:

"Jesse James, a consultant and motivational speaker, won't be seen leaping from speeding Amtrak trains with sacks of stolen goods. But James, 57, does want to help people get their lives on track. In February, James and his wife, Ashlee, plan to launch MyEMatch, an online dating service.

...What differentiates MyEMatch from thousands of other dating sites is its "Love Quotient," a test that assesses the user's relationship-building skills, James said. The idea is to make people aware of possible challenges in developing relationships."

destinationCRM 2004 predictions...

destinationCRM.com: What's in Store for '04?
by Martin Schneider

...As the New Year approaches, some wonder what 2004 has in store for the CRM industry. Industry pundit Barton Goldenberg, president and founder of CRM consultancy firm ISM, Inc., predicts a lot of positive momentum on the horizon for the industry.

Other hot trends in 2004 include the emergence of CRM in the social networking space, especially in the sales field; further acceptance of the hosted CRM model as a viable CRM strategy; and 30 to 40 percent growth in the number of companies operating as true real-time enterprises, according to Goldenberg...

social networking predictions...

David Lidsky, a senior editor at Fortune Small Business, reports his Fearless Forecast for 2004 in hopes of duplicating the success of his "outlandish predictions" for 2003.

One of the questions David Lidsky asks & answers is:

"Will social networking stay cool?"

...quote...
Friendster, the leader of the social networking phenomenon, becomes withdrawn, angry, defensive, moody, and erratic, leading sites one degree away from Friendster - Tribe.net, LinkedIn, CraigsList - to stage an intervention. Friendster couldn't deal with its surging fame and became addicted to prescription painkillers it got from Rush Limbaugh when he signed up. And he had said that he was "just here to help." That enabling behavior meant Friendster never had to confront that it was never really interested in making new friends as it says on its profile. Its true desire had been to find "activity partners," if by activity you mean finding gullible young hipster wannabes to sign up for a thinly disguised dating service in the hopes of making money off of them later. The pressure to maintain the friendly illusion led it to spiral into decidedly non-friendly activities, making the gossip-page exploits of Britney Spears, Tara Reid, and Paris Hilton look like the ladies were attending ice cream socials. Friendster checks itself into the same retreat where Limbaugh sought help and returns to the Net five weeks later, blaming the media for wanting it to succeed too badly because it's different from the other dating sites.
...end quote...

tickle in your christmas stocking...

Silicon Valley Biz Ink has a fun press release on Tickle by Emode's shopping related quizzes: Corduroy in Your Stocking This Year? - that reveals America's 'Holiday Shopping Styles and Quirks.'

social networking more or less...

The New York Times :: Social Networks
By Jon Gertner

...quote...
Some of the fledgling social-network companies may indeed mature into powerful business hubs like eBay or Amazon. Yet the more intriguing prospect, from a sociological standpoint, anyway, is whether these applications will actually transform our lives. Ever since the publication of "Bowling Alone," we've been flooded with even more data about the end of community and lamentations for its return. At least in theory, a readily accessible social network would enable more of us to bond with people we regard as far less anonymous than strangers. The larger possibility, that plugging into our social networks might somehow remedy a profound national loneliness, is even more enticing.

What seems just as likely, however, is that social-network applications will further fracture life into disparate spheres -- the online and the offline. Jonathan Abrams (the C.E.O. of Friendster) and Mark Pincus (the C.E.O. of Tribe Networks) see their creations ultimately as a means to enrich offline experiences. But this fact is incontrovertible: technology has outpaced our physical ability to manage the social network. Duncan Watts, author of this year's book ''Six Degrees,'' has wondered whether our primitive ancestry gives us a hard-wired tendency to attend to only our immediate associates, like family and friends. Our online persona may be rich with friends and contacts; it may make us feel popular and deeply valued as we trade tips about the best Australian Shiraz or converse about the best way to get to Burning Man. But our offline persona still gets stuck in traffic on the way to the liquor store. Our online persona may manage a Web-based cocktail party of three degrees -- a party that would include our friends, the friends of our friends and the friends of our friends' friends. But our offline persona, juggling the demands of family and work, can barely return the telephone calls from the first degree.
...end quote...

Plaxo evil?...

[UPDATE: I have subsequently made a number of posts regarding Plaxo at The Social Software Weblog that you might want to reference as I have 'softened' my opinion on Plaxo, and so has David Coursey, quoted below, for that matter.]

Yes, says David Coursey, Executive Editor of ZDNet AnchorDesk in 'Why my address book is spamming you.' David has been testing add-ons for Outlook and 'spamming' his address book acquaintances with requests for infomation. The add-ons he has been testing are: AccuCard, GoodContacts, Plaxo, and he is looking for feedback on AddresSender, which he did not get an opportunity to test. David has decided to stay with the service he started out with: GoodContacts.

The following is an excerpt from David's article above - his opinion on Plaxo:

...I'LL START my comparison of these services with Plaxo, because Plaxo gives me the creeps. There are several reasons for this.

I don't respond to Plaxo requests, won't join Plaxo, and recommend you don't, either. On the other hand, Plaxo is free, promises to stay free for individuals, and if you don't share my concerns to heck with you. Seriously, Plaxo seems to work fine, it will just never work for me...

social networking for fun not love...

In The New York Times this morning, S. Lee Jamison writes about 'An Online Search for Fun, Without a Look for Love.'

As my burgeoning list of 'social networking' links - creators, channels, funders, and analysts - grows by leaps and bounds, so does the number of reasons that people seek these 'channels' of connections.

Do you dial into any of these 'channels' for connections?

The New York Times article that I cite above is a 'fun' read about the value of finding friends while utilising the connection power of CraigsList, Friendster, The Lunch Club NYC, and Social Circles.

social networking with zerodegrees...

MarketWire :: ZeroDegrees Debuts Premiere Privacy-Driven Social Networking System for Business

...quote...
Online Service Exponentially Increases a User's Network of Relationships While Maintaining "Gold Standard of Privacy"

SANTA MONICA, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 12/10/2003 -- ZeroDegrees Inc. (ZDI), the "People Network Company," has announced its company launch with the final beta of its ZeroDegrees social networking technology that enables people to connect in a way that closely emulates natural social behavior. Its final beta is now available for free download at www.zerodegrees.com. In the 16 weeks since its soft launch and original beta, the network has grown to 140,000 searchable contacts.

ZDI simplifies and accelerates the real-life process of connecting people with the contacts of their friends and colleagues using modern technology and old-fashioned discretion. Recognizing that the lion's share of new business development in industries such as law, automotive, accounting, software, medical and marketing services are done by personal referral rather than cold call -- in some cases by a factor of ten to one -- ZDI's "People Search Engine" enables business professionals to find a path to new clients through trusted intermediaries who know both the client and the business professional. In addition, sales and business development professionals can search for a path and request introductions to known executive decision makers in the Global 2000 using the same process of leveraging trusted relationships.

The ZeroDegrees system is available as an online service for individual subscribers as well as enterprise customers on a per-seat basis. The service is 100 percent opt-in at every level and lets each subscriber decide what is published about them, who can see their information, whom they are linked to, who can search across their network, and who can contact them for an introduction...
...end quote...

social networking goes to the dogs...

In MarketWire today there is an announcement for Six Degrees of Separation for Your Pets.

Backwash a Boston, Massachusetts based company that grew out of a personal project of founder David Ring, today announced - Backwash for Pets - "the first social networking site for pets and their owners."

David Ring comments: "The whole pets concept grew organically. A few of our Backwash.com visitors registered under their pets' names, uploaded their pet photos, wrote profiles for their pets and then engaged in message board discussions posing as their pets. The idea quickly caught on like wildfire and the spin-off site Backwashpets.com is the end result."

Backwash was founded in August, 1997 and is headquartered in Boston, MA. (Sounds like an 'only in California' concept to me, but hey... (^:)

social networking ala boston globe...

Boston.com :: Six Degrees Co.
By Chris Gaither

More buzz on social networking attracting users and investors. Many of the same faces and places I have documented in the past - but a few new individuals mentioned in this article which asks: "But will anybody make money?" and questions the wisdom of calling 'social networking' 'Internet 2.0.'

Mentioned in this article:

James P. Currier, Tickle by Emode, Friendster, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, Sequoia Capital, Battery Ventures, Mayfield, Knight Ridder, The Washington Post, Tribe.net, Andrew L. Anker, August Capital, Ringo, Evite, Barry Diller, IAC/InterActiveCorp, John Foley, Monster, Stanley Milgram, The Oracle of Bacon, Sixdegrees, Stan Fung - Zero Stage Capital, Elizabeth Lane Lawley, Spoke, Ryze, visiblepath, LinkedIn, Contact Network, David Flaschen - Flagship Ventures, Google, Mark Kvamme, and Samir Arora.

C I Host + Friendzy = Social Networking?...

EWORLDWIRE :: C I Host, Friendzy Partner To Launch Social Networking Site

DALLAS/EWORLDWIRE/Dec. 5, 2003 --- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

C I Host, Friendzy Partner To Launch Social Networking Site

BEDFORD, TX (December 3, 2003) - Those purported "six degrees of separation" may narrow a bit as C I Host, a global leader in Web hosting and Internet infrastructure, partners with One Technologies, Ltd., to launch social networking site Friendzy.

Friendzy, hosted by C I Host, provides one of the most comprehensive sites for social networking - perhaps the fastest growing and most symbiotic example of the Internet's communications potential. Intimate social networks, called Friendzys, form around common threads - experiences, hobbies, interests, needs, professions, consumerism, informative sources, etc.

Alex Chang, Friendzy founder and CEO of One Technologies, said, "Friendzy membership will multiply rapidly, so we need the highest assurance of security and the greatest flexibility for community growth. The site is based on Microsoft .NET technology, so C I Host satisfies and actually surpasses all of our requirements."

Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host, said, "Friendzy realizes the Internet is bringing the world together in ways never imagined, one hundred eighty notches opposite from critics who said computers create isolation."

Friendzy brings together members based on experience and real life interaction, to create quality relationships not just quantity. The network invites new members to enjoy self-expression and self-discovery by meeting new people and trying new things.

CNN on social networking...

CNN :: Net-working: Can cyberspace help?
By Nick Easen for CNN

...Web sites are springing up to help managers meet the right contacts. And in many cases colleagues can help make the connection.

Venture capitalists have ploughed millions of dollars into Friendster and similar community sites. But it remains to be seen whether they will reap big returns. "I have no doubt that 90 percent of people will be happy to pay a fee for a referral that they can't get any other way," says Guericke...

six degrees patent via NYT...

The New York Times :: Patents: Idea for Online Networking Brings Two Entrepreneurs Together

...Reid Hoffman, chief executive of LinkedIn, and Mark Pincus, chief executive of Tribe.net, considered the six degrees patent so valuable that they bid on it and won when YouthStream decided to auction it, saying it was not using it in its current business operations. They learned about it from Andrew Weinreich, a lawyer, who founded Sixdegrees.com in 1997 with a friend, Adam Seifer. YouthStream bought the company in 1998 for stock then worth $125 million.

Nonetheless, other entrepreneurs like Mr. Brydon are skeptical that patents will play a significant role in shaping the social networking landscape, even though Mr. Weinreich, the co-founder of Six Degrees, is an adviser to visiblepath. "This industry is going to go in a thousand different directions," Mr. Brydon said. "I think we're going to find that many of the things being protected today are completely irrelevant a year from now." ...

social networking ala New York Post...

New York Post :: Social Networks Get New Friend$
By Ben Silverman

...DID you hear the news? Social networking is the next big thing.

Friendster is currently free, devoid of annoying ads (it has some ads, but no pop-ups) and pretty private. But venture capital firms don't throw down $13 million to make people happy - they do it to make themselves money. And like the most successful social networks, it's all about money...

knight ridder on tribe.net and blogging...

Editor & Publisher :: Knight Ridder's Web Focus: Local, Local, Local
By Carl Sullivan

Interview with Hilary A. Schneider, president and CEO of San Jose, Calif.-based Knight Ridder Digital (KRD)

...As we move into 2004, what are the biggest challenges facing KRD?

HS: The challenge is to keep growing, both share and revenue in existing businesses -- and expand into new businesses -- in ways that are smart for Knight Ridder. We have aggressive plans for next year. On the classified front, we want to grow volume of recruiter listings and leverage our increased job seeker traffic from MSN and AOL. We also plan to continue to grow automotive listings share. And while we focused a lot of attention on our largest sites in 2003, next year we will bring that expertise to all of our sites to drive audience and revenue in our community markets. We successfully rolled out several site redesigns this year, and will continue those efforts in 2004.

In addition, we're exploring how social networking can power listings -- especially private party -- through our investment in Tribe.net. We think there's a tremendous opportunity here to build a business around the intersection of communities of interest, self-publishing, and person-to-person listings.

What news sources do you consult regularly -- online and offline? And what do you think of blogs -- hype or industry-changing?

HS: Living in the Bay Area, I read the San Jose Mercury News, and regularly jump onto the site to check out breaking news throughout the day. I also read The Wall Street Journal.

As for blogging. I think it's a fascinating development. We have two blogs on SiliconValley.com: Dan Gillmor's eJournal and Good Morning Silicon Valley. As newspaper companies, we have to ask ourselves: what does it mean to allow a reporter to publish under the media brand directly to the Web -- without any editing? This is different than traditional editorial workflow, which has multiple levels of editorial checks and balances. To provide transparency to users, blogs should be clearly labeled: what is edited by us, what is written by us but published in real-time, and what is self-published by other users. The business model to sustain this kind of publishing is still to be determined, but to reference Tribe.net, we think user-generated content, powered by social networking, has potential to drive traffic, revenue, and listings in our local markets...

danah decoding @ nyt.com...

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...

social networking notes...

While perusing Luigi Lugmayr's realkm weblog this evening I came across another social networking sites to add to my growing list: Affinity Engines.

Luigi makes mention of Valdis Krebs in his weblog which inspired me to perform a Google search on sites 'related to' Valdis' InFlow software and I found: Fractal Genomics - another site that I have to look into further, and an organization to which Valdis belongs: INSNA (International Network for Social Network Analysis) that has a long list of software programs for social network analysis.

social networking ala red herring...

Red Herring's assessment of the current 'social networking' playing field, in:

Social nets: goldmine or rat hole?, is:

"Friendster and San Francisco-based Tribe Networks appeal to the consumer market. Friendster helps people looking for dates and new friends, while Tribe is creating a community-based classified ads service. Meanwhile, LinkedIn and British Virgin Islands-based Ryze are aimed at professionals. Others, such as Spoke, New York-based Visible Path and Santa Monica-based ZeroDegrees target the enterprise." This article goes on to state: "The various flavors of social networking are based on a simple premise: that a friend or a friend of a friend will help you find your next sale, job, or date." And concludes with "All told, the fuss over social networking shows that VCs and entrepreneurs are once again willing to place bets on companies with unproven business models."

Mentioned in this article, in order of appearance,
(a veritable 'Who's Who List' of the current 'Social Networking' Players, Analysts, and Funders):

LinkedIn, Sequoia Capital, Friendster, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, Spoke Software, Doll Capital Management, David Hornik, August Capital, Tickle by Emode, Alison Murdock, IBD NETWORK, Reid Hoffman, Charlene Li, Forrester Research, Sixdegrees, YouthStream Media Networks, Tribe.net, Ryze, visiblepath, Zerodegrees, Mark Granovetter, Mark Kvamme, Mark Pincus, craigslist, Ben T. Smith, IV, Tim Sullivan, Match.com, Barry Diller, IAC/InterActiveCorp, Evite, John Foley, Monster, Microsoft Wallop, MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, Cary Fulbright, and Salesforce.com.

social networking service search...

Sand Hill Road is sifting through the contenders to find the 'perfect social networking' investment. Matt Marshall - in Mercury News :: VCs on the hunt for next hot 'social networking' service - says "The gold mine, as VCs see it, rests in using the Internet to give a personalized, user-friendly twist to mainstream industries like dating services, job listings and classified advertising."

Below I have included links to those mentioned in this article:

Mayfield, Tribe.net, AOL, Evite, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Mark Pincus, Friendster, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, Esther Dyson, Esther Dyson's tech newsletter, The Washington Post, Knight Ridder, Larry Page, Tickle by Emode, Ringo, and Love.com.

social networking news...

[there are three news stories in this post, don't miss the two 'below the fold'.]

United Press International: The Web: Real-time networking
By Gene J. Koprowski

..."The idea is to take advantage of the Internet's ability to mimic normal human behavior," Alex Chang, founder of Friendzy, a Web-based social networking organization, headquartered in Dallas, told UPI. "The most useful contacts you make are through someone you already know. There is no better targeted marketing than going through people you already know."

Plantec also predicted the very nature of social relationships would change for humans as these virtual characters evolve. "People will have relationships with computers," he said...

Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: Gratitude.net Provides Opportunity to Share Life Challenges and Cultivate a Deeper Sense of Thankfulness and Zest for Life

...With the renewed popularity in social-networking sites, Gratitude.net builds upon the trend of people looking to the web to help them make personal connections and experience a sense of community. With instant access to a large network of others who may have faced similar life challenges, Gratitude.net allows members to easily poll one another to quickly tap into knowledge and insights on how to best approach specific problems. The Gratitude community allows for a supportive environment to ask for advice, seek affirmation and discover solutions to real problems.

"Gratitude.net was developed to help cultivate that person we all wish we could become," said Gattis...

Mercury News :: Marimba chairman to step down
By Therese Poletti

...Kim Polese, one of Silicon Valley's few high-profile female executives, said Tuesday she is stepping down as chairman of Marimba, the software company she co-founded in 1996...

He speculated that Polese may be interested in a new kind of software growing in popularity. "She has been showing up at parties about social networking software and blogging parties," Winer said. "It's a whole new generation of software, and some of it is being created in the valley."...

social networking trends...

In the following article Bambi Francisco outlines nine trends and warnings to keep in mind when considering a jump into the Internet sector. Her seventh point addresses the current interest in the 'social networking' arena and I am including it here.

Coming in 2004 :: Internet market-share wars
By Bambi Francisco

...7. Venture capitalists fortunate enough to have some money invested in public stocks have had some fresh cash to invest in upcoming competitors to the consumer Internet incumbents. Social-networked sites like Friendster, Tickle, Tribe.net, etc. are getting funded in hopes that they will be the next-generation of sites where people will flock and advertisers will follow. These sites just have to organize their database of people in a way that make it compelling to advertisers. At the very least, the sites do provide an alternative to subscription services like IAC's Match.com. To the extent that Tribe.net can get established as a place to advertise services or goods locally, sort of a combination of craigslist and eBay, it may see some traction next year. If you think the start-ups aren't ones to watch, think again. If the Internet years (1995-2000) are similar to the 1980-1984 PC revolution, it's more likely that companies going public after the 2000 crash will be big winners by the end of 2010. Of the 50 largest market capitalized tech IPOs in the last 22 years, 20 went public between 1985 and 1989. Only 9 went public in the early part of that decade...

social networking and baboons...

Anthropologist Joan Silk, a UCLA professor, is in the news this week for her research with female baboon moms who have formed tight social networking groups.

[There were about 30 hits for this story this morning on Google Search: silk social networking]

Professor Silk offers a number of publications - on the evolution of cooperation in primate groups - (in pdf format) on her website.

photo credit - Joan Silk's website

social networking and blogging...

[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...

social networking & knowledge work research...

A large portion of my research is at the intersection of social networking and social software solutions, and their capacity to help improve knowledge work. The following three papers may be of interest to others who are working in this space. An abstract for the first paper appears 'above the fold' on my weblog, please continue reading 'below the fold' for the remaining two papers.

Enabling Collective Knowledge Work Through the Design of Mediating Spaces: A Framework for Systemic Socio-Informatic Change (ResearchIndex)
By: David Ing and Ian Simmonds

ABSTRACT: We propose a framework for designers of business organizations and designers of information systems that portrays three forms of “space” that mediate social interactions: physical space, social space and informatic space. The framework aids organizational designers and information technology designers to understand some of the complexities of enabling knowledge work, by contrasting the properties of the spaces and their interactions:

* Social interaction enabled by physical spaces is the focus of architects of buildings and urban planners, managers locating individuals and team who work together, and conference organizers who plan events to encourage networking.
* Social interaction enabled by social spaces is the focus of organizational designers who develop supporting social structures such as centers of excellence or practitioner support networks.
* Social interaction enabled by informatic spaces is the focus of knowledge architects and process analysts, who administer and moderate groupware and workflow applications.
In addition,
* Informatic spaces hosted in physical spaces are the focus of Information Technology architects, who ensure appropriate geographical coverage, performance, availability and security through appropriate computer hardware and software (e.g. servers, access points and networks).

Since the ways in which knowledge work can be carried out vary from person to person across a community, and innovations are naturally introduced over time, an enabling infrastructure should be capable of adaptation to those changed needs. We draw on research in general systems theory, architectural theory, and social theory to inform our practices in advising on business design, and methods and tools for information modeling.

Information Retrieval Algorithms For Knowledge Management – The Challenge Continues (ResearchIndex)
By: Elaine Ferneley - E.Ferneley@salford.ac.uk, Brendan Berney - B.T.Berney@salford.ac.uk, and Yacine Rezgui - Y.Rezgui@salford.ac.uk

This paper considers Information Communication Technology (ICT) support for the knowledge creation process that takes place by the interaction of both tacit and explicit knowledge with the knowledge creating entities of the individual, group and organisation (or organisations). Attempts to provide ICT support for this process have tended to focus on two stages in the knowledge evolution cycle, firstly extraction and representation and secondly dissemination. In order to extract and represent knowledge a number of approaches have been used, these include: the use of knowledge bases and ontologies, the use of filtering and categorisation mechanisms to extract key terms and the development of various weighting mechanisms in an attempt to prioritise or cluster related entities. To support dissemination various approaches to user profiling have been used which usually incorporate some form of adaptive information filtering mechanism. This paper presents a critical evaluation of a number of the more well know extraction and representation techniques. It then presents a set of user profiling techniques appropriate for use in intra-organisation knowledge management portal applications.

SMILE Maker: Concept-Orientation in Agent-Based Architectures for Personal Assistance and Collaborative Problem Solving (ResearchIndex)
By: Svetoslav Stoyanov, Neli Stoyanova, Piet Kommers and Ivan Kurtev

The paper presents some experimentally validated design solutions on the groupware module ‘Partner’ of SMILE Maker for mobile and personal support facilities. Three types of scenarios for collaborative problem solving have been tested. Pin-cards, Delphi and BrainMapping modes proved to have a differential effect on learning and collaborative problem solving suggesting concrete design solutions.
SMILE Maker is a web-based knowledge support system promoting with just in time, just enough and just at point of need intelligent support in dealing with ill-structured problem situations. Conceptually SMILE Maker lies in a cross-section area of four recently strongly recognized paradigms: problem solving, concept mapping, collaborative learning and instructional design.
The module ‘Partner’ of SMILE Maker enables a shared group environment for distributing learning resources. It supports externalis ation and sharing the individual potential in terms of formal expertise and tacit knowledge, organised by the personalised meaningful perception of the problem space.

social networking and blogging...

Wired News :: Will Microsoft Wallop Friendster?
By Kari L. Dean

The two articles that I cite and quote today - from Wired and eWEEK - offer a little more on Wallop - Microsoft's 'invitation only' entry into social networking and blogging - and an extension of their IM product that is currently being tested by approximately 100 Microsoft employees.

Wallop is receiving mixed reviews as a entrant into the social networking / blogging sphere of services. Recently there has been a surge in mainstream news articles reporting on this cross-over area between social networking, social software, and weblogging.

...Rumors about Microsoft's Wallop have been greatly exaggerated, mostly due to the blogging community's inability to penetrate the site's invitation-only front door.

"We anticipate (Wallop) as being very closed and proprietary, which is antithetical to the way that blogs, as technology and a culture, have developed."...

Also reported by: Packing a Wallopby Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft's Wallop : Gadgetopia by Deane, The Blog Herald: Wallop being beta tested: Microsoft looking at 2nd Qtr 2004 release Archives, WinXPcentral - Microsoft Research Packs 'Wallop', and TechNewsFirst.com :: Microsoft Research Packs 'Wallop'.

Microsoft Research Packs 'Wallop'
By Darryl K. Taft

...LOS ANGELES - Microsoft Corp. themed this week's Professional Developers Conference along the lines of the company's advancements in presentation, storage and communications, and Wednesday Microsoft showed how its research arm is enhancing these areas and more.

Cheng demonstrated a research project called Wallop that includes Web logging capabilities, document and image sharing, and other interactive features. Cheng said parts of Wallop will find its way into the Longhorn operating system. The software will automatically associate people, groups and data in Longhorn...

social networking and blogging...

MediaDaily:: All The News That's Fit To Blog? Not Yet, But Maybe Soon

By Larry Dobrow, Contributing Writer

...Blogging and social networking may or may not change the face of traditional media as we know it. But Web wonks at a freewheeling panel discussion in New York Thursday morning said the impact of both is already being felt up and down the media food chain. And with one of the panelists estimating that somewhere in the neighborhood of three million blogs currently exist - three million people decrying the Bush Administration's economic policies, overcrowding at the local zoo or the propriety of continuing "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter" without John Ritter - it probably behooves those few who aren't paying attention to get with the program.

Other panelists explored whether social networks can help media companies build loyalty with existing readers. Tony Perkins, creator and editor-in-chief of AlwaysOn and the event's host, questioned whether newly emboldened readers will continue to be engaged by Web sites that don't allow them to comment on stories, editorials or columns. What the blogging and social networking era has done for these readers, he said, was reveal "the power of participating in media... the average citizen out there has something to say." As a result, he believes every Web site will eventually have to open itself up to readers' comments, or risk losing their trust...

MacNN News :: Rainjul launches Polywogg blog services

...Rainjul has released a first public beta version of Polywogg, a journaling/blogging service for Mac OS X Jaguar and Panther. "This first release of Polywogg is packed with innovative features, many never before seen on any journal service, such as video blogging with Apple's iSight camera and comprehensive desktop web client application support. The blogging and journaling phenomena are ultimately about the appeal of social networking." It is available as fully functional and non-expiring software with both a Polywogg Reader and Polywogg Publisher. For a limited time, a one-year subscription for five journals is free for Apple .Mac members and $15 for others...

social network news - upcoming.org...

The New York Times :: Online Diary: A Collaborative Event Calendar
By PAMELA LiCALZI O'CONNELL

...Event listings in newspapers and city magazines can be frighteningly comprehensive (there's far too much going on). But there's one thing they cannot tell you about a concert or lecture: who is planning to go.

Eventually Mr. Baio may have to recruit "super users" to help enforce rules against self-promotion (venues can't enter their own listings, for example) and to weed out fake listings. A recommendation engine will be added, he said, "to suggest events to you that otherwise you may never have heard about."...

social networking - the link is the thing...

DM Review - The Link is the Thing, Part 3
By Richard Hackathorn

A partial list of references mentioned in this three part series:

Valdis Krebs :: Post-Merger Integration, Scale-Free Networks, The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, Small World Project - Columbia University, Norah Jones, Citations: Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications - Wasserman, Faust (ResearchIndex), DM Review - Farming Web Resources for the Data Warehouse , The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web - Page, Brin, Motwani, Winograd (ResearchIndex), Pagerank Explained Correctly with Examples, Pagerank Explained. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it., SIENA, Associative Link Analysis resource site.

...Part 1 of this article (August 2003 issue of DM Review) reviews the work in network analysis of complex systems, particularly the recent research into the small-world (SW) property, aristocratic-egalitarian (A-E) distinction and tipping points. Part 2 (September 2003 issue of DM Review) applies these concepts to the business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) fields with a new methodology called Associative Link Analysis (ALA) by discussing the translation of typical warehouse schema into an associative graph form. This article, Part 3, the final in the series, describes several metrics for analyzing graphs, strategies and tactics based on the SW property, and implementation issues...

Additional reading on a few of the concepts introduced in this three part series:

"Small World Property": Locality, Hierarchy, and Bidirectionality in the Web (ResearchIndex),
"Small World Architectures": Multiple Scales in Small-World Networks (ResearchIndex),
"Tipping Points": Tipping Points,
"ER Schema": A Formal Framework for ER Schema Transformation - McBrien, Poulovassilis (ResearchIndex).

social networking and social software...

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.

social network news...

National Post :: Fast times at Friendster.com
by Mark Evans

Mentioned in this article, in order of appearance:
Friendster, Match.com, CMGI, Jupiter Research, Google, Yahoo!, Sequoia Ventures, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Tribe.net, LinkedIn, IAC/InterActiveCorp, Evite, Microsoft, and Time Warner.

...In many ways, Friendster's popularity is similar to that of Google Inc. Both services are useful and user-friendly. Much like Google's early days, Friendster is looking for a viable business model.

The most likely candidates are Barry Diller's InterActive Corp., which owns Match.com and the Evite.com invitation service; Microsoft Corp.; Time Warner Inc. and Yahoo!, which also has a large dating service. Conspiracy theorists would get plenty of ammunition from the fact Mr. Abrams happened to have a copy of Business Week magazine on his desk featuring Mr. Diller, who has quickly built an e-commerce empire through a series of acquisitions...

Business Wire :: Socialtext Unveils First Enterprise Social Software Collaboration Platform

...PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 21, 2003--Socialtext Inc.(TM), a leading developer of enterprise social software, today introduced Socialtext Workspace 1.0(TM) the first social software collaboration platform to bring weblog and wiki-based technology into the enterprise.

Socialtext Workspace is currently deployed with customers ranging from Fortune 500 companies to smaller startups to online communities...

Oakland Tribune Online :: Men hold the edge on gender gap odds
By Justin Pritchard, Associated Press

...Courtney Johnson of the San Francisco-based social networking company Emode, which launched an online dating service in the spring, recently gave a public talk on meeting your match.

"They're saying, I moved here because I know there's all these geeky guys who are waiting for the right person, but they can't find anybody," Johnson said. "People are too busy."...

The Straits Times :: Friendster takes Internet by storm
By Eugene Wee

...THINK of it as a warped pyramid selling scheme where, instead of cosmetics or health supplements, the commodity is people.

Only in this case, it's legal and costs nothing. Nobody gets cheated and everyone has a blast doing it, making new friends along the way.

If you're lucky, you might even score yourself a date. Friendster.com is taking the Internet by storm the way Napster first did four years ago...

The Straits Times :: Here you can make pals and get business partners

This article lists:
Friendster, Vanity Date, Pretendster, Tribe.net, and LinkedIn.

smart small services...

The New York Times :: Cellular Phone Company Gains by Thinking Small
by WAYNE ARNOLD and CARLOS H. CONDE

Mentioned in this article, in order of appearance:
SMART, Smart Buddy, Citigroup, Northstream, Philippine Long Distance Telephone, Globe Telecom, Safe Taxi, Virgin Mobile, MasterCard, SMART Money, Unilever, and Procter & Gamble. An excerpt of this story unfolds below the fold...

...Ms. Gazo, a 33-year-old housewife who lives 600 miles south of Manila in Davao City, is one of more than 100,000 mobile phone users who re-sell SMART cellular services through a new prepaid service called Smart Buddy e-Load. With a special, $20 chip for her mobile phone, Ms. Gazo can transfer bits of air time to her friends' and acquaintances' phones - as little as 30 pesos worth (about 55 cents). For every 1,000 pesos she sells, Ms. Gazo collects 150 pesos in commissions, turning her mobile phone into a second source of income for her family of four. "If I can earn 150 pesos a day," Ms. Gazo said, "I don't have to work."...

"Texting," as it is known, has cult status in Philippines, and everyone from the poorest student to the loftiest government official uses it. Executives tap out messages during business meetings. When hot news or juicy rumors erupt, they spread like wildfire over the country's text networks, which have become a kind of hand-held national chat room...

social network news...

[there are six news stories in this post, some interesting reads.]

ZDNet News :: Emode launches Friendster foe
By Paul Festa

...San Francisco-based Emode launched the Tickle Social Network after a two-month test, or beta, release. Designed to compete with Friendster, Tribe.net and other so-called social networking sites, Tickle lets people post profiles to help them make business and personal connections.

Emode said it is profitable already through its fee-based personality quizzes and matchmaking service. The company claims more than 6 million users of the latter service, and 500,000 of the Tickle beta, out of 15 million active members overall. Investors in Emode include August Capital...

rediff.com :: Indian to take on iTunes, Napster
by Tanmaya Kumar Nanda in New York

...Come November, a new Internet company hopes to go boldly where not many have dared. Srivats Sampath's company, www.mercora.com, is poised for launch, and will join a limited but growing number of online sites for buying and sharing digital music files.

Sampath has the 99 cents-a-song model in mind. Additionally, he will use Windows copy-protection but insists they are "agnostic to the DRM (we) use - but at some point, we will also support the Real Networks Helix DRM."...

TheFeature :: RFID Zeitgeist
By Howard Rheingold

Mentioned in this post:
RFID Journal, Prada Epicenter, Wired, Gen. Tommy Franks, Benetton, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, and Mark Pesce.

...We have never before lived in a world where your telephone knows your name, social networks hitch rides on objects and places, doorknobs decide who gets into a room and know who has entered, and every place you go, every thing you touch, is more likely than not to contain a processor and a miniature radio.

"RFID" isn't a household word yet, but geeks are beginning to care about "Radio Frequency ID tags" because of the privacy implications. The cost and size of microprocessor technology had dropped to the point where a sensor, a computer, and a radio transponder can be woven into clothing or embedded in the packaging of consume packaged goods. The notion that your razor blades might be spying on you is scary, but privacy isn't all there is to it. RFIDs are only the beginning, just as the first microchip, suitable only for desk calculators, was only the beginning for chips and PCs in the 1970s. Think about what it will feel like to inhabit a world where every object we handle, consume, or wear is likely to contain computing gizmos...

Movie rental services charge into online battle
by Chris Lake

...The nascent online DVD rental market could emerge as one of the key growth sectors in the UK, judging by the recent launch of two new companies that hope to replicate the offline success of Blockbuster on the web. ...

The VC-backed company is using personalisation and social networking tools to create a community-based service, with users recommending and reviewing films to provide insight for others. Klein said: "Personalisation and community features are very important - we allow film fans to rate films and write reviews to help inform other users. And we have a management team with bags of expertise, which we believe differentiates us from the competition."...

BusinessWire :: Entopia Introduces Enterprise Social Networks Analysis for K-Bus; Automatic Diagnostic Tool To Optimize Information Flow for Sales, Customer Support and Human Resources Teams

...BELMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 14, 2003--Entopia, Inc.(TM), a provider of information solutions, today unveiled Entopia Enterprise Social Networks Analysis, a diagnostic tool that enables managers to optimize information flow. By combining Entopia's dynamic expertise location with its visualization techniques, Entopia's latest application identifies the social networks within the enterprise related to a specific topic. These "people maps" instantly illustrate the subject matter experts, information bottlenecks and disconnected communities with an enterprise. Currently being exhibited at KMWorld & Intranets 2003, October 14 - 16, 2003, Santa Clara Calif., Entopia Social Networks Analysis is a solution built upon Entopia K-Bus, its enterprise knowledge infrastructure technology. Entopia Enterprise Social Networks Analysis harnesses the existing content in, and user activity around, various enterprise-wide repositories for use by the human resources, sales, mergers and acquisitions, compliance and customer support teams to identify experts, build teams, improve communication, identify displacement problems and avoid work duplication.

"Social network analysis has moved from an academic discipline to a critical business competence. New software tools provide real time analysis of knowledge worker networks," said French Caldwell, vice president of Gartner Research. "Who knows what and about whom is the most important knowledge for businesses trying to close a critical sale, launch a new product, or rapidly pull together a new project team." ...

Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: World's Largest Online Dating Network Launches JewishFriendFinder.com

...PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- FriendFinder Inc., the world's largest operator of online dating and social networking communities, today announced the launch of JewishFriendFinder.com. Created to answer the unmet needs of busy Jewish singles looking for marriage, dating, and friendship, the new site focuses on values specific to the Jewish community that are not addressed by other dating resources. JewishFriendFinder is the latest addition to the market-leading FriendFinder network, a series of customized destination sites designed to meet the unique cultural, religious, or demographic needs of individual communities...

km & social software research notes...

Information Ecology References

[Full text PDF versions of the following papers and book chapters are freely available on the "Information Ecology References" link cited above.]

Published Papers 2003

McArthur, R. and Bruza, P.D. (2003) Discovery of implicit and explicit connections between people using email utterance: To be published in the Proceedings of the Eighth European Conference of Computer-supported Cooperative Work, Helsinki, September 2003

Abstract. This paper is about finding explicit and implicit connections between people by mining semantic associations from their email communications. Following from a sociocognitive stance, we propose a model called HALe which automatically derives dimensional representations of words in a high dimensional context space from an email corpus. These dimensional representations are used to discover a network of people based on a seed contextual description. Such a network represents useful connections between people not easily achievable by 'normal' retrieval means. Implicit connections are 'lifted' by applying latent semantic analysis to the high dimensional context space. The discovery techniques are applied to a substantial corpus of real-life email utterance drawn from a small-to-medium size information technology organization. The techniques are computationally tractable, and evidence is presented that suggests appropriate explicit connections are being brought to light, as well as interesting, and perhaps serendipitous implicit connections. The ultimate goal of such techniques is to bring to light contextsensitive, ephemeral, and often hidden relationships between people, and between people and information, which pervade the enterprise.

McArthur, R. and Bruza, P.D. (2003)

Chapters in Chance Discovery, Ohsawa, Y. and McBurney, P. (Eds), Springer-Verlag

Discovery of tacit knowledge and topical ebbs and flows within the utterances of online community
5.1 Introduction
This chapter will show how to derive post-semantic context ([2][3]) based on vector representations of words (described in Chapter 5). The core problem is to discover relevant word associations in relation to seed words in the utterance. This may involve uncovering implicit associations or re-weighting explicit associations more highly. In other words, the goal of the mining process is to provide highly weighted associations, firstly between a seed word such as "John", and words inherent to the background information surrounding "John" such as "Smith", "Microsoft" etc., and secondly with terms implicit in the original utterance (Note: we continue using the example framed in 5.2) It is our view that the set of such associations form a part, if not the basis, of Grice's conversational implicature [1]. The chapter describes techniques for computing associations in a dimensional space that have shown promise in the literature. The goal is to provide some initial insights as to their usefulness for mining conversational implicature by applying them to a small set of email utterances. The second illustration illuminates how the representation and techniques inform of association's changes over time capturing the ebb and flow of conversations in the community of a mailing list.

Dimensional representations of knowledge in online community
6.1 Introduction
Chance discovery in online communities has many facets. It is the serendipitous meeting of two people with a background or interest in common (the interest being subsidiary to the community's raison d'etre). It is a solution to some problem that the community has, but that solution must come from without.
In this chapter, we separate the area into three facets:
1. chance discovery of online communities;
2. between communities;
3. and within a community.

social network news...

New York Times :: To Whom May I Direct Your Free Call?
By Nicholas Thompson

...Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis have reunited with the same team of Estonian programmers who wrote the code for Kazaa and have created a way to allow people to make high-quality phone calls over the Internet without having to pay a penny.

Paul Bresson, an F.B.I. spokesman, said, "It is legal; it is a concern; and it is something that we are looking into."

Mentioned in this article: Skype, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Cisco, The Pew Research Center, Legg Mason, MCI, Yankee Group, Vonage, and AT&T.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette :: Why hurt feelings really do hurt
By Michael Woods, Post-Gazette National Bureau

...The old Scottish nursery rhyme was wrong. Sticks and stones can break your bones, and names can hurt you, too.

"Emotional pain is an undesired psychological state of affairs," said Pankseep, who was not involved in the research. "And the less there is of that in social networks, the more harmoniously people will interact."...

social network news...

smh.com.au :: Text generation growing up online
By Deborah Cameron

...The prophets of the online world did not dream it up, the Jesuits did, but as mottos go it is hard to top: "Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man." And how true it is. With almost every girl and boy in Australia using the internet - 93 per cent, according to the latest reckoning - a new "kid society" is blooming.

The surprise for RedSherriff's research director, James Burge, is how rusted-on child users are and how pragmatic their parents have been about it. The internet is regarded as second only to books as an educational tool by parents, he said...

social network news...

[there are two news stories in this post.]

Fortune.com - Fast Forward - I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends of Friends of Friends
by David Kirkpatrick

...There may be a new kind of Internet emerging--one more about connecting people to people than people to websites. The blog phenomenon, where blogs link to blogs, is another aspect of this same trend. Mark Pincus, an investor in Friendster and founder of Tribe.net, calls this the early phases of the "peopleweb"--a user-controlled network of identities and relationships that transcends any one site or company. How that web will take shape remains murky, but in the explosive growth of social networking we are surely seeing the future, using the Net to connect people with bonds of trust and friendship--and maybe sex...

CNET News.com :: McAfee founder joins chorus of music sellers
by John Borland

...With a pitch that evokes the heady days of 1999, digital music start-up Mercora is planning to launch a distribution service next month, inspired in equal parts by iTunes, Friendster and eBay.

Mercora is adding a community element to simple downloading that it hopes will help it stand out from the pack. It's drawing on the "social networking" idea that has Silicon Valley aflutter: Mercora users can group themselves together based on what kinds of music they like and then use these rough groups as sources of content and recommendations...

valdis krebs needs a weblog...

valdis krebs' inflow
mapping knowledge creation
weaving well-formed webs...

haitech haiku™
©2003 judith meskill

This morning I received a comment on my Notable Judiths - Judith Donath post of 31 August 2003 from Valdis Krebs [whom I met virtually in Jerry Ash's AOK: Star Series with Patti Anklam.]

I then did a search on my personal "k-loggers" blogroll [which I have built in the last three months since I began my "Knowledge Notes" weblog] utilizing "Blogs I Read" [courtesy of Micah Alpern] and found the following references to Valdis:

individual posts:
Danah Boyd's connected selves: Mapping and honing our interconnections,
Jack Vinson's Blogs and the Tipping Point,
Jim McGee's Social Network Mapping and Blogs,
Joy London's Social Network Analysis,
Lilia Efimova's Blogger social network mapping,
Peter Merholz's Interview with social network researcher Valdis Krebs, and
Richard Gayle's Political Patterns on the WWW,

multiple posts:
James Robertson's Column Two,
Jon Udell's Radio, and
Julian Elve's Synesthesia,

and a preponderance of posts:
Patti Anklam's Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness,
Phil Wolff's a klog apart,
Ross Mayfield's [old Radio] Weblog,
Sebastien Paquet's Open Research, and
Stephen Dulaney's Blogging Alone.

And this is just in my small corner of the blogging universe. When "googled" Valdis Krebs returns 2,350 hits. [See his article for HR.com on What's Your Google Number]. Maybe Valdis Krebs doesn't need a weblog after all? (^:

msn chatroom shutdown: money or morality?...

BBC NEWS | Technology | MSN shuts down its chatrooms

Don't miss the Have Your Say section of this article...

...MSN is closing all its chatrooms in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and most of Asia from 14 October, and changing the way others are operated globally. ... Chatrooms on MSN's other global sites will either be supervised - or moderated - by an adult 24 hours a day, or will be on a credit card subscription-basis only. ... It means no free, unmoderated chatrooms will exist anymore on any of MSN's global network of sites...

social network news...

Many-to-Many :: The Weakening of Strong Ties
by Ross Mayfield

Ross Mayfield weighs in on the viral nature of Plaxo...

...Now that we are all on the network, it is time to figure out how to best leverage this incredible set of connections...the objective of keeping data current for dynamic analysis has led some models to burden people who don't benefit from the system to perform data entry. We have all been Plaxoed by now in the name of virality. If the transaction costs for updating contact information were lower or if non-participants gained value we would all be Plaxo users. But we are not -- stop spamming us...

MSNBC | Newsweek :: Chewin' the Fat
by Gersh Kuntzman

...Suburban sprawl also makes us lonely. Our communities, the journal says, "are not interconnected" and cause "a lack of social networks and diminished social capital, which can contribute to obesity, cardiovascular disease, mental health problems, and increased rates of mortality."...

urban informatics...

TheFeature :: Cities, Swarms, Cell Phones: The Birth of Urban Informatics
By Howard Rheingold [& Anthony Townsend, urban informatician and wireless activist, professor of urban planning at NYU]

...Townsend believes the pace of urban life is quickening. "As every person completes more tasks, communicates with more people, coordinates activities among more social networks in the same amount of time, the aggregate effect is an acceleration of the urban metabolism."...

At the same time that the urban core is heating up and attracting the young, fast-moving, youth thumb-tribes and unwired mobile knowledge workers, it becomes possible to extend sprawl even further. People will be doing email via speech-to-text/text-to-speech intermediaries while crawling through traffic from their suburban homes...

social network news...

Tidepool | Answering the Call, What can a volunteer fire department tell us about community?
by Ed Hunt

...In his groundbreaking book "Bowling Alone" Robert Putnam documented the increasing social isolation of Americans. We have shunned the civic organizations of our fathers and have instead turned inward, assuaging the longer hours we are all working with quality time at home with our families in front of the TV, or disengaged in solitary activities. In the past 25 years there has been a 58 percent decline in attendance at civic club meetings, a 33 percent drop in family dinners and a 45 percent drop in having friends over for dinner...

Science Blog - Baboon Fathers Really Do Care About Their Kids

...According to Jane Brockmann, who directs NSF's animal behavior research program, "This study puts together the behavior and physiology of individuals with the genetic and demographic structure of groups and populations. It will substantially increase our understanding of the evolution of complex social behavior."...

social network news...

The Value of Latent Ties :: AO
by Ross Mayfield

...Bottom-up Social Networking Models like Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe.net and Ryze grow from strong ties to weak, and share a predominant risk of devaluing what it means to be a Friend...

Business Wire :: Canon National Parks Science Scholars 2003; Recipients of Scholarships Announced at Vth World Parks Congress in South Africa

...Saudiel Ramirez-Sanchez is a student at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby (Canada). Saudiel is using a social network approach to study fish resource access and use practices in the Parque Nacional Bahia de Loreto in Mexico in order to address marine resource conservation issues. His work will provide information on social network properties as indicators of cooperative management of sustainable resources...

The Origins of Business Networking :: AO
Krishnan Unni [http://pigtailpundits.com]

...The first social networks started 3.5 billion years ago, almost a billion years after the Big Bang, with the cyanobacteria...

social network news...

The Chronicle Online - Program aids new student leaders

...Leading At Duke, a new leadership orientation program, aims to simplify their initiation process by providing students with better training and a greater understanding of the resources available to them at the University... the orientation program will also help students create a social network with peers and administrators...

Spoke Builds on Social Networking Patent Portfolio

...Currently, there are seven companies in closed testing of the social networking software, according to Tolles. A $9.2 million funding round earlier this year is expected to last Spoke until those companies become customers...

Your Table is Ready ... Meet New Friends Through Dinner Introductions

...Dinner Introductions utilizes an upscale and intimate dining experience to provide members with interesting social contacts and focuses on expanding their member's social network through an evening of engaging conversation and fine dining in intimate and upscale settings!...

social network news...

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Buzzworthy: Share that book

If you're interested in social networks and communities formed using the Internet, check out Rebekah Denn's story today about local involvement in BookCrossing, "a literary Web version of a message in a bottle."

More than 3,000 people from Anacortes to Yelm are now surreptitiously dropping off books covered with sticky notes announcing "I'M FREE!" and bookplates listing the volume's ID number for tracking online. Worldwide, the Bookcrossing site now boasts more than a half-million books and 150,000 users.

Santa Cruz Sentinel: Business calendar Monday September 7, 2003

A "SOCIAL NETWORKS AND BUSINESS" dinner panel will be Wednesday at 6 p.m. at Xerox, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto. Presented by the Institute for Social Networks Analysis of the Economy. Speaker: Mark Granovetter, a corporate scientific advisor, researcher and writer. Cost: members $45, nonmembers $55. Registration: ISNAE: Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy (ISNAE: is-nay)
.

notable judiths - judith donath...

Last evening I was reading a post on Mopsos - Is there a practical use to SNA? wherein Martin Dugage responds to an article by Patti Anklam on KM and the social network and asks an important question about SNA and corporate settings.

Reading Martin's post and Patti's article inspired me to perform a Google Search on the intersection of "knowledge management" and "social network analysis". The first result of this search was a February 21, 2002 article by Peter Morville on Social Network Analysis that appeared in his column Semantics. Great post by the way. When I read the comments section for this entry I found Ben Hyde's reference to The Sociable Media Group.

Clicking on the Sociable Media Group's people link led me to Judith S. Donath, the Director, who "is an Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab, where she directs the Sociable Media research group. Her work focuses on the social side of computing, synthesizing knowledge from fields such as graphic design, urban studies and cognitive science to build innovative interfaces for the online communities, virtual identities and computer-mediated collaborations that have emerged with the convergence of computing and communication."

This winding web-based path guided me back to an idea that I had a number of months ago to scribe a series of brief bios, on my weblog, of Notable Judiths. I was first inspired to embark on this endeavor by a late night Google Search on the word Judith. In this search Judith Donath was the second entry out of 4.78 million results. I was originally going to start scribing this series with the first Judith returned by Google. However the second (Judith Donath), in this serendipitous turn of events, will serve as an excellent beginning.

Postscript:
I found this article from Discover magazine in the April 2003 edition - Emerging Technology: Who Loves Ya, Baby?. In this article the research of both Judith Donath and Valdis Krebs are featured. And so, to bring this piece back full circle, I recently had a virtual meet with both Patti Anklam and Valdis Krebs in an AOK: Star Series discussion. Patti Was the Star of the series and Valdis most graciously joined in on the discussion to bring his deep knowledge and research to bear in the rather lively discussion. Well within six degrees. (^:

waypath buzz-o-meter...

The Waypath Buzz Maker gives you the option to enter up to five topics and chart their "buzz factor" among weblogs over the last 30 days. The following is a chart of five of my favorite topics in my "knowledge notes" weblog:

social network news...

Playgrounds in the U.S. More Than Just a Hop, Skip and a Jump Away

"Playgrounds are excellent places for neighbors to build vital social networks within their communities. This study reinforces how important it is for all of us to work together to build and maintain these valuable resources," said John Costello, executive vice president of marketing for The Home Depot. "In seven years, Home Depot built 100 playgrounds with KaBOOM! and we're committed to build 100 more by 2004."

Computerworld | The future of life on the road

"Through new sales knowledge services, it is possible to coordinate sales efforts towards a target customer group. This makes it possible for salespeople from different regions who work on similar clients to get insight on sales strategies of their colleagues, for example, and show how they can combine offers to create more sales. These collaborative services and agents can also create social networks with other salespeople and clients."

social network news...

Bunbury Mail : School Spins Its Web

"The project, called Networked Neighbourhoods, was officially launched at Picton Primary school this morning by Premier Geoff Gallop and is designed to show how the internet can strengthen a community by creating social networks and improved delivery of government services."

social networking - viral or valuable...

There was a good deal of buzz back in November 2002 and then again earlier this year regarding Plaxo (free-for-now contact update software.) Opinions vary widely from the trusting to the suspicious. I have recently been getting a preponderance of requests to update my contact information from a new wave of business acquaintainces who have been switching to Plaxo.

Today I found an interesting article on Plaxo by Stowe Boyd in destinationKM entitled Contact Unmanagement. I also found a plug for Plaxo on T Jacobi's weblog. He is happy that Plaxo recently (end of July) received another 8.5 million in second round funding from Globespan Capital Partners.

There was a lot of talk about Plaxo back in March including speculations and concerns from Stefan Smalla, Techie Musings, The Plaxo Worm and the Lovelorn by Bill Machrone, and then shortly thereafter Bill released a "change of heart" piece entitled, Machrone Takes a Fresh Look at Plaxo. In this same time period Paul Rowlingson, writing for computer active, thought Plaxo "A great idea that works well."

How do you weigh in on Plaxo, viral or valuable?

social networks - alliterative assay...

neighbors networking
budding buddy business buzz
friend of a friend fun

haitech haiku^tm
©2003 judith meskill

budding buddy business buzz...

Mercury News | 08/17/2003 | Budding buddy business

"Venture capitalists are opening up their wallets with caution to hot "social networking" start-ups, or those companies that help you connect with friends to help get ahead in romance or work."

mentioned in this article: Friendster, LinkedIn, Spoke, Ryze, and Tribe

social networks - cascading failures...

We're All on the Grid Together

"Most failures emerge and evaporate locally, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. A few, however, percolate through our dense technological and social networks, hitting us from the most unexpected directions. Unless we are willing to cut the connections, the only way to change the world is to improve all nodes and links."

social network and km research abstracts...

Research abstracts on Social Networks, Common Sense, and Knowledge Management.

(All of the following papers are available in PDF format and require Adobe Acrobat Reader for viewing.)

Social Network Computing

Nathan Eagle, Alex (Sandy) Pentland
"A ubiquitous wearable computing infrastructure is now firmly entrenched within organizations across the globe, yet much of its potential remains untapped. This paper describes how the handheld computers and mobile phones in today's organizations can be used to quantify face-to-face interactions and to infer aspects about a user's situation, enabling more creative and transparent functioning of human organizations."

Wearable Common Sense

Nathan Eagle, Push Singh, Alex (Sandy) Pentland
"This paper introduces a system that incorporates both contextual and commonsensical information to understand the gist of an informal, face-to-face conversation. We show that wearable devices, such as PDAs or cell phones, can provide the valuable contextual information critical for robust classification of a detailed conversation topic. "

Common Sense Conversations

Nathan Eagle
Submitted to the Artificial Intelligence, Information Access, and Mobile Computing Workshop at the 18th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Acapulco, Mexico. August 2003.

"We introduce a method for situation understanding in natural, face-to-face conversation. Our method combines a network of commonsense knowledge with keyword spotting and contextual information automatically obtained from a wearable device such as a PDA or cell phone. Using this method we demonstrate the potential for high accuracy, detailed classification of conversation topic."