Recently in social network Category

Three weeks ago, Linda Girard and Catherine Juon over at Pure Visibility convinced me to start Tweeting on Twitter. It's been sort of fun, but I find I mainly do it when I am extremely busy otherwise. If I'm not busy, I do it less.

A few general observations about Twitter's utility:

• It's been a great tool for keeping up with happenings around Ann Arbor. I've certainly learned a lot more about the people at Pure Visibility who are all on Twitter.
• I've managed to reach out to other people who I knew in past lives, and that has been fun.
• In the preceding two cases, I'd categorize everyone as part of the digerati. My personal trainer is not on twitter. None of my gym pals are on Twitter. The Dean of the school where I teach is not on Twitter, nor will he ever be.
• The chief question on my mind is the extent to which twitter's mainly digierati crowd can provide me with generally applicable information. One point in favor of twitter is that I have learned alot of things about Ann Arbor I never knew, and I've been here a decade. So, it's been at least a little worth it.

Josh Porter has asked on his blog what practical value people can get out of folksonomies, and Steve Rubel is trying to come to grips with potential marketing implications. A folksonomy is just the aggregate of tags (labels) people have applied to a resource in a shared archive. The best known example is del.icio.us, a system where people label and store their browser bookmarks on a shared web site. The tags for these bookmarks can be thought of as one-word descriptions of what the bookmark is about. The folksonomy for a particular bookmark is the collection of tags the various people who bookmarked it have applied to it. So people might tag the New York Times book review site as variously “books”, “literature”, “idiotReviews”, etc. That collection of tags is the folksonomy for that site. The word folksonomy can also be used for this same group classification process applied over many sites.

So, what's the practical value of all of this? My cut is that one of the main sources of value is in tracking the spread of memes (e.g., pivotal ideas, advertising slogans) that can be summarized in a word or short slogan. Are people picking up on a particular way of viewing the world, perhaps one that you espouse?

I read an interesting post by Steve Rubel who was attending the Blog Business Summit over the past couple of days. He was reporting on a presentation about using blogs for emergency PR (his profession). Reading the post, I wondered what it really had to do with blogs. It seemed to me that he was really just talking about a web communications channel, of which blogging is one example. So, what's so special about blogging?

Just thought I'd drop a quick note about progress with The Community Engine. We have a few exciting developments over the next few weeks:

• We will be getting out a white paper on the BIT320 Blogosphere. That should be quite an effort, with lots of PR.
• We may very well get a podcast going on the site. Podcasts are just a new way of distributing MP3 files using xml syndication. The main point being that you can subscribe to the podcast and have it delivered to you. A very nascent technology, but potentially big.
• The full web site should be complete sometime next week. The trick will be getting it paired down appropriately, so that it gets completed.
• The Community Engine should soon start work with Menlo. More on this one later.