Results tagged “community”

Last week, I found this picture of a group dinner at Guero's restaurant in Austin, TX, taken during South by Southwest in 2002.

At the time, most of us at the table knew each other primarily through the web and through the then-nascent blogging community. But in the seven and a half years since then, many of us have gone on to become entrepreneurs or creators, launching dozens of companies and products. I'm still collecting names and companies in the comments on Flickr, but just a cursory glance shows founders from Blogger, Six Apart, Adaptive Path, Flickr, Gawker, Twitter and more.

I point this out not (just) to name drop — you can click through to the Flickr image to see notes about who was there, read what they've done, or add your own annotations. But I also wanted to highlight one of the most important resources that creative people need to truly succeed: A community of peers.

In the business world, and especially in the technology industry, we focus a lot on the functional requirements of raising money, or on the technical requirements of having certain features or technological capabilities. What I've found, though, is that being part of an active, ambitious, supportive and diverse community of peers is just as valuable, if not more so, than any of the more prosaic prerequisites for success. That's even true in this photo — some of the people whom I met in person for the first time that night or that weekend have gone on to become among my closest friends, the biggest supporters of my work, and have ventured their formidable social capital to support my career. An even more diverse community of others whom I met at similar dinners or other events have played a similar role as well. Yet, at the time this photo was taken, I don't think any of these people had ever taken venture capital money for any project they'd ever done — everyone here had bootstrapped their way to the table.

So, it's easy to focus on the money or the little technological accomplishments, but I am glad I found these old pictures as a nice reminder that we should set aside time for a great meal with smart friends every once in a while. If it's not enough enticement that you're just having a good time, you can also justify it as one of the most worthwhile investments you can make in your future success.

From eWeek's "Upcoming" section, which I'd praised a few weeks ago, comes this interview with Java creator James Gosling. The key quote, for me:

Of Google, Gosling said: "I guess part of me has almost a moral problem with, 'What do you mean the killer app for Internet is advertising?' I'd love to believe it was all about building communities on the Web. But building communities is just a scam for getting people to pay for advertising. Search is just a scam to get people to pay for advertising. I know the Google folks actually resisted doing advertising for a long time. They didn't like the idea, but they had to have a spreadsheet solve to a positive number."

He goes on to overreach with some of his conclusions, but I thought his perspective was interesting.

Do you want links? Because I'll give you some damn links, I'm not afraid of you! I'm not afraid of NOBODY!

• Reyhan Harmanci on the third wave of academic study of hip hop:

Dominant, a UC Berkeley alumnus who actually attended the much-publicized class on Shakur in the late '90s, says that he finds value in hip-hop studies, provided they take the long view. "With hip-hop and all black music, you can't talk about the art separate from a lot of other things," he says. "You can't talk about hip-hop as an art form without talking about the people, the economics, how and why it was made. You have to be pretty thorough."

Finding ways to teach and study hip-hop from within a university setting is not easy. "I worry that scholars like us get so obsessed with trying to justify hip-hop that we end up running in circles," says Berkeley grad student Felicia Viator, a DJ who's finishing up a doctorate in history.

• Businessweek's Catherine Holahan looks at the unfiltered conversations that have sprung up in light of community changes after USA Today's recent web redesign. I don't know that I'd make a change in the cultural assumptions of a site at the same time as aesthetic/UI changes, because then you don't know which one caused everybody to lose their minds.

• Speaking of which, I started a shitstorm by suggesting that Ask MetaFilter should have a white background. My personal experience is that the site is white, since I've customized my account, but I didn't, uh... make a very good case that it should be the default because I was a bit uncharacteristically combative. On the other hand, I learned I'm a twit, a shrill, self-promoting, a-list retard who's not good at building community, more than out of touch, prone to issuing stridently absurd protestations, deserved of getting pissed on by an elephant, who is only being taken seriously ... because [I'm] friends with Matt Haughey and I'm encouraging selling out. One of my toughest critics in the thread had actually proposed a winning redesign in a contest on the site, an entry that featured a white background and was voted the winner by the entire community. I don't know why people think the blogosphere is an unfriendly place, when an honest suggestion to change the background color on one subsite of a popular community blog that I'm a huge fan of can inspire those kinds of delightful, well-considered reactions. At least there was only one vague threat of violence.

• I was surprised to find a list of Fall Out Boy's favorite albums to be somewhat interesting.

• Ask the Wizard, written by Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo is, flat out, the best new blog of 2007. The thing I love about great writing is it makes the pervasive truths seem self-evident and even obvious. Plus it's actually funny, not another tech exec wearing a goofy tie and claiming to be full of ha-ha.

• There was a lot of link love for the list of NYC's ugliest buildings on Gridskipper, but the overlooked gem was the pan of the Astor Place Monster from the New Yorker a few years back. Man, that thing still startles me (in a bad way!) every time I walk by.

• Dear Drew, have you considered changing the font on Fark's homepage?

• This is the old Top 5% of all Web Sites graphic that used to be used by Point. Which was actually Point Communications, which was actually at pointcom.com, until it sold to Lycos during a period of the web's history 10 years ago that is apparently so old nobody caught the reference. Winning the meaningless award used to be accompanied by an email alerting you to the good news. I suspect Todd Whitney is not still toiling away at Lycos.

• Indie rock is a cult of failure. Could be worse, it could be emo.

• I spoke at the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver a little over a week ago, and there's video of my presentation up on the web, albeit with suboptimal sound. But it kind of gives you a feel for what we were all talking about, if you have the patience to sit through it. (My part starts about five minutes in.)

• I wanted to be uniformly supportive of the Times story about the struggle of Asian pop acts, but I'd felt kind of conflicted and couldn't articulate why. Fortunately, Sree Sreenivasan articulated it concisely: We're Asians too, dammit.

• If you've somehow missed them, a few articles on the tech generation gap. Emily Nussbaum's excellent, definitive look at the distinctions between the technological expectations of those born before and after 1977 in regard to privacy seems like the coming-out party for the topics danah has been talking about forever. A simpler, but still compelling, Tim Bajarin piece in PC Magazine complements it nicely. And the WaPo sez colleges have lost track of students because the schools are still trying to use phones and email to talk to kids who only use Facebook and IM. Whoops.

• Here, take this: A capella Beastie Boys vocals from some of their best tracks.

• Remind me to run all of this through the Cliché Detector later.

• Someday, me and Kal Penn in a steel cage match for Most Famous Indian in America. Someday.

Jason describes the blog commentor's gaze, a rumination on how people who act unreasonably on the web fit some parts of the scientific definition of a psychopath.

For what it's worth, I was mostly just venting (posts that I write on weekends are almost always lunacy, generally speaking) but Jason aptly describes my true feelings on the subject:

I don't think most of the people that demonstrate antisocial behavior in comment threads are actually psychopaths or sociopaths (there is a difference) in real life. Rather, interacting via text strips out so much social context and "incidental information" that causes some people to display psychopathic behavior online and fail to develop an online moral sense.

The question now, of course, is how we can give people more social cues when they're interacting online. A few of the comments on my post, from Don Park and Ben Benner, do a good job of addressing this issue to some degree, as well.

John Dvorak examines incidental online communities, as opposed to explicit social communities like Friendster. There's some nice praise for MetaFilter in there, too. Having had the chance to spend some time with John recently, I'm more amused by his shenanigans, especially in light of useful articles like this one. He's still a world-class troll, but he seems to fully understand that intellectual dishonesty is a powerful tool, and should only be used in service of important and valuable causes.

Like many great social software applications, Flickr began its life as something else. Flickr was built on a platform for a game called Game Neverending, which had a lot of great features including an in-game economy based on exchanging various totems that had different relative values. There was really only a barter economy, which left the "innate" value of any individual item to be pretty opaque.

Today, Flickr has interestingness, which is a measure of some combination of how many times a picture has been viewed, how many comments it has, how many times it's been tagged or marked as a favorite, and some other special sauce. I suppose revealing the exact mix would encourage even more people to game the system, but the fact that it's not disclosed has led to a number of attempts to reverse-engineer the system. I doubt any of them are/will be successful (Flickr can update/evolve fast enough to change the algorithm if they figure it out) but that's probably going to be an ongoing dialogue.

When I think of things getting gamed, I think of Clay Shirky saying "social software is stuff that gets spammed". So maybe economies are things that get gamed.

What I'm wondering is, how is Flickr's interestingness different than the economy in Game Neverending? Than Second Life? (Or in Evercrack or Neverwinter or any of the other gaming platforms.) Is interestingness its own reward? Why don't I get to level up or power up when I create something interesting?

More to the point, the in-game economies of these games translate pretty cleanly into real-world cash, with eBay amplifying the efficiency of the currency conversion. And interestingness in other online media (like blogs) is rewarded by cash in a pretty straightforward way; I can sign up for TypePad, check a box to enable text ads, and pay for my account or point the proceeds to my PayPal account when I start getting lots of visitors.

But interestingness in Flickr doesn't pay. At least not yet. Non-pro users are seeing ads around my photos, but Yahoo's not sharing the wealth with me, even though I've created a draw. Flickr's plenty open, they're doing the right thing by any measure of the web as we saw it a year ago, or two years ago. Today, though, openness around value exchange is as important as openness around data exchange.

So does that mean the right answer for cashing in on my interesting work is to ask for a penny from Yahoo? Or does it mean I should just make an automated script that grabs my interesting photos and posts them to my TypePad blog so that I can put ads on them?

One of the things I've learned of late is that, despite being a wonderful, generous community of truly warm-hearted people, sometimes the blog world likes nothing more than a good old-fashioned pile-on.

I thought about this looking at the (totally justified) hard time that Cory gave Fast Company over their dumb linking policy. If you look at the conversation, people act as if some lawyer gleefully rubbed his hands together and said, "How do we get this periodical to be an isolated island of unlinked misery on the web?" I'm guessing that's not the case.

Keep in mind, Fast Company is an organization that's smart enough to have a homepage that damn near validates as XHTML. They've had a real, honest-to-god weblog with comments running longer than almost any magazine. They even send Heath (and his amazing transcription skills) to various conferences so that people who can't attend can get a lot of the benefits of attendance for free on the web. In short, they're surprisingly clueful, especially for a mainstream business/general interest magazine. But people are assailing this part of their site's terms of service as if it were a concerted effort to be evil.

For Cory's part, I'm not criticizing his post about this topic at all. Cory's mandates are the openness of information, fighting the tyranny of bad law, and encouraging the free sharing of information. And he's doing what I do a lot, bitching about something that sucks, particularly appropriate as this is his bailiwick. I think I've got pretty good credentials for defending Cory's right to write about whatever he wants. But still, the reaction incited is one that's unproductive at best and unkind at worst.

Since I hate to complain without offering a solution, what I'd like to do is propose a new model for responding to the blogosphere's frequent and characteristic calls to action against Stuff That Sucks. First, read the link. Don't go being a slashdot flameboy. Read the thing that's being linked to. Second, we're good at collectively ferreting out information, so let's find the person responsible. There can't be that many people responsible for a terms of service document at a publishing company, and it's easier to get a revision made if we know who's going to do it.

There's a human benefit to finding out the person responsible, in helping to understand their circumstances and constraints. In almost all of these situations, there's someone who had to compromise for reasons that are totally reasonable. Maybe the guy writing this stuff was tired of fighting with his boss over it, and didn't have hundreds of emails from bloggers who'd back up his position. Maybe the woman who put this in place intended to fix it as soon as she got back from maternity leave, and figured who's gonna read a TOS document that closely anyway? Not all of us are lucky enough to have our licenses fisked by our audience.

So, once you've got information on what's actually happening, know who's responsible, and understood why they might have made this mistake, you've got what you need to make a change. We're bloggers, that means we self-organize pretty well. Be the person who starts the petition or explains how to contact the decision makers and provides a useful, non-confrontational template for how to get in touch with them. Provide a place where everyone concerned about the issue can TrackBack their complains, along with specific suggestions. (I can't take credit for that one, Mena nailed that idea.) And, believe me, people will read that feedback. Especially since it'll be the first Google result for either (1) their company name or (2) their name within a few days.

And then? Follow up. They'll make changes, as quickly as they can, though in most organizations that's not all that fast. Keep in mind, you're adding a task to their list that they didn't anticipate, and they probably already have a day job. My last request, though I suspect it's not likely to be adopted, is that people acknowledge the change when it happens. From personal experience, you can usually find about a ten-to-one ratio of complaints to acknowledgements of an improvement, in the best case. If you are the one on the receiving end and you get one tenth as much kudos as complaints, consider your work a success.

Now, all my blog posts are under a Creative Commons license, but this seems one of those ideas that can definitely be refined and expanded into a specific set of plans for action by the weblog community on almost any issue. So this post is completely public domain, and I hope you guys help direct all the energy of the various weblog communities into positive action more often.

I'd suggest a few things off the bat:

• A PowerPoint plan of action so that executives or non-tech people can see how to use blogs for positive action
• A how-to so that non-profits and other social organizations can leverage blogs for their campaigns
• Some background documentation on the types of results bloggers have had (with everything from Trent Lott to the Star Wars Kid as examples)
• A place to collect personal testimonials from people who've benefitted from blogger-inspired campaigns or who've changed their work or changed their ways due to input from the blogosphere

I'm proud of what we've done in creating so many different weblog communities, and I don't want our legacy to be one of having the positives overshadowed by our frequent, though understandable, tendency to be unkind or uncivil to those we're communicating with.