I went through a monumental change at Get Real last week. I decided to drop the dozens of categories I had been using, and to drop back into a small number of very general categories, like "events," "technology," and "corante." This is primarily motivated by my adoption of tags, starting back in March. In recent months, i have been creating more and more tags, and part of the rationale for categories had been absorbed by the tags, and the two were overlapping.

For the moment, I have continued to use Technorati as the targetted tagspace, but I hope to transition to a Corante managed tagspace in the near future. More to follow.

Just because Suw is not posting heavily at Strange Attractor (see Fallow period), doesn't mean she's goofing off, as this BBC piece details: she's the co-founder of the UK-based Open Rights Group, working with folks like Cory Doctorow.

Jeff Jarvis (buzzmachine.com) will be joining us at the upcoming Corante Symposium on Social Architecture, 15 November 2005. His topic will be the impact of social architecture on media. In related news, the New York Times today announced that Jeff will be joining the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, as director of the new media program and associate professor. We couldn't have a better voice for this issue that his.

I am also pleased to announce that the Berkman Center on Internet and Society is a partner with Corante on the Symposium, which will be 15 November 2005 at the Harvard Law School, and a reception the night before.

I want to thank David Coleman for jumping in as guest contributor in August. Good posts that sparked a lot of discussion!

Because there is so much confusion swirling around about the former Podcast Hotel event, I am posting this to help clarify the situation.

We had planned a conference called Podcast Hotel, which was being developed by Alex Williams, who lives in Portland. On August 1, Corante decided not to proceed with the conference, because we had concerns about being able to have the sort of conference that we wanted to deliver for attendees and sponsors. As a result, we informed all sponsors, speakers and the few folks who had registered by that point that we were not proceeding with a Corante event at that time and place. We do intend to have a conference on podcasting, tentatively called "The Business of Podcasting", likely to be in the first quarter of 2006.

Alex wanted to proceed with a conference, independently, at more or less the same dates and locale, and we were ok with that. He has gone his own way, and is no longer serving as a director of events at Corante.

We all agreed that he would call it something else, which he has done. The conference he is holding is called Podcast Jams. The confusion has arisen from the fact that Podcast Jams is being promoted at the same Podcast Hotel web site, which is owned and operated, now, by Alex. And to make it more prone to confusion, in some places he refers to the event as Podcast Hotel and in others as Podcast Jams. We have asked Alex and others who have recently posted about the Podcast Jams show (like Chris Pirillo - Thanks, Chris!) to clarify that the event is not sponsored by Corante. It is Alex's conference, which he is running independently of us, not based on the program we were developing.

We wish Alex well with the show, but we don't want people to think this is the same Podcast Hotel that we were affiliated with. It's not. It's more oriented toward the music scene, and less about mainstream business podcasting. And it's most definitely not a Corante sponsored event.

Headed out to the Blog Business Summit tomorrow AM, and trying to bring some interesting folks together for a "salon" -- a thinly veiled excuse to talk while drinking. If you have not been invited and you think you should have been, check out the evite: Stowe's Salon.

Over the past several months, I have written many times about "social architecture" (see here). I recently invited a group of thought leaders to join me in developing a one-day Corante symposium on the topic, and got a great response; but I also got one email (from Ross Mayfield) that said "Sure, sounds fun. What's Social Architecture?" For the sake of my co-conspirators on the event, and anyone else, I am writing this post to clarify what I think the term denotes, and set a loose collection of questions to start a dialogue about the event.

[Note: I should be formally announcing venue (Boston, provisionally) and date (early November, provisionally) in the next few days.]

Social Architecture Dynamics

The following diagram is an attempt to charcterize the interactions of three sorts of "social agents" in the blogosphere -- the human creators (or authors) of blog writings, the human readers of blog writing, and the social software applications (or "machines") that search and analyze the blogosphere based on the social "gestures" that human writers and readers leave behind. Note that human authors and readers are collapsed into one category -- they are almost identical from the viewpoint of social architecture, since they both are reading and then leaving a gestural history behind.

Authors and readers both leave social traces behind (or "gestures"), as a result of their activities. Authors point to other blogs in their posts - either by link or by name - and create ageless links like blogrolls: these represent an implicit social network relationship between the parties, not just a topical pointer, like a search engine provides. And the actions of readers (which includes all authors) create similar gestural information: explicit, shared evidence of reading like comments and bookmarks, and implicit value indications, like the frequency of return to a specific blog, or the number of comments left.

Authors and readers can make assertions about blog posts, based on various capabilities that are basic to the current Web, like HTML keywords, or relying on specific capabilities supported by various software implementations, like rating services, blogging tools (Movable Type categories, for example), or tags. Tags in particular are an area of intense interest, to a large measure as a result of the premise of a distributed, decentralized, and bottom-up approach to making sense of the exploding volume of the blogosphere. For example, we browse through the tagspace of our Deli.icio.us network of friends or all Del.isio.us users as a whole to discover web pages of possible interest: a social search mechanism.

Machines -- software applications, like Google or Technorati -- "read" the blogosphere, too, although not in the way that people do. These apps are plowing through the blogs, indexing the text, and, on the social side, algorithmically evaluating the value of various blogs or blog posts based on the social cues that readers and writers have left behind, as well as less social analysis, like keyword incidence.

The analysis that machines provide serves the general needs of readers, and specialized reader constituencies, like advertisers. We use the analysis of Google and other search tools to provide us the most relevant and most highly valued results based on our search terms. We use Technorati's tag-based analysis to help us find the most recent or most relevant and highly rated posts associated with given tags, or sets of tags. They provide, therefore, and very useful service necessary for us to make sense of the expanding blogosphere.

On The Road To Get There

In essense, what people are doing is an endless search for more stuff to read.

In a real sense, what we do on the Web can be reduced to the graph above: we are somewhere -- looking at some page, a search result, the New York Times -- and then we read what's there, we make comments, capture bookmarks, or write blog posts. These are all -- including the micro details of how we read the page -- gestures that represent, implicitly or explicitly a value judgment about the material we are looking at. Sooner or later we leave the page, perhaps following a local link: one embedded in the post, a blogroll link, or a tag. Alternatively, we might jump from the local context not using local, hard coded links, but just typing in specific terms or tags at Google or Technorati, that are related in some way to what we were reading.

Clicking on any link is a vote -- clicking on an embedded link leads to overall link counts for the target page, while clicking on a tag is an endorsement of the relevance of the tag, itself, given the context where it occurs. All these gestures are ways that we extend ourselves in the world, and thereby make it our own, and socializing it.

[Note: This is why graffitti is a creative act. What is considered defacement is in fact an innate socializing impulse -- to leave our mark on what we behold, and thereby denote our liaison with the greater world.]

But we are always moving from Somewhere to Elsewhere, and everything we do on the way is potentially a gesture that could, if it were captured, lead to a richer understanding of the relevance and value of the pages -- and by extension, the authors -- involved.

Toward an Ecology of Social Architecture

The elements of social architecture are appearing at a bewildering rate, and there are a number of very complex societal and economic issues emerging along with the explosion of social artifacts:

1/ Ethics and Economics of Social Gestures -- Who owns the traces of social architecture? If authors create public tags -- for example -- can companies accumulate them, and sell the resulting information gleaned without consideration for the authors? Do we need to tag all tags with creative commons-like agreements? The same considerations arise relative to other public gesture spaces -- comments, links, and so on.

2/ Open Architecture -- How open is enough? How should various sorts of gestures be implemented: for example, there has been a lot of discussion recently about making tags more open (see here). If a few major companies (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, for example) come out with competitive, closed Technorati-like solutions, we could rapidly find ourselves in a fragmented world, with three non-interoperating, partially overlapping tagspaces. It is clearly not in the public interest to go down this path, like what has happened in the instant messaging world.

3/ Privacy and Identity -- What measures for privacy should be contemplated? Is there some way to make gestures only sharable with known others? What does anonymity mean in a socialized Web? Is it possible at all? Are we defined as the sum of our gestures? Will we be declaring our willingness to be advertised to by a tag-based profile? What is the aggregate complement of the history of our meandering around the Web, writing, comments, and tagging?

4/ Better Social Elements -- Blogrolls and other explicit links are very coarse-grained mechanisms to represent social relationships between people, but explicit mechanisms to denote degrees or depth of relationships have not emerged. Is there a solution here, buried in the countless gestures we make in the world, including closed spaces like your email and instant messaging, or explicit social networks?

5/ The Personal and Global 100 -- The recent spate of criticism about the various top 100 lists suggests that new ways of analyzing social architecture are needed so that the oft-quoted notion -- "everyone can have their own top 100" -- might be more than just an handwave. How do can we manage our own lists, really? Explicit blogrolls (embodied in blog readers, on on our blogs) is not at all the same as determining who are the most relevant top 100 writers on a topic of interest, based on personal preferences and inclinations.

Close

The continued growth of the Blogosphere will make its social architecture even more of an global asset that it has already proven to be. We will continue to witness enormous technological innovation, with dozens of new Flickrs, Technoratis, and De.licio.uses appearing in the next year. As more writing (and other media, like audio, video, and photographs) is generated on an ever widening range of topics, more and more machine-generated analysis of human social gestures, and the gestures themselves, will play an increasinglt important role in making sense of the Web. Without these techniques, the explosion of the Blogosphere will overwhelm our traditional information-based approaches.

The criticality of these activities will cause friction on technological, societal, and economic levels, and as so those of us who are most interested and involved in these discussions may have a significant impact on the future direction of the socialized Web. The planned Symposium is intended to bring together thought leaders, practitioners, and entrepreneurs in the arena and to explore the various threads making up the discussion about social architecture.

Last week, I had a chance to chat with Jory Des Jardins, author of Pause, and frequent contributor to a wide range of publications, like the NY Times, Sports Illustrated For Women, and Fast Company (to only mention a few recent examples).

Jory and I met as the outgrowth of the upcoming Blogher conference (I am one of the hims going to Blogher), although I have followed her work for some time, and we have a lot of common friends. I was particularly interested in the trajectory of her work, which has led her from a more-or-less conventional media background -- working with companies like CNN and the folks who were running Comdex -- into very familiar territory for me: management consulting, and now media consulting. I guess it's not much of a surprise that I would find so much in commen with someone who spends her time very much like I do.

Right now she is splitting her time between various writing projects, her blog, and working with various companies who are trying to wrap their minds around the application of social media to their businesses. That's why she is a perfect fit with the Corante Social Media Advisory Service: another true voice joins SMAShmouth. I can't wait for the right project to materialize where I might get to work closely with Jory.

On the train en route to NYC, for the Blogging Goes Mainstream conference, hosted by Business Development Institute, and a long list of great speakers. If you can't attend, I think PR Newswire is streaming the audio out for $125.

I plan to corner various people on the conformist pressures on bloggers, as the basis of an upcoming True Voice show. Apropos of the recent New York Times article by Tom Zeller (see here), this topic truly aggravates me. Individual free expression must continue, and the whole social media vanguard should continue to howl about it.

I did a flashmeeting based interview with James Payne of Rhombus, earlier today, as another in the series of Get Real shows (click here to replay).

I recently reviewed Ubergroups, the Rhombus offering that James and I discussed (First Look: Ubergroups).

James shared some thoughts about the Ubergroups real time communication framework (instant messaging and persistant chat, with support for XMPP so you can use Jabber-ompliant clients), and disclosed that calendaring is the next big thing, perhaps in a Q2 release (and a tantalizing mention of wireless support).

By the way, if you haven't seen me on IM lately, I have transitioned to iChat as part of my mac migration: stoweboyd@mac.com on iChat and AIM, now. Currently inactive on MSN and Yahoo; I plan to fix the Jabber connection in the next few days.

sponsored by

The session is a reprise of the panel session I held in the middle of an INBOX workshop on Real Time Collaboration last November. I asked the various participants to return:

Speakers

You're invited to this complimentary seminar, covering business topics from leaders in today's leading companies—delivered via web conferencing from Microsoft Office Live Meeting. All you need is a web browser and a phone. We hope you'll join us.

Instant Messaging in the Attention Economy
October 26, 2004
9:00AM - 10:00AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
12:00PM - 1:00PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Speaker: Stowe Boyd, President/COO of Corante

Seminar Overview

The discussion around instant messaging generally centers on the first order effects of its deployment: costs, risks, and direct savings. This was true of all preceding communication media as they were being adopted by business, as well: telephone, fax, email, and cell phones. But as we now know, the second order effects – that generally take much longer to become manifest – are significantly more important in the long run.

We now live in the world that email built; but are headed for a world where instant messaging will become the foundation technology of communication. What will that world be like, how will it be different, and why should we work to adopt the new modes of interaction and communication that this medium requires?

We are in a time of unparalleled information access, but this paradoxically limits our ability to absorb information, because we have limited bandwidth: only so much attention to go around. Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate, once wrote, ‘What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.’

Linda Stone coined the expression “Continuous Partial Attention”, characterizing it as an aberration, a disorder, and an unnecessary disruption in business. But the benefits that arise from reorganizing around real-time coordination, collaboration, and communication pathways – most importantly the acceleration of response and increased parallelism – outweighs the apparent change in social mores needed to accommodate this new form of interaction.

This seminar will cover:

• What are the first order benefits from IM, and why are they less important than generally argued?
• What is “Continuous Partial Attention” and why does its adoption offer advantages, not disruption?
• Why does IM etiquette matter, and what can we learn from the biggest users of IM?
• How can we gain the acceleration latent in massive real-time communication across projects, the enterprise, and the extended enterprise; and what role can instant messaging play?

Click here to register or get more info.

I am really excited about a new event that I am honored to be involved in: Corante's Real Time Collaboration Experience held in collaboration with Inbox East.

The Inbox conference runs 17-19 November 2004, and will be held in Atlanta's Cobb Galleria Centre.

The Experience involves a workshop and trade show pavilion, and will be held on the morning of 19 November. Be sure to register with this code -- CRTE04 -- to get a $100 discount!

I have asked my old pal, David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies to play the role of co-host, so we should be having an illegal amount of fun there. Here's the current prospectus, such as it is:

THE WORKSHOP

Your Host: Stowe Boyd, Corante
Co-Host: David Coleman, Collaboratives Strategies

Setting Context: The Wheel of Real-Time Collaboration

Stowe will be leading the workshop using his 'late show' format, involving short and focused presentations, strong reliance on interview and dialog, and demos of breakthrough technologies. In this first session, he lays out a conceptual framework for real-time technology and its impact on today's world.

Market Trends in Real-Time Collaboration

David Coleman will present various trends in the real-time marketplace and their relevance to the enterprise and individual.

The World That Instant Messaging Is Making: New Directions in IM

Stowe and David will discuss and demonstrate a number of innovative instant messaging technologies.

Convergence and Collision: From Apps to Stacks

This session is devoted to the convergence of technologies like IM, web conferencing, voice, video, content, and other real-time collaboration apps into complex enterprise architecture stacks. It will include 'policy/vision' statements from major industry representatives.

Real-Time Social Tools

This session is devoted to the convergence of real-time collaboration into social media and social tools. It will demonstrate a wide variety of real-time social software.

Summary: A Roadmap for Real-Time

This wrap-up session by David Coleman is devoted to detailing a roadmap for the enterprise adoption of real-time collaboration technologies, and then a final wrap-up by the host, Stowe Boyd.

Note: attendees will receive an executive report of the same name, co-authored by the Host and Co-host.

This is in a sense the first real official announcement about Corante Events, about which we will have a lot more to say in the upcoming weeks. We intend to launch a wide variety of real and virtual events over the next few months, and we invite our contributors and readers to help us to make them innovative, timely, and rewarding.

And remember, if you're signing up for Inbox be sure to include the registration code - CRTE04 - to get a $100 discount!

Our recent Social Tools in the Enterprise Symposium in London 12 July was a big success.

Matt Mower of Evectors Software did the introductions, and I was the MC. We were working on the Late Show motif, with lots of interview/dialogue. It was so fun.

Speakers included:
Stowe Boyd
Corante
blog: Get Real

Social Software: Ready for the Enterprise?

Lee Bryant
Headshift
blog: Headshift moments

Joined up Knowledge Sharing: Supporting Informal, Joined Up Knowledge Sharing In a Networked Organisation Using Social Software

Marc Eisenstadt
Knowledge Media Institute
blog: My Dog

Knowledge Workers: Maps, Enhanced Presence, Instant Messaging

David Gurteen
Gurteen Knowledge

Social Software Café

George Por
Community Intelligence
blog: Blog of collective intelligence

Community Discussion Leader

Euan Semple
BBC
blog: The Obvious?

Working In A Wired World

Phil Wolff
blog: A klog Apart

Understanding the Payback: Why 10 Million People Choose To Blog

Wow! We are planning to do it again in like six months, so stay tuned.

Greg Narain and I attended the iDate conference in Nice last week, as part of our Horde of Vandals tour of Europe. [Greg, are we going to make us t-shirts for the crew?]

The conference was only around 60-70 folks, but either because of that, or because of the particular mix of people, it was a great mixing bowl of networking. Old Friends (like Judith Meskill of the Social Software Blog, and Michael Jones of Userplane), and many new (like Sandra Williamson and Jim Houran of True, and Patrick Marshall of Thomas Services).

The real benefit of a conference in Nice is (as you can see) the food.

(photo courtesy of Yasu Nagaoka; more are found at iDate photos).

I gave a talk, entitled "Social Tools and The Third Space," which I enjoyed researching, and which I will be turning into a written piece in the next week. Uploading the powerpoint won't help much because a/ it was mostly pictures and me handwaving, and b/ the pictures are so dense that the powerpoint overwhelms our Moveable Type limits for upload. Stay tuned. Here's the abstract:

Web context is increasingly assuming the role of the 'third place' -- after work and home, as defined by Ray Oldenburg -- where the sense of community is created. As third place moves online and becomes third space, how will the technologies that we use to communicate shift to support a broader range of social interactions? What about the enhanced third place that new cell phone services are creating in Europe? What can we learn from online work communities and today's online affiliatory communities (like online dating) to intuit the third space of the near future, both internationally and in Europe? What other business models appear in the third space, aside from those we have already seen in social networking today?

Matt Mower conserved the transcript of the first IRC meeting we held regarding the London Social Tools Symposium (see STES #1 transcript available).

The only solid thing is that we decided on 12 July as a date, and London had been the venue selected already.

We are speaking via freenode (IRC server) and we will be trying two channels -- my head hurt from all the chat and side chat streaming through one, I admit:

Matt Mower

The second meeting will be on Friday at 9am PST, 12pm EST, 5pm BST, 6pm CET and will be held in #kmtalk and #kmbackchat. Trying to do everything in one channel proved challenging. Next time we are going to try and use two channels and see how that goes.

We are holding an IRC Chat today (12 PM ET) for all those interested in contributing to the planning for a London symposium on Social Tools for the Enterprise. One of the key agenda items to be resolved today is the date for the event, which will be sometime between the Vienna BlogTalk 2.0 conference (5-6 July) and the Nice iDate conference (15-16 July).

Matt Mower

[via email]

Hi folks.

A reminder about the IRC chat today in #kmtalk on the Social Tools for
Enterprises event.

There is a new wiki available for public edit at:

http://www.socialtext.net/stes

Please use that and not the old wiki page. (Many thanks to SocialText
for hosting this.)

There are notes about the agenda at:

http://www.socialtext.net/stes/index.cgi?potential_agenda

The chat will begin at 9:00AM PST / 12:00PM EST / 5:00PM BST / 6:00PM CET.

#kmtalk is on the freenode IRC network. You will need an IRC client,
there is a list for almost every conceivable device/os here:

http://www.ircreviews.org/clients/

My recommendation would be either Trillian, mIRC, or Hydra IRC on
Windows. I'm not sure about Linux or MacOS X. Maybe someone with an
opinion can add links to the Wiki in the IRC pages:

http://www.socialtext.net/stes/index.cgi?irc

To find the FreeNode server closest to you see:

http://www.freenode.org/irc_servers.shtml

If you need any help please ping me via regular instant messenger

MSN: mmower@novissio.com
Y!: mowerm
AOL/iChat: mattmower
ICQ: 170796182

Look forward to talk to you later.

Regards,

Matt

--
Evectors Software
Email:matt@evectors.com Web:http://www.evectors.com Tel:+44-(0)7977-076-709 Blog:http://matt.blogs.it/

I am excited to announce the launch of Corante Research (see About Corante Research), a new initiative here.

Corante Research is part of a broad new growth plan that will have me, Hylton and others building upon the strong foundation here. We're excited about initiatives underway, have other developments we'll be letting you know about and are eager to hear from others about ways in which we might work together.

I have assumed the role of managing director for Corante Research, and will be dovetailing the work that I have been conducting through A Working Model into this new research group, and kicking off several initiatives, including the Corante Research Social Networking Project, the Corante Research Real-Time Collaboration Project, and a Corante Research New Media Project, about which we will be providing more information in the near future.

For more information on these, and other research activities, please contact me at stowe@corante.com.

In the interest of getting a local group formed to swap ideas, thoughts, wishes, and dreams about social software, I formed an international group at MEETUP around the topic.

Please join, and if there are any MEETUP+ members out there, I would like to chat about venues for Northern Virginia.

It has been almost a month since my last entry for Instant Messaging Industry Insider. I have been through a serious medical ordeal, involving a subarachnoid aneurysm (blood vessel in my brain leaking) and subsequent brain surgery. I have managed to come through with nothing more serious than a glorious scar, having avoided loss of motor, sensory, or cognitive function, miraculously.

After a few weeks of recuperation, I am back at my desk, and ready to catch up on what's going on in the instant messaging marketplace.

Thanks to all those who sent their best wishes. I appreciate the hopes for my rapid recovery and the many offers to assist me and my family in a time of need.

My new column is up at Knowledge Management magazine. I blather about recent experiences with Groove 2.5 and Kubi Software's innovative integration of peer to peer collaboration integrated in Outlook.

An executive report I wrote for Cutter Consortium's Agile Project Management Service has been published (at long last). To read the executive summary, and get a free download of the entire whopping report (30 pages!)click here. Features interviews with Tom DeMarco and Kent Beck.

PS The answer to "does software reuse matter?" is yes and no. "Yes,"on a bottom-up, small scale, with individuals and small teams sharing components and local knowledge, but "No" relative to the large-scale, top-down concept of software reuse that was prevalent in the 80s and 90s.