Web 2.0 makes inroads in the scientific community as the Hershey Center for Applied Research, in Hershey, PA develops a social network to improve interactions between industry, academia, government, venture capitalists, the work force and IP attorneys. The social networking software is said to provide a "LinkedIn look" that will enable scientists to connect with each other, and provide content areas such as wikis.

KnowledgeMesh is designed to create and improve interactions between industry, academia, government, venture capitalists, the work force and IP attorneys. Secondarily, Butcher said, she hopes the tool will position the center for growth.

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A social network can help bridge the gap between researchers and the resources they seek. Moreover, the social tools will let outsiders collaborate with scientists they wouldn't ordinarily be familiar with.

KnowledgeMesh includes profiles, wikis and other tools that were created by Intelmarx, a social software provider that caters to nonprofit organizations and higher education institutions.

This week I'll be starting another new stage in my career, as I take on the role of Director of User Experience at Traction Software, Inc, marking my return to the subjects you've read me blogging about in the past: design of information retrieval and content management systems, knowledge management, and social networking and social software for the enterprise.

It's with great pleasure that I return to work on the application I used as a client, and to the team that I contributed some interface design work to over a year ago as a consultant. You'll be reading me return to blogging about the topics I mentioned above, but this time from the design and product development end of the conversation. Previously I wrote mainly about grassroots needs for social software and km and how blog/wiki tools meet these needs. In addition, I expect to show details of the application and its use for various forms of personal and enterprise knowledge management. I've used this tool in the past on a range of needs, including serving as a tracking system for usability testing issues, documenting project information (wiki style), and simply for logging my own projects and todo lists (personal km style wiki).

There will be more to come. I look forward to sharing with you.

Apparently Chris Pirillo wants to do something with Drupal that will make using Drupal as a producer/publisher easier. He describes (with his usual zeal) why Drupal makes sense for people wanting to build communities. They're talking about making an installer profile and some modules. Adam Kalsey is in on it and his first module, activitystream is up. I installed it on Konigi, but ran into some installation errors. Will have to try again later.

I think this will all be good for Drupal, since it comes down to contributing to the community in order to make the experience friendlier for community-minded publishers. I'm definitely going to be paying attention. More about this project can be found at assembla.com/wiki/show/drupalcpp.

A recent blog entry from Danah Boyd is making the rounds. In it, she writes about class trends she's observing in her ethnographic research of teens and social networking platforms. Nothing surprising really. A comparison of the demographic audience would yield the obvious. Since Facebook started out as a college social networking site and later included professional networks, the skew will be toward higher educated and higher economic classes. To quote Boyd:

Over the last six months, i've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

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What I lay out in this essay is rather disconcerting. Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace. A class division has emerged and it is playing out in the aesthetics, the kinds of advertising, and the policy decisions being made.

Certainly makes for an interesting discussion of the shifting attitudes towards the community you keep as your socio-economic position changes. I would argue that there might be some interesting discussion about how this shift in attitudes correlates with advertising and marketing issues as well.

An interesting hypothetical issue to play with (to me anyway) would be to think of how you would choose to market a particular product advertisement between Facebook or MySpace audiences. We have some real world analogies we can make and assumptions to break about who spends more. Having more dollars doesn't naturally mean spending more as a consumer. It depends on the product being hawked and the match to consumer. If, for instance, you look at the market share of portable gaming devices to the share of home computers, the numbers indicate that higher income and more education is not the best indicator of spending with regard to these markets. As I recall from reading "Got Game," the Nintendo Game Boy has greater market penetration than the personal computer in their respective markets precisely because of the low price point and the economic audience they appeal to. You've got more people in lower economic positions going after those low cost consumer purchases in quantity, who historically haven't been able to spend the dollars for a home computer.

There's so much gray in this analysis that I can't make any real conclusion about Boyd's observations yet. Observations that have mostly to do with demographic differences don't yield much value to me yet until I find her correlations in these trends with something more than where teens choose to maintain their social network.

I had an interesting conversation with a family member this weekend. This person is in an older category range--to 65 year olds nearing retirement. He happens to watch a few reality shows, one of which is "Dancing with the Stars", and we got onto the topic of judging on all of the shows with the "American Idol" format of judging.

From what we could gather, there seems to be 3 formats of judging:

• The public call in and online vote method--used on American Idol
• The expert judge method--used on Project Runway
• The split judge/public vote method--used on Dancing with the Stars
• The peer system where winners vote off another player--used on Survivor

The pure judge only option is not without controversy, as many who watched the 2nd season of Project Runway will attest to. Quality is a subjective thing to measure. The judges + call in vote system seems to be the one that tries to prevent the popularity of a public vote from being a way to game the system, and ensures that actual quality of performance has something to do with the outcome.

There might be others that I'm not aware of. These seem to be the most popular. Let me know if you are aware of others used on these reality shows.

Compare these with the systems used on social software sites.

• For ratings, there's the purely quantitative rating system--used on Netflix
• For comments there's the karma moderation system--used on slashdot and digg to promote or bury posts and comments

What are the methods and typical algorithms for both ratings and comments that prevent gaming these systems?

InfoWorld has announced the 2007 Technology of the Year Awards for the applications they rated best and most innovative in each of 8 classes of information technology. Traction Software, who I began doing user experience consulting for last spring, won in the Data Management category for Best Enterprise Wiki.

Last year, Traction released version 3.7 of Traction TeamPage and Communicator, which introduced several very exciting new content management and theming enhancements and continued to focus on usability improvements. If you're in the market for an application that does enterprise collaboration tool the way you want to, you'll want to check out the Traction 3.7 feature set.

Congrats to all the recipients of the IW Technology of the Year Awards.

We're not talking freetagging here. This is graffiti. Except on Draw Here you're using mouse pointers to leave your mark on web pages instead of inking up walls or scratch tagging sgraffito.

Who knows what we'll see here. Some of it could be art or maybe just egotistic chicken scratch like mine above :).

... at least it is on MySpace.

I'm late getting to this, but I've been sifting through Ze's stuff lately. This video from "the show" talks about ugly MySpace pages or what's been called the MySpace problem. I know, I keep piling on more of the same stuff in this blog, but I do that kind of thing to accrete knowledge in a topic area. More is better in my book. But this was fun to watch because it's probably where some of the ideas from his Web 0.2 discussion emerged.

In the video Ze is talking about an Ugliest MySpace page contest that he must have proposed. He goes on to talk more about the impact of consumers conversing in the language of visual designers, namely, the deterioration of "good" taste.

"Ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damned cool. ... Over time as consumer created media engulfs the other kind, it's possible that completely new norms develop around the notions of talent and artistic ability.

I doubt that anyone really believes that though or that it would ever happen. Ugliness could be accepted, just as grunginess in music and fashion is accepted as a representation of different ideas that may have appeal to some. But, remember that his point is mainly about experimentation with tools and the language of design, not about ugliness. Ugliness is just a painful result of that process, along with crashing my browser and making me listen to horrible music.

I had been looking for literature comparing the behavior of Intranet vs. Internet users as follow-on research from a blog entry I wrote about Ze Frank's Web 0.2 presentation and in reponse to a colleague's comment on the subject. The harder questions came up when I began exploring the topic of Internet/Intranet culture. As the increasing community of prosumers push the use of technology, as Internet users flock to social software and collaboration sites, how does this affect users of technology in the enterprise. Are business users taking risks with information technology? If they're not, why not? How does this all impact the evolution of collaborative technologies and how does that information feed back into products.

What I ended up reading didn't really answer all of these questions, but did get me to start thinking more about the evolution of blogs as social software. But, first, I want to talk about what I did find in the literature. The observations I found about intranet users were totally obvious. Culture and politics are key influencers when it comes to collaborating on the intranet. I'd already been saying that in my blog presentations. It's obvious. No major surprises there. Nothing in the research or academic literature seemed to be illuminating beyond that.

In the middle of attempting to read through papers, Boris Mann pointed me to a comment referring to karma as a motivator for collaboration in Drupal. Boris suggested that we might get to a point using Drupal where karma could be the basis for incenting collaboration.

I began wondering how these ideas apply in the corporate enterprise if at all. "This is excellent", I thought to myself after reading through this. Drupal developers thinking about more complex problems related to collaboration and how they can be solved with technology. But, to return to my problem, is this type of enabling technology pointless given a culture where people are not inclined to share? I once called this type of space a clenched-fist knowledge culture.

This is the space I was most concerned about when this inquiry started, because I perceive large companies that don't have a rich participatory information ecology to be positioning themselves for failure when it comes to knowledge management. But, while I'm generally interested in the topic of how to help transform clenched-fist knowledge cultures into open ones, that's not where I want to spend my valuable cycles these days. Instead, I'm interested in what to do to enable participants when the cultural space is open. How do you help them express themselves in that space?

I was reminded of some KM vendor presentations I had been to a few years ago where monetary incentive was mentioned as one key to sustainability. I don't remember the names of the products, but I found the suggestion interesting, but philosophically wrong. Years later, the explosion of blogs as the 99 cent KM solution emerged. The idea of incentive was interesting, but using money as the motivator was wrong-headed. With blogs we see that individuals may be more driven by selfish and unquantifiable incentives, e.g. self-promotion, prestige, authority, participation in a communal system because it gives back what individuals put in. These are not external motivators. They arise organically from within individuals -- from the grassroots.

In spaces where open knowledge sharing exists and where people seem to be getting as much from collaboration as they give, social software seems to fluorish. On the Internet, people take to Wikis, Weblogs, social networking communities and social bookmarking communities like mosquitoes to still water. Viewing the enterprise as a cultural petri dish, all you can do is set up the right environment and watch to see what grows.

For the most part, you can't simply drop social software into any cultural situation and expect it to "take". (I'm thinking about eggs attaching themselves to uterine walls as I write this. Sorry. Enough with the bad metaphors.) Install an enterprise wiki into a cold corporate space and no one will hear it die it's slow death. Perhaps a few users will exploit the technology, but if if the technology doesn't fit in with the culture, you're probably wasting valuable time. At a local level, this might not be the case, but in a large enterprise this might not cut it. Think of behemoth enterprises that drop SharePoint into the mix just because they can. Creating the pre-conditions for the right culture may seem to require withcraft or alchemy rather than business savvy. I can't tell you how to get that kind of change, although I'd like to see literature that talks to that issue.

If and when the cultural pre-conditions are right, then the enabling collaborative technology can be introduced. But we need to be certain that it focuses on objectives that provide value to users, that design for ease of use, efficiency, and relationship formation. When the object of the technology is relevant and the tool is implemented correctly, expression within an open culture may happen naturally and a rich, diverse ecology may emerge.

Robert Young says in GigaOM that self-expression has become a new industry. I'll just give you the quotable bits:

• the art-form of self-expression has become the “new media”, and social networks are their distribution channels
• for any player who seeks to enter this industry and become the next social networking phenom, the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of “cultural products”
• For traditional media companies that are seeking to enter this space it’s critical to follow the audience into the development of this new market by re-focusing core assets that have the capability to deepen the level, and heighten the production value, of self-expression