Category Archives: Social Software

craigslist new orleans – web 2.0 in action

You can find just about anything on craigslist. Bikes, mattresses, futons, stereos, landscapers, moving vans, graphic designers, jobs. You can even find missing persons, or a safe haven thousands of miles from what was once your home. How a public classifieds section transformed itself overnight into a dynamic networked survival book – a central node in the effort to locate the missing and provide shelter to the uprooted – captures the significance of what has happened over the past two weeks in Katrina’s wake. The web has been pushed to its full potential, capturing both the enormity of the disaster (in a way that the professional media, working alone, would have been unable to), and the details – the individual lives, the specific intersections of streets – that got swept up in the flood. This give-and-take between global and “hyperlocal” is what Web 2.0 is all about. Danah Boyd recently described this as “glocalization” – “a dance between the individual and the collective”:

In business, glocalization usually refers to a sort of internationalization where a global product is adapted to fit the local norms of a particular region. Yet, in the social sciences, the term is often used to describe an active process where there’s an ongoing negotiation between the local and the global (not simply a directed settling point). In other words, there is a global influence that is altered by local culture and re-inserted into the global in a constant cycle. Think of it as a complex tango with information constantly flowing between the global and the local, altered at each junction.

The diverse, simultaneous efforts on the web to bear witness and bring relief to the ravaged Gulf Coast – a Knight Ridder newspaper running hyperlocal blogs out of a hurricane bunker (nola.com); a frantic text message sent from a phone in a rapidly flooding attic to relatives in Idaho who, in turn, post precise coordinates for rescue on a missing persons forum (anecdote from Craig Newmark of craigslist); an apartment rental registry turned into a disaster relief housing index; images from consumer digital cameras leading the network news; scipionus.com, the interactive map wiki where users can post specific, geographically situated information about missing persons and flood levels – that is the dance. The case of the scrappy craigslist, or rather its users, rising to the occasion is particularly moving.

new curatorial machinery on flickr

Clusters
Flickr has unveiled a pair of new tools for sifting through its 31 million images. The first is tag clustering, which breaks up single-term tag searches into clusters based upon patterns among coinciding tags. For instance, a search for “flight” yielded three clusters (see screenshot below): one with a preponderance of birds, one with shots of airplanes, and a third with general scenes of air travel. A search for Europe might yield separate clusters for France, Italy, and Germany, and might also set apart images with a high incidence of cathedrals.

Tagging has always been central to the Flickr experience, but given the incredible volume of images, it goes only so far in helping one dig out items of interest. There is always the option of an advanced search, which narrows down a query to images that have two or more tags in common. But tagging is an idiosyncratic business and the more refined the search, the more brilliant your guesswork must be.
Clusters aren’t a bad alternative. They find a middle ground between the single tag avalanche and the razor-sharp advance search, turning up groups with nice, fuzzy affinities. From now on, I might check clusters before moving on to an advanced search.
Interestingness
One unfortunate fact in Flickr (and the web in general) is the brutal hierarchy of time. The more recent a thing is, the easier it is to find. More a pile-up than an archive, it’s difficult to get to anything that’s not in the vicinity of the upper layers. Recognizing this, Flickr has initiated a Google-style ranking system called “interestingness.”
Carrying on the Flickr tradition of cute, exuberant terminology, “interestingness” is based on an algorithm that ranks images on a kind of impact index, judging by number of times viewed, number of times marked as “favorite,” number of comments, diversity of click-throughs, etc. For any given day of any given month, you can see what the algorithm has determined to be the 500 most interesting images. You can also sort tag search results by “most interesting,” and can even see what the algorithm thought of your own personal photostream.
When it came to my own images, I found the machine to be a poor curator, since what I consider to be my most interesting images have, for whatever reason, been viewed less frequently. A popularity contest does not always award the most deserving. But looking at the monthly exhibits, its hard to deny the quality of the selection. I highly recommend visiting the “explore” page.

vimeo open to the public – new constellations in the sky

In February, I stumbled upon a wonderful new site for storing and sharing video clips, which, until recently, was being tested on closed beta. Now fully open to the public, Vimeo aims to do for short form video what Flickr does for photos, openly citing the photo-sharing phenom as inspiration. Right now, it’s pretty basic. Create a free account and you can start uploading compressed clips (8MB weekly limit), adding tags, and browsing what other users have put up. Over time, I expect they’ll start adding some Flickr-esque features (like in-house email, groups, video sets, calendar, favorites and who knows what else). When Vimeo first came onto my radar, they had an interesting feature that allowed you to string several clips together within a single tag, creating an ad hoc montage. They still say on their “about” page that “several clips can be played together to create a movie,” but I could no longer figure out how to do that.
All in all, given how troublesome it can be to get video working on the web, Vimeo seems to be off to a very smooth start. Something I hope they figure out is how to make it easy for users to post video to blogs. If they could rig up a basic form that automatically embeds a clip into a blog post, it would be a tremendous boon to the incipient video blogging community. And if they could provide basic video editing tools, then they might have something really big on their hands. (I’ve posted here my inaugural upload to Vimeo – a column from the ruins at Caesaria, from my recent trip to Israel.)
Though just barely off the ground, I have a feeling that Vimeo could evolve into something serious. Another exciting launch is Odeo, the podcast hub. Taken together as a constellation, these three ventures – Flickr, Vimeo, and Odeo – are constructing the beginnings of a vast media commons, tiny when compared with the giant 20th century media industries, but maybe not for long (see post on the London bombings). Another recently launched site, ourmedia, seeks to create a similar kind of homebrew media repository, offering (through a partnership with the Internet Archive) to “host your media forever — for free.” But so far, I’ve been much more impressed with the the afore-mentioned image/video/sound trio. Different media present different challenges, and there’s something to be said for doing one thing really well rather than trying to do everything sort of well. I’ve found ourmedia’s interface frustrating. It’s difficult to browse for media, and sometimes hard to open an item once you’ve found it. Flickr, Vimeo and Odeo all provide a dynamic tagging system, making it much easier for users to dig and explore. ourmedia has no such system. What ourmedia is exploring more intensively (and Odeo too) is the need for an editorial voice, maintaining a rotating roster of volunteer editors, whose duties, among other things, include constructing the site’s homepage. Odeo, on the other hand, is more clearly descended from traditional broadcast media, namely radio. The site is organized into channels, each with its own signature mix of programming. But unlike a radio station, an Odeo channel has fluid boundaries. Listener’s can pick and choose programs, constructing their own broadcast.
But ultimately, we can’t leave it up to these sites to make selections for us. Flickr has its own blog where the site’s creators draw attention to noteworthy material. But more interesting is Flickrzen, a blog posting regular “reportages” of the most compelling photos turning up on Flickr. Flickr Pix Photo Magazine is on a similar mission. Of course, with millions of photographs already on Flickr, and thousands pouring in as I write, it would be impossible for any single editorial body to exhaustively survey the whole repository. So there’s definitely room for more of these curatorial ventures. They are the next step.

tagging the digital city: a new way to make your mark

Remember subway trains in the 70’s & 80’s; traversing the conduits of New York City’s tunnels bearing the spray-painted “tags” of urban graffiti artists? Taggers, as you may recall, were interested in trafficking their name on high visibility real estate like bridges, tunnels, buildings, landmarks, and subway cars. They were individuals attempting to mark the complex urban landscape in an effort to be “seen.” I think this is the motivation behind the re-emergence of tagging in the context of the internet landscape, which is becoming increasingly cluttered and noisy in the same way that cities are. Tagging is a way to stand out and be seen, it is a way to connect, it is a way to make your contribution last a little longer and go a little further. The fact that these “tags” are useful for organizing things is something of a happy accident. People tag because they want other people to see their work. Because they want digital objects to bear their mark. This is a very human thing. Can we use it to help us organize everything? Maybe. An interesting article in CNN, ‘Tagging’ helps unclutter data: Online search categorizes how humans label things, posted Tuesday, May 3, 2005 gives a good overview of how tagging and social software are being used to organize data. But it also points out the possible drawbacks to this method of organization.

When we think of subway graffiti, we think of the elaborate, colorful calligraphy that ended up in art galleries and coffee table books. I include a picture (above) by Magnum Photographer Bruce Davidson, to remind you that most of it was uncreative and relatively ugly black marker work. Worse case scenario, spammers figure out how to exploit metadata, proliferating their “tags.” Scrawling their signature on every digital object they can access, and doing for the digital landscape what the spray can did for 1980’s New York.

city chromosomes – an sms chronicle

Found this on textually.org. The City Chromosomes project is a sort of scrapbook of the city of Antwerp made entirely from text messages beamed in from mobile phones. Further evidence of the new genres emerging from this technology. An english version has just been published under a Creative Commons license.
Also take a look at this sister project, CityPoems, from Leeds. Posts from the Leeds project are interspersed through the english version of “Chromosomes.”
From the introduction to “City Chromosomes”:
“The city of Antwerp is full of writers. And many of these writers describe their city, often in splendid stories, novels and poems that gain a wide readership. In this way, they determine a large part of our image of the city. But what about the people who only readers, or even those who do not care for reading, what do they think of the city? And would it not be possible to persuade them to write this down?
“This was the point of departure for the City Chromosomes project. We got the idea of gathering sms messages. Nearly everybody has a mobile phone. Everybody has a moment to spare to type in a message. This was the ideal way to make the project accessible to everybody. The people of Antwerp, and anyone else with something to say about city, could submit their impressions anonymously. We established 25 text sites across the city, and the contributors could indicate with a simple code to which part of the city their message applied. By means of posters, flyers and ads, we asked people for their impressions. The only restriction: the messages should not be longer than 160 characters.”