Social Media Club, day 2

This morning I arrived five minutes before my presentation was due to begin. (I was the opening act.) I explained that I didn’t want to miss what I had to say. Now that I tout informality, I do improv; I never know what’s going to come out. We were just getting warmed up when the clock ran out on us. Someone suggested we host an informal learning camp.

Gail Ann Williams runs the WeLL (now part of Salon) and opened up a fascinating discussion of keeping communities together. A big question when one enters a community space is “How do I play this thing?” Orkut, for example, asked you to puzzle it out. A community of people at one photo site moved over to Flickr because their site was being overrun by another group. (”If you’ve been living in Bolinas and fear becoming a suburb of L.A…”)

A group discussing trust and identity noted that this problem has been around forever. There will never be a silver bullet, because trust is inherently content-specific. There are several forms of trust systems: authority-based (identify yourself to be let in), FOAF (friend of a friend), and situational/experiential. Trust varies with risk. I may trust your restaurant review because there’s little downside; I won’t necessarily trust you to pay me $3,000 for something today that I will receive tomorrow.

Vocabulary: Bubble as an adjective, referring to the dot-boom days.

Neologism: Reputerrorist.

Explaining the critical importance of tagging is like explaining sex to virgins.

Beta-test your new application with strangers, not your friends.

A final discussion centered on what Web 2.3 will look like. I found this exercise frustrating. Everyone wanted to talk about the evolution of technology. Chris asked about our points of pain with the existing web. Whoa! I brought up appreciative inquiry, which builds on strengths and doesn’t discuss problems because the mere framing hi-jacks the topic. Tech, tech, tech. I suggested that we needed a purpose in order to propose a future, e.g. world peace, eradicating poverty, etc. This didn’t even make it to the simultaneous mind map being projected on the screen.

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