e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

Roll Your Own Social Network (via the Blog Herald)

(Blog Herald link)

A long time ago (like 2 years or something)...this site called ning launched. You were supposed to be able to create your own kind of Web 2.0-ish apps and then clone them and share them. Whatever. I tried it, found it confusing and not compelling at all. Flash forward to now and ning has re-launched.

Turns out that ning's CTO and co-founder is Marc Adreessen. Yes, that Marc Andreessen. Now ning is focused on giving people a set of tools to easily and quickly create their own social networks. It is easy and quick. You can see the banner for the e-Clippings' network that I set up in about 5 minutes and which is available here. There is some interesting functionality here..I'm still exploring it all and I'm still trying to map out how this could be used for something useful and not just create a bil old mess of balkanized networks...

   There were also some other things that I wondered about...like this...

I don't know if you can read that but it is a copyright mark that automatically attached to the bottom of the page as I was creating it. I wish they had an option to license this under a Creative Commons license.

ning is also ad-supported, so your network will have ads pasted to the right-hand side that you can't move. The ones that came up first on my network also made me wonder....

Exclusivity of Social Networks Update

Almost as soon as Lee has me thinking that maybe I'm being a little paranoid with social networks trying to go the way of e-learning's early days and trying to lock in users...Scott Leslie over at EdTEchPost highlights a new social bookmarking service from Blackboard that is...you guessed it....locked to Blackboard users - the general public can browse but not add to the system.

Named "Scholar" - apparently in some ironic attempt to conjure up an image of an open, academic environment, the system does nothing that I can tell (except perhaps finding proprietary objects within BB's system and allowing users to import those objects directly into your BB course) that can't be accomplished using any one of a number of Webtops or Web-based aggregators. Unless of course your intent is to lock in customers - oh and charge them more because you went out and once again "invented" a bunch of services that were already available.

"Network Once, Socialize Anywhere" (Subtraction)

This post echoes some key thoughts about the growth of social networks.

Key quote: "This fretting about the overhead of social networks seems especially important if, as some suggest, the path to success for these networks will be exclusivity, the idea that “these networks are only as strong as their members” and that the gatekeepers would do well to “keep the riff-faff out.” It seems like a small leap though from strategically exclusive to enduringly proprietary; if you’re looking to keep unwanted users out, it follows that you’ll also want to lock ‘good’ users in."

The Object of Social Networks

Jyri Engeström over at zengstrom.com really hit the nail on the head with this one. He has a post which in my mind, goes a long way to helping me explain to people why some social networks work and why others don't. Jyri makes the point that you simply can't talk about "social networks" without referencing the OBJECT of the network. His great example is that if you look at these networks you can describe them by their organizing object - meetup is a network built on events, linkedin is built around jobs, and flickr has managed to embed sociality into pictures. (I also want someone to tell me why the U.S. seems so behind in designing inter-disciplinary programs like the Dept. of Organisation, Work and Technology?)

So what does this have to do learning and trying to figure out how to leverae the dynamics of these things? Well, what I think it means is that we have to consider the objects that the networks will be built around. Is it somebody's job? And by 'job' - do we mean their actual performance or do we really mean their career? Is it an event? If so, do we need to look at branding these ad hoc networks with some kind of expiration date? What about if we allow these networks to be built around performance in training - do we want to consider parking the high performers in an area apart from the low performers? I think this consideration of the object in which the sociality of the social networks will be embedded can be a critical design element for successful networks.

Additonal Links:

Ross Mayfield on the Social Capital of Blogspace