Art and Social Networks

From MashupCamp

This session was recorded and the audio file is available on xDrive. If you have trouble downloading the file, log into xDrive and access the Mashup Camp 4 public folder

To preface the discussion, KevinLawver talked about what he thought the differences between "mass" social networks like MySpace or Facebook and Online Communities built around creating "art". He noted several differences:

1. "The herd": mass social networks are driven, and derive value, from mass. But, internet users are herd animals, and the herd will eventually move on, leaving only tumbleweeds behind. Social networking sites don't recover from that... while communities built around art build artistic artifacts that themselves have value, and keep users engaged and involved in the site.
2. "Practice" and "The Virtuous Circle": Communities need to encourage people to get better. For example, when I joined Flickr, I had a crappy little camera. Now, three years later, I have a nice point and shoot and a digital SLR because I was encouraged by the great photos I saw on the site.
3. "Rewards" and "Reputation": Communities need to have a rewards system. On flickr, it's showing up on Explore based on "interestingness". On other sites, it's badges, or on ficlets, it's having your story be the Featured Story of the day or showing up in the Most Popular or Most Active lists. That has to be some reward for both quality and good behavior.

Here are the original notes Kevin wrote on a post-it

The conversation then wandered all over the place. We talked about:

• Trust, safety and security - Users need to feel comfortable in giving you their content to host - that you respect their content, respect them and won't do anything to break that trust.
• Moderation - There has to be a way to punish bad behavior, whether it's full-time moderators or automated systems.
• Voice - It has to feel like there's a real person behind the site. The more human a site feels in voice and messaging, the more likely the community is to respect it.
• Metrics - Users need to be able to see how their content is doing - how many times it's been viewed, rated or commented on are all veeeery important, and drive the virtuous circle.
• Discoverability - There has to be a way for people to find content they're interested in, whether it's automated "interesting" lists, top-rated, or tag clouds, there has to be a way to encourage browsing.

Sites We Think Do Some Things Correctly

I tried to write all the sites that people used as examples down on the sheet. Here's the list I got...

I'm trying to remember why we put these up, so if you have any to add, or you were the one to mention them, please add the description:

• DPChallenge - Myk mentioned this one as a site with great moderation.
• National Novel Writing Month - The community and encouragement is more important than the final product
• Flickr - Great discoverability, and a good example of the virtuous circle
• ficlets - Shows how the voice of a product influences the community's behavior, and some decent discoverability tools
• IconBuffet - Good example of building a niche and a fantastic rewards system
• Escape Pod - Science fiction podcast. Chris Radcliff talked about it.. Chris?
• Flyer Talk - A good niche community around an activity
• iStockPhoto - Great rewards system (monetary!)

Software

There was a good question about what software or tools you could use to build a social network without doing a lot of programming. Here are a few... I think I missed writing some down, so feel free to add some:

• Drupal
• Wikis (MediaWiki, pmwiki, twiki, etc)
• bulletin boards (bbpress, phpbb, beast)
• Ning
• Ruby on Rails

Goals

We talked a little bit about the goals behind a community. I honestly don't remember what we talked about during this part, and the notes aren't triggering anything. Help!