I talk to people from time to time about working in cyberspace and successful new media participation. If I were a hipster, I might even say, “I do SEO,” but I’m not, and I don’t, really. The truth is that I don’t have a good, simple, answer to the question, “How do I succeed on-line with social media.” I do have a lot of ideas on the subject, as you might expect (many of which I’ve already written about here before.) The core of my approach revolves around a conviction that word of mouth--like offline--is the most effective way to promote events and products in cyber-space, with the corollary that “meatspace” connections are among the most powerful and valuable “cyberspace” resources.

During college I spent a long time reading and rereading an essay by Samuel R. Delany, called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue about the process of gentrification in Times Square and it’s affect on cross-class/cross-race social/sexual contact. The argument was that environments and geographies that promoted situations were individuals would come into contact (randomly, casually) promoted opportunity, satisfying social interaction, and interesting conversations in a way that “networking” opportunities (conferences, workshops, cocktail parties, etc.) couldn’t. In illustration of this, Delany describes situations from talking about philosophy in the pornographic theatres of the old Time Square to finding a vacuum cleaner repair service in the checkout line of the grocery store. Furthermore, “contact” between people of different classes (as was present in the pornographic theaters of the old time square,) promotes the destabilization of class-based injustices.¹

Contact has been an incredibly powerful and useful concept for me in a number of different contexts, because it provides an method for affecting social change in “every day life” and in creates a notion of “politics” that’s closer to “people interacting” and further from something tied to institutions of power (“government,” etc.,) which suits my disposition. I think, largely the internet is most powerful when it promotes something closer to “contact” and further from something that resembles “networking.” And by powerful, I mean a number of things: most likely to positively affect people’s work, provide meaningful opportunities for commerce and social relationships, to develop unique cultural environments.

While there are opportunities for contact on contemporary social networking websites, they mostly specialize at helping you find people who are actually quite like you, like people you know in real life, people who are interested in the same things you’re interested in, and people who are friends with people you know in real life. That’s not contact, in the sense provided by Delany.²

There is still, I think, contact. I think microblogging (twitter/identi.ca) particularly with “track” features,³ represents (or did) a move away from “networking” to contact. The communities that form around open source projects, promote contact, as they are often interest specific, and contain members with disparate skills and backgrounds. Once upon a time, general population/topic (ie. non-project specific) IRC channels (chat rooms) were an immense source of contact for their users.⁴

I’m not sure what this means. I remain convinced that contact is a useful and important way of looking at social interactions. I also think it says a lot about my interests in open source. I also think that as technologies and memes in cyberspace (eg. blogs, social networking, microblogging) develop in ways that promote “contact,” and eventually become “networking” opportunities not that the latter is bad, but it is an important conceptual shift. It’s also quite likely that we’d be able to see what ideas are going to be the next big thing based on the degree to which they promote contact. There are other implications I’m sure, but I’ll leave those for another time.

I had an odd experience as a writer a few weeks ago. I found myself writing “copy” rather than my more comfortable “blog post,” “essay,” or “fiction story” and I learned a great deal from the experience. Mostly, “never be a copy writer if you can help it,” but I learned something about my other writing in the process: basically I write conversations.

This makes sense on a number of levels. First, it explains why I enjoy blogging as much as I do, and why I write for the blog in the way I do. Blogging is a conversation, I write stuff, you think about it, you comment. Repeat. Or I read something, and I respond with my “part” of the conversation. Secondly, I’ve occasionally been told by recipients of particularly quick emails that I “write just like I talk,” which makes sense given how I type, and how “natural” that is as a communications medium for me. Third and finally, people who’ve read my fiction, routinely comment on the dialog.¹

This may also be why “being a writer” (professionally, creatively) has been a struggle. On some level the writing, even the fiction, is a means to an end. Banging words out on the keyboard for the blog is a means to have a conversation with you, dearest readers; writing fiction is a means to explore ideas and conversations that I couldn’t begin to articulate except through fantasy (on some level.)

When I tried to write knitting patterns, I wrote these essays that were basically me standing up with a finished sweater saying “so if you want to make this, start here, and then do this …” and so forth through the entire sweater. On one hand they were stories, on another it was just me talking.

I don’t know what this means about me, what I write, or how I write. Frankly, I’m not sure I’d like to know much more, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Onward and Upward!

Most of the time when something new happens on the internet, I’m hopelessly behind the curve. I only really figured out wikis a few months ago, and I was a bit too young to get blogging out of the gate. And I was late to live journal and even then it took me years to figure out why that was so cool.

But microblogging? I was totally there, I mean I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but from the moment that there was any amount of steam behind twitter, I got it. Which is really cool, at least I think it is. Basically micro-blogging is a short, 140 character, “blog/messaging service” which combines the best parts of group chat and

And as you might know from your own experience or from my previous posts, I’ve tried a lot of services and have a few opinions about what makes a service better or worse. I can hear you saying, “What tycho opinionated?” but suspend your shock, and hang with me.

Twitter

Twitter’s “killer feature” is the fact that there are so many users, and that it focuses on ease of usability, so people “get it” pretty quickly. There’s a lot of power in the size of the community, and the fact that the crowd is no longer “just geeks.” The cons are that they don’t have IM access (which isn’t good) and that it’s all “too simple” so that it can be hard to track conversations and ideas and/or to have enough granular control over conversations.

Jiaku

Jaiku started in Finland, and bought by google, innovated in two big ways. First, it combined the lifestreeming (a la whoisi and friendfeed) with microblogging. Secondly, it has threaded comments, which make a lot of sense, and provide a helpful way to get around the 140 character limit. There are also “channels” which users can join and form to create (almost) ad-hoc groups based on topics and events to keep discussion of events out of “general feed.”

Plurk

I have less experience with plurk than the other services. The features of this one seem to be: an innovative display (which I hate) and a greater focus on conversational threads, but I think the Jaiku solution is better, frankly. Also there’s this “karma” system which I think is clearly a cheap ploy to get people invested in their Plurk activity, but it’s too transparent and makes me feel like I’m in a game theory experiment which isn’t cool at all.

Facebook

Largely irrelevant, to my mind, but facebook has had “status” for a long time, and this is basically a microblogging feature. It now has comments, and isn’t prefixed by “is” (though for a while, there was some humor in how people used or didn’t use the leading to be conjugation.) I think as a serious microblogging competitor, it doesn’t really pan out.

Pownce

Pownce, is nifty, and as of today, has file sharing abilities that other services don’t have. That’s cool. Pownce is also the only one that I know of that has abandoned the 140 character limit, which I’d throw my hat behind. It also has threaded conversations, but I think jaiku’s implementation is a bit better. There’s IM but it’s not incredibly intuitive. It’s been a while, which brings me to the major down side is that despite having a semi-compelling feature set, the community has never been that large or active, or grown beyond the usual core of early adopters (etc.) that I’ve grown used to seeing everywhere. If we’re just talking about features though, I think pownce has a lot going for it, unfortunately this isn’t a features game.

Identi.ca

Clearly this is where I am right now. Fundamentally, I’m not sure if the laconica software solves (m)any of the problems with twitter. For the moment it uses a CMS rather than a messaging model, it doesn’t have threaded conversations (really), the graphic design/theme needs a good once over, and there isn’t that huge community that twitter has going for it. The people who use identi.ca tend to be really into it, and that makes up for the relatively small size. It helps that there’s a real-time push-based IM/xmpp connection, and the scaling problem is solved by making growth a horizontal (federation) rather than a vertical (architecture/infrastructure) problem.

So that’s the major players, at least of the open networks (not counting yammer, say) and of the sites that I’ve had any real interaction with. The most interesting thing about this is that it’s all going to be different in six months or a year, and it’s cool to be here now to watch as things unwind.

Today was the first day that my regular blog post/essay didn’t get crossposted to my livejournal. This is one of the cool things that I can do now that I’ve redone tychoish.com. So LJ-land if you want to read about a really cool linux/open source thing click the above link.

In other news, I’ve been toying around with identi.ca which is the flagship of an open source federated twitter clone called laconica. (You can join/follow my “dents” here if you use any Laconica site.)

Now I’m a really big fan of the twitter except that my prefered method of interacting with twitter is via the IM/jabber interface, which hasn’t worked for months. While I’d love to jump ships to another platform (like identi.ca or jaiku), twitter has too many people that wouldn’t jump ship with me. So until Laconica can import tweets a little better, I’m going to be in a couple of different worlds for a while. Anyway…

I listened to an interview with the author the other day, and I think I’ll be writing some blog posts on this subject very soon, but its mightily cool, conceptually (because it gives everyone a lot of control over their microblogging life.)

A while back I wrote a post--after identi.ca started up, actually--about how microblogging needed to be thought of as an evolution of IRC and IM rather than an evolution of blogging. Not so much in terms of database structure (though I hear that would help,) but in terms of user interface and interaction.

I still think this is the case. Just FYI. And I still want to use something that really works. And better access control would be good.

Ok, blathering over.

Onward and Upward!