SocialTech

Open Source Social Software

This week, a bunch of us from the Emerge project were invited to contribute to the OSS Watch expert workshop on profiling communities. I was asked to present, and as part of my talk looked at the current state of Open Source social networking platforms and tools. I'm hoping to follow up with an evaluation matrix of the platforms, but in the meantime, I'm happy to pass on brief details of the sites and services I looked at. This isn't an exhaustive list by any means - I'm happy to report that there is plenty of choice if you are looking to invest time, energy and resources in using open source tools. This list represents  examples of what's currently available & is not an endorsement of any particular product or company :)

Open Source Social Networking Platforms

All in one solutions for community hosting, providing user profiles, tools sets & supporting collaborative activity. 

AROUNDMe  http://www.barnraiser.org/ -
Developed by Barnraiser a Swedish based registered not-for-profit organisation. AROUNDMe is suite of three social tools, designed to help users create their own OpenID-based services and tools for individuals and groups.

Elgg  http://elgg.org/
Social networking engine Elgg coming soon in two flavors - Classic Elgg and the soon to be released Elgg 1.0. Elgg, developed by the UK-based company Curverider.

Dolphin 6.1 http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/
One of a suite of tools from Australian based company BoonEx, who offer hosted options. A test platform is available at http://www.boonex.us/

Insoshi http://portal.insoshi.com/
US-based Michael Hartl and Long Nguyen's company, project and product Inoshi. The Insoshi open-source social networking platform grew out of RailsSpace.

LovdbyLess http://lovdbyless.com/
Like Insoshi, Lovdbyess is built with ruby on rails, by US-based developer team Less Everything, to provide a free, open source basic social network  platform that additional specific functionality can be added to.

Mahara http://www.mahara.org/
E-portfolio social networking software developed for the education community, and including a résumé builder/digital CV. The Mahara project is based in New Zealand, with partner organisations in Japan and the UK.

Open Source Social News

Stand alone and built to work with existing content management platforms, these tools allow users to share content published online, and comment on there own or others contributions.

Drupaligg http://drupaligg.com
A Digg clone built over Drupal

Newscloud http://www.newscloud.com
Newscloud is an OS Media Platform, designed to support communities around news and discussion. Information about downloading and developing can be found here.

Pligg http://www.pligg.com/
An OS content management system providing an interactive website for users to submit, vote and discuss web-based content.

Open Source Social Bookmarking

GetBoo http://www.getboo.com/
Scuttle http://sourceforge.net/projects/scuttle/
Unalog http://unalog.com

Open Source Video Sharing

Plumi http://plumi.org
Showinabox http://showinabox.tv/ For creating WordPress video blogs
FilmForge http://filmforge.koumbit.net/ Video for Drupal

Open Source Microblogging

Identi.ca http://identi.ca/ Open Source federated microblogging
Laconica http://laconi.ca/

Open Source Virtual Worlds

OpenSource Metaverse Project http://metaverse.sourceforge.net/
Croquet http://www.opencroquet.org/
NMC Open Virtual Worlds Project http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/nmc-launches-open-virtual-worlds-project Extension of Sun Microsystems’s open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland

Open Source Lifestreaming

Mugshot http://mugshot.org/main
Sweetcron http://www.sweetcron.com/
SimpleLife http://kierandelaney.net/blog/projects/simplelife/

& many more at: http://lifestreamblog.com/create/

Projects to watch/Upcoming 

Buddy Press http://buddypress.org/ Open Source project creating plug-ins to turn Wordpress Multi-User into a social network platform.

Identi.ca http://identi.ca/ Open Source federated microblogging

SocialLearn http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/socialearn/index.php The Open University's project is already picking up fans, and leaning towards OS. Fingers crossed.

Wikia’s Social Profile extension for Mediawiki http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SocialProfile adding social elements including profile pages and friending to the popular wiki software

 

Young People and Social Networking Services

I'm delighted to announce that the Young People and Social Networking Services report that I have been working on for Childnet International, with the generous support of Becta, is now available from Childnet's digital literacy and citizenship site, Digizen.

It's a pretty comprehensive report, with the whole shebang available for download under a Creative Commons License on site, or from here:

Download fullReport.pdf

and weighing in at 37 pages. The online version breaks the sections up for your viewing pleasure - so you can just dip in to the sections which are of interest or use to you. The report was written from a UK schools and Further Education perspective, although much of the information will be useful to people working outside of these two contexts.

It isn't a completely introductory level document, but should be useful and informative for people who have a responsibility care towards children and young people - including governors, principals and senior management teams, Safeguarding boards and local authorities - people who are making decisions concerning  educational provision and resourcing.  It will also be very handy for anyone working within the sector and wanting to use internet based services with young people.

What's in the pack?

What are Social Networking Services? looks at where we are in terms of definitions, and  splits services up into six main categories: Profile-based services (eg Bebo, Facebook, MySpace); Content-focused services (eg Flickr, YouTube); White-label networks (although I could have written a book about these); Multi-User Virtual Environments (although some of these aren't necessarily social networks - particularly those designed for younger children); Mobile services; and Microblogging/Presence update services (Social Search engines & Lifestream aps also get a mention as adjunct services). The version that's on the site is the short one. you can download the 9 page PDF on site or from here:

Download social-networking-overview.pdf

Evaluating Social Networking Services comes in two parts: an evaluation chart which has an online version and an easier-for-me-to-read downloadable version:

Download Sns.pdf

That's designed to be printed off big (well, A3). The services which were kind enough to take part are used as examples to help people make their own evaluations of services. Big thanks to everyone at Bebo, Facebook, Yahoo!, MySpace, Ning, Taking It Global and Google who pitched in and gave permissions. There is also a checklist guide that accompanies the chart, designed to walk you through what to look out for when evaluating services for use with young people. This covers a lot of things, including profile privacy, moderation, customisation, security and access issues, data management tools, and interoperability.

Benefits & Opportunities is a section looking at the potential positives for young people  and organisations of using social networking services.

Barriers & Risks looks some of the issues preventing educators from exploring social networking services and some of the e-safety issues involved.

The Ideas and Examples returns to the different kinds of social networking services outlined in the first section and looks at what educators in the UK and around the world are doing. I'd like to continue to develop and expand this section so all  suggestions are welcome - and of course you can always enter your fantastic project for this years International Edublog Awards :)

So that's it! Except to again thank the fantastic advisory board who worked on the project, keeping an eye on how the research was developing and what the final report looked like.

   

 

Digital Communities & Digital Identities

Most of my week was taken up presenting, hosting, and having a huge deal of fun at the Emerge project three day online conference, Digital Communities and Digital Identities. I lead on the programming for the event,& recruited many of the speakers, so it wasn't altogether surprising that I really enjoyed myself. The quality of the session content, speakers, and participant contributions exceeded even my high expectation though. I'm going to blitz through some of the sessions here, linking to resources on an ongoing basis (not everything is up yet) and inviting additional linkfo where people want to contribute them. Also, a quick reminder that following the ol Emerge tag convention, we went with jiscemerge0408. We used three primary environments: Elluminate (java based online conferencing software) for synchronous activities, Moodle (open source virtual learning environment) for asynchronous activity and conference co-ordination, and Second Life (multi-user virtual environment), for the conference social. We also used a host of other tools for specific tasks - twitter, wikis, media players, and the Emerge main site (a social networking platform), primarily for blogging.

You can see a visual record of the conference here. I tried to record as I went along, using screen shots of the presenters on cam. A very simple solution to creating a visual record of the online conference, but I can't say I've really seen it used at other online events.

What were my conference highlights? One of the big things that hit home for me at this conference was the definite sense of community belonging. Certainly, community members have a very diverse experience of and understanding of Emerge, and it's primarily (as Graham Attwell noted) a community of interest. Although the Emerge 'border policy' has been a semi-permeable and pragmatic one, our majority of our members are primarily associated with two funding rounds, designed to support innovation and user engagement in the UK post-compulsory education sector.   

However, the more important understanding that really hit home for many of us at this particular conference is the appreciation of Emerge as a community of cultural and social practice. Graham Attwell and Stephen Warburton will doubtless add to this far more graciously shortly. For me, the conference really highlighted the business of serious fun and how conductive and essential providing an relaxed, comfortable environment where people were able to express themselves, take risks and reach out. Knowing that you are part of a community which is interested in your work, sympathetic and alert too the problems and contexts you operate in, and basically on your side, can operate as a critical safety net, fostering creative risk taking and collaboration.  I'm not talking about blandly sycophantic  agreement here either. Meaningful friendship involves critical engagement - people who care enough and are interested enough to say things that might be challenging. It's difficult to have and engage openly in critical conversation - but ignoring it and hoping it will go away is a childish, disrespectful strategy which will eventually bite you in the ass.

A fun illustration of this was the revival of Frances Bell's community beard meme, originally coming from a funny critical post on the the prevalence of beards in the community  commenting on the gender imbalance of the visible community. Frances is an consummate expert in being a critical friend, and partly what I'd like to see actively cultivated in the community is  an environment that allows constructive criticism to be given and received non-threateningly.

George Siemens delivered a great keynote on Technology and Community as Identity, and raised a lot of themes which continued to resonate throughout the three days. So hats off George - you're a great keynote speaker!

Brian Kelly's session on Developing a sustainable approach to the use of web 2.0 was a masterclass in service design and management, summing up where we currently are in terms of institutional, legal and ethical terms regarding using third party services to support learners in formal education.

The Emerge Bizarre launch (mp3 file)- that went out as a live radio show - was a triumph of content and production values, and includes some interviews with a couple of our projects. Great use of CC licensed music and a big kick to us to used multimedia more effectively in future.

The ARGOSI and HABITAT projects community slot - presented by D.H. Lawrence and two ladyz also wearing rather fetching beards - The User experience of Virtual Worlds was very interesting and exciting. I'm particularly in love with the ARGOSI project which seems to be inspired by 80's TV programme The Adventure Show (which I loved! Please send me a link someone!). I'll add more detail and links to this shout out shorty.

What Not to Rez - our fashion show social on Second Life was something that I really enjoyed too - you can check out the Flickr show link at the top of the post for pictures of me in my monster-truck proportioned frock.

Signal vs Noise

Picture taken from Thomas Vander Wal's presentation, Granular Social Networks.

Thomas Vander Wal recently posted a great short presentation, Granular Social Networks. In it he tracks the complexity of relationships within and across networks, making interesting and important points about the overlapping of interests and following behaviours between connections. The only thing that I'd be keen to stress a little more would be the relatively haphazard relationship most followers necessarily have within social networking service relationships. While most of us have very few connections that we engage with across the entire range of their interests, activity and expertise (stalkers, the love lorn and private detectives aside). Similarly, even amongst those connections that we have an identifiable interest in - for example, I'm interested in your music consumption and recommendations - it's not usual to keep track of every single recommendation or playlist. There are just too many other things going on. So to a certain extent I don't believe that greater control - i.e. finer granularity within network channels - is the answer ( & you can check out my post on in service granularity here for further elaboration). While intellegent and sensitive service design, along with user digital literacy are important, a philosophical acceptance of serendipity and a kindly understanding of the human limitations for data absorption are also useful.  In the words of a Jaiku conversation I had with Terry Madley earlier today: "or maybe, only learn not to mind so much about the inevitable periods of disconnection. It's kind of good to not think about the info streams as if they were linear, let alone might constitute any kind of linear narrative. Maybe this is one of the reasons why lifestreaming is popular - the illusion that if you could somehow keep track of everything, there'd be a coherent story at the end of the rss rainbow."

The other issue that Thomas touches on is another of my current bug bears - signal v noise. I wanted to post here primarily to put on the (blog) record that both signal and noise are entirely subjective concepts. They aren't even stable.  What's noise to me on Tuesday morning might be be signal from heaven on Wednesday evening - when I might desperately be in need of an inspirational line of poetry, or the reassurance that all is well in someone's household, or a link to a resource or an idea that helps me think through a presentation I'm writing. The signal vs noise distinction often implies a judgement call. The reference Thomas makes is entirely free from this implication -in fact his presentation couches the distinction as personal definitions. I'm just keen to draw attention to the fact that what is signal and what is noise doesn't consist of objective content that we can necessarily pre-determine.

Permissions granularity ABC

Picture credit: Peek-a-boo by Annie in Belziers, Lolcat title added

I'm almost sure that's my most boring title to date, but hey, please feel free to refrain from reliving any duller former glories.  Anyhow, I should have two fantastic launches to celebrate soon, both of which will be of interest to people using, providing or running social networking services, so I'm going to thrash out a few of the issues I've been mulling over recently, prior to whatever trumpeting heralds my blog budget will run too.

Granularity in this context refers to the degree of choice users have about sharing their information- the choices a site member can makes over who gets to see what information and data they upload or create on site. Most services offer basic permissions within broad friend categories - you can share all your information with no-one (private), with all friends (friends in this context meaning people who you have approved/included on your contacts list), or with everyone (the public - this may be the broader site membership but usually refers to the internet viewing public).

The more granular the service, the more flexibility members have over what is made available and to who. The level of permissions granularity for any given piece of social software can actually be expressed quite simply:

who can see stuff x what kinds of stuff they can see = level of granularity

Permissions granularity is made up of there two main sub sections: the who and the what.

As outlined above, the who baseline permissions extend to three broad categories: myself (private), friends (privileges), or everyone (public). Of course across sites and services there are variations on these permission sets – Flickr for instance provides you with two levels of people you have given permissions too, labeled friends and family. Some services allow you to divide your friends list into sub-groups of your own making, so that you can label them and, in theory, manage who gets to see what more effectively.

The what refers to your stuff – blog posts, audio visual files, status updates and activity logs. So how granular the permissions are in this respect refers to how finely you can control the size of bits that you want to make available or restrict access too. So at the chunky end of the scale, you may only be able to make every thing public, private, or available to yoour pre-approved list. In the middle, you’d be able to assign viewing preferences to all of the different categories of activity and assets. Very granular services would enable you assign permissions make each individual post, update or whatever.

However, life isn't this simple. Unless permissions are easy to understand, use, and change, most users will fall back on whatever the site defaults are, or to setting up their own defaults and leave permissions management at that. Any transparency about management is obviously further complicated by the increasing use of third party widgets and services into the mix.

Overly complex granularity, like an indiscriminate friends list, leaves users in the same fall back position – ignoring permissions controls because its easier.

Facebook: Neo-con social experiment?

The Guardian ran Tom Hodgkinson blistering critique of Facebook a couple of days ago. While I'm not in the business of defending any particular social networking site – I’m a platform neutral kind of gal - I do however see the value in social networking sites and I am interested in exploring their potential for social participation and for formal and informal education.

I’m going to ignore my lack of surprise that old media fosters and promotes attacks on new media, since what I’m interested in here isn’t the ongoing bun fight between sections of both, but in addressing some of the digital literacy and social participation issues that Hodgkinson's rant raises.

Some of the arguments are Facebook specific, many spill over to address social networking services and those who use them in general. Since the figures are pretty staggering - and aren't showing signs of slowing down, it may be more useful to look at how we can move the arguments and services forward rather than just advising people to opt out, or even worse, start banning stuff.

1. Facebook as a neo-con libetarian social experiment.

One of the main arguments is about association: because Facebook is bankrolled and directed by the Machiavellian neo-con Pay-Pal guy Peter Thiel, and others who can be regarded as ideologically dubious, Facebook membership supports a particular ideology and puts money in to the pocket of those who believe in it. Ownership and profit is a dilemma that most people have to face daily and isn't unfortunately restricted to a single social networking site. If I watch the Simpsons (which I do), however hilariously subversive it might be, I've got to accept I'm supporting the Fox Network and helping the people who make money out of the network make some more money.

Technology is not neutral. Services and products rarely get to be  big simply because they are really loveable/offer the best tool set. Tech development is funded for political/ideological ends and motives. Tech is generally designed to serve some non-neutral purpose. Technologies have social and political impacts. And in general, people who are funding stuff are not doing it just for a love of humanity. This doesn't mean that tech can't be used in subversive or in positive ways, just that non of us are operating in an ideologically vacuum. 

 

2. Technology alienates rather than connects.

Hodgekinson argues that Social Networking Services provide the spectacle of community, connection and collaboration whilst actually robbing humans of meaningful, real interactions. Personally, I’ve lost count of the number of people I know who have fallen in love on line, many of whom have gone on to have relationships where they do meet up and get married. Is their online interaction with each other somehow fake? No, of course it isn’t. Hooking up with and getting to know someone online isn’t a shoddy substitute for picking someone up in a bar on a Friday night. It’s just a different type of interaction. Relying on some notion of the real that involves only three dimensional interaction not only dismisses the history and role of information communication technologies (do love letters not count? Does finding our about a war not really mean anything if it’s from the television?), it ignores the fact that the internet and being online isn’t a separate space from 'real world interactions' – its just a different one. My son often meets up with his friends in virtual worlds and on gaming sites. Not only is he continuing and developing his existing friendships, he’s using and developing his social and literacy skills. Maybe not in ways that Hodgkinson appreciates, but certainly in ways which will help him get a job and manage the disperate groups that are typical of friend and family networks within industrial societies.

A part of this argument includes Hodgekinson’s problem with people constructing overly flattering artificial representations of themselves. Again, he hasn’t looked at as many profiles as I have because a lot of them could do with advice in how not to represent yourself to the world. Presenting a more flattering picture of yourself to people you haven't previously met doesn't make you a lier, it makes you normal.

3. Friendship is a universal, unwavering category

Hodgekinson seems to only have one definition for the word friend. ‘(insert social networking service) friends’ – are not necessarily your real friends (unless that’s how you work your connections). They are more often than not a badly thought out disperate set of connections, made up of people you really do know and like, people you went to work or were in formal education with, family members and complete strangers. 

4. Facebook as an all encompacing data-leech monster

Actually this would make a great horror movie. Not about Facebook of course - any of the named services would sue. But just some generic social networking site. If any South Korean film producers are reading this – I’m up for scripting. We could launch a brand off the back of it - it would be like Death Cigarettes all over again. Hodgekinson's line “The US defense department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier” is going in there. 

People should, of course, think about what data they submit to services. Read the privacy policy and the User Service Agreement. You don’t have to be a passive consumer of services. If your data is going to be sold - and most services make money through selling or renting data and/or through advertising - don't fill in data you don't mind being sold on to someone. If you really object to the terms and conditions, look for another service, or join the service and launch a protest.

5. “Facebook is profoundly uncreative”

Social Networking Services and social media tools provide platforms across which users create and deploy their own selection of content. Hodgekinson argues that they aren't providing services of any real value, since users are the ones doing all the hard work. You may as well argue that swimming baths and playgrounds shouldn’t be funded. Does the whole web 2.0 revolution boil down to virtual republics of idiots who donate their labour and data not only for free but in order to be exploited? My guess is that people are pretty much the same offline as they are online, in terms of their interests, intelligence levels and willingness to be exploited. There's no doubt that the internet can be used to support creativity, play, communication, and community building, and offers unprecedented opportunities for social participation and collaboration. Throwing your hands up in horror and going off to plant seeds in your back yard is one way of responding to services and practices you don't like. Or you could actually try doing something about them.

Endings 2007

Well, that was 2007.

I've been very busy, mainly working on resources for schools and colleges around using Social Networking Services (to be released soon) and traveling around the UK talking about cyberbullying and the guidence I helped produce for the UK government with school teachers, parents, leaders, local authorities, the police and social services - what it is, how we can prevent it and how to deal with it effectively when cases occur. I just wanted to post a catch up note commenting on a few end of year events.

We held the 4th International Edublog Awards slightly early this year - the most ambitious event to date. I'm really happy to say that the amazing international team - social website and community expert James Farmer (Australia – & the legend who who set up and ran the first awards, and rejoined us this year) webcasting pioneer and audio supremo Jeff LeBow (US), EdTech luminary Dave Cormier (Canada) and Second Life guru Jo Kay (Australia) - carried it off with aplomb. Huge huge thanks to them and to everyone else who pitched in.

& if you haven't already - check out Cormier's annual top ten EdTech stories of 2007.

What else? The last time I posted was just after the Eduspaces disconnection notice. I'm happy to report that after a flurry of dismayed activity, some kind of agreement was reached with TakingITGlobal.org who have now stepped in to begin the process of (hopefully) fixing the technical issues brought about by the shutdown activities and continuing the community with greater involvement of the members. The threatened closure raised a lot of issues for educators around community development, risk management, data protection and the use of third party web 2.0 services in education.

I also got asked to talk about Social Networking Services at the Bazaar European Conference on the 14 December 2007 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and I was delighted to be able to hang out and talk shop into the wee hours with such smart and passionate company - including Helen Keegan, Steve Wheeler, and Bazaar supremo Graham Attwell.   

Speakers were asked to encompass the conference themes in their topics: data security, privacy and sustainability; social software, tools and content creation; Open Educational Resources (OERs) and the culture of sharing; Interoperability, metadata and OERs; Personal Learning Environments, ePortfolios and informal learning. For me, one of the huge things to come out was the lack of up-to-speed digital media literacy resources across the UK and Europe, for adults, children, young people and educators (particularly around data protection and management). I'm a huge fan of Henry Jenkins US based New Media Literacies project, and I'd like to see more action from both the UK's Media Literacy Taskforce, Becta, and Ofcom this year.

Eduspaces says goodbye

Just got the email from Curverider announcing the Eduspaces closure:

Hi All,

We would like to inform all users 
of EduSpaces that we will be shutting 
down the service on Jan 10th, 2008.

We have provided a mechanism 
for you to export all your blog 
posts in either an RSS format or 
HTML. To do this, go to your blog 
and select the submenu option 
you require. For those of you 
with files, you might want to 
download those as well.

Thank you to everyone 
who has supported EduSpaces 
over the last three years.
 
Best regards,
 
The EduSpaces team

It's no huge surprise (amongst other indicators Dave and Ben both moved out of Eduspaces a while ago), although I had hoped they would find someone to take the site over, and I can't say that I'm not sad to see the site go. Eduspaces and the Curverider team have provided a really important service, and an even more important model for the international education sector - demonstrating how web 2.0 and social technologies can be used to support learning and teaching, and showing the world what a learner-centric system might look like.

Edublog Awards - come celebrate!

Come and celebrate all the hard work that everyone has done this year:

• exploring and demonstrating how social media can make a real difference to the effectiveness of our learning and teaching
• battling restrictions and insecurities about new technologies and pedagogic practices
• putting the learner at the center of formal and informal learning
• making sure education is a creative, playful, enjoyable and worthwhile experience for all

The International Edublog Awards is now in it's fourth year, celebrating and highlighting excellence in the educational use of weblogs and social media, drawing attention to the vast amount of cutting edge educational practice out there and making friends on the way.

The awards party is upon us: Saturday December 8 2007 @ 21.30GMT. For your local times please click through. We're currently sorting out the hosting issues - the event will be taking place on the Island of jokaydia in Second Life.

Not able/wanting to join us on jokaydia? Why not keep track of all the action at one of our delightful  alternative locations? ;)

• EdTech Talk supremo & long time awards partner Jeff Lebow will be hosting Ustream Simulcast and text chat at EdTech Talk   - You'll be able to watch and hear whats going on at the SL location without risking anything, and join in with the party from there. You can find the audio only listen link are there as well.

There'll be a two alternative SL spaces setup for people to meet and listen to the webcast of the event if we get too full on the Island of jokaydia:

• Worldbridges Webcastatorium on Info Island. Special thanks to the World Bridges Team for sharing their space.
• The Island of Terra Incognita. Special thanks to Decka Mah for sharing her space with us for the event.

• Use Twitter to read/post about the awards - follow 'Eddies' to join in the conversation

• There's a Flickr pool for you to add your pics to - we'd love to see what you look like while you're at the awards, on or off line.

• There's a Facebook event listing up for those of you who have Facebook accounts

• For those of you busy doing your own thing, the tag is 07Eddies - please stick it on your awards related goodness!

Award recipients who would like to give an audio acceptance speech can either skype 'worldbridges' (or be skyped by worldbridges) or speak up in SL.

See you there!

Wilson on OpenSocial

Scott Wilson has just published an excellent post on the tech ins and outs of Google's Open Social. I really love Scott's writing, admittedly I'm way geeky but he really nails the issues in an easy to grasp way. I'm already feeling spent on OpenSocial, so I'm going to try and leave what's essentially (and unfortunately) turned out to be not-that-big-a-deal alone now for a while - as I said over at Jaiku (jeeze I'm loving it over there at the moment): "OpenSocial has probably caught fire so quick because the name suggests it might be something open and social. It isn't really either. Great branding though. Reminds me of when FaceBook were talking about being an open platform."

Childnet's Digizen Cyberbullying Competition for 14-19 year olds

We talked a lot last year about how we'd like to run a competition showcasing how young people were using social software to engage with local and global communities, and develop their own voices online. The Edublog Awards are run as a voluntary effort and we just weren't confident that we could expand the awards in terms of the category requests we were getting (you'll notice that we run to 20 categories this year - double the number we've previously had), and in terms of providing young people with a really high quality awards programme.

I've been fortunate to work with charity Childnet International this year - one of the worlds leading e-safety organisations, whose mission is to work in partnership with others around the world to help make the internet a great and safe place for children. Childnet provide a wide range of high quality resources covering topics including blogging, mobile phones, data protection, file sharing, aimed at young people, parents, carers, and schools. Most recently I've been working with them on their Digizen site - an amazing media literacy project which covers cyberbullying issues, and advice on using social networking services in education.

Childnet have a long history of running internationally based young peoples competitions which focus on the responsible use of technologies, and in supporting young people to models great practice. The Edublog Awards are delighted to be promoting Childnet's brand new Digizen competition (we've included the competition under category 19) and we hope that you will support it as well, by spreading the word and by encouraging young people to enter - or even supporting the production of entries in your school councils, or in your subject areas - citizenship, drama, English or IT for example.

The competition is open to young people between the ages of 14 and 19 who are in formal education, or who are being home schooled. There are main two criteria for entries:

1. Entries should address some aspect of cyberbullying.

This could be around a specific type of cyberbullying, or a particular debate or issue to do with cyberbullying. Any format or approach is allowed - it could be a videoed discussion, a comic about a students experience or views, a podcast of a radio show, reviews of resources. The entries should be targeted at their peers or at younger children. They don't need to be huge, overly complex or ultra slick - they do need to be thoughtful, interesting and engaging. One example of a potential entry could be a short discussion of why mobile phones might be banned in response to cyberbullying incidence in school, and whether or not this might be effective. A student could record this on their mobile and upload it to a video hosting site, inviting other students to leave their comments.

You can get more ideas about the range of issues cyberbullying touches on over at the Digizen site.

2. They must be online

Entries can be in the form of websites, blogs, social network site profiles or groups, and can be audio, visual or text based. Once entries have been posted online you can submit your students work here. Find out more information about the competition terms and conditions over at the Digizen site.

We'll be updating on the competition at the awards in December (the Digizen competition doesn't close for entries until January 31 2008) - and we hope to be able to highlight some of the examples of the entries to date.

2-Way API Action

Rumors currently flying about Google's plans for social networking development & I'm as interested in the next (ok, fairly geeky) person to see how they plan on expanding their Empire. The potential for creating a new kind of social networking service - one that sits on top of a range of distributed activities - formalising (and making easier? Certainly easier to bank data) the kinds of cross site activities and networking we internet monkeys already get up to sounds awfully tempting. The strength of the model is not that the vision is anything new - what's new is that the fact that an internet Goliath is (allegedly) seriously pursuing this kind of open door policy. It's huge strength - that it'll be built on Google's stable of services - is of course a mighty advantage, and an obvious potential limitation to how any one company manages to string our disparate interests, preferences and activities together. I'll be interested in how Maka-Maka manages or accommodates relations across other service providers and locations.

UPDATE: Google OpenSocial info up now

The BIMA Facebook debate, & Chris Kelly's announcement today

I had a blast as one of the debate panelists at this week's BIMA organised Facebook Debate (Yes, I was there, despite not being included on any of the speaker lists) at the BT Center in London. I'm not a huge fan of the debate format - for and against arguments always kick against the pragmatist in me,which is why I love the slam concept, but it was fun to go all out for a specific side. My team (me & the endearingly grumpy Robert Lock) were pitched against Damien Mulley and Sam Sethi on two audience selected topics - Facebook's decision to open up its interface to all developers was a mistake (we were asked to argue for) and friend requests from your boss are best ignored (against).

I'm not going to run through all of the arguments, although some of them I suspect are well on the way to near legendary status (Sam's statement that Boss stands for bag of shit, for example) and I'd also like to publicly thank Damien since his arguments were all of huge help to our team  :)

I'll call out a couple of points that I made that may be of interest to readers over here. Firstly (and this turned out to be the most contentious thing I said all night) I suggested that one of the problems with opening up the Facebook platform to external apps was that to the extent that third party apps were interesting/useful (& I'd like to think that some are useful, as opposed to just entertaining), many just expanded the Facebook sink into a black hole - eg - more information that I can't get out. Although the management of distributed presence was clearly a theme that ran across the evening, data portability seemed to be  largely regarded as a matter of choice - in the sense that if you want it - go to another  platform. 

Secondly, I talked about having your boss included in your contact list as a good excuse to finally get to grips with Dante's 10th circle of hell - aka the peculiar granularity of FB permissions. I asked for an audience hands up on who in the room felt really confident about setting up and using permissions, and about five people did. It'll be interesting to see whether the introduction of friend categories makes permissions easier, harder, or no different to navigate (& just in case anyone involved in the coding of it for FB is reading this - please make sure you can assign individual friends to multiple groups).

UPDATE: Adam Tinworth has posted a really great report of the event over at One Man & His Blog. I'm sorry he couldn't stay to the end and talk!

In other related news - so this doesn't become the FB blog - Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, posted today on a range of e-safety activities, including a commitment to address complaints concerning certain categories (nudity, porn, harassment, unwanted contact) within 24 hours - as far as I know the first social network service to specify a customer service level agreement response time (please do let me know if I'm wrong!).

Google buys Jaiku

Full press release over here. Congrats to the Jaiku team on their speedy acquisition.

The limits of homophily

Thanks to Frances Bell for drawing my attention to this article, and to a really useful word. I've been talking about the issues of homophily within social networking sites and practices for some time now, but without having an actual word to describe what it was I was getting at. So cheers Frances!

Homophily in this case was sourced from the article Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks (2001). McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook stitch up the concept in the abstract:

"Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order."

There's no doubting the fact that social networking sites are built around the facilitation of  homophily - whether its of general or specific interest (liking 'film' or liking 'Korean cinema', or 'Choi Min-shik', for example) , geographical location, institutional affiliation etc etc. The rise of social search makes this even more explicit. In particular, people search engines which mine social networking sites - (e.g. Explode, Squidwho, Wink, & more each day) - are built around the idea that you can find friends who share your interests across locations, not be bound by your network-flavor affiliation.

The current reality is a bit more hit and miss - blame it on the relatively small volume of white-label social networks, or closed houses, or  the lack of tag savvy amongst the general population,  but it's going to be easier for a while to find someone with very broad interests (for some reason, sex springs to mind as a popularly listed one), rather than your specific long-tail requirements for some time to come.

The question I was asking is what we miss by reinforcing homophily as the prime directive online. To give a pretty flip example, I don't have a huge amount of friends over at last.fm, but I certainly don't want to make friends with anyone who listens to exactly the same music as I do. What would be the point?  I want friends who listen to things I've never heard of, and am unlikely to stumble over by myself. I like to listen to new stuff, even if I only very very rarely fall in love with something.

Digizen launch

Along with the UK's cyberbullying guidance for schools, I've been working hard getting a new site ready for Childnet International - Digizen. The site is targeted at teachers, parents and carers who are interested in understanding and supporting children and young people's online social participation.

The site went live on Friday morning, and I've got to say I'm more than delighted with how it's turned out - huge thanks to new media company ContraPositive for getting the vision for the site look and feel down from the bunch of emails, conversations and web links we threw at them. It's a unashamedly perpetual beta project, and has been designed around three initial areas.

Young People and Social Networking Services houses the sites research project, which has been sponsored by Becta:

The project is designed to investigate how distributed/web 2.0 networks can and are being used to support personalised formal and informal learning by and for young people (11-16). It will identify the opportunities presented by a range of web-based services.

The project will also identify the key issues and barriers for the UK schools sector in making use of SNS technologies and practices. The report will address and identify the key child safety, child protection issues and commercial considerations within web 2.0 spaces and look at how risk can be effectively managed.

Our cyberbullying area houses the UK government's brand new guidance for schools, as well as supporting resources including an overview of the guidance and a short film and teachers pack, designed to be used in class, assemblies or for parents evenings.

DigiCentral is our creative space - as well as a competition for young people to create their own peer targeted cyberbullying resources, we'll be releasing the Digizen widget very shortly (and I will be avoiding calling it the DigiWidgit.)

Please take a look around the site - if you like what you see, please help us to publicise Digizen as much as possible - by talking about it, sharing the address or posting about it on your own blog or school website.

There's loads more arriving on site between now and Christmas, so either check back or subscribe to our web feed for updates.

4 bloggers blogging

Blogged already by James, Steve & Hayden, but I can't resist posting this photo from David Bryson's bloggers blogging slideshow - it's of Simon, me, Frances and Helen blogging after the Web Slam. Ah, happy days.

Web Slam: 2.0

I'm still at ALT-C 2007, enjoying catching up & meeting a bunch of new people. This morning,  Helen, Frances and I ran a Web 2.0 slam workshop. We were aiming to get the audience to take over the session and approach Web 2.0 apps, issues and practices creatively. Everyone was asked to contribute a 90 second competitive slam - basically, a quick and dirty performance piece around the stuff we covered in the first half of the session. We worked as we went and you can check out the WetPaint wiki, which links to the pictures and vids our lovely best boy Simon Hardaker took during the session. Big thanks to to Steve Wheeler who put time in as our chair, Unfortunately no one took up my suggestion to explore web 2 through the medium of interpretative dance, although the winning slam was a web 2.0 parody mime. 

We may or may not have film of the presenters' slams - apparently there was additional secret filming going on in the audience and we're currently trying to uncover the footage. Helen presented a visual montage around web 2.0 issues and themes; Frances contributed a bed time story/morality tale for our times on Facebook disclosure; I explored social network search engines with a live dating session for the single people in the audience.  This could potentially be a good career move for me so if you have a tech event coming up and would like some live matchmaking 2.0 give me a call ;)

Shout out for social networks in education

As some of you know I’m currently working on a project for Childnet International that looks at young people’s use of technology, specifically social network services (SNS).  One of the strands of this work is designed to help educators and carers in making informed decisions about using social network sites. The work will provide an introduction to what are new kinds of sites and practices for many people, outline potential risks and things to keep a look out for, and provide strategies to address these.

The project aims to

•    Look at how children and young people can use the internet safely to change the world for the better;
•    Recognise the huge positive potential young people have and the vital role they have to play in shaping the world; and
•    Celebrates the unprecedented opportunities that web 2.0 affords children and young people - to develop a voice, to collaborate, to organise, to debate, to create, to share, to learn, to develop essential skills, and above all - to participate. 

I’m putting a call out for help with two specific sections of the work:

1.    Examples of SNS currently being used to support education both big and small projects – from setting up your own social network platform to examples of students using flicker to organise a presentation.

2.    Ideas for using SNS to support education – perhaps your school blocks a lot of social network sites but you have some great ideas for how you would like to see students making the most out of these kinds of sites.

You can send your gems over to sns4ed@gmail.com
Please get them to me before the end of August!

Questions (please do add any others to the comments!)

What do you mean by social networking services Josie?

Part of the work of the project will be in addressing the thorny issue of definition. There’s a reasonable indicative list of social network sites over at wikipedia

As well as services like MySpace and Bebo, my definition would include all of those other services that support users to create content (including commentary and criticism) within a networked environment.  & Yes, I am counting virtual worlds and multi-user gaming sites. I’d also throw in social book marking services (like del.icio.us), microblogging services (like Twitter and Jaiku), and of course I’m interested in multimedia sites like Flickr, YouTube and other services that utilise mobile phone functionality.

I’m not focusing on freestanding blogs or wikis – not because these aren’t important, or don't allow people to create networks – but because of the scope of this project and also because I already run the Edublog awards which does a lot to recognise stuff going on using those tools. So if you have a great example of practice, why not enter this years awards?

What age range are you looking at?

I’m focusing on UK school aged children, that is, 11 – 16 year olds. However, if you’ve got a great example of practice with older or younger learners – please do send it in!

Are you only interested in UK based examples?

The work is primarily addressing UK education issues, but I’m happy to take examples and ideas from anywhere!

What will you do with my fantastic contribution?

Some of the entries will be featured on the website. I’ll release all of the ideas and examples as a separate CC licensed download to benefit all of us. I’ll be giving link credit to every contributor who wants it – so please remember to include your name and the site you’d like to link to.

I don’t have any ideas or examples :( What can I do to help?

Let people know about this call! Pass on the word! Huge thanks!

Getting more out of Facebook

OK – I promise to shut up about Facebook for a while after this, I really do belong to many other fine social network sites and following on from Ben and Dave's posts around the upcoming data sharing summit: interoperability and open standards are important kids. Also, the fact that Facebook can do whatever it likes with your data once you’ve put it in there (of course you remembered to read that user agreement, right?) makes it a hard site to recommend for collaborative and developmental work.

But I’ve had a few people ask me about Facebook RSS feeds, and what exactly it is that you can get out. The granularity of Facebook provides a ton of options, but can also make finding your way around permissions sets a bit tricky. It’s worth while spending a bit of time familiarising yourself with who can see what and how – especially as your public updates, posts and notes can theoretically be exported off site and outside the happy protected sphere of your hand picked 'friends'. As usual, it’s just a question of remembering that if it’s not something you’d be happy turning up in a Google search for your name, don’t post it publicly in the first place.

There are 6 feed options altogether: Three types – status updates, notes and posted items, with two choices – all your friends, or an individual (friend or yourself) – if you have permission. Info on all the feed options is here (it doesn’t look like you have to be signed in to read it either)

The feeds at the moment are pretty clunky – for example, if you’d like to export information around a certain topic, you can forget it. Facebook doesn’t use tags to organise data that make it difficult to see how they’re going to refine the export options.

In order to export your status updates to other sites and services, you probably have to check your privacy permissions. Hit privacy, applications and then Notes privacy settings. You’ll need to select “anyone who can see my notes can export them”. Then head back to your profile page, click through to mini-feed see all and select status stories. You should now find a feed option at the bottom of the tab.

Thanks to Michael Pick and Luke Rankin for tips.

Women Web 2.0 founders

Found this list via the Web 2.0 (Entrepreneurs) group over at Facebook - an amazingly well connected group. As an aside, they also have a Join a Startup group for people wanting to join or recruit into startups, and a brand new sub-group, Web T.e, for experienced programmers, founders, developers & designers.

Anyhow, the call was for a list of female founders of web2 companies - it's a respectable list but considering the number of 2.0 startups around there must be a few more to add. Check it out.

Women, Blogging & Business

I spent a great day on Friday at the Women, Blogging & Business conference - the first European event to focus on women and social media. The final programme offered a great line up, and this is the first conference I've been to since the early 90s that had an all women speaking cast, and certainly the first tech conference I've ever been to where the women clearly out numbered the male delegates.

It was a fantastic day. The first keynote was Meg Pickard (Head of Communities and User Experience for Guardian Unlimited) who delivered a great analysis of the web 2.0 transformation of the consumption, interaction, curation and creation of content.

Next up was Eileen Brown, Microsoft Technology Evangelist, who gave us the low down on the strategic use of employee blogging within Microsoft and outlined the impact it has had on humanising the public perception of the company, as well as on influencing policy and practice at Microsoft itself.

Jory des Jardins,  Media Consultant & Co-founder of BlogHer wrapped up the keynotes with an overview of women