Anarchy VS government

Within the world where you are allowed and supposed to interact there are two types of social softwares. The anarchic and the governed social software.

The vast majority of popular social softwares are governed by the creators AND the users. Lets have a closer look at those users in later posts.

More about rules for digital interaction

Speaking about rules, there are two levels of rules

1- The one level you are meant to interact in. The game or forum or whatever itself. Breaking, or bending the rules here is mostly harmless (but also annoyning to some other users).

The designers of your virtual world might say "shit, we didnt think of that", and either fix the hole in the set of rules that you exploited, or say "shit, why didnt we come up with that first?" and let it be a accepted behaviour by other users.

2- The technical level. Break the rules here and you can "cheat". Often, figuring out how to cheat is more fun than doing it. And you might upset the designers of your social software. So just don't.

If you are the designer of a social software, EXPECT people that people will try to cheat by hacking in.

Law and order imposed by Web?

In the transformation of the web from read-only to a read-write media something very funny - but dangerous will happen.

A shining exampel of this is this story:

A girl on a subway in NY takes a pic of a flasher. She posts the pic on Flickr. The story makes firstpage of NY newspaper.

But- what if he is innocent?

Well, let's hope he´s not. This is a good example of how easy it is to use the web just compared to a few years ago. To take a picture and post it on the internet was indeed a bigger effort a few years ago.

Now, I dont expect all stories like this one to be as big. And most stories will remain in the offline world. But stories like this wil be more common. And not all of the persons involved will be guilty.

Web 2.0 - in brief

Web 2.0 is this:
Websolutions created to let the user create and provide the content of the websolution itself? - see for example del.icio.us.

RSS (subscribing to content via RSS readers)

Tagging, instead of the classic hierarchical treelike organized content, we have it all in a database soup and adding tags help us find it, (Tags are metainformation which is the information you need to find the information you seek :-). And anyone is welcome to tag.


Did I miss something? Most other distinguishing features for Web 2.0 is covered by above, as far as I can see.

What we don't know yet, is how/if this will affect internet behavior, or simply just strengthen old behaviour. (people will read same content, but with RSS, go to same websites, but use tags insted of browsing, have more and easier ways of communicating, but be too shy to do it)

Tag web 2.0

The four horsemen of the infocalyps.

The fear of the openess of the web is always there- a public forum will by some always be regarded as a potential marketplace for drugdealers. The possibility to upload files to a website is by some doomed to end up as a database for forbidden porn. Or so they think.

Well, guess what. It happens, but it is actually pretty rare.

The fear of the neo-nazis, the drug-dealer, pedophiles and organized crime (Trolls, chek it out in Wikipedia, they dont belong in this post, they are minor asshats and not illegal.)

Web 2.0 again

The technical aspects of Internet 2.0 is not the topic of this blog. The topic is what does it mean to you?

First of all: nothing revolutionary. No need to buy a new computer. No need to "start all over" and learn again. It's no revolution. It happened and is still happening in a slow, pice by pice, user by user incremental way.

You will notice it not by the new techniques being used, but rather how the web as a whole slowly moves toward the information flow of radios (earlier it has been compared -and still is by some-to publishing, "a webpage as a newspaper that needs editing every day").

Yea well... I'm not updating every day, but the true Internet 2.0 websites are. By the users.

Observation # 4

Since the online world is growing rapidly, and more people than ever join the big communities, the total overflow of information spawned a new way of organizing info.

The old way, used in hundreds of years, is to let someone with knowledge about the information (a librerian?) categorize the bits and pieces of info (books) to make information easy to find ("hmm.. thats on shelf 13, under non-fiction")

Well.. the organizers of the online world cant do that if the information (also called content) is added faster than they can categorize it. Which is just what happens at for example Flickr.

Therefore, the user who provides the content also labels it, with sometihing called a tag.

This way of organizing is called folksonomy. It is more random, more subjective and completely lacks order and structure. And again... its very very subjective. What is non- fiction and what is fiction? (UFO landings are... fiction? science fiction? Facts?)

There is a debate is whether this is good or not. Thats missing the point. So far, there are no options.

Web 2.0 or: why you are here.

Well then -what happened? Internet came, loads of money pumped up a "bubble" that popped, and then...the days came and went and ..the hype is back? And it is called Internet 2.0 or something like that.

And what is it and hat fuels it?

First of all, more people today use the internet in many more ways simply because broadband is more common.

Second, CMS (also known as CMT's, or content management systems), got so cheap and simple that they were for free and text only (blogs).

Third- for those of us who already knew how to create and maintain a website, RSS came in to the picture. (something for the masses- blogg, and something for the few- RSS). (and yes, RSS is still for the few)

And here we are. Internet 2.0