By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blackboard's Social Bookmarking Service
"I am sure they will get demonized for this." So opines Scott Leslie as part of his reaction to Blackboard's new Blackboard-only social networking service. Me, I think that if the only people in your circle of friends are Blackboard users, you need to get out more. As Leslie points out, the companies aren't alone in the blame for this sort of thing. "But the customers (that's you, right) have got to demand this, not expect vendors whose whole business model is 'lock in' to simply just provide it." Quite right. And as he says, "for some reason I still can't get a simple OpenID plugin for Wordpress." 2007 is shaping up to be, I think, a pushme-pullyou between open distributed systems and the silos that dominate the corporate and commercial approach to the online world. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Graham Attwell[Edit][Delete]: Social Software, Personal Learning Environments and Lifelong Competence Development, The Wales Wide Web [Edit][Delete] December 11, 2006
Good paper that looks at the links between competencies and the personal learning environment (PLE). Attwell notes that while there has been a hostile reaction from the education community to social networking applications, research about SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) shows that people actually learn informally and socially, in communities of practice. Informal learning isn't just some uncredentialed version of formal learning, which is why recognition has been difficult. It is closely tied to practice, and practice varies from community to community. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kathy Sierra[Edit][Delete]: The Asymptotic Twitter Curve, Creating Passionate Users [Edit][Delete] December 8, 2006
I liked this article, but I liked it better near the beginning when I thought Kathy Sierra was making a different point. She begins by looking at Twitter - "A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?" - and draws the 'Twitter Curve', mapping the adoption of various technologies with the frequency of interruption. So far so good, but this then wanders into a hackneyed discussion of how interruptions make it hard to get into the flow of things, which we've read a million times before. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Fred Stutzman[Edit][Delete]: Social Networking: Five Sites You Need to Know, Unit Structures [Edit][Delete] December 6, 2006
Some social networking buzz. The five sites aren't what you might expect. "In my opinion," writes the author, " these trends are really telling. Social networking is absolutely here to stay - this is not simply a 'phenomenon'." I agree - the phenomeonon may be refined, but the idea of creating systems that help people connect with each other will not go away. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Boanerges Aleman-Meza and others[Edit][Delete]: Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, WWW 2006 [Edit][Delete] November 23, 2006
This is a great paper. The discussion is directed toward the use of links within a social network to detect a potential conflict of interest. This would help editors select reviewers for journal articles (OK, so the authors are still rooted in the old world - let it go). Two networks, FOAF and the bibliographic literature in Computer Science research, are used. What we get in this paper is a nice series of steps (and cool diagram) that characterize such semantic analyses:
1. Obtaining high quality data
2. Data preparation
3. Entity disambiguation
4. Metadata and ontology representation
5. Querying and inference techniques
6. Visualization
7. Evaluation
It's interesting to see just how many real and potential conflicts of interest appear among the authors. More...