By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Danah Boyd[Edit][Delete]: Social Network Sites: My Definition, Many2Many [Edit][Delete] November 21, 2006
For Val, this link to Danah Boyd on the definition of social network sites (I know that's not exactly 'social software' but it's close enough). Something like this definition is needed because with the recent popularity of social software everything and its dog is being called social software or a social networking site (I can just imagine getting in my email: Purina Cat Chow - social networking for your pets). Boyd writes, "A 'social network site' is a category of websites with profiles, semi-persistent public commentary on the profile, and a traversable publicly articulated social network displayed in relation to the profile." or as I wrote (see the comments), "The point about social software is that it creates persistent links between users, and through these persistent links, a community is formed. Moreover, the ownership and control of these links - who is linked, and who isn't - is in the hands of the user. Thus, these links are asymmetrical - you might link to me, but I might not link to you". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Darren Kuropatwa[Edit][Delete]: Networks are Groups, A Difference [Edit][Delete] November 13, 2006
Darren Kuropatwa argue that there is no distinction between networks and groups. "The edublogging community is a group of people with a common profession that have certain attitudes and interests in common," he writes. "Ultimately, we are all interested in the same thing: improving the education of the children in our lives." That common interest would make it a group, were it the case. But it is not a common interest (many of the people I have worked with are adult educators, others are primarily technologists, and many are interested in 'learning' but not 'education'). That sort of proclamation of 'a common interest' is just the sort of thing I have been trying to guard people against. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Gayle Duncan[Edit][Delete]: The Networking Instinct, The Empire Club of Canada Speeches [Edit][Delete] October 6, 2006
On reading some of my recent work on networks John Duncan from Regina set me this speech by his brother to the Empire Club in 2001. The speech looks at some of the early achievements - such as Schoolnet's witing of the last school on Pictou Island - and embraces the network philosophy explicitly: "Like Brockman, I fervently believe that what he calls distributed networked intelligence is the greatest monument to our species' experiment with civilisationbuilding so far. More...