Jobs in SecondLife

Don’t know if anyone’s still reading this, but in case you’re looking for work in SecondLife, here’s the link:

http://www.ifreelance.com/project/detail.aspx?projectid=18920 

Last Homework

First, another stab at defining community, our third attempt. As with the previous attempts, try not to refer back to earlier definitions. Just you and the screen, informed by our class experience.

Community is still a group of self-interested, rational decision making individuals connected in a way, even if the way is only through the online medium. The community has to grow strong, though, or it will perish. The connections between the community’s members have to mean something for the community to truly thrive.

Second question: Is community possible online, purely online? Yes or no, and why or why not? So we’re not talking here about FaceBook, which we agreed is a Web site that primarily facilitates offline community. It is not meant to create or enable community only online.

Yes, I would argue that. It’s not easy, though. No matter what kind of community is being created online, the people there are always going to be real people with real lives apart from the community. So far, the most successful models have built on the foundation of a preexisting community. However, there’s nothing that I’ve found in research to tell me that the model cannot change. Is facebook just simply a transition tool for a future of communities that are totally online? Time, along with users’ personal tolerances, will tell.

Third question: Is social networking online — Web 2.0 — part of the problem, or is it part of the solution? Include in your answer what the problem is, and what might be its solution. If you’re having trouble with this one, think of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.

Solution. Hands down. Maintaining real-life friendships is less costly because of the decreased amount of time required for them since the advent of social networking. This allows people time to either delve into making more friends, doing more things online, or actually going outside. With every technological change comes an initial resistance. Then, when the dust settles, people realize how much they enjoy the new systems in their aresenals. There was a time when polite society frowned upon cameras, TVs, phones, and computers. Now they all come in one device. Imagine that.

3 Good Moves for MySpace

1) Encourage shareholders to invest in extra funding for MySpace to innovate. Business-minded people have all heard the rule, “Innovate or die,” and it’s time shareholders heed it.

2) Get a better ‘technical group’ or more of them. The number of ‘unexpected errors’ that happen in MySpace are inexcusible for an entity owned by NewsCorp or any other large company for that matter.

3) Brand MySpace as Fox/Newscorp, but not in a way that takes away from the personal freedoms within the program. Work out the bugs, listen to users, and make Fox/Newscorp the heroes of the redesign.

Doing these things should keep myspace on top of the pile. At least until the next big thing comes along.

Community-new definition

A community is group of self-interested, rational decision-making individuals that are connected in some way.  There could be multiple connections, or the connection between the members could simply be just that they are members of the group.

Specific Research Objectives

Below are the questions that I will address in formal research for my project about dandelife.com:

1)  Is dandelife a real community?

I will contend that it is a true community by using existing research about online communities as well as observation of dandelife user posts, etc.

2)  Is this the next step in the way we think about history?   Not in the traditional sense of dead presidents or large events, but as real people essentially piecing a quilt of lifetimes of experience?  We talk a lot about citizen journalism these days.  Is this citizen history in the making to the point of creating a revolution in the way events are recorded and remembered?

3)  Why do people feel the need to reveal personal stories on a public forum?  Do casual readers of other peoples’ stories/histories care if the writers are lying or not, and what is the incentive, if any, to lie on Dandelife?

4)  Is the business model viable?   Will dandelife grow and morph like ebay, from being designed to serve one maybe small purpose to something that may become a much larger community?

 

 

 

Cute metaphor for who makes our ‘communities’

This appeared on the zefrank show on  Monday.  He does a daily short and is generally a fun and interesting guy that has neat things to say about the news.

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2007/02/020507.html

Here’s what other people say about ze:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze_Frank

 

Paper Proposal, Continued

Below are a few things I’ve been thinking about as I begin my research.  Please add comments and ideas on additional questions to ask about such a new social networking site.

Creating an Identity on Dandelife
Dandelife.com allows users to easily create their identities, simply through signing up and writing a story. The program can be used either to detail an entire life story, or simply to share certain events (i.e. Pictures from a trip) with the world.

Gaining Trust and Reputation
Reputation is established in the meat of the stories. Those with neat stories and interesting lives get clicked on by more people, and receive repeat visits. Those that are generally boring and do not post stories may still get unique visits because of the way Dandelife can randomly suggest stories for you to click on, but overall, I would say they see fewer visits than those with plenty of life ingredients in their timeline.  Ditto would go for people that try to post personal advertisements  on their dandelife timeline.

It is truly up to the user how much they want to reveal about themselves, whether they want to tell sad or happy stories, or whether they just want to sell stories to corporations.

One of the questions I have in beginning the research, as I have not read a great sample dandelife.com timelines, is “Do people really care if users are telling genuinely honest stories or not?”

People read the news and are touched by stories hundreds of miles away that they cannot verify except on the reputation of the source for honest reporting, so why not feel some sort of emotional connection to a happy/sad story?

Another question I have is, “If some people are dishonest, does this hurt the community?” So far, my answer is yes and no. Yes, because if someone is willing to lie on their dandelife timeline, they may very well be lying about other things, giving me a reason to distrust their character and possibly a disincentive to be interested in their thoughts. The reason I say possibly is for the no part, and that is the reason that the community at this point in time seems to designed for the enjoyment of people to identify with other people’s struggles and successes with corporations gleaning off the best ones to make the next Budweiser commercial or something.

Why Dandelife is a Cool Project
This is an interesting concept because, unlike a blog, this is a way of easily telling your history.  It details a life that is not a second one, but a real-world history made up of people, thoughts, and feelings, not avatars and money that one is too lazy to get off the couch and make in the real world.

I think this will be a great new way to get the elderly, who make up an increasing share of both internet users and retirees with time on their hands, to preserve a history in ways that we have never seen before. Imaging reading a story like Anne Frank’s, only with a timeline and pictures you can click on, complete with links to other resources and similar stories.

This is one of the ways that dandelife will become a strong community. It will catch on among different crowds of friends of neighbors, who are able to share their memories without pulling out photo albums or going through mountains of microfilm.

Why Dandelife won’t be your second life
The links to the physical world are too strong for a community like this to replace someone’s real life. In short, the cooler life you have and the more things you do, the better dandelife you can create.

 

Some Neat Info
CEO of Dandelife.com, Kelly Abbot, is a member of LinkedIn, another social networking site, and subject of Ross’ research project.

Here’s an example of a Dandelife timeline, complete with photos and stories: http://dandelife.com/ianus

Paper Proposal

The example of an online community I would like to use for a final paper is a website called http://dandelife.com/.  The site represents a variety of individuals telling their own stories using text, videos, and timelines.  A typical Dandelife timeline shows headlines/titles for stories in a person’s life.  Larger headlines generally denote bigger stories, while smaller ones would mean less important stories.  Users can drag and drop You Tube videos and other public content straight into their stories.   They can also comment on other people’s stories and link to their own.

The business model of the company is really neat because if the users choose, they can toss their stories up for corporations to bid on for use in advertisements or whatever endeavor they choose.

Since the site is still in its infancy, profitability reports remain to be seen.  However, the concept promises to be interesting because it allows people with nothing else in common, that may have never met before, to share in each other’s stories, fulfilling expressive needs, and perhaps economic needs as well.

One thing that I see as a possible difficulty for the site to overcome is that some people treat their timelines as a place to drop a one-liner about an event, rather than tell the story behind it.   However, as long as there are enough people telling their stories and connecting with one another, companies will likely choose to invest in the best of these.   Also, I have yet to explore the site enough to see how reputation is obtained and maintained in the community, but feel that this will be an easy barrier to get past.

More formal research outline to come.

Community and Social Capital, personal definition

A community is a group of individuals, connected through some means, that share some commonality of interest, even if that only commonality is simply through membership in that group.  We use our communities for a variety of reasons, one of these is to build social capital.  This can be aligned similarly with Nan Lin’s definition of social capital, and categorized as self-interested individuals investing  in social networking and other behaviors  for a potential return.

This definition works better than others proposed in the past because it actually acknowledges that all beings are self-interested and that they are economic actors making rational decisions.  The terminology of referring to humans as economic actors has its roots largely in the camp of Austrian economics and is best represented in the book, Human Action, by Ludwig von Mises.

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