JonMountjoy.com

There was a complete web 2.0 meltdown today. I needed to write a little blog post about Enterprise 2.0, and so I needed to point to some Web 2.0 stuff. The first meltdown came while trying to lookup a definition of Enterprise 2.0 in the hallowed library of web 2.0 itself, wikipedia. This is what I got:

I then tried to look up the very definition of web 2.0:

Not looking good. So I decided to rely on that poster child of the social aspects of web 2.0, tapping into the wisdom of the crowd. Yep, I thought I’d use twitter. This is what I got:

It really hasn’t been a good day at all.

Over on the Radar, Dale writes about Desperately Seeking Status. Dale’s a bit perturbed by the rather cold statement: “It never hurts to remind yourself of the business you’re really in: providing your customers and clients with status.” Though I agree, I also think that we don’t see enough conversation around this important topic.

As we enter the Web 2.0 era, where the social aspect of computing plays an increasingly important role, we need to see more social psychology and research being applied too.Much of harnessing collective intelligence is really also about groups and group behaviour. While Dale doesn’t think in terms of status, the majority of people do-perhaps unconsciously. We live in groups, and status within these groups and the hierarchies that we build are innately human things.

I’ve just started reading a fascinating book the subject: Michael Marmot’s Status Syndrome. Primarily a thesis about health inequalities, he provides some interesting research showing how our position with a hierarchy is reflected in our longevity. The social gradient in health seems to be based in our work and life circumstances-our social arrangements, status and position within the hierarchy.An example: Academy Award-winning actors and actresses live four years longer than their co-stars and the actors nominated who did not win. That’s a long time, and he argues that this is primarily due to their elevated status.

This health gradient is reflected in many different hierarchies (some overlapping): for example, income, amount of schooling, parent’s social classs. But, he argues, it’s not about how much money people have, but about two features of societies: hierarchies and cooperation, which he translates as how much control individuals have over their lives and how widely spread are the opportunities for social participation.

The knowledge economy has its own hierarchy:perhaps Tim’s alpha-geeks are nearer the top. If I learn more Ruby and Web 2.0 and mashups I will undoubtedly be improving my status within my group of peers. I am acquiring status skills, whether I like it or not. And if there’s any truth in Marmot’s research, I’m also going to live longer because of it. That’s a good enough reason for me.

The ETech’05 Keynote was pretty interesting. I enjoyed the patterns that Tim and Rael present, and I repeat a few of the them here, drawing a lesson at the end:

• “Design for Participation” - success lies in small pieces loosely joined
• “User-centered development” - great benefit to sharing efforts and processes with users
• “Syndicate e-commerce” - glue together small pieces of others
• “Users add value to shared data”
• “Network effects by default” - make participation the default
• “The long tail” - many of the limiting factors from the physical world are absent on the internet
• “Software above the level of a single device” - design to integrate services across disparate devices
• “Packets and shipping containers” - understand the packet size of the application domain, the most effective way to ship

Though I didn’t attend the conference, it appears to have been a great success and well presented - with a novel combination of information sources: Good speakers, great weblog coverage, articles, wikis, tags galore, flickr feeds, the Attention Stream and more. To me, all of these ways of presenting the conference follow on from the patterns. The conference itself seems to have been designed for participation, it’s obviously user-centered and devices like the Attention Stream syndicate other applications. The attendees added value to the conference, and almost all information sources were public and immediately available. Remixing was happening at almost all levels too: direct quotes from the speakers were blogged, thoughts, articles and interviews too. Awesome.I live many thousands of miles away, but could participate at some level. That’s phenomenal. I’d like to be even more involved next time, which makes me think back to some of the other patterns:

• Above the level of a single device - at a conference, the device is the speaker’s voice and the attendee’s ears. So, how about making everything available to non-attendee’s ears too.
• Packets and shipping containers - sounds suspiciously like “MP3 and podcasts” to me
• The long tail - well that’s all the other folk that couldn’t physically attend the conference

Although there are now a few podcasts available, having them available after each speaker would benefit not only those present, but those abroad too. I hope that more conferences move towards the standards set by ETech’05, and beyond. Afterall, permitting the long tail to participate has been shown to deliver unprecedented rewards.