It’s the community, stupid

Joshua Porter writes in “Why Invest in Social Features for Your Web Site?“:

In addition to the explicit benefits for the site owner, implementing social features means building a community around shared experiences. The notion of “shared experiences” difficult to define, but the benefits of increased participation and caring are clear. People respond best to communities where they believe they’ll find like-minded people and where they feel their ideas and opinions matter. This trust is the real benefit of social software.

Therefore, adding social features isn’t so much a leap of faith as it is an investment in a long-term experience design strategy.

It’s a great article, describing some of the softer or harder to quantify benefits of adding social features to your site, and connecting them to core user experience design issues.

Profiles of Web 2.0 users and usage

Two publications recently came out which try to break out of the “everyone uses Web 2.0″ versus “no one uses Web 2.0″ argument and produce more detailed breakdowns of different kinds of people and different ways of using different web 2.0 technologies.

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Web-Killer 2.0

Carl Howe’s “Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Apollo: Web-Killer 2.0” argues that “these proprietary browser extensions break the utility of the World Wide Web in important ways”:

• Put users into plug-in hell.
• Create Web ghettos.
• Don’t provide accessibility.
• Make search a pain.

It’s a great beginning to a real debate about the place of technologies like Silverlight that many others have been fawning over.

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Words, Words, Words

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words. Words. Words.
- Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii

I’m not normally prone to quoting Shakespeare – more of a Modernist and Americanist by (academic) training and by inclination. But a few blog memes this weekend have me thinking of Hamlet and his antic disposition, and the potential for words to be meaningless.

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Obama and Creative Commons

(via Lessig Blog) comes notice that Barack Obama’s campaign posted this notice encouraging the DNC to license all Democratic presidential debates under a creative commons license:

I am writing in strong support of a letter from a bipartisan coalition of academics, bloggers and Internet activists recently addressed to you and the Democratic National Committee. The letter asks that the video from any Democratic Presidential debate be available freely after the debate, by either placing the video in the public domain, or licensing it under a Creative Commons (Attribution) license.

Since then it seems Edwards has joined in as well:

. . . I am asking each news network to make video footage from the presidential debates that they broadcast available on the internet for the public to view and use responsibly. I am also asking Chairman Dean, who is playing a valuable role in organizing many of the Democratic primary debates, to use his influence with the networks to make the debates more broadly available.

The Creative Commons license terms offer an easy way to ensure that the networks’ rights are protected. Much of the content on my own campaign web site is available under just such a license.

Commercial constraints are severe enough in their effect in diluting the substance of our campaigns. Limiting access to long-form televised debates makes matters worse.

Hopefully the debates themselves will be worth all the fuss about making them available – if it is the same old sound bytes having them under a CC license won’t be terribly helpful.