Social objects again August 3, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : theory, social objects , add a commentThe ideas of object centered sociality formed a big stimulus when Jyri Engeström visited London in June . This post is just to note a report of Hugh MacLeod speaking at connectSF.
from InmanBlog:
Social networking sites are all about “social objects.” The objects themselves — pictures people upload to Flickr, say — are unimportant. It’s the conversation that takes place around them. Social objects always consist of a noun, such as the photo, and a verb — the action they create, such as the urge to share. MacLeod didn’t dream all this stuff himself, he said. It goes back to research anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski did while living among Pacific Islanders nearly 100 years ago.
Whether these ideas which can be applied to online networks and social websites have their origins in ethnographic anthropology or in soviet psychology (Activity Theory), probably both, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the recognition that theory has an important and very practical role to play.
That conversations take place around objects rather than around nothing is an important principle. The objects themselves may indeed be unimportant compared to the conversation, but that doesn’t mean you can do away with objects. In the absence of any object, I would venture that a surrogate object tends to be contructed, often out of elements from the conversation itself. Then people start talking about the conversation, about the meaning of words and other such distractions. If you’ve ever taken part in threaded online discussions where there is no clear topic or purpose then you know what I’m talking about. It may well be that it’s the absence of social objects which causes people-to-people-only networks to fixate upon the meta-levels of conversation about the tools or about the processes.
So get yourself some objects, preferably made out of concrete 
Blog Friends growth accelerates to 10% a day August 2, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : facebook, blogs and community, London, web2.0 , 1 comment so farSomething seems to be working very well with Luke and Jof’s Blog Friends Facebook application, announced last month. The functionality has been increased to catch blogs from friends of friends, which makes the ‘discovery’ aspect a winner. ( Hint: I already my friends’ blogs anyway, unfiltered). There’s also an easy one click link to a blog post to be read from within Facebook. I hesitated about that for a second, but decided it’s a good thing - just like providing full posts in RSS feeds - as long as they don’t start enabling comments right there within Facebook, because then a blog on blog friends will have the potential to evolve as a split community - part inside Facebook and part outside on the internet. Maybe some people will figure out that’s OK, but I’ll be wary.
I’ve been tracking the membership growth with another Facebook app called “appsoholic” which today produced the graphs below. The previous time I noticed the growth was at 8% a day, which is very fast by most standards, but this has now increased to 10% a day which may indicate an accelerating rate of expansion. Well done!
That 10% puts blog friends in the top 40 of Facebook applications for daily growth rate, still according to appsaholic, whilst being ranked at 740 for size.
MyFootballClub reaches 50,000 target August 2, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : ebbsfleet, crowdsource, UK , add a comment
On July 17th I reported that MyFootballClub was close to reaching the target of 50,000 registered interests and today this has been overtaken. This means that email invitations have gone out to join for real and cough up the membership fee. So do you really get to own part of a football club for £35? I looked into it a bit further and found out a few things. Let’s see if we can add some more.
Q. Is it a one-off price for a genuine share issue?
A. No. The £35 is an annual membership fee.
Q. But do I still get to own a club?
A. Yes. The club will be owned and controlled by the membership through the MyFootballClub Trust. This is a not for profit organisation separate from MyFootballClub Ltd, which runs the website.
Q. So if the club is successful, will I make any money?
A Not in any obvious way. The Trust is registered as an “Industrial and Provident Society” and is protected against carpetbaggers by a clause which directs that if the club is sold, all proceeds will be donated to charity. So it won’t happen.
Q. Right. So what do I get for my £35 a year then?
A. Effective part ownership of a football club. The opportunity to vote on a whole range of decisions, including team selection. Access to the members area of the website. The fun of being part of a unique crowdsourcing experiment. A real sense of grassroots ownership of the first club to be directed by fans.
Q. And what does my £35 get spent on?
A. £27.50 will go towards purchasing a football club, buying new players and other club expenditure. £7.50 will go towards the administration of the MyFootballClub Trust and the building and management of the MyFootballClub website.
Q OK how do I sign up?
A http://www.myfootballclub.co.uk
myfootballclub
I18n coming to Google apps August 1, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, web2.0 , add a commentAny global organisation needs to cater for a multitude of languages, and the percentage of English speakers on the intenet will continue to decrease as the technology spreads faster to the rest of the world. So you can have a business which restricts itself to the english speaking world and still have a vast potential customer base, but to be the world leader in any general market it needs to be fully multilingual, internationalised, “i18n” as some write it. (because the word ‘internationalisation” has 18 letters). And it’s not just human language, but also currencies, character encoding, dates, time zones, local spelling, postcode formats, weights and measures - the list goes on.
According to Google:
- Fact 1: 65% of Internet users around the world speak a language other than English.
- Fact 2: The Internet’s top 10 languages still only account for around 85% of users — and the remaining 15% represents almost 200 million people.
So they have set about making the paid-for google apps service i18l and have just announced six more languages:
Official Google Blog: Google Apps goes global
Here’s the full list: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hebrew, Indonesian, Hungarian, UK English and US English.
On another aspect, automated language cognition is always going to be a case of diminishing returns but it would be nice to see some extrension and improvement to Google Translate.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
