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 
Music business models for internet artists July 15, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Flickr, Long Tail, Music , add a comment
Samantha Murphy asks on Facebook MyQuestions how can a musician earn a living in the digital age, in conjunction with having just decided that “Free is the way to go” and making all the tracks on her album available for free download.
I’m trying to synthesise this situation facing musical artists with the ideas from Jyri Engestrom back in June. He noticed a change in successful website businesses towards charging the publishers, not the spectators. Photos on Flickr for example, are consumed free of charge by a readership far wider than the photographers. The photographers themselves pay a small premium in order to be allowed to upload a larger number of pictures and organise them. Back to music, last.fm currently charges consumers for full access to their own personalised radio station but in some sense they are also publishing their playlists. The movement there is towards encouraging artists and labels to provide free downloads and then perhaps pay to gain higher exposure on the system. Applied to the digital music industry then, the model would appear to be to “charge the uploaders, not the downloaders”.
Vanity publishing
So life would appear to be tough for the artists. Perhaps there is a surfeit of aspiring musicians and it is audience attention which is in short supply? All a bit like the vanity publishing industry for amateur novel writers. Or is it?
Free Prince album
By coincidence, news has just broken that the artist now known again as Prince has struck a deal whereby his new album is given away with a newspaper. This is said to be an arrangement more lucrative than his previous album sold conventionally through the record shops. That doesn’t seem very repeatable, but it’s seen by the music publishing industry as a betrayal. They managed to convince most celebrity artists that defending intellectual property rights is the only way to ensure they can get paid for being creative. In truth, it’s the only way to ensure the intermediates get a disproportionate slice of it, and that is what’s being lamented.
Singer songwriter
Nearly all musical artists who work solo call themselves singer-songwriters these days, and nearly all bands perform their own material. This is probably a distortion caused by the writers royalties being a major factor when choosing material to perform. Probably there are a lot of great singers, many potential songwriters and a few who are great singer songwriters. There could be opportunities for musicians who have mastered the art of digital studio recording to offer to turn songwriters’ material into published tracks for them. Alternatively singers may commission writers to provide materal especially for their performance style. The opportunities for cross covers, remote collaboration, duets and derivative mixes are bursting out of the old model, and who knows where it may lead in the long tail of diverse taste and the needs of so many people to find an outlet for their creativity.
Quote
A spokesman for the singer told The Mail on Sunday: “Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those who want to hear it.
“Prince feels that charts are just music industry constructions and have little or no relevance to fans or even artists today.”
July 4th Wiki Wednesday July 5, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, wikiwed, London, COP , add a commentAnother London Wiki Wednesday last night, and a good one too. This time hosted by Bearing Point in Paternoster Square.
Tiddlywiki was on show again, this time with a quick prototype of an app for setting up VOIP connections in the form of “speedgeeking” which was chaotic as intended.
I spoke on ‘the importance of theory’ briefly relating Communities of Practice and Social Objects theories to the online landscape and wikis. No slides or pitches, just conversation really.
Steve Coast put on a great presentation explaining the rationale behind wiki.openstreetmap.org
“OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you.”
PS regarding the date, I was amazed to see that a group on Facebook called
“Petition to revoke the independence of the United States of America”
has 88,057 members!
WikiWednesdayPajamaNation is now FREE July 3, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Pajamanation, Microjobs , 2commentsRegistration for the pajamanation global microjobs exchange is now going to be free, forever. There will be no subscription fee, and no commission or percentage charged on microjob contracts.
Just as I pondered after listening to Jyri Engeström, the business model for a sucessful website these days often needs to change. “Charge the publishers, not the spectators”. I’m not sure that we will ever have ’spectators’ as such, but there will be people who are occasional browsers, searching the microjobs exchange just in case they spot something they fancy doing at that particular time. So searching, browsing, registering and placing ‘bids’, quotes or tenders will be completely free (as in beer). Pajamaworkers are also encouraged to consider creating microjobs of their own to place onto the exchange for others to bid on, to become micropreneurs, and there is no charge for this either.
So that’s the announcement over. What are you waiting for?
Because comments are social objects too June 25, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, blogs and community , 1 comment so farApplying the theory of object centred sociality to a blog, it seems reasonable to deduce that the main social object is the blog post or article, ( that which used to be called a ‘blog’ before weblogs themselves took the name). Comments are logically subsidiary to articles but it can also be the case, especially with popular blogs, that each comment has the potential to become a social object around which new activities can be linked. So it was bothering me on this blog, ever since I upgraded to Wordpress 2 and adopted the regulus theme, that the permalinks to individual comments were broken.
Sometimes it’s necessary to deep link in to a particular comment in order to provide context for a further response or to show where a point has already been answered etc. Or a discussion elsewhere may wish to crosslink.
Not only that, but the “Recent Comments” section in my sidebar needs to go straight to them, which was not happening correctly.
I checked out the theme author’s site for bug reports, but he’s done a great job and moved on. The work is considered ‘finished’. So I’d have to get my hands dirty and do a bit of PHP coding myself. That’s not something I’m currently experienced in, but neither am I afraid to tackle new languages as long as there are some examples to follow.
In the end I added one line of code into the comment.php file and changed another. That’s it. Done.
I should now try and find a way to offer the modification back in case the author would like to incorporate it.
Social Objects applied to PajamaNation June 19, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, object centred sociality, Pajamanation, Microjobs, distributed research, London , 4commentsI’ve been thinking about Jyri Engeström’s geek dinner where he outlined the Five Principles of Social Objects. In particular, if this approach is significantly beneficial for designing sucessful social websites then what sort of implications, suggestions and ideas can be generated by applying this to pajamanation, the global microjobs exchange?
- You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.
- Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It’s clear what the site is for.
- AWARD a microjob
- UPDATE a pajamaworker profile
- CORRECT a microjob listing
- SEARCH or FIND microjobs - not sure how to resolve this one.
- VIEW profiles and portfolios
- How can people share the objects?
- Turn invitations into gifts.
- Charge the publishers, not the spectators.
That would be the microjob. So using the theory, pajamanation is not all about connecting people to people, it’s about connecting people to microjobs. And there are at least two ways to be connected. One person places a microjob onto the marketplace and others apply or bid for it. When a contract is awarded to a suitable bidder then this connects two people together in a working relationship, but this exists via or around the microjob which is central. The pajamaworker and her profile or his portfolio are important too, but they are not the objects around which the action takes place.
Each microjob therefore, needs to have its own page, permalink, unique resource location (URL).
That is the case at present. The url could be more friendly, it could be displayed on the page and there could be more options available to do things with microjobs, but the basic stuctural design is in place, for example:
http://www.pajamanation.com/microjobexchange
/projectdetails.php?jobid=380
Fast typist needed to type 200 page book into a word document
This is harder for us. “Buy” and “Sell” can get confusing when applied to services. A worker is selling his labour, and the job “provider” is buying a service but when you start “bidding” for microjobs it can sound like the other way round. In reality, the bid is an offer to receive a payment hence the description “reverse auction”. It can even get confusing to talk about providers since both ends of the transaction could be regarded as providing something - skills or microjobs.
Additionally we have two major verbs on the website “find” and “search” and it’s not immediately obvious what the difference is. So this needs looking at.
One recommendation would be to have a prominent “Place a microjob ad” button on the main page. Is “place” clear enough?
so the main two verbs should probably be PLACE and BID with these others featuring less prominently
Good point. I guess we need an “email this microjob to a friend” button as well as options to add comments and tags right there on the microjob page.
As above. If you’re browsing for work and you come across something which isn’t quite suitable for you, but puts you in mind of an appropriate friend thne what better gift than to point them towards an opportunity? So change the wording to reflect that - “Give this microjob opportunity to a friend”
Here’s a rub. The original business model for pajamanation is to charge a moderate annual subscription for access to the local market, a bit more to go global. That’s already different to ebay and many straight job sites which charge commission or make entry level free with a premium service for those who require additional privileges. The idea of charging publishers would imply that the microjobs can be viewed and bidded upon by anybody for free, thus building up a large and valuable readership which is then so sought after by the microjobs providers that they would pay to be allowed to publish jobs, or perhaps to place more than one per month. Something like that. We are currently focussed on the problem of not getting a high enough proportion of microjobs for the registered workers, so charging for placement would appear to be the opposite of what’s required. It’s not completely implausible though, and a flexible approach may help to get geared up for the big picture once things start really moving. I also remember hearing that posting jobs to sites which accept free job ads is a waste of time because they get filled up with rubbish that nobody wants to sift through.
Ok, that process certainly helped to surface a lot of ideas and suggestions for development of the pajamanation site. I hope this starts a dialogue leading to fruitful exchange, faster growth and development towards a world changing service. I published my thoughts here on my blog where participation by all will be welcomed, especially my most valued spectators 
Thanks again to Jyri for inspiration and bringing theory to the social media world.
object centered socialityDigesting the geek dinner June 15, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, London , add a commentOn Tuesday I went to a London Geek dinner, only the second I’ve ever attended. The first was last year with Chris Anderson on The Long Tail
Despite being distracted by the environment ( there was a big band practice in the adjoining room!) , Jyri captivated the assembled geeks and provoked serious discussion. This was no sales pitch but a clever analysis of what it is that makes the rising stars in the top 100 websites attract and retain growing numbers of participants. I listened carefully, but after a couple of glasses of red wine provided by Hugh Mcleod I didn’t manage to retain all of the carefully ordered points for instant recall when I got home. What a stroke of luck then, that Robin Hamman video blogged Jyri giving much the same talk at NMK the next day
This is important stuff which takes a bit of digesting, so I decided to add a page on DARnet wiki to gather together my notes with the links to the video, slideshare, blogs etc.
The implications of applying the checklist to various projects I have an interest in are reasonably clear, but challenging. Exciting.
Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about social objects
on Darnet
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
