brightly colored food

Nice overview of various takes on the importance of storytelling here. Bruner, Ong, Seeley Brown, Baudrillard, Jung, and more. Looks like a promotional site for a book on storytelling in organizations.

As a few others have pointed out, the current excitement over “social software” is somewhat odd because this group is hardly the first to discover many of the issues they’re tackling. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I see little evidence that they’re building on the work of fields such as computer-supported cooperative work, computer-mediated communication, and social informatics, all of which have which have been around in name since the 80s hashing over many of the same issues with which social software now tackles.

Furthermore, as Matt Jones states, the tech concerns of social software seem to be overriding the human-centered concerns. One might argue that it’s a different approach to design - build the infrastructure, then let everybody tinker - but that still seems like engineering/requirements-driven design rather than design informed by human behavior and needs.

Here’s a post from Tanya with links to several good introductions on social informatics. She also mentions another article that contains a good overview of computer-supported cooperative work and also discusses ethnography, library and information science, computer-mediated communication, and computer-supported cooperative learning. Other approaches like social computing also come to mind, and I’m sure social scientists would have more to add as well.

In the end, I guess I don’t have a problem with people rallying around a new name - this is about group-forming, and new groups love to recognize/differentiate themselves with names - but it’s distressing to see decisions made that either aren’t informed by previous research or are made in the interest of technology without thinking long and hard about the human issues first.

3600 Research Essays about the Net. It’s like stringing together all your favorite keywords and then slapping them on one page. Also from the same site: 750 Internet Researchers and 1800 Net Art Links.

From Red Rock Eater Digest

Howard Rheingold has started a weblog to complement his forthcoming book “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution”.

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive.

I enjoyed reading this interview with Will Wright, the guy behind all the Sims games. It deals with philosophy of game design, mining the rich data gathered on “The Sims”, modeling complex systems, and more. Quite good.

from Black Belt Jones

New First Monday is out (wait - it’s not the first Monday of the month yet!). Two articles on education that both look interesting, including an article that looks at MIT’s Open CourseWare Initiative.

Before I became such a user-experience dork, and after I was a biology and music dork, I had a brief career as an education dork. I worked doing instructional design at a startup, and one of the courses I developed (a high school study skills course) is now being used by something like 50,000 kids. There’s obviously a lot of crap out there in the world of computer-mediated education, but I remain certain that it’ll be one of the few things that pushes any real reform into our hobbled little educational system that exists today.

There - now you know a bit more about me. The mythical redesign is progressing slowly, and I hope to begin some production in the next week, so these tidbits will have to tide you over until I get BCF 2.0 released.

Set of unrelated mini-essays/opinions on cell phone use and innovative service models, rumormongering and amplification on the web, musicians and profit in the age of p2p, and three ways to look at institutions. They’re all worth reading, but skip to the last if you’re going to read just one. Here’s a summary:

Institutional discourses are dispersed across the programs, laws, and buildings into which they are inscribed, and then they are distributed among the many individuals who learn to use them. Institutions operate largely in a distributed fashion through the incentives that motivate their participants to pursue careers within them, and the unfolding career strategies they adopt.

Good comments from Phil Agre on participating and contributing within a network of fellow professionals.