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There is a new social networking phenomenon called "tagging". Howard Rheingold ,In his message for Salon.com article has shared his views on this new phenomenon

"It's like Friendster for knowledge as far as I'm concerned. I look to see who the other people are on del.icio.us who tag the same things that I think are important. Then, I can look and see what else they've tagged ... And isn't that part of the collective intelligence of the Web? You meet people who find things that you find interesting and useful -- and that multiplies your ability to find things that are interesting and useful, and other people feed off of you."

I think using tags for growing collective intelligence requires more than a clever technology. Unless we think of CI in the statistical sense (as in The Wisdom of Crowds), it requires the art of integrating the triple network of People, Knowledge, and Technology. Tags (bookmarks referring to the same subjects) collected from millions of bloggers are not more useful than a Google search that turns up over a million pages in response to my query. When somebody comes up with a way to integrate tagging with my trusted circle of friends and colleagues, then CI got a potent new tool, indeed. Technically, it shouldn't be difficult and I'd be surprised if an innovative social network host would not be already working on it.

Phones with eyes

The Economist Technology Quarterly includes a thoughtful article on the developments around camera phones (Monitor Phones with eyes The Economist Technology Quarterly, Mar 10th 2005 [subscription required]).

It notes that "[c]amera-phones are not just for taking pictures. They can be used for other things too, from shopping to treasure hunts" and discusses phones being used as business-card scanners, for taking snapshots of train timetables, price checking in a bookstore, and the use of two-dimensional bar-codes (developed by Semacode) for getting up-to-the-minute bus information and treasure hunts. The uses described, it observes, "might not be what the mobile operators had in mind when they launched their picture-messaging services, but it does at least generate traffic and revenue for them".

It concludes with a quote from your correspondent. "Nico MacDonald, a design and technology strategist with Spy, a consultancy based in London, notes that technologies often thrive when people start using them for purposes beyond those for which they were originally intended."

The Role of Infomediaries

Dave Pollard has an excellent article on the topic of intermediaries. Dave writes we live in an age of "disintermediation" - the cutting out of the middleman.Excerpts with edits from the article:

We do bank transactions without tellers, we browse libraries without librarians, we learn without teachers. Intermediaries-Infomediaries are finding their roles are getting redefined. Blogging is in a way an attempt to disintermediate this chain. Some in the mainstream media would like to see blogs as just another link in the chain, at the very end between the channels and readers, adding little or no value other than links to related stories, high-tech cataloguers. But online journalism can incorporate all six of these intermediary roles, and, in fact, bloggers can be newsmakers in their own right - like when they break major stories that the legacy media miss, or undertake investigative reporting that the legacy media no longer have much appetite for.

Search tools and social networking software are providing additional channels and ways to aggregate information, working to some extent hand in glove with bloggers to create entirely new ways to connect.Value addition is the key – failing to add value is an invitation to be gobbled. Value addition shall lead to reintermediation rather than disintermediated.Intermediaries in Dave’s view can be seen to be more value adding when the follow the published guidelines:

Some Methods that can value add to an information intermediaries are highlightd below

• Make the content more useful, more actionable, or at least more interesting.
  
• Study how to write great stories, so that those further along the information channel will be disinclined to pare them down and reduce the value you have incorporated in the story.
• Focus on information that's important, rather than urgent. Too much of the content reaching the reader and viewer today is 'sold' as urgent, when all it is is new. Not enough is important.
• Follow up. We squander reader/viewer interest and trust when we get them worked up about today's story and then never tell them what happened later.
  
• Be conversational. Let the reader/viewer see the person behind the point of view. And don't pretend to be objective -- your audience knows better.
• Help people deal with information overload.
  
• Get out more. Intermediaries need to learn the value of doing their own primary research , and not merely working with the content flowing though the chain to them..
  
• Read broadly. It gives you perspective. And it has a lot of other benefits as well.
• Learn a disciplined approach to research and analysis.
  
• Take some chances. The disintermediation that is overwhelming the information industries came about because the technology industries were bold, and didn't constrain their products to doing just what other technologies had done before them.
  

Social Software for Social Entrepreneurs

Lee Brynat of Headshift Moments makes a recent presentation on how the new "social software" can help scale communities of interest at very low cost.

1. Social networks are at the heart of social enterprise – so called "social software" can make it easier to build and scale these networks in support of collective action.
2. Social computing is not new; social software is a welcome return to the core purpose of the net: connecting people.
3. Online social networks are emerging as a core infrastructural element - a kind of organisational immune system - that can support distributed, values-based communal activity.

Lee defines social software as:
- Simple, easy to use tools and services using open standards
- Aim to create social affordances through network effects
- Augment, not replace, human interaction
- Model of networked individualism.

Lee's approach towards implementation and his general guidlines are indeed insightful - he says:
- A balanced approach of networked individualism and free-style group forming can unleash dialogue and collective action
- Manage feeds, not items: informal weblogs, feed aggregation and bottom-up metadata can help solve the content problem
- Online social networking works best for a specific common purpose, not for its own sake
- Engage with people on their own terms and build the network person by person, group by group
- Embrace rather than deny complexity: "Small pieces, loosely joined" is more resilient than command and control.The full presentation is available here. Lee also goes on to provide suggestions for implement social software within enteprises.A good presentation with lot of details - I particularly liked Lee's emphasis on flexible metadata models and total aggregation and syndication.Lee is spot on when he talks about IT department as an impediment - by focussing on Classic IT barriers to action
- Overformality and inflexibility of systems, preference for centralised command and control software.

Lee, adds on that there are so many useful and innovative social enterprise projects , but here's a few cheap and easy ones to get started:

1. Start a weblog and persuade everybody involved to talk about their work in an open, honest and engaging way
2. Use a newsreader; find and read all relevant weblogs and other online sources in your field of interest
3. Offer RSS feeds for your content and make sure you can be found on Google, Techorati and other search engines
4. Find other weblogs that talk about issues of interest, find intersections with you own work and comment on them / link to them to begin connecting your conversations with the wider world
5. Take photos of what you do and tag them on Flickr with terms related to your area of work
6. Put links up on Del.icio.us with similarly relevant tags
7. Get yourself onto LinkedIn and other online social networks, talking and writing about what you do
8. Use an internal wiki to organise project documents, to do lists and commonly used information
9. Offer Weblogs to your partners and supporters so that they can talk about the issues too - then when people are posting regularly, aggregate the content using user-defined keywords or tags and perhaps apply some form of text analysis to identify common themes

Tagging : Novel Net Navigation

Flickr became very popular by leveraging tagging. Bweek writes about the phenomenon that tagging is. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:

On del.icio.us, people are able to tag any link they choose for easy recall later. That tagged link is stored on every subscriber's personal area on the service - and it's added to the overall service so that users interested in a specific topic can easily find new links.The notion of end users tagging content is reverberating throughout the Web, giving people a new way to think about how information is organized and found online. Tagging potentially can eat away at traditional search. Though tags wouldn't replace search as we know it, people could turn to tags more over time, displacing time they spend on established search engines. Such tagging is already being adopted by popular startups, including blog search engine Technorati and photo-sharing service Flickr.

Until now, search engines have been the standard gateway to the web to find and organize information. No matter how many pages they index or how quickly they bring back those results, most search engines can't really put things in context. Search engines make attempts by including the Web page heading that contains the result. But fundamentally, most simply lump together everything having to do with a specific word. For instance, if you look up the words "electronic publishing" on Google, the list of results throw together the lists of electronic publishers, The Journal of Electronic Publishing, and disclaimers on copyright. On del.icio.us, you get a list of links tagged with electronic publishing, but also related tags, such as blogging, journalism, and wiki, which can help you quickly navigate to specific articles.Tagging systems allow people to work together organically to create a structure around issues, blog entries, Web links, or photos. Tags also help reveal what's popular on the Internet generally or at particular sites and provide a novel way to navigate through information. For instance, check out the tags index at Technorati. The blog search engine tracks the tags that bloggers give to their posts, photos, or links. Tagging may appear unorganized, but for the moment it's working. And as it gains more converts, it's helping people rethink what search means online.

I do not necessarily see tagging as an alternative to search. Search engines have a fundamental limitation in not being able to associate results with context. Tagging may not have the algorithmic wizadry that search engines have – but can help in creating context to search results. The two may need to work in tandem to amplify the retrieve and render experience to surfers.

Source : http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/feb2005
/tc20050228_6395_tc024.htm?chan=tc&

The Skype Economy

Like the iPod, free phone service Skype is creating a coattail economy as hungry developers rush to cash in on its popularity.

In just 18 months, Luxembourg-based Skype has signed up some 31 million registered users, promising free phone calls over a broadband connection between two members anywhere in the world. Now Skype is hoping to take the service even further by recruiting third-party developers to build add-on programs that might attract even more customers and possibly take its technology in new and unexpected directions.

Since the company began licensing or giving away its proprietary source code late last year, an estimated 1,000 programmers have jumped on the bandwagon, creating dozens of free and commercial products for the service. Developers get the source code by promising to either give their products away for free or provide Skype a share of the profits.

Skype's developer program has seen some limited success so far. In the vanguard are relative unknown companies such as VOIPail, Connectotel and Meinskype, offering free Skype voice mail, SMS and ring tones, respectively.

Third-party applications are an important competitive bulwark for Skype, which is pushing to make its proprietary software an industry platform. Most of its competitors have turned to open standards-based technology known as Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP, that's used in instant messaging and Internet telephony and can be freely licensed by anyone.

Some backers of SIP have criticized Skype for potentially splitting the Net phone industry, undermining standards and interoperability--a threat that would become all the more acute should Skype's developer community take off.

Since developers must pay Skype to sell products based on its source code, it could face a long-term disadavantage against SIP if its market share begins to slip.

Furthermore, because Skype is a relatively small company with more than 100 employees, developer support is a costly luxury. Some developers have complained they were basically left on their own to navigate complicated licensing contracts and technical issues, leaving it unclear whether developers are allowed to profit and under what conditions.

The risk for companies or developers who build on these newer platforms is that they're totally beholden to the provider -- and that puts them at risk. They have no control over the environment they're working in. Skype could decide to build the same functionality themselves. Or, other products could become more popular than Skype. Sometimes it works... but many companies don't realize the danger of putting all their eggs in one basket. If they pick the right platform, it can be lucrative for a while, but it's not always easy to know who's going to win.

Source : http://www.techdirt.com/