Tom Standage’s book The Victorian Internet was a revelation when I read it. As a cub academic, one of my colleagues in the psychology department - a woman who’s been doing fascinating research on smart homes - recommended it as an “airport read”. I’m very glad I did (although my book group didn’t find it nearly as fascinating and worthy as I did). It felt like stepping into an Infinite Perspective Machine: the hubris that we experience during the hysteria over a contemporary “new” technology often has parallels with previous periods of innovation. Standage places the Internet and the Web in this context.

Briefly, it describes the social changes that we attribute to the online environment, but as they were observed and practiced during the era of the telegraph. One of the phenomena he examines is love “over the wires”.

...

“During quiet periods… the online interaction really got going, with stories, jokes and local gossip circulated over the wires. According to one account, ‘stories are told, opinions exchanged, and laughs enjoyed, just as if the participants were sitting together at a club.’” (p. 124)

The Victorian Internet is one of my favourite books too (I can't quite remember when I read it) and this quote that Aleks Krotoski highlights is one I've reflected on a bit over the years. I often mention it in presentations about social technology and society.

• Firstly, the telegraph users were utilising slack in the system to communicate with each other. Remember that the telegraph was charged by the letter and its primary purpose was to transmit information that was delivered to other people, not as an n-way communication channel.
• Secondly, despite what people say, even just using morse code people were able to create deep and meaningful relationships 'online'.
• Thirdly, the community (and particularly the bosses of the telegraph operators) were worried how this technology was corrupting employees.

If this interests you, also think about the humble postcard as a social technology.

With self-service, the transaction costs of managing information appear to have fallen. But the real costs have not gone away. In fact, they've risen as they shifted from lower-cost administrative staff to professionals — hidden in the salaries of professional staff who start early, stay late and spend weekends checking email, searching, answering questions on discussion boards and organizing documents. Though it only takes a few minutes here and there, self-service information management consumes a significant portion of our personal and professional lives. Anyone with a slightly complex problem booking a flight on-line, seeking computer tech support, comparative shopping or using different software to participate in discussion forums, find an expert, or document an insight understands how much time this consumes.

Self-service has another consequence. It takes professionals' attention away from their real job, which is to use information to think.

You might be surprised, but I don't believe that self-service is the answer to everything. l've actually written a few things in the past about this point of view (see my articles page: 'Beyond HR Self-Service' and 'Empower customers with self-service, not automation').

What's surprising here is that Richard McDermott is effectively describing in his article a knowledge management approach that is a decade or more old. But its one that is still very much applicable, even in an era of social software and big data. Web 2.0 and social software should not automatically mean self-service - that's entirely the wrong perspective.

Hat tip to Jack.

We have to start thinking about social objects in the enterprise as having two primary purposes: to collect patterns, via the metadata generated around the social object; and to collect pattern recognisers, via the communities built around the social object.

This is the third in a series of posts about 'Social Objects' (with at least one more to come) from JP Rangaswami. I mentioned Social Objects in passing in my recent Architected for Collaboration presentation at BarCampCanberra 2011. JP helps explain this idea in more detail.

Our social web tools must start to understand the strength of ties, that we have stronger relationships with some people than with others. And with this knowledge they need to adapt.

There are three kinds of relationship ties:

• Strong ties: People we care deeply about.
• Weak ties: People we are loosely connected to, like friends of friends.
• Temporary ties: People we don’t know, and interact with temporarily.

A great Boxes and Arrows article on the need design social apps to reflect the different needs of strong, weak and temporary relationship ties.

The focus here is on public Web applications, so I suspect some minor refinements might be needs if you were building an application being used within an organisation or some other network, where the trust dynamics are different. For example, inside an organisation roles and position in the hierarchy provides an additional trust structure to use (although bear in mind, it does not necessarily embody social capital based trust).

At some point this would probably also be a good model to add to the Project 8 materials, to provide more depth to the user experience principles we put forward.

Curation is the process by which aggregate data is imbued with personalised trust.

Good quote from JP.

Just a thought: Curation is not the same as creating content, in the way for example that a pro-blogger earns a living like any other advertising driven channel. So with that in mind, I wonder, can someone make a living (a job, a business, etc) from being a digital curator? Or is it something that is purely social and altruistic?

In other words, can we buy this kind of trust and are we willing to pay for it?