That makes more sense. People with common interests speaking a common language. As long as that language is English I’ll be OK.

I’m guessing you’re a cyclist?

Thanks,
Jay

I’m a member of Angie’s List. I’ve often thought about what would happen if people inside an organization (I’m not talking about ‘the world’ here) could log into a site and search for people the way you can search for services (i.e., people who perform services) in Angie’s List. People post anonymous write-ups, good and bad, about all kinds of service providers. The providers show up in one or more categories. One can filter a search by a number of parameters, including “show me only those with a B+ or higher, with 3 or more write-ups, done in the last 6 months.”

I realize that this probably wouldn’t fly inside an organization unless it’s HUGE, and I also realize that something like this exists in LinkedIn. But, I still think there’s something to learn about the Angie’s List model here… just haven’t figured it out yet.

To answer your question when I think of a genre, it is a category of interest and might include sub-genres. For example, road racing would be a sub-category of cycling. And within cycling we would share a common language (lexis) that is unique to the group. For example, if I say that I’m more of a roleur than a mountain goat or specialist you’d know what I mean.

To put it more simply a discourse community share a common knowledge, language, ideally trust and credibility as well as a common goal and methods of communication. When I think of social software it is any software that supports the creation and maintenance of these communities.

I was on your call this afternoon — great presentation! Nice to hear the drivers for people to participate rather than the old “capture your knowledge; you’re losing 80%” thing.

Like thecapacity said, I think that the temporal aspect of social networks is very important… when I think about the future of social networking, I think one of the two bigs keys is presence.

Something I wrote recently (in an email explaining why social networking was my passion):

“Ten years ago the internet was about information distribution — how to get your message out to the greatest number people, period. Five years ago, we focused on *finding* information and culling useful information out of the millions of data streams. Today the internet is about matching the right people with the right information (via, for example, personalization). Tomorrow the internet will be about the delivering (and finding) the right information, to the right people, when they’re in the right place to use it.

This includes, of course, extending social networking into a space/time dimension, which is one of the important contexts for relationships. Some sites (like Twitter) have begun to leverage this information, but they have not yet extended into the world of business and there’s a huge opportunity there.”

IMHO, the other key is “social currency,” and by “social currency” I mean that it’s not just about how many people you know, it’s how valuable each of those relationships are in a given context. Knowing a wine distributor is not necessarily useful if you’re trying to build a house, but if you’re interested in throwing a really fabulous party, it’s a very meaningful relationship. The next question to be answered in this realm, then, is how to create, build and sustain *useful* networks. How do we categorize relationships, vette them and create trust in them while addressing people’s privacy concerns?

This ties in to you comments this afternoon about the fact that people “get over” LinkedIn and stop friending “just anyone”.

The social networking existed a long time before the word web2.0 was coined. Online communities, discussion forums, and bulletin boards, your instant messaging buddy list, etc. — were there to connect people together. And these current web2.0 tools just provide some new or maybe only somehow new ways to accomplish some similar goals, in my opinion.

Since I have been thinking about the adoption issue, I have some new perspectives. We might want to focus more on what purposes the social software are, or how they can help people to do their work. Not in very general marketing terms, but more specifically on “benefits to my work”…

Might be overly simple but it has helped relay the concept to customers.

Jon

“4. utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
5. in addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis.”

What does this mean?

1. has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.
2. has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.
3. uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.
4. utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
5. in addition to owning genres, it has acquired some specific lexis.