Social Software
From wsuwiki
Social Software (see Wikipedia) is an new genre of web-based tools. The general premise of social software is collaboration, however, the collaboration can even be post-hoc or even unintentional -- that is, by working in public others may find and benefit from things done for private purposes. This page is for listing and describing uses of social software in the WSU context.
Writing
Wikis provide collaboratively edited documents, and by making the wiki open to a wide community over time, the collaboration potential is increased. Documents become living texts. Example uses in WSU Wiki include pages for/about groups (such as an social group or a jointly developed bibliographies (such as CTLT's [[Category:MorningReadingGroup |Morning Reading Group].
Blogs are individual (and sometimes group) journaling places, typically with postings serialized. They become social by interlinking among various blogs, noteably with the trackbacks. Blogs also become social, or at least a community of voices, when aggregated. A variety of aggregation tools exist, each suited to different purposes.
- End user aggregation can be accomplished in an RSS reader, or with tools that process multiple RSS feeds before display.
- Tagcloud (now defunct 2/2008) allows a user to specify several RSS feeds and then it processes them, showing the words/phrases they have in common. Clicking on a word shows all the posts that used that word. Tagclouds can be published for others to read. Alternative tools are appearing for this function. TagCrowd does the cloud conversion but has problems with RSS feeds.
- Technorati is a search engine that compiles lists of blog posts on a shared topic. Authors can place a Technorati tag in their post and target which Technorati lists will include the post. A key difference between Tagcloud and Technorati is that the former is configured by intention, by an "editor," while the latter is configured without intention, by the authors of the blog posts.
- RSSMix takes several RSS feeds as input and creates a new RSS feed that combines the inputs into a date-sorted list.
- FeedBurner, like RSSMix, processes RSS inputs into new RSS outputs. Among its uses are for podcasting. A new (12/13/05) feature, FeedFlare, adds a footer to each item in the RSS with email this... and other social connection links.
Sharing
Social Bookmarking tools provide a mechanism for users to share their collections of URL bookmarks. One tool del.icio.us is well suited to collecting URLs, while another CiteULike is specificalled oriented at academic journals. In either system, there is the potential to discover other resources that have properties in common, and other users that share an interest in a particular resource.
Notetaking/ sharing Google Notebook is an offering from Google that allows you to take notes of web pages you are viewing, and to share those notes. At first review, it does not appear to let others leverage off the bookmarks implied in the notes you take+share. The site says Window XP & Linux & firefox (maybe IE), but its seems to work in Mac OS X 10.4 + firefox 1.5
Photo sharing An example is Flickr. There are other photo sharing sites, where a user can upload images and authorize friends to view them. Flickr's important property is that photos are typically public and can be "tagged" by the owner (and be others) and these tags span users, creating collective pools of photos on shared themes. This page shows the currently popular tags at Flickr.
Social Mapping software applies tagging, sharing, and collaborative editing ideas to maps and points on maps. An example is Wayfaring. The developers of Wayfaring are using a an agile approach to program development that makes the development of the tool into a collaborative process among a distributed community of both developers and users as well. The Wayfaring Forum provides both a place for feedback and suggestions and a record of the process.
Social Spreadsheet software allow a group to collaborate on a web-based spreadsheet. An example is Google Spreadsheet.