There’s an image, a map of online communities, making the rounds this week, developed by Randall Munroe, whose sweet, romantic, yet inexorably geeky comics at xkcd are a favorite part of my blog-reading routine. Regular xkcd readers know that Munroe buries little mouseover “easter eggs” in his images. The map one reads, “ I’m waiting
One of the things I find most fascinating (and frustrating) about games is that typically you’re not modeling an external goal-set, but are creating one out of whole cloth — and thus one that the potential user must find attractive, engaging, and fulfilling. It sets a whole new bar on software “usability.”This observation by my
Jacqui Cheng over at Ars Technica notes that voyeurism still rules the web 2.0 world. She refers to a speech this week by Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco: According to the report, only 0.16 percent of YouTube’s total traffic is made up of users who upload videos. Similarly,
The current flurry of interest in the idea of a code of conduct for bloggers is a bit amusing to veterans of community building on the Internet. The issues being raised now about the costs freedom of expression exacts have been well-known since the days when Usenet News first gave anyone with an Internet connection
We’ve all had experience working on an important project. Maybe it was one which was going to have the attention of the movers and shakers, or one which was going to decide whether we get the business. Or maybe, it was one which was going to decide our grade for the semester. If we’ve been
One of the key values we see in collaboration software is its ability to capture dialogue. Which sort of begs the question, why do we need to capture dialogue? Isn’t it enough that we’re having it? In a small organization, it may seem as if the need to capture dialogue is non-existent. My husband operates
We are seeing a wave of new entries into the collaboration software category which incorporate the new hot web 2.0 applications. Everybody and his brother is building platforms with profiles, blogs, wikis and rss, and depending on which piece the developers know best, that piece is the centerpiece. The Blogtronix people clearly believe that the