A remarkable trend has emerged over the past few years indicating there is a strong demand for lightweight authoring and sharing of personal content online. The more people have the ability to share online with minimal effort, the more they are taking advantage of these lightweight authoring, or micropublishing, tools.

Although an estimated 9 in 10 U.S. Internet users still rely on emails as their communication tool of choice (Madden, 2003), people are increasingly using other forms of communication to share personal content. The home page has a long tradition as a personal repository of information, with an estimated 13% of U.S. Internet users having a home page in 2004 (Lenhart, Horrigon, & Fallows, 2004). However such web sites are difficult to update, and provide little or no tools for notifications of changes in content. Web logs, or blogs, provide a new form of communication that addresses these issues. Blogging tools allow users to post new content to personal or group blogging sites, in which entries are posted in reverse-chronological order much like that of a journal. Most blogs are public, and people may access each others’ blogs either through web links, or through subscription services (RSS) such as Bloglines.com.

Blogs bridge the gap between the public, static web page, and more private, asynchronous communications (Herring et al., 2004). A person may post his or her content to a blog, and people who have subscribed to that blog receive a notification of updated content. Blogs allow people to communicate one-to-many in a lightweight, freeform manner, without burdening their targeted audience with unwanted email notifications. Although the more well-known blogs resemble news editorials (NITLE Blog Census, 2004) with thousands of subscribers, Herring et al. (2004), in a study of randomly selected blog sites, found that most blogs (70.4%) are used as personal journals and shared with only a small number of friends.

Although it is estimated over 2 million active blog sites now exist world wide (NITLE Blog Census, 2004), only a small percentage of U.S. Internet users are estimated to maintain a blog (3%) (Lenhart, Horrigon, & Fallows, 2004) or visit blogs (10%). Blogging software, while easier to use to share content than the traditional home page, is still not as easy to use as emails. Maintaining links to the blogs one cares about requires a fair amount of time and effort, and transforming one’s personal blog into a subscription service through RSS, and then subscribing to other people’s blogs, is still the pursuit of the advanced Internet user.

Digital cameras and camera-enabled cell phones also increasingly encourage more lightweight, media rich sharing of everyday events of life. 21% of U.S. Internet users report sharing photographs through web sites (Lenhart, Horrigon, & Fallows, 2004). This change is due to small digital camera sizes, mobile phone integration, and the emerging popularity of blogs. Cameras and personal photography are becoming less event-centric and more integrated into the flow of everyday life (Counts, & Fellheimer, 2004). Many people now carry cameras all the time, rather than only to special events, encouraging them to take pictures in situations that they would not previously have deemed picture-worthy, such as photos of someone’s lunch, the view from a car window, or a new bike (Viegas, Wattenberg, & Dave, 2004). Each picture becomes a lightweight, rich manifestation of a moment easily shared through email, web pages, and blogs.

We found in a study of socially active users of social technology (Farnham et al., 2004) that about half of participants took digital pictures, and that they shared pictures with friends electronically an average of 4.3 times per month via emails, as compared to about twice a month via photo sharing web sites and emailing a link to the site to friends. The advent of cell phones with cameras has made it feasible for users to take dozens of pictures in an ongoing documentary style, and send the images to services such as ’mobile blogs’ for the enjoyment of friends (e.g., Textamerica.com). Even in blogs that are not explicitly photo blogs, interspersing photographs into the text is becoming more prevalent. Although cell phones are increasingly used to capture digital moments, cell photo sharing technologies are still remarkably awkward, when transitioning from the moment of taking the photo, to sharing it online. In the Social Computing Group we implemented a mobile sharing prototype (Flipper (Counts & Fellheimer, 2004)) for a PDA, and found that a one click experience of taking a picture and sharing it with a group friends was very compelling experience to users. However we could not currently implement this technology on standard cell phones.

People are also increasingly utilizing more collaborative technologies to publish online. One such example is the wiki, which allows multiple users to post and edit the same text. An entire encyclopedia (wikipedia.com) was generated through this form of collaborate knowledge exchange. Perhaps one of the more remarkable features of the wiki is that even though people are not personally identified in wiki systems, and do not directly communicate with each other, wiki authors over time develop norms for appropriate behavior. They would communicate these norms by editing each other’s content. For example, if a person personally attacked someone else in their addition to a wiki (“Joe is stupid, because he likes extreme programming”), another wiki author is likely to edit it to say (“People often seem to consider extreme programming ineffective”). Over time, users learn through these kinds of edits that they should not personally attack each other in the wiki.

Wikis have an inherent tension. To the extent that people are trying to collaborate to build collective content, who says what is not particularly relevant to the content itself. However, to the extent that a system hopes to foster community and accountability, who says what is very relevant. We expect that wiki authors would be greatly empowered if wikis layered a social context over the collective content, in such a way that readers can render the social context transparent when focused on the content itself, and render it opaque when focused on the social context. Along these lines Viegas et al. (2004) developed a compelling visualization of implicit conversations in wikis by tracking who posted what content over time. It is clear from the visualization, for example, that people often engage in conflict over the wording of the more controversial wiki content, going back and forth between their preferred versions. Such tools for understanding the social processes underlying these collaborations will be very valuable in the future of their use.

Through micropublishing and sharing technologies such as the blog and the wiki, whole collections of people are able to accelerate their collaborative knowledge, art, and technology development. People have access to specialized, up-to-date content they cannot get through traditional published materials, which are often too heavyweight for individual contributions & effort. The transfer of information and ideas is almost immediate through web technologies, and for many, print media seems obsolete because of the lag in time between when an event occurs and when the news of the event is received. Similarly large scale conversations develop ideas at an accelerated pace, to the extent that those who wish to stay on the cutting edge of a knowledge domain will be left behind if they are not tracking these online knowledge sharing systems.

One of the problems with sharing online is that, due to its fairly informal nature, people do not clearly understand copyright issues when building on each others’ content. There are few sharing controls in such systems once personal content is posted. The Creative Commons is a web site that addresses this issue by making all content shared in the Creative Commons usable by all. The other extreme would be to provide users with tools for controlled posting and sharing of digital content online that others could then buy or license through micropayments.

The proliferation of these micropublishing technologies has global implications. The average person may share information or opinions through the Internet, outside of the hands of centralized media or political agencies, to any other person online across the globe. Many predict this global democratization of content will transform the way entire nations of people interact with each other. As mentioned earlier, it has been amazing to observe the social mobilization that has occurred at the local level in developing support for the Tsunami relief efforts: this is largely a consequence, we believe, of the barrage of personal emails, blogs, and photos we all received from those who suffered its effects.

• Social Web 2.0 course notes:
• New affordances
• • Tools for lightweight authoring
    • Home pages
    • Blogs (WordPress, Blogger)
    • Wikis (Wikipedia, Wetpaint)
    • Photosharing (Flickr)
    • Video (YouTube)
    • Profiles (in social networking sites)
  • Sharing/notifications mechanisms
    • Email, social newtorks, RSS
  • RSS Aggregators (Google Reader, Bloglines)
  • Vertical search/news (Technorati)
  • Easy/cheap digital photo/digital video
• Democratization of Content

• The Power of Lightweight Authoring and Syndication
  • Social contributions with individual benefits
  • Content editable
  • Up to date, with notifications of changes
  • Rapid proliferation of ideas
  • Content as feeds or web services
  • Remixing
• Age of Remix
  • Taking digital content that already exists
  • Modify
  • Reshare
  • Issues:
    • Licensing
• Creative Commons
• A closer look at blogs
  • Time based entries
    • Journal like
    • Time stamp
    • Links
      • Increasingly media rich
  • Really Simple Syndication
  • Blog rolls
  • New trend to combine with social networks
  • Trackbacks
  • Mobile integration

Technorati

• • Search world “live” web
  • Dynamic and always-updating
  • Citizen media

   A closer look Wikis

• • Collective knowledge/wisdom of the crowds
  • Unlike blogs, static pages
    • Emphasis on static info, not recent/updated news
  • Editable
  • History of edits, with who edited
  • Roll back feature very important

  Visualizing large scale collaboration

• Blog Issues
  • Spam blogs
  • Spings
  • Rapid proliferation vs. fadism/lack of rigor?
  • Fragmentation
• Photosharing — Flickr
  • The social in phot
• YouTube – the new revolution
  • Founded Feb 2005
  • Destination property, users watch 70 million videos dail
• New emerging genres
  • Play around user generated content

• Unique aspect of youtube genre
  • Get immediate to the point
  • Context, competition for attention
  • Programming
  • Timestamped tagging/text overlay
• Issues with user generated rich media
  • Photos/video not searchable
    • (tagging, ESP game)
  • Sharing/replay
  • Taxonomies for search and retrieval
  • Structuring (play lists, channels)
  • Moderating for adult content
  • Other?

Recommended Readings

Herring, S., Scheidt, L., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs. In Proc. HICSS-37 (2004).

Nardi, B., Schiano, D., Gumbrecht, M., and Swartz, L. Why we Blog. Communications of the ACM, December 2004, Vol 47, 12, (2004).

Clay Shirky, in Clay Shirky’s Writings about the Internet: Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing, http://shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html

Lenhart, A., Horrigon, J., & Fallows, D. Content Crea-tion Online. Pew Internet & American Life Project (2004).

Cedergren Magnus. Open Content and Value Creation. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_8/cedergren/index.html

Viegas, F., Wattenberg, M., Dave, K. (2004). Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations. In Proceedings CHI 2004.

Commentary on www.shirky.com: The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality, http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html, and http://shirky.com/writings/music_flip.html, and http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/01/shirky_freeloading.html

References

Blood, R. The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining your Blog. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002

Boyd, D. Friendster and Publicly Articulated Social Networking. In Ext. Abstracts CHI 2004, ACM Press (2004).

Counts, S., Fellheimer, E. Supporting Social Presence through Lightweight Photo Sharing On and Off the Desktop. In Proc. CHI 2004, ACM Press (2004).

Farnham, S., Kelly, S.U., Portnoy, W., & Schwartz, J.L.K. Wallop: Designing Social Software for Co-located Social Networks. In Proceedings of HICSS-37, Hawaii (2004).

Herring, S., Scheidt, L., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs. In Proc. HICSS-37 (2004).

Lenhart, A., Horrigon, J., & Fallows, D. Content Crea-tion Online. Pew Internet & American Life Project (2004).

Madden, M. America’s Online Pursuits: The Changing Picture of Who’s Online and What They Do. Pew Internet & American Life Project (2003).

Makela, A., Giller, V., Tscheligi, M., Sefelin, R. Joking, storytelling, art sharing, expressing affection: A field trial of how children and their social network communicate with digital images in leisure time. In Proc. CHI 2000, CHI Letters 2(1).

NITLE Blog Census. http://www.blogcensus.net. 2004.

Viegas, F., Wattenberg, M., Dave, K. (2004). Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations. In Proceedings CHI 2004.