Technology Blog

Every so often in the business-oriented online communities in which I participate, the issue of free speech and censorship comes up, usually from someone (or several someones) who is testing or pushing the envelope of the acceptable boundaries within the community — profanity, flame wars, etc.

Is free speech an absolute right within online communities? Can an online community, regardless of its size and membership requirements, establish and enforce a more restrictive code of conduct?

There is a long, well-established precedent for moderation/governance in online communities — even ones that are open to the public. Whether it has been tested for constitutional validity in court or not (and I haven’t found any court cases, but would greatly appreciate any references anyone may have), online communities have for years been in the practice of having codes of conduct that were far more restrictive than constitutional protections. Even large, open membership communities have moderators who are able to edit or delete posts and suspend or eject members who violate those codes of conduct. To say that the boundaries of constitutionally protected free speech is applicable to any privately-owned online community is to go contrary to decades of business practices.

Do blogs change this? What about sites like Gather, Ecademy or AlwaysOn, in which individual blogs are aggregated or displayed in the front page and other pages? One could make the argument that blogs are somehow different because of the fact that they are an individual voice rather than a community space. However, the aggregation of them on the front page and the nature of the threaded comments would, I think, negate any such argument. The site may call them blogs, but if they’re aggregated and allow comments, they’re still really just one big threaded discussion forum. I doubt a court would see a substantial difference simply based on the slight technical difference.

Even so, most hosting companies, including blog hosting companies, also have terms of service that are more restrictive than free speech limits, typically restricting hate speech and pornography, among other things. For example, WordPress.com prohibits the use of PayPerPost. Is that a violation of a blogger’s right to free speech?

Under the Uniform Commercial Code, we all have the right to voluntary restrict our free speech by contract, and when we join an online community we are doing just that — subject to whatever the terms of service are. In fact, the contract doesn’t even have to be explicitily signed in order to be in effect. Consider that when you walk into a theater or restaurant, you give up some of your free speech rights. Do anything that is significantly unpleasant to other patrons — talk too loudly, let your kids run wild, etc. — and you’ll be warned and eventually ejected.

Why would anyone expect an online community to be any different?

You do have the right of free speech, but the owners of a community also have the right to establish and enforce codes of conduct within the community, and be joining that community, your right of contract supercedes your right of free speech.

So when you find yourself bumping up against the boundaries of behavior in an online community, you might want to consider whether that community is really the right community for you. If so, then you can either adapt your behavior to the code of conduct or you can use persuasive means to try to change the code of conduct. But don’t make cries of “Censorship!” — you gave up that right when you joined.

This post was written by Scott Allen, source: Free Speech and Censorship in Online Communities

Sid Yadav writes, “33 Places to Hangout in the Social Networking Era,” a summary with brief profiles of 33 different social networks, each with descriptions and target demographics.

This post was written by David Teten, source: 33 Places to Hangout in the Social Networking Era

Andrew Shaindlin (who contributed a sub-chapter of The Virtual Handshake) just wrote a good piece on Online Networks: A New Tool for Alumni Relations : How third party social and business networking sites can benefit alumni online communities.

One of the great ironies (and brilliant aspects) of TheFacebook is that it has monetized the networks of Harvard, Yale, and virtually every other university in the US—without paying them a dime! Andrew wrote this piece to explore how university alumni communities should respond to these new services.

This post was written by David Teten, source: Online Networks: A New Tool for Alumni Relations

From Jason Dowdell (via Claire Delong of Accolo): Konstantin Guericke of LinkedIn writes:

There are two types of acceptance rates…

1.) Those from invitations
2.) Those from introductions.

Invitations to connect are generally from people you know and trust already, like former co-workers, classmates, etc.. By accepting an invitation, you agree to make introductions for the person when he/she wants to meet people you or your contacts know. Of the people who send over 10 invitiations, 7% have an acceptance rate of 90% or higher. These kinds of conversion rates are unthinkable in traditional marketing, but only possible via word-of-mouth marketing where there are well-established relationships and bonds of trust.

Introductions are contact requests from people you generally don’t know and who are contacting you about doing business via an introduction from someone you know. When accepting a contact request, you are providing your contact information, so you can start a dialog about the opportunity via phone or email. When people receive an introduction, they accept it (meaning they provide their contact info to the sender) 84% of the time. This is quite amazing given that they generally don’t know the sender, and it’s a testament to the fact that business users realy heavily on social filters — they are much more willing to give their attention and respond favorably to someone who comes introduced (even if the sender is just a friend of a friend of their connection) than if they get contacted directly via phone or email where nobody is vouching for the sender and where they can’t easily look up the profile of the sender. It also shows that most users are careful which people they let into their LinkedIn network and that they give signficant weight to the fact that one of their LinkedIn connections is recommending the sender, based on their direct knowledge of the sender or based on the recommendation provided about the sender by someone they know and trust.

What comparable data can other services provide? Any ideas?

This post was written by David Teten, source: Social Networking Acceptance Rate Stats

One of the questions David and I are frequently asked, and that comes up as a recurring topic of debate, is, “Which tool is best for me to build my network?” In our latest Fast Company column, Of Hammers, Wrenches, and Screwdrivers, we take a side-by-side look at online networking communities, blogging and LinkedIn, and compare and contrast them based upon the Seven Keys framework we introduced in The Virtual Handshake.

While the boundaries between the application of these tools is somewhat fuzzy and they tend to cross over each other, this is a handy, concise overview of the predominant models and how they relate to each other and to your relationship-building activities.

This post was written by Scott Allen, source: Choosing the Right Tool for Virtual Relationships

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This post was written by David Teten, source: Social Networking Platforms: From Friendster to Myspace and Beyond

Anne Berkowitch, cofounder and CEO, SelectMinds
from today’s Virtual Handshake conference.

New employment realities are weakening employee relationships: high turnover, outsourcing, telecommuting, etc.

4 types of networks: extended enterprise networks, corporate alumni networks, and intra-company networks

Corporate Social Networking is becoming best practice. SelectMinds has 45 clients: top investment banks, 2 of the Big 4 accounting firms, Accenture, IBM, premier law firms

Fortune 500 knowledge-worker companies: tech, defense, health care.

Offer:
- deployment and management of technical platform
- advisory and execution services (member participation analysis, broadcast communications, surveys, reporting)

Client successes:
Cooley Godward (law). 1 new client/ 3 active leads within 6 mos. Of launch. Highly targeted prof’l events for alumni & employees
E&Y: 25% of hires now rehires(!)
BearingPoint: employee-submitted operational improvement suggestions
Collaborative idea generation across enterprise network

Some of their clients invite ‘friends of a firm’ on a select basis to join the network

Variation of network across firms: Goldman Sachs alumni network is extremely active.
Some other clients do not have a strong alumni culture. Lower levels of engagement.
People like the fact that this is a closed network.
People use this primarily for business.

I can login and see what which other employees have RSVPd for a given alumni event—and can see which alums in my personal network specifically are attending.

This post was written by David Teten (admin), source: Anne Berkowitch, cofounder and CEO, SelectMinds

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This post was written by Scott Allen, source: Marketing Yourself on MySpace

Back in November 2004, I wrote what turned out to be one of the highest-traffic posts on this blog, “Can the blogosphere find a kidney donor?“. I had met a woman, Debbie Diamond, who was looking for a kidney on behalf of her brother, Neil.

Here’s the update directly from Debbie:

“This story has a lot of twist and turns. I cannot believe this and I am still pinching myself! I came to Craig’s List in search of a kidney donor for my brother. I placed ongoing ads for several months and got plenty of replies. Several people went ahead and took the various tests. Though two were matches nothing came to fruition for my brother. But, I am happy to say that my brother did get his transplant, from a source outside of Craig’s List 3 months ago and all is well.

While I was determined to save my brother’s life and find him a kidney donor, I was also helping another person find a donor for herself. Let me go back a few steps to show how much of a Craig’s List story this really is. Ten months ago there was an ad on CL seeking people to work at a great event in NYC. I applied and was hired by the two people conducting the interviews. This man and woman who did the hiring have been good friends for many years. They recognized me from the newspaper regarding my kidney search for my brother. They started to tell me about a friend of theirs who was on dialysis and in dire need of a transplant too. I initiated conversation with this woman via email first. After several emails we spoke on the phone at length. We then met in person, and once acquainted I realized that she did not have many resources on how to go about networking, etc. I told her to post an ad on CL which she did. She called me and said she did not get any replies and asked if I would post ads for her, which I did. While this is going on I am still working hard on finding my brother a match. Keep in mind that when someone goes for testing to see if they are a match, the hospital/transplant center will only see one person at a time. The tests are plenty, time consuming and some are not the most pleasant. So you cannot bombard the hospital with a bunch of people at once. Since I had received so many replies to my ad for my brother, I could not answer all of them at one time. I had to wait to see the outcome of the person being tested prior to scheduling the next individual. I had an email in my inbox from a woman in California. I had not answered her right away as we were waiting for another’s results. Finally, instead of answering her email I decided to forward it to the woman I was trying to help here in NY. The two women were also the same blood type. The women had been in touch and I have been emailing back and forth with the woman from California for several months too. It is now November. This has been in the making for about 5 or 6 months now. Like I said, it is not as easy as a quick test here and there… there are glitches, problems, set backs, re-doing of tests, etc. As I sit here and type this these two women are in a hospital in California; transplant complete!

The truth is that the chances of finding a stranger who is a match for a kidney transplant are slim to none. That is why they always tell you if a family member is a match (usually some family member would be) and can donate, that is the best case scenario. Having said that, it is equally difficult to find someone who does not drop out after starting testing, way before they know if they are a match or not. There are so many reasons that people drop out, and to hang in there with every trial and tribulation, and to take the last step and actually donate your organ, is a deed so great that words cannot even describe.

Most people thought I was crazy to post ads on Craig’s List seeking a donor. They also thought nothing would come through via this medium either. I am so glad I ignored all the doubt and negativity. Imagine if I hadn’t!? Anything can happen, and if nothing happened then we lost nothing, we just remained in the same place. If there is a moral to this, or actually several morals to this story they would be: Follow YOUR gut and not anyone else. The Two Women had The Transplant Too! If you get turned down a thousand times, if nothing happens for a year or more, don’t give up. Keep the focus and keep putting yourself or whatever it is out there. Eventually something will give. Even if it is just more information you never know where it will take you. I certainly did not. I found out though and I am glad I did. Nothing is too out there or to ridiculous for you not to give it a try. The other part of this is how great Craig Newmark and his site is. Craig’s vision did not include this (organ donations) at all. When he started he had no idea his site would become what it had become and that it would spread like wild fire all over the place. I have thanked him personally and have shared emails with Craig, always keeping him up to date regarding these two situations.

Again, thanks to all who were there and supportive, especially Craig and his site. Thank god my brother has a functioning kidney, is off of dialysis and leading a much more normal life because of it. And now a second person was spared more years of dialysis and getting sicker. Last but certainly not least, thanks to the woman in California, the Angel that was sent anonymously to my email inbox. Angels like her are a dying breed today which is sad but I am so grateful I found her!

This post was written by David Teten (admin), source: Update: how to find a kidney donor on craigslist

Dave Pollard has put together an excellent visual map of the social networking landscape. He breaks it down into eight major objectives people are trying to accomplish with social networking tools:

1. Finding people (discovering, rediscovering, or locating them)
2. Building directories, network maps and social networks
3. Inviting people to join your networks
4. Managing access to your networks (”permissioning”)
5. Connecting with people in your networks (using various media)
6. Managing relationships across media (e.g. making the jarring transition from e-mail or weblog-based relationships to voice-to-voice or face-to-face)
7. Collaborating with people in your networks, and
8. Content sharing with people in your networks (and other learning, knowledge-finding and knowledge-sharing functionalities that are arguably the domain of Knowledge Management rather than Social Networking)

Of course, most sites offer some combination of these and don’t easily fall into a single category. He goes on to look at the combination of these that the major types of tools and some of the most popular sites provide, plus his list of the ten biggest problems with most existing social software tools. Great reading.

If you’re looking for categorized lists of social networking sites, he mentions Judith Meskill’s excellent SNA Meta List, but unfortunately overlooks our Directory of Online Network / Social Software Companies, which is wiki-based and allows contributions and edits by anyone who’s interested in helping us keep it up-to-date.

This post was written by Scott Allen, source: Visual Map of the Social Networking Landscape

MySpace is all over the news this week, most notably for launching the MySpace record label, which “will feature independent and unsigned artists as well as compilations that include top groups from other label.”

On the darker side, MySpace has been at the center of attention in the growing concern over internet privacy and safety. For example, in a highly controversial move, a private Catholic high school has issued a ban on blogging and online profiles, threatening students with suspension if they maintain profiles and blogs on sites like MySpace and Xanga.

Meanwhile, MySpace has surpassed AOL, Hotmail and even Google to become the #4 most-visited domain in terms of page views and is approaching 40 million members.

This post was written by Scott Allen, source: MySpace Launches Record Label Amid Growing Controversy, Membership

I recently wrote about how the online conversation is real. The basics of that post is that blogging fosters interaction. No surprise, to be a successful blogger, reading, writing, and responding to others within the larger community is an absolute must.

There are a growing number of ways that users can keep track of online conversations. David Teten spoke to one of them in the previous post- PubSub. PubSub is a prospective (forward looking) matching service that provides new information to users as it becomes available. So, for example, if you want news or information on social software, you would create a PubSub subscription with keywords “social software”. You can view a subscription like social software on PubSub or simply by copying the feed they provide into your favorite news aggregator.

Other ways to monitor the conversation include keeping track of “tags” that interest you. Tagging is a growing trend in the social software world and is closely related to “social bookmarking”. I’ll first speak to social bookmarking because it is similar to a word most people are familiar with - bookmarks.

Social bookmarking builds upon collaborative efforts, in that an individual’s bookmarks (or “favorites”) are no longer just their own. Rather, they are shared with the larger community. Unlike storing a bookmark under a particular folder in your browser, social bookmarks are saved online and are not categorized by folders, but are instead “tagged” by keywords. Users (and not computers) select appropriate tags for articles or sites of interest, as they come across them through their surfing of the web.

This post, for example, might be tagged with the word “socialsoftware” on any number of social bookmark sites. The most popular social bookmarking tool to this point is del.icio.us. Take a look at the socialsoftware tag or at my social bookmarks. Each tag also has an RSS feed, so that you can keep track of them in your favorite news aggregator (I’ll provide some more info on how to actually do that in my next post).

Tags can help you stay informed and introduce to information you might not have found otherwise. For a more advanced use of tags, take a look at what I am doing with my first blogoposium.

update: a good reference on social bookmarking basics (via Jyri Engeström) by Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott; and a very academic piece by Clay Shirky entitled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (via David Teten’s suggestion)

This post was written by Ken Yarmosh, source: Monitoring the Conversation

I recently wrote about how the online conversation is real. The basics of that post is that blogging fosters interaction. No surprise, to be a successful blogger, reading, writing, and responding to others within the larger community is an absolute must.

There are a growing number of ways that users can keep track of online conversations. David Teten spoke to one of them in the previous post- PubSub. PubSub is a prospective (forward looking) matching service that provides new information to users as it becomes available. So, for example, if you want news or information on social software, you would create a PubSub subscription with keywords “social software”. You can view a subscription like social software on PubSub or simply by copying the feed they provide into your favorite news aggregator.

Other ways to monitor the conversation include keeping track of “tags” that interest you. Tagging is a growing trend in the social software world and is closely related to “social bookmarking”. I’ll first speak to social bookmarking because it is similar to a word most people are familiar with - bookmarks.

Social bookmarking builds upon collaborative efforts, in that an individual’s bookmarks (or “favorites”) are no longer just their own. Rather, they are shared with the larger community. Unlike storing a bookmark under a particular folder in your browser, social bookmarks are saved online and are not categorized by folders, but are instead “tagged” by keywords. Users (and not computers) select appropriate tags for articles or sites of interest, as they come across them through their surfing of the web.

This post, for example, might be tagged with the word “socialsoftware” on any number of social bookmark sites. The most popular social bookmarking tool to this point is del.icio.us. Take a look at the socialsoftware tag or at my social bookmarks. Each tag also has an RSS feed, so that you can keep track of them in your favorite news aggregator (I’ll provide some more info on how to actually do that in my next post).

Tags can help you stay informed and introduce to information you might not have found otherwise. For a more advanced use of tags, take a look at what I am doing with my first blogoposium.

This post was written by Ken Yarmosh, source: Monitoring the Conversation

Steve Pavlina, who blogs on “personal development for smart people” (sounds like a tag line I could use) writes on Using Online Communities Effectively. This article reads like a micro-summary of “The Virtual Handshake”. For anyone who is an active user of online communities, it’s worth reviewing this.