Joe Friend: Virtual Communities

Distributed task lists

"And, what was I doing up? Working on internal productivity tools for next generation distributed task lists..." [FuzzyBlog]

I'm interested in seeing what Scott is up to. I'm putting together a team to work on web communities here in Indonesia and we need a tool like this to help coordinate work.

Towards the ubiquitous internet

To deeply impact a society via virtual communities you need to have broad access to the internet. One way that his happens in indonesia is via internet cafes or warnets, as they're called here. Another way I believe that this will happen in the future is via wireless. Only 3 out of every 100 Indonesians have a phone in their home. Lots of fiber has been laid throughout Indonesia, but the last mile problem is huge. The last mile infrastructure will probably never support broadband internet or be broadly installed in homes. So, all the activity in the Wi-Fi area is very interesting. I love the warchalking symbol card that Jenny posted about. The idea is that as you encounter Wi-Fi access points you note them in a public way (via chalk on a nearby building). I hope that I can find some Indonesia ISP that is seriously integrating Wi-Fi access points into their strategy. It seems that the potential here is HUGE. Marry Wi-Fi, GSM, GPRS, internet cafes and small devices (something like Danger) and I think you start to get an internet solution that will really impact Indonesia.

You can download:
A PDF of the card to print out and use [31k]
An EPS of the card to download and improve [800k]"

Kuro5hin ad

I just bought an add on Kuro5hin's website. I figure it is an interesting experiment and a way to support them. I'm not a regular reader and I've never posted, but I'm all for what Rusty's trying to do. Viva la K5!

K5's in trouble. Do I care?

What's this K5 thing all about? Visit my weblog and fill me in. While you're there relax and enjoy.

Kuro5hin is broke

It is always sad when a web community hits the skids. In this case, it is "simply" money problems. Hopefully it won't bring K5 down.

Safe communication

Really, it’s bloody simple. If you want people to talk, giving them the technology to do so is necessary but not sufficient. You also have to ensure that talking is a safe activity for them. That means controlling it as little as possible. That means tolerating -- dare I say, heeding and understanding? -- well-expressed dissent. That means accepting that sometimes we all say the wrong thing to the wrong people at the wrong time. That means a firm injunction against messenger-slaughter. The identical instant some wanker makes talking unsafe, workers will retreat back into mute Worker personae. [Caveat Lector]

Got this one from Jon. I think that creating a safe environment for communication is critical for web communities. Sure the platform (technology) is important. However, if you've got the greatest site, but people don't feel safe to open up, you've got a beautiful, empty site.

Essense of web communities

"Amazon and eBay succeeded because they empowered their users and made them visible to each other." says Esther Dyson in this Fortune article. This really hits at one core essense of web communities. Thanks Jon for the pointer.

Great performance, little cost

"I spent a bit of time today analyzing the "Slashdot Effect". Yesterday the web site www.kerneltrap.org got featured on Slashdot which spiked it's traffic by six fold. I was lucky enough to get performance metrics and put into a 3 page "Performance of Open Source Portal Software" guide. You'll see the PDF tomorrow or later tonight. At it's peak this site was sustaining 100 hits per minute. Never crashed. Now the shocker ... Single processor PII 300 mhz server. 512 megs of RAM, Linux, MySQL, one box running DB, Web Server, Portal/Content Management Software. Every single page view was served out of the database (Drupal's cache optimization was turned on). [The FuzzyBlog!]"

I'm VERY interested in this post by Scott. I'm looking at software to use for creating "virtual communities" and had already stumbled on Drupal. It looks like it covers the right feature set. I haven't actually installed it or looked at the code. Then I saw a tangential reference to it by Scott yesterday and then this post today. Amazing stuff. I'll have to probe further.

Small world experiment

You've heard of "six degrees of separation," right? No, not the play, game or even the movie with The Fresh Prince. I'm talking about the concept behind it, which came out of a study by Harvard Social Psychologist Stanley Milgram and has recently be repopularized by Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. Well you can participate in this study to determine if the theory scales on a worldwide basis. I'm already registered and have submitted my name to be a target. Very cool. Thanks Clay for the pointer to this site.