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URLs make fantastic identifiers — for the 0.1% of the web population that understands that they “are” a URL. Fortunately, the other 99.9% of the world (our parents, for example) already understand that they have an email address.

The underlying thing that is wrong with an email address is that it's affordance is backwards - it enables people who have it to send things to you, but there's no reliable way to know that a message is from you. Conversely, URLs have the opposite default affordance- people can go look at them and see what you have said about yourself, and computers can go and visit them and discover other ways to interact with what you have published, or ask you permission for more.

One thing I learned at Technorati is that one sure-fire way to get linked to by bloggers is to write an article about blogging. Sure enough, The Economist and Nick Carr have, with their 'death of the blogosphere' articles, garnered a fair bit of linkage.

Their curious obsession with the Technorati Top 100 is missing what is really happening. As JP points out, the old blogging crew are still around, they're just blogging less that those paid to do so a dozen times a day. Not because they are less interested or engaged, but because there are now many new ways to do what we used blogs for back then.

In 2001, if we wanted to share brief thoughts, we used a blog; to link to others’ posts, we used a blog. If we wanted a group discussion, we made a group blog.

With Technorati, and trackback and pingback, we built tools to follow cross-blog conversations, and learned that we are each others’ media. As I wrote in 2004:

The great thing about weblogs is when you discover someone. Someone who makes sense to you, or someone who surprises you with a viewpoint you hadn't thought of. Once you have found them you can subscribe to their feeds and see how they can keep inspiring or surprising you.
You can even start a blog, link to them, and join the conversation

A year later I reiterated:

By tracking people linking to me or mentioning my name, Technorati helps me in this distributed asynchronous conversation (thats how I found Mike and Dave's comments, after all). However, as I've said before, "I can read your thoughts, as long as you write them down first". In order to be in the conversation, you need to be writing and linking. Perforce, this means that those who write and link more, and are written about and linked to more, are those who most see the utility of it.

What has happened since is that the practices of blogging have become reified into mainstream usage. Through social networks and Twitter and Reader shared items and Flickr and HuffDuffer and all the other nicely-focused gesture spreading tools we have, the practice of blogging, of mediating the world for each other, has become part of the fabric of the net.
This may be the first blogpost I've written since August, but the many digital publics I'm part of have been flowing media and friendly gestures to and from me all the time.

Monica thanked me for the explanation, saying that she was glad I had elaborated as she had thought, and I hope she forgives me for paraphrasing, that 'social software was something awful, like social workers'. That really made me think, and I haven't quite got to the end of where that throwaway comment has led me.

Is 'social' the problem with social software? Certainly in the UK, 'social' has some rather negative connotations: Social workers are often despised and derided as interfering, and often incompetent, busybodies. Social housing is where you put people at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. Social sciences are the humanities trying to sound important by putting on sciency airs. Social climbers are people who know how to suck their way up the ladder. Social engineering is getting your way deviously, by using people's weaknesses against them. Social security is money you give people who can't be bother work for themselves. Socialism is an inherently flawed system that is prone to corruption. Social disease is venereal.

The SSA meeting was fairly chaotic - perhaps reflecting the diverse meanings of 'Social'. Clay Shirky did not show up (or if he did, did not speak up); Dave Winer later poured scorn on the efforts, implying it was all about social climbing.

Friedrich Hayek famously said that the word 'social' empties the noun it is applied to of their meaning. Hayek goes on:

...it has in fact become the most harmful instance of what, after Shakespeare's 'I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs' ( As You Like It , II, 5), some Americans call a 'weasel word'. As a weasel is alleged to be able to empty an egg without leaving a visible sign, so can these words deprive of content any term to which they are prefixed while seemingly leaving them untouched. A weasel word is used to draw the teeth from a concept one is obliged to employ, but from which one wishes to eliminate all implications that challenge one's ideological premises.

Perhaps the problem is that the social realm is the realm of trust, so saying things are social is asserting "trust me". As Adam Gopnik writes on magic in the New Yorker:

But the Too Perfect theory has larger meanings, too. It reminds us that, whatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is “dynamic,” unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information. We are always reducing the claim or raising the proof. The magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it’s a trick but not which one it is, and being impressed by the other person’s ability to let the trickery go on.[...]

I saw, too, that David Blaine is absolutely sincere in his belief that the way forward for a young magician lies not in mastering the tricks but in mastering the mind of the modern age, with its relentless appetite for speed and for the sensational-dressed-as-the-real. And I thought I sensed in Swiss the urge to say what all of us would like to say—that traditions are not just encumbrances, that a novel is not news, that an essay is a different thing from an Internet rant, that techniques are the probity and ethic of magic, the real work. The crafts that we have mastered are, in part, the tricks that we have learned, and though we know how much knowledge the tricks enfold, still, tricks is what they are.

Tim O'Reilly has written an excellent review post on Open Source and Cloud Computing which says, among other things:

The interoperable internet should be the platform, not any one vendor's private preserve.

So here's my first piece of advice: if you care about open source for the cloud, build on services that are designed to be federated rather than centralized. Architecture trumps licensing any time.

But peer-to-peer architectures aren't as important as open standards and protocols. If services are required to interoperate, competition is preserved. Despite all Microsoft and Netscape's efforts to "own" the web during the browser wars, they failed because Apache held the line on open standards. This is why the Open Web Foundation, announced last week at OScon, is putting an important stake in the ground. It's not just open source software for the web that we need, but open standards that will ensure that dominant players still have to play nice.

The "internet operating system" that I'm hoping to see evolve over the next few years will require developers to move away from thinking of their applications as endpoints, and more as re-usable components. For example, why does every application have to try to recreate its own social network? Shouldn't social networking be a system service?

This isn't just a "moral" appeal, but strategic advice.[...]

A key test of whether an API is open is whether it is used to enable services that are not hosted by the API provider, and are distributed across the web.

I think this API openness test is not strong enough. As I wrote in An API is a bespoke suit, a standard is a t-shirt, for me the key test is that implementations can interoperate without knowing of each others' existence, let alone having to have a business relationship. That's when you have an open spec.

The other thing I resist in the idea of an internet operating system is that that the net is composable, not monolithic. You can swap in and implementations of different pieces, and combine different specs that solve one piece of the problem without having to be connected to everything else.

The original point of the cloud was a solved piece of the problem that means you don't have to worry about the internal implementation.

Thus, the answer to "shouldn't social networking be a system service?" is yes, it should be a Social Cloud. That's exactly what we are working on in OpenSocial.

Bob Garfield's de haut en bas attack on web commenters upset two very skilled conversational catalysts, Ira Glass, and Derek Powazek. The false dichotomy of 'we choose who you get to hear' and 'total anarchic mob noise' was dismissed by Jack Lail too. At the same time, Ben Laurie explained how the IETF's open-to-all mailing lists can be hijacked by time-rich fools, talking about the Open Web Foundation.

At Supernova last month, listening to Clay Shirky talk about the problems of collective action reminded me of a small nit I have with his excellent book Here Comes Everybody (which you should all read). He talks about the deep changes that ridiculously easy group forming online has wrought, but he also explains that most of these groups fail, in various ways.

The key to this is finding people who play the role of conversational catalyst within a group, to welcome newcomers, rein in old hands and set the tone of the conversation so that it can become a community. Clay referred to Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, who is a great example of this, and I have had the privilege to discuss this with Teresa, Amy Muller,Christy Canida and others at the Troll Whispering session at Web2Open, and heard very similar stories from Gina Trapini, Annalee Newitz, Jessamyn West and Jeska Dzwigalski at The Users Are Revolting at SXSW.

The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don't have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage. The big problem with have is that we don't have a English name for this role; they get called 'Moderators' (as Tom Coates thoroughly described) or 'Community Managers', and because when they're doing it right you see everyone's conversation, not their carefully crafted atmosphere, their role is often ignored.

In other languages there are words closer to this role - Suw and I thought of geisha a while back, whereas Teresa suggested the Yiddish Tummler - both Deb Schultz and Heather Gold liked that one. In French animateur has the broader connotations of discussion, leadership and guidance needed, but in English we are stuck with enervated latinate words like facilitator. Even an eloquent and charismatic presidential candidatehad a difficult time explaining what a 'Community Organizer' does, around the same time that Bartlett was resorting to card tricks.

Which brings me back to Clay's book - in it he gives an account of the #joiito chatroom that completely misses the rôle that JeannieCool played there, making her sound like a n00b. The software tool, jibot, that has helped keep that conversation going for 5 years, was built to support Jeannie's role as conversational catalyst. I do hope he gets a chance to correct this in the next edition.

The broader issue is one that we are still working on - building rules for who gets to speak where and when, re-imagining the historic model of a single hegemonic public record that print Journalism still aspires to, from its roots in the coffeeshops of London into the many parallel publics we see on the web, and how legal precedents designed for a monopoly of speech make no sense here.

In the meantime, if your newspaper, social media initiative or website isn't working right, you need to find your tummler, geisha, animateur or conversational catalyst, but you should consider giving them a big name title like 'Chief Conversation Officer'.

Jeff Jarvis says he's writing a metaphorical application of Google principles to running a restaurant. Over the last few weekends, while sorting out stuff at home, I've been watching Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares which BBC America seems to be playing continuously at weekends. If you haven't seen it, do watch some - each episode, Ramsay spends a week at a failing restaurant in the UK and tries to help them turn it around.

After seeing a few, there are recurrent themes that Ramsay comes up with: simple menus, built on good ingredients that local people understand, served promptly. Which fits well with Google's ten things - simple frontend, low latency results, user-focused. How he tries these out involve analogues for user testing, A/B experiments, and profiling under high load.

Of course, Google does run restaurants - so Jeff can read how they get built and tested directly.