Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Social Share

Our colleague Andy Havens oozes words out of his pores. Somehow he finds the time to be our Manager of Creative Services, Alice's boss, family guy, and wordsmith. He comments here on IAG, he sends us email noting interesting things and he writes a lot. He can talk a lot too. We suspect he's got some sort of deal going that makes his day 30 hours long.

One of his blogs (yes, he has more than two) TinkerX, is in no way affilitated with OCLC (I say this to make sure you know it's not an OCLC blog--it's his own personal one. You've got that? TinkerX is not us....I belabor this point just so you know) but his interests and IAG's overlap now and then. More now than then actually.

So, I point you at Andy's post on "Social Share" as he wrestles with (in a wordful way) the inadequacy of the phrases that we are using to talk about people doing more stuff in public digital spaces. Social networking and social computing leave me cold as I don't think these phrases capture the complexity of whatever is happening (Something, serendipitously, Jessamyn muses on). I'm not sure "social share" describes all facets of one's existence in the Big Network but Andy raises really good points, not the least of which is...
"If you build it, they will come…" That’s what the mysterious voice said in "Field of Dreams." A neat movie. I liked it a bunch. But at the end, when you see that whole line of cars all queued up to experience the mystery and drama of the baseball field in the middle of the corn… my only thought was, "Where are they going to go to the bathroom?" Once you get to a social destination… what do you do there?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Funny, because I wanted to post a comment to it about lurkers being part of the conversation, but I couldn't because comments aren't enabled for that post.

Anonymous said...

Karen: Comments are enabled. I just tested them. One of the few things I don't like about my current WordPress theme is that when there are no comments, you have to click on the words, "No comments" in order to leave a comment. Kinda like clicking on the "Start" button in Microsoft Windows in order to shut down your computer. Not very intuitive. If I can figure out how to change that, I will. But you should be able to leave a comment, and I'd sure like that!

You do need to add two numbers to leave a comment, though. I use a comment spam filter called "Did you pass math?" to help keep out such.

Hope to see you around.

Anonymous said...

It could be a UI thing. I wasn't stumped by the "no comments" line. I did the math. I got a comment box. But it looked as if I was leaving a comment on the PREVIOUS post. Went back and forth a couple of times, still with that impression.