LZZR

Internet States of Presence

So picking up from where we left off in the post on the Internet History let us summarise in condensed form what we may take from there and use in our further reasoning.

The transformations described in that posting eventually lead to the explosion of Web 2.0 were secured through gradual introduction of three distinct states of Internet presence. Whilst online, an individual may act in one of the following three capacities:

• Visitor – freely surfing the net: anonymous, invisible and passive, can only read and download
• Legal Self – predominantly when engaged in some sort of monetary transaction, government or job-related activities: tied up to various offline ID tokens (SSN, Credit Card Number, Legal Address etc.) mostly sporadic, purpose-driven and compulsory, creates two-way tunnels between "real" and "virtual" worlds transferring tangible goods or services
• Internet Service User – authorised with login/password combination, recognisable by nickname and/or avatar active contributor to user generated content and participant in online communication (at the moment fragmented and scattered all over a large number of isolated services)

In purely technical terms of course Legal Self is just a subset of the User state as to be identifiable one has to be logged into a certain service. What makes these two states taxonomically equal is not heir relation to an internet service but their relationship to the outside world. In other words, looking from within a server the former is just a type of the latter but looking from the offline point of view these two are different in kind.

For the part that is to follow it is crucially important to establish that there are only three possible states of presence and no other states exist.

tags: internet history, internet service user, internet states of presence, internet user, legal self, visitor, online, states of internet presence

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Posted by LZZR under Social Networks | Comments (2)

Those who cannot remember Web 1.0 are condemned to repeat it

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
from "Reason in Common Sense", the first volume by George Santayana
not my favourite philosopher, I admit, but the quote is too good not to use it

Well, of course there is no new thing under the sun but problems we are facing with the rapid introduction of Web 2.0 are even more severe than those arising at the time its predecessor Web 1.0 took over the world. In its early days Web 1.0 looked like a mysterious cyberspace inhabited by semi-robotic creatures travelling over the paths of hyperlinks. Overexcited zealots preached nothing short of digital revolution and it might have been looking very much reasonable at the time. All that existed in real world seemed to be easy to digitise and place on the InterWeb (where else?). This was imagined as nothing short of a parallel reality both mimicking the real world and obscuring it. It looked as if some sort of parallel reality is about to be born. Matrix (the movie) comes as perhaps the best illustration of the spirit of the time. At the time it looked indeed like a second virtual reality structurally opposed to the real world coming into being. Now we may look back and see how exaggerated this whole thing was, how much fantasy was projected into something that was not even nearing this image.

So, what was in fact this Web 1.0? We need to look at it now with the benefit of hindsight as without the clear understanding of Web 1.0 all talks about subsequent versions of the InterWeb will inevitably just produce an equivalent amount of hype that can only obscure the reality. At the foundation of Web 1.0 lied HTML. And it was just this – a HyperText Markup Language – perhaps the most crippled computer language ever devised it could only do what it says on the tin. Tied up with HTTP protocol in an inseparable mass this HTTP/HTML alloy was placed right in the foundation of the WWW and that’s exactly the kind of burden we have to carry into the future. In those early days the vision of the Internet was no more than just a collection of texts enhanced, in comparison to paper texts, with the ability to link otherwise separate documents with hyperlinks. No more nor less. Behind it was still the idea of printed books. The whole Internet looked as a huge library with universal 24/7 access. More importantly all content structure of the Internet itself was also modelled from printed books, with web sites being in a way similar to specialised libraries and their directories being books with web pagers clearly standing as separate documents with separate single titles and the continent was assumed to be linear and one-dimensional.

The same concept of linearity applies to larger Internet structures. The general assumption was that the content is guided by principles of linear narrative, or in other words that it should be read from the beginning to the end and from top to bottom. Actually it was assumed that any given piece of content must have its beginning its body and its end. Once again we are dealing with an idea of a written text that originated in classic literature of 19^th century. So at this stage, search engines appear as a form of a catalogue allowing quick keyword search through those structured and subject oriented texts.

Now we have a library, a catalogue, and we have users, who are not even users just yet, they are only readers. And what those readers could do in that global library? Well, only what they were supposed to do, and they were supposed to read. HTTP protocol allows read-only access. HTML language was not designed for constant editing of documents. What advertised itself as second reality turned out to be just an enormous collection of texts.

This created a certain type of user self identity that would have been better characterised by the word of the time: a visitor. The state of an Internet user formed at this stage could be seen as completely anonymous passive recipient, an invisible traveller, a museum visitor who is only allowed to see objects, but never allowed even to touch, not to say to modify them. Production of Web content was primarily limited to a very tiny circle of Internet professionals and was out of reach for those who viewed their computer as just a sophisticated typewriter. Static pages, passive visitors, huge catalogues, plus constant buzz about virtual reality - that’s how our beginnings look like.

It’s not that Web 2.0 came out of nowhere. Changes amassed gradually within a period that might be called Web 1.5. First your typewriter with a screen turned into a multimedia PC - remember how a simple addition of a soundcard and CD-ROM overturned the whole concept of this device? Now text stopped being the only possible continent on the Net. With it came filesharing for which neither HTTP, nor HTML were designed and which required user authentication. Two other things, contributing to these changes were e-commerce and interactivity.

E-commerce was perhaps the most significant in breaking through the virtual barrier as it provided a bridge between the real world and that virtual reality, previously separate from it. Now you could find a virtual object in this virtual world, provide your real details, pay with your real credit card and a week later a postman would bring it to your doorstep in a form of a very tangible real object - the first and perhaps the most important breakthrough in this real vs. virtual dichotomy. Real credentials placed in a virtual world and a virtual world producing a real object in return, that’s a very demystificating experience. In addition, our visitor for the first time became active, online shopping required definite actions and produced tangible real-world results of those actions.

But what finally turned our visitor into a proper user was interactivity, where bulletin boards and forums are perhaps paramount examples of the genre. It’s there the final transformation took place – now our visitor could quickly switch from an invisible observer to active and personified participant. Nicknames, usernames, passwords and avatars all suddenly became attributes of nearly everyone who ever spent some time on the net. Now another state of internet presence emerged – instead of having a homepage user became accustomed to having profiles. Notably, those two are differently related to the concept of online self: if the former was about that very self and presented some text or images produced by that self, the latter is actually a facet of online self or at least being perceived as such. For the first time profiles established not "is authored by me" but "is me" relation between online self and a URL. In other words, "this URL is me in syberspace".

Although being scattered all over different services these profile pages became constituent parts of a new type of online personality representation which is different in kind to the one provided by homepages only. Bulletin boards and forums or, broadly speaking all that comes under the term interactivity, also changed the type of content, adding to the previously prevalent linear narrative a different tree-like conversational structure that came not out of planned writing of a single individual (author) but as a result of a conversation between an indefinite number of participants.

This collectively produced content had no single author, no linear structure and perhaps no pre-defined narrative structure at all, as even if a particular subject in forum discussion might have a beginning, it surely has no end and at any time can stroll away from the initial subject to some off-topic deviations that may sometimes never to come back to the initial point. This type of content better known as "user generated content" is fluid, dynamic, progressive and growing and only this variety content can be seen as truly and genuinely specific to the Internet.

In the same way as printing revolution produced after some time a bunch of literary forms from pamphlet to a novel, the Internet, or better computer revolution, begins to produce its own specific modes of existence for written word, changing on the way the meaning and the perception of the written word as such. In many respects it is the most significant cultural consequence of this revolution and I promise to discuss it in more detail in a piece on Search Engines I am planning to write next.

Suffice to mention for now that as a result of this our visitors or guests became gradually trained to act as users, they now expect to be identified and recognised, expect to be able to contribute to almost anything, expect to be able to leave a trace either in a form of a comment or in "last visited" logs, expect to be seen when online and addressed by their fellows. This gradually turned the perception of the net from being a tool of information dissemination to the one of active real-time communication. Instant Messaging too contributed to this training albeit in an indirect form. Remarkably, it’s been brilliantly reflected in traditional paper literature already in the book Loneliness on the Net by Janusz Wiśniewski.

Needless to remind here that for all these activities neither HTTP nor HTML were designed, but in the absence of native solutions twisted and crooked implementations of HTML and HTTP became common practice to such a degree that to this day we all prefer to turn a blind eye on the perverse nature of these solutions.
Please, consider this being a first part of a larger article that I just had to split as otherwise it would be over 7000 words To be continued…

tags: interweb, internet history, janusz wiśniewski, loneliness on the net, matrix, web 1.0, web 1.5, web 2.0, web 2.5, web 3.0, interactivity, online self, parallel reality, period of transition, transition period, user generated content, users

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Posted by LZZR under Social Networks | Comments (5)

Happy Birthday SexySEO

My dearest SEXiest SEO – I’m infinitely sorry. How could I be so stupid not to post my virtual greetings in time? How could I think that it’s enough to make a non-virtual presentation? Forgive me SexySEO.
Well, not SexySEO actually. It’s Lora’s birthday, not hers. But she’s angry with me. Who? Lora or SexySEO? I’m totally confused and the more I think about, the more confusing it seems. Lora wasn’t angry with me when I met her at the party. SexySEO is angry that I forgot to post my greetings in her blog. But they are the same person, aren’t they? I know they are! I’ve seen them both! Both in real life and online. Admittedly not at the same time and moreover SexySEO can only be met online while Lora predominantly circulates in real world.
Surely they are the same, as it clearly isn’t the case of split personality. Perhaps it’s very much like when writing a novel author feels that when characters become more and more developed they become more and more independent and even the one that was supposed to be the alter ego becomes detached and starts demanding the right for independence. Banal comparison it is, but still worthy of taking it a bit further. Online interaction is different indeed, as you can not detach yourself from your online personality to the same degree, and the narrative of online interaction is forged daily and is never completed. It demands consistency. You can’t get too distant from your online image but you gradually realise how it attaches itself to your offline you and now we can’t make any distinction between Lora and SexySEO. But were they ever separate?
SexySEO is neither a fiction not a function and neither is Lora. It once started as an experiment. Once I suggested that Web 2.0 SEO isn’t about unique content at all. It’s about social interaction in online communities. This became known as zero content SEO in our circle but remained just an untested idea until Lora decided to put it in practice. And the course of events took SexySEO from being just a nickname to becoming a separate phenomenon, almost a brand name if you allow. Something that was started by Lora as just a proof of concept suddenly became an integral part of our online environment. Honestly. I have no clue how she did it. Perhaps the key to her social media success, along with unquestionable expertise in conventional SEO, is her remarkable and friendly personality. Not only she managed to make otherwise dull and booring business of SEO to look sexy but somehow she is able to see the best sides of all people she communicates with and find nice and comforting words exactly when one needs it (the skill I am admittedly short of). And now again I don’t know if I am talking about Lora or SexySEO, but who cares since they are the same.

So, happy birthday to you, Lora and my sincere apologies to SexySEO!
Better late than never
PS: for those who never met SexySEO here is her blogspot: SexySEO

tags: seo, sexyseo, birthday, media, sexy, social, social media success, unique content, zero content seo

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Posted by LZZR under Social Networks, Blog | Comments (0)

Do we see the road ahead?

Now, how do I start this story? Once upon a time, sometime in mid July to be more precise, I was approached by a group of guys from a young start-up company who wanted me to assess their in-work project both in terms of conventional SEO as well as from a more generic angle and all because I once wrote an article on Pownce. My first reaction was to avoid this since I didn’t at the time consider myself to be an expert in Social Networks and Online Communities at all. Before continuing with the story perhaps I should give you some more details about the project itself. Initially the project was conceived as Yet Another Social Network Profile URL Aggregator capable only of storing URLs of user profiles on various Social Networks. Somehow logically it progressed to the idea of gathering friends from those social networks thus creating a sort of representation of a Social Graph or better User Circle that can be viewed, accessed, managed and controlled by user from one centralised location. The system is supposed to issue alerts and inform the user of new or orphaned friends and other discrepancies in the user circle. At first I took these guys for a bunch of deluded and overexcited amatures, arguing that to amass and manage this kind of data would require computing resources available only to the likes of Google itself. However, I had to radically change my opinion after a rather impressive demonstration of their working prototype. The guys had already a spider capable of reading friends circle with minimal delay simply by parsing XHTML code and a database server running already several hundreds thousand user circles gathered from several major social networks. Most importantly they had a clear idea about scaling this prototype and some sketches of user interface allowing a very detailed management of this user circle. They also produced a draft version of API and data exchange protocol. Suddenly it all had begun looking doable, realistic and interesting. So I decided to accept the challenge and started working with them. Needless to say that I am continuing working on the subject to this day providing some sort of theoretical and even ideological background for those managing the project and with their kind permission I am going to publish some of my conclusions in a series of articles in my personal blog here.

Now, let us continue with the story. Eventually we’d set up a timeline and all went working on our respective tasks, me doing research and thinking, them doing their stuff which I suppose mainly consisted of some kind of hardcore programming of which I honestly know nothing. Back then, nothing spelled a disaster that was about to happen when all over sudden there comes Brad Fitzpatrick with his now infamous Thoughts on the Social Graph article. Although with the benefit of the hindsight being quite predictable at the time it came as a bolt from the blue and looked like a terminal deathblow for the whole project. The team spirit went so low that I nearly thought it will never recover. Pity, you couldn’t see the expression on their faces after they’d heard the news. The closest analogy that comes to my mind is what perhaps every one of us had experienced or at least observed while still at school. You are about to sit down on your chair and just at the very moment you cunning classmate quietly pulls the chair from under your bum. It’s that split second when you realise that the seat is not where it is supposed to be and now there is nothing that can stop you from falling and hitting the floor in front of the whole class as well as your much hated teacher and neither yourself is now able to stop the force of gravity, that can produce this truly unique and inimitable facial expression. In our circumstances I’ve been given a pleasure to observe this very expression on their faces for several days in a row and this is something that happens not very often in your life. Their reasons for panicking are not so difficult to understand as when the almighty Google decides to move into the domain you rather foolishly considered to be your own, you really need the nerves of steel not to run away and duck and cover. Should I mention that the fact that Brad now works for Google was even back then just two clicks away from the article itself?

It took me some days to convince the shell-shocked guys that not everything is lost and in fact this sudden intervention may even work to their advantage. First of all I had to unveil my treasured theory of second-mover advantage trying to convince them that time trial isn’t at all the worst kind of racing game. Moving in after the leader had already ploughed the virgin land makes following the furrow a much easier task. Besides Brad’s article itself didn’t look very convincing. Not only had he managed to spoil the whole impression by inelegantly trying to promote the Dopplr project to which he personally is seemingly related, but also it had a number of weak points we are about to discuss here. But before we begin with the critique it is customary to acknowledge all the positive sides and achievements of the article in question. The strongest point of the article is obviously the magnitude and the power of the vision: the vision of the project, the vision of the future of the internet and most impressively the vision detailed enough to include such practical things like API, servers, databases, browser apps and so on. The vision that is so close to my own that I must admit I nearly went frustrated seeing it written by somebody else.

Undoubtedly, the most attractive part of the picture drawn by Brad is the openness of user data, but being at the core of the idea this is at the same time is the weakest point in this whole construction and precisely at this point of course our visions differ. However wonderful the idea of a non-profit body taking care of the promotion, maintenance and proliferation of user data might look, this part is the most questionable in the whole article and no wonder it remains the least elaborated. Please, understand me correctly, I am not defending the greedy corporates trying to get hold of everything that’s alive, neither I am an advocate of paid services, and quite to the contrary, I would love to see such a project as being completely free and open for all, but at this stage it looks merely utopian, especially considering the amount of work to be done and the size of obstacles ahead. The starting point for the project, to which I am now related, was certainly different. From the very beginning it was thought to become an independent business venture with a rather banal but clear business model based on selling ad space. And by all means the project is intended to be self-supporting starting from phase two. After digesting the open data idea, obviously there was an attempt to adjust the current business model to the one offered by Brad. To my infinite disappointment it turned out that there is none. The problematic issue here is sustainability of the whole project. To achieve the desired sustainability and growth one simply must have a clear business model; even non-profits do have one. Keeping the project data free at the user level one must have at least an idea where those money needed to set up and maintain servers, to program APIs and browser add-ons etc, etc will come from. Avoiding even remotely any possible outline for this side of the project is either an evidence of a complete carelessness concerning the business side of the idea (something I find myself hard to believe into) or, more likely that the funding had been already promised at least for the initial stage of the project. All subsequent events only confirmed my suspicion. It is not incidental that soon after the article Google itself comes with their Open Social initiative. By all means Google is probably the worst possible starting point for a project of this kind. Let me explain why. Structurally as well as commercially Online Communities, no matter who owns or operates them, in their very nature are antithetic to the concept of Search Engine (more about it in my next posting). Google being a Search Engine is eager to gain a foothold in the competing business area and get at least a partial access to Online Communities data. Hence, an attempt to gather free community effort only to provide Google with free qualified labour and ideas is certainly bound to fail. We’ve been there, we’ve done that. In addition, one needs to ensure a rapid uptake of the service in circumstances where the initial data collection depends largely on a good will of big players in the Online Communities field, and those players are not likely to display any good will at all, clearly seeing this as an attempt to lessen their competitive advantage. Merely, there is no pretext which would convince large Online Communities hosts to share their data with anyone, but to share those data with Google would be plain stupid if not suicidal on their side. To sum up - I can see three highly questionable points in what can be seen as a practical side of Brad’s plan:

1. absence of a clear business model independent from Google funding and support
2. consequently his call for community effort in a project that would ultimately benefit Google looks to me a bit hypocritical, to say the least, and by all means not convincing enough to gather independent volunteer developers under those banners
3. over reliance on willingness of big Online Communities hosts to share their data – just get real, it simply ain’t going to happen, and the only way out is to focus instead on building a robust spider engine capable of gathering public domain User Circle data from those hosts regardless of their willingness to cooperate

However, much more fundamental follies of Brad’s article are not in the field of practical implementation but rather in the field of theory and general methodology. Like many others before him Brad falls under the magic spell of the word social that is ever present in thinking about online communities. Trying to narrow the problem to a mere representing of pre-existing social relationships in digital form we are running a risk of missing entirely the meaning of the ongoing online interaction. A somewhat longer discussion of this issue can be found in my previous posting while here I’d rather point out some technical issues that will inevitably arise as soon as one has to deal with the actual reality and not with imaginary Social Networks.
Social Networks and People Search are perhaps the most evil terms currently circulating in our lexicon. Both are equally deceiving making us to believe that we are dealing with real-life people and real-life social interaction. Undoubtedly most of the data we are dealing with is a result of actions performed by humans, as even robot-generated content ultimately comes from human activity, but it is a serious mistake to represent our dataset as if it contained data on real social relationships between real people. All we can analyse is a dataset containing user accounts and relationships between them (mind you, only positive relationships are on record). Firstly, there are no grounds to make one man - one account equation, as for various reasons most individuals have multiple accounts on the same service and have their own reasons for not declaring this fact. To illustrate the point ask yourself how many email accounts you currently have and have had since the introduction of this wonderful way of communication. Isn’t it correct that you’d prefer not to mix your work email with your friends and family one and will use a third separate email account for registering at free services that are likely to send you tonnes of spam and virus attachments? Consider also that the same individual may abandon one account simply because of a lost password and open a new account instead. Now think about institutions, organisations, companies and simply groups of friends having their joined accounts at various Online Community Services. How about registering an account for your pet? Facebook had to introduce a special policy dealing with accounts of deceased people, placing it in a so-called "memorialization state" but what about other Community Services? And mind you we are not even talking about things like spammer activity constantly generating thousands of accounts from one source and account hijacking that totally confuses the picture. Now, the relationships we are able to see in our dataset: apart from the obvious lack of negative relations that are always present in real world, we have to deal with a completely different set of ties. Nobody in their right mind would go and list all of their rather boring relatives, friends and acquaintances from real life on their internet profile while one has a wonderful opportunity to find new and exciting online friends. Perhaps one of the strongest intents for having an internet identity at all, is the ability to find new friends, not to get stuck with your old ones. Real world friends sometimes can even be a burden online. Generated and supported by offline social environment, real world relationships are rarely needed to be actualised online, as the only reason for displaying your offline relationships publicly is when they may add to your online status. This brings up yet another distinct feature of online friendship – it is all public, and not all of those with whom you communicate online are supposed to know about each other. Sometimes multiple accounts are created precisely for the purpose of keeping one’s relationships of one kind separate from another. More importantly, online friendship is so attractive precisely because it does not function in the same way as the real-world one does. It is capable of traversing geographical and class barriers, state borders and time zones. It requires neither spatial co-presence nor even temporal synchrony as online communication allows for a reasonable delay. Sometimes it can even break through the language barrier thanks to online translation services. On some occasions online friendship can be transferred to the offline world and I assume this happens more often than the other way around. Far from being just a mirror image of real-world ties, this is a distinct type of relationships, the meaning of which should be analysed in its own right. On aggregate all of the above not only introduces a loud noise that distorts otherwise "pure" picture, but creates a completely different one – it is an altogether different phenomena. Once again, the idea that Online Communities are mirroring offline social relationships with each account representing single individual and friendship relations reflecting real-world relationships is no more than a phantasm, a product of wishful thinking and a sick fantasy of marketing executives and election campaign managers. The stronger the tendency to bind online profiles and accounts to personally identifiable data the stronger the backlash to be expected from internet users. The stronger the threat and the pressure the more often Internet users will evade positive identification of their accounts with their real-world identities and the more effective this evasion will be. The fact of the matter is that nobody wants yet another Big Brother, this time not in a form of a potentially accountable state agency, but worse, in a shape of unaccountable private corporations watching over every aspect of their online activity. As recent Facebook privacy scandal reminded us, users tend to become quite aggressive, active and inventive when their privacy is at stake, and you don’t mess with an angry user. The internet is a place that provides the means for effectively anonymous communication and as soon as it looses this ability it becomes no different from any other way of communicating and therefore redundant and hence it is not likely that this will ever happen!
To give a roundup on this:

1. in our Social Graph or better User Circle dataset we are NOT dealing with people and their relationships, we are dealing with user accounts and a sort of very primitive connections between them
2. one person – one account equation if fundamentally flawed, instead we are dealing with all sorts of accounts, from accounts representing just a segment of an individual (segmentary accounts) to accounts owned by a group of individuals (collective accounts)
3. relations between accounts are only of positive value and most often have no direct correspondence in offline world; it is only the fact of a relation that can be registered, as there is no reliable and uniform mechanism of classification (microformats is a step in right direction, but it is too limited to provide a reliable solution)

Ultimately, to answer the challenge we need not to reduce the complexity of online interaction to a mere representation of offline social relationships but finally understand the futility of such attempts and start dealing with the subject the way it deserves. We have to accept online interaction not as a secondary phenomenon but as an activity in its own right and analyse and deal with it accordingly. To illustrate this I can give you an example of a problem that belongs to the same set but had not yet been mentioned precisely because it seems to have a workable solution already. I am talking about a problem of establishing correspondence between accounts held by the same user at different online services. If left on its own this functional feature may easily get out of hands as nothing prevents me or any other user listing account of Bill Gates (or Brad Fitzpatrick for that matter) as my own at some other online service. Fortunately there is a way to verify these connections either with microID or with OpenID. These two solutions are precisely of the kind we are looking for. Instead of attempting to relate Internet accounts to an external real-world identification marker (be it SSN, credit card number or whatever else) it elegantly connects one internet account to another via internal mechanism of the internet itself. It seems the solution to problems described above can be found along the same lines.

And now, back to where we started. The project continues, as gradually all fear and panic happened to settle, all boiling down to the fact that it would be altogether completely stupid to abandon such a wonderful idea only because we are not alone in this field. Considering the enormous complexity of issues one has to work with, dealing with this completely untapped field there will be some room for all - from giants to some petty traders like ourselves.

PS Merry Christmas to you all! To those who celebrate it, and to those who don’t, regardless!

tags: big brother, pownce, social graph, social networks, user, user circle, api, brad fitzpatrick, facebook, google, online communities, open social, openid, opensocial, people search, social graphs, url aggregator, users circle, microid, microfirmat, online friends, online relationships, profile aggregators, public domain, second mover advantage, social relationships, user data

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Posted by LZZR under Social Networks | Comments (1)

Online Communities - Notes on Terminology

Having to read masses of texts written on the subject of Online Communities I had to face the sad fact that we are all hopelessly confused by the overwhelming amount of information coming from all sides and terminological mess arising from our inability to grasp the meaning of the emerging phenomena doesn’t help a bit in our attempts to catch up with events. As it always happens in moments like this buzz words tend to spring up from every corner of the field quite naturally reflecting the need to name something that only just came to exist. Being rather natural product of the course of events buzz words are just that, buzz words, that came into circulation spontaneously out of scarcity but not as a result of regular analytic attempts. Clear and transparent terms reflecting at least to a some degree the meaning of phenomena are clear signs of the maturity of the field and can provide an invaluable help in our attempts to rationalise the stream of events. Although some of the thoughts presented here might look obvious or banal to some I nevertheless find an attempt to sort out terminological mess a very timely mental exercise even if only for my own sake. Far from being an Internet guru I just first of all need to put my own thinking in order . So, look through the list of terms I find problematic and hopefully this will help sorting at least some things out.

Social Network - perhaps the most abused term in the current thinking of the subject as in free circulation it is being applied to such a wide range of things that its meaning gets almost entirely diluted, hence it seems to be particularly important to return to its strict definition. Being in the centre of all related notions it provides a good pretext for a discussion that is no less relevant for all other terms I am about to list here. Needless to remind, that the term itself had originated within Social Science and has more to do with such disciplines as Social Anthropology and Sociology than with the subject of Online Communities. There it refers to relationships forming between real people in real social context and most importantly the analysis of those real Social Networks is only a small part of the whole which in its entirety includes much more important factors like age, class, gender, kinship and so on, of which those networks are just a direct function. The way this term is currently applied and used in various writings about the Internet (and Web 2.0 in particular) supposes a completely different set of circumstances. Understandably there are certain Online Communities, of which Facebook is probably the best possible example, that are formed with an intention to become a mere digital reflection of pre-existing real-world Social Networks hence their insistence on real names as opposed to nicknames and pictures instead of avatars coupled with an attempt to establish a self-policing community that enforces referential integrity with offline relationships from within. Of course this type of online communities is a dreamland for every advertiser and every PR agency. Having clear and direct correspondence between a user and a real person reinforced by the ability to visualise and analyse real-world relationships between them provides the owner of such dataset with potentially unlimited power and influence in real world which can be actualised at any moment in a huge variety of ways. Luckily for all of us Facebook and various facebookoids are no more than just unfortunate exceptions and the online game is played by completely different rules. The Internet is a place inhabited by avatars, nicknames in imaginary locations not by real names and social security numbers acting from real zip codes. It’s cyberspace after all, innit? Whatever draconian measures those control freaks from Facebook might implement to enforce their sick ideas about real names and locations, even there they had to have a cow as one of their accounts. To cut it short, on the Net we are not dealing with real people, instead we are presented with certain facets of real-world individuals designed and structured in the way that suits the purpose best. It’s only natural that the same individual would have radically different profiles on say job seeking portal, parents association, professional community and ultimately on an adult dating site. Should I mention that it is customary to own more than one profile or identity in the same community or service? Now, the relationships that can be established in Online Communities are of a different nature too. Various Facebookoid fanatics are quick to offer us online services where virtual relationships can only be instrumental applied to relationships pre-existing in the real world. Real world relationships and true social networks do exist without their virtual part and what virtual networks do for them can be viewed only as means of facilitation capable of intensifying them but not essential for their very existence. That’s how they want to see it. Luckily again the internet is not one big Facebook and most of the relationships forming there are virtual ones. The test that can be applied to distinguish between the two is in one simple question: will the relationship under examination exist if the whole Internet with its Online Communities will suddenly disappear? If it continues functioning albeit in a reduced form, the relationship belongs to the real world, and on the other hand if it ceases to continue it is a true virtual online relationship. Certainly there is a full spectrum of possible combinations between the two extremes but the essence and the beauty of the internet is precisely in its ability to generate this specific type of relationships hardly ever possible in real world. To put it straight the difference comes from the fact that online communication is capable of generating new relationships independent from those arising otherwise in real world. In other words relationships that are possible in virtual world are often absolutely impossible in real one. Needless to say that most of them are not transferable to the real world too. They simply can not actualise in the real world as they would invariably meet a huge number of various obstacles. Funny enough obstacles of true social nature like age, class, social and educational background and so on will be playing the most prominent role. Consequently, relationships forming in online world are capable of crisscrossing the real world relationships and in many instances are openly opposing them. If someone needs more explicit interpretation of the latter statement think of an online flirting or a virtual infidelity in marriage (quite a widespread phenomenon of late) where existing social relationships contradict online activity and online activity as such is rarely being actualised in real world.
Admittedly, this buzz word is so powerful that earlier on I named this very section of my blog Social Networks. Mea Culpa! And alas, it is much too late now to change this.

Virtual Community - although Wikipedia places this along with terms e-community or online community in the same row as synonyms it contradicts itself in the very same sentence defining it as a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as letters, telephone, email or Usenet rather than face to face. Taking it as a working definition, i. e. defining Virtual Community as any community that exists without immediate interaction, one can’t fail noticing that terms e-community or online community are of the different taxonomic level being just subsets of the former. Some other examples of Virtual Community one might think of would be for example armature groups or car-to-car radio users communicating over radio waves. So, all communities depending on a certain media can be called virtual, which reminds me again of Social Science where the term Imaginary Communities gained significant popularity with a slightly different meaning.

Online Community - the article in Wikipedia cited above also provides the following definition for this term: If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Funny enough in strict terms this definition is problematic as well if one remembers a long dead FIDOnet that is at the same time a computer network but also a classic example of offline communication and even Usenet to a large degree too. Hence less contradictory seems using terms Internet Community or Web Community as they reflect the meaning in a much better way. Sadly as the same Wikipedia tells us the latter had been taken already with the meaning of an online community established by a business with a purpose of facilitating that same business. So, we are only left with one precise term Internet Community which Wikipedia shamelessly redirects to the mentioned above Virtual Community article. Having to choose between the conventional Online Community and more precise Internet Community I would of course favour the latter but the power of tradition and already established practice in this case seems much too strong to go against, so for the time being I’ll be using both terms intermittently turning a blind eye on the imprecise mature of the former.

Online Community Service - if the term Online Community covers all those who act as members of the said community, this term should logically mean the vehicle of communication through which the functioning of the community is actualised. For example services like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiky etc, etc emptied of all their users would fall under this category whilst each of them taken separately could also be rightly named Online || Internet Community Host which reflects better their place and function.

Social Network Service - in a very sad way this Wikipedia article assigns the meaning that should rightly be referred to by the previous term to this one. The reason why it seems to be completely misguiding should be apparent from the note on Social Network.

Social Graph - a term introduced to the field by Brad Fitzpatrick in his now infamous Thoughts on the Social Graph article seems to me particularly unfortunate. Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I am able to grasp the concept, these two words are supposed to denote a user centric set of data that consists of friends of a given user and user identities from a potentially unlimited number of Online Communities. If this is so, than both of these words are completely out of place. Firstly the adjective Social pre-supposes real social relationships forming in real world while in fact what we are able to observe online are specific relationships that can only be formed and maintained via the media of the Internet. Secondly the term Graph is not only extremely user-unfriendly, but also carries a misleading connotation to visual representation of relationships while in fact it might only refer to a set of data regardless of the way the data are represented in each particular case. As the term itself just appeared there is still a window of opportunity allowing to replace this combination of words with something that would better reflect the meaning of the notion as well as be more user friendly. Having in mind that the question of naming still remains open, I would nevertheless like to propose an alternative term I grew accustomed to use in my work. I certainly think that calling the same phenomenon User Circle is much more preferable as in my opinion the former part of the term reflects better the user centric nature of it whilst the latter leaves more room for manoeuvre allowing to denote not only visual representation but any form of data related to a single user. In addition placing a user at the centre of the term we are intentionally cutting off unwanted connotations to social side of things postulating an online nature of our data this way. Although the term Social Graph had been already issued and is currently in circulation I will meanwhile stick to my guns until a better alternative is on offer.

User Circle - a term that in my opinion reflects much better the meaning Brad Fitzpatrick was trying to assign to his Social Graph concept. Firstly, the word user much more precisely positions a user in the centre of a dataset as well as carries the right connotation not to a real-world individual, but to a user of an internet service. Secondly, the word circle is flexible enough to include various forms of data representation ranging from a complex graph, to a simple list of friends or any other data, thus being much more adequate in daily usage. And last but not least the term itself seems to be much more user-friendly and more likely to be picked up by an average user.

Oh, and did I mention that this whole post acts as a kind of a preface to a series of articles on the subject of Online Communities that are in progress as we speak? I didn’t? I do now.

Added 23.12.2007
When I was in the middle of writing my next post I realised that I desperately need another term to describe adequately my new idea. Once again, I am not after introducing the I propose to any sort of wider circulation, I just need them to be able to express some new concepts in clear and unambiguous way.

User - an active party accessing an online service through proper authorisation procedure. Why do we need to define this additional term? Simply because it is the only adequate term capable of signifying the right meaning. From the side of our system be it for administrative purposes or in our analytic activity we have no means to know and no grounds to insist that it is always the same real world individual, in fact we can not even state that it is an individual at all. There can be plenty of various combinations. To list just a few instances: user account that is used by several family members, accounts held by institutions/organisations managed by a number of authorised employees, accounts passed from one individual to another etc. Individuals having multiple different accounts at the same online service tend to complicate the picture even further. Even if via indirect evidence we can suspect that such accounts belong to the same individual/group for our purposes they remain separate users. So the working definition of user might be as follows: someone (or something) who is able to log in to our system under the same username/password combination. Another purely instrumental term could be introduced in relation to this one. An individual who is acting under a given username/password combination at any given time can be called an account operator. The difference is that it denotes not a user as we see from the side of an online service administrator but an acting agency on the client side. To illustrate the difference suppose I step back from the computer and during the same session give access to an online service to my wife and she sends a message to her friend from this account. On the client side my previous actions and the message sent by my wife are performed by different account operators whilst on the server side they are performed by the same user! In other words the term user reflects what happens on the server side while the term account operator denotes what really happens on the client side. The only problem that things that really happen on the client side are completely beyond the scope of our knowledge as service operators hence the term itself has only instrumental significance in our analysis.

Added 29.02.2007
Writing on Web history I came to realise that there are two more terms that need to be included in this list. Although being discussed in detail in my next post they are still needed to be repeated here if only for the sake of consistency.

Surfer - the most generic state of online presence characterised by NOT being logged in into any particular online system or service – the most anonymous and passive with read-only access.

Legal Self - a state in which a User provides real-life credentials in order to make a legally binding transaction. In this state only a user can be traced back to a real-life individual.

tags: facebook, internet, legal self, myspace, online community, online community service, social graph, social network, social network service, surfer, user, user circle, virtual community, web 2.0, web history, community, guru, network, online, social

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Posted by LZZR under Social Networks | Comments (1)

Pownce Invite - Microblog SEO cheatsheet, tips and tricks

Quite frankly the first item in my ToDo List was to write a roundup on LZZR Linking but the scheduled work on this project that mainly consisted of watching people joining in and backlinks spreading over the network was mercilessly interrupted by getting a long-awaited Pownce Invite. I can’t help applauding their market-entry strategy where the main element is to roll out a public beta but make it an invitation only service (not original per se but beautifully implemented). By doing this they were able to kill two birds with one stone: firstly creating an aura of exclusivity around the service and secondly providing starting points for user trees to branch from.
BTW if someone needs a Pownce Invite ask my lovely friend SexySEO through her MyBlogLog account as she must have some invites left. You can also message me on MyBlogLog but please, care to send private messages!
So what this so far exclusive Pownce thing is all about? Briefly it’s yet another one microblog. Although you have probably guessed my personal attitude towards microblogging from my post about Twitter, this emerging Web 2.0 genre pioneered by Twitter seems to be steadily gaining ground in terms of popularity and traffic. The problem with Pownce is that it has to catch up with Twitter that has a good gain since about a year ago. Pownce appeared just at the end of this June but is doing remarkably well despite of a recent saddle in the graph.

Now, why do we have to bother with a service that seems to be mimicking an already existing one? Is it just another blueprint startup? Without falling into an already common Twitter vs. Pownce comparison I feel I need to point out two important things. Firstly, Twitter in my opinion is ugly while Pownce team did a good job to make the service visually attractive including even changeable skins. Secondly, Pownce was founded (among others) by some Kevin Rose who incidentally happened to be a co-founder of Digg.com at the same time. Taking into account his past service record this guy must surely know something. If you ask me, my money is on Pownce as I believe it will eventually take over from behind. What is your bet? Well, it actually does not matter as in the near future we will see a good run where both players will be willing to put as much resources as they can into promoting their services in terms of popularity, visibility, functionality as well as Google PR. And here we are, standing right under and ready to rip the benefits.
Enough of comparison, let’s see what Pownce is in it’s own right. Honestly, I was shocked to realise the kind of approach they took designing the core of the service. This microblog does not have any kind of mobile integration. Does this mean that microblogging as an Internet activity is considered mature enough already to make it possible to cut off the umbilical cord of SMS and other mobile messaging or it’s just a sign of immaturity of Pownce itself I don’t know and I am honestly puzzled by this. If the absence of mobile interface can possibly be explained by the current beta stage of the project another no less surprising feature seems to be a part of the design. The central page of your profile on Pownce aggregates and displays not only your stuff but also all kind of stuff from your friends! That’s a kind of a surprise I did not expect. They’ve done a thing completely opposed to Twitter structure, pardon me for the inevitable comparison again. And this does not seem to be a mistake but rather a part of the design. I might have guessed from the name… What do you think of the following definition of the slang word pwn taken from reference.com: to take unwilling control of someone else or something belonging to someone else by exploiting a vulnerability? This is exactly how Pownce works. In effect your own profile page is being hijacked by messages and links posted from your friends. You are no longer in control of your own frontpage! This and some other rather weird features make SEOing Pownce a bit of a challenge.
So what Pownce can offer us in terms of SEO? I believe that as a result of competition with Twitter Pownce is bound to gain in both Page Rank and exposure power. Our task is to optimize Pownce to make it useful in some bigger project (I hope nobody expects a microblog to become a major content distribution source). So let’s try to work out some helpful tips and tricks to make powncing useful for your main site. Once again the task is not just to optimize Pownce itself as being a microblog it simply has no chance to rank high in SERPs but to make it a point from which your main site will get additional exposure and benefit in terms of Google Page Rank.
Having your profile page stuffed with messages from your friends doesn’t help a bit. Your main profile page is the strongest as it gets most internal links from within the system from all of your posts through author link and avatar and hence it will be gaining most of PR and exposure. At the same time it is the most useless page as not only you are not in control of its content but also it will have a horrible link and content churn rate. What we need is to create some alternative place within the Pownce itself and make it as strong as your main profile. Luckily there is one already – it’s your Me Only page. This page is what you get by default on Twitter only here, on Pownce it had been given a second-rate status compare to your profile. It already has a direct spiderable link from your main profile page, so it has to be known to Search Engines but will be ranked very poorly. Our idea is to give it some additional weight. I assume that Pownce will gain a good standing with Google and eventually Google PR will flow easily within the site. In this case it is usually enough to give it some two or three external inbound links to kick-start PR accumulation.
Hence our SEO tip number one: when you promote your Pownce account at external resources link to your Me Only page, NOT to your main profile. Note: you also have a Sent page which should be the same but isn’t always the same at all! There is also another juicy place within your Pownce estate – your Type Links page where you get only links (both yours and not yours). On Pownce there are four different types of Pownces you can write: messages, links, files and events each capable of generating a stream of it’s own. The only problem with this that type pages (and streams) stay unlinked and Search Engine Robots have no way of learning about their existence. That is of course true only until you show those pages to them. You can post links to your Type Pages from external resources but it certainly won’t hurt to have some internal links too. Unfortunately Pownce is plagued with nofollow too and all links in your profile and messages are nofollowed. The way out of this trap is to post your links as Link Type thus creating a kind of internal loopback.
So here goes SEO tip number two: if you want a certain type of your Pownce postings to be spiderable too – create external links to this type page and use links type to post internal links. If you want to have as many of your pages on Pownce spidered – rinse and repeat for every page type. Mind you if you are a friendly character there is some point in pulling out your friends lists too. Of all possible combinations Pownce links only to your Friends and Fans pages and hides a page with people you follow which is logical enough as those followed by you give only links from their fans page while both friends and fans publish your stuff in their profile streams. All of these three types of friendship relations pages can be strengthened using the abovementioned method. You can also create groups of your friends to gather posts from selected accounts excluding your own strangely enough.
At this stage it is perhaps the time to talk about more dubious SEO and SMO tricks that Pownce is prone to. Please, bear in mind that I don’t endorse them by any means due to their ethically problematic nature and I don’t use them myself (only for experimental purposes). Look at this list as anti-recommendation and use this information to protect your account from falling a victim of these tactics. Perhaps not surprisingly the star of our list is Mass Friending. Although very well-known and widely used across social networks it is particularly powerful on Pownce since Pownce posts your messages direct to your friend’s profile. Having a huge number of friends allows you to swamp the system with your messages and links. This warning might have been completely redundant if I did not see the results of my small SEO experiment strictly as a part of my eSEO programme. I randomly befriended a good hundred of Pownce users with a third profile that had nothing on it and over 50% accepted this friends request. It’s amazing how unprepared are average Social Network users to this kind of malicious activity. Another method is a variety of this one called Mass Stalking. Of course less effective as you only get a link from My Fans page of the profile you stalked but no less dangerous as you as an account owner have no way of getting rid of your stalkers. The last tactic I would consider to be particularly evil and dirty could be called Friends Infidelity and is based on unfriending mutual friends thus gaining an asymmetrical advantage. But this is a No-No, it is pure abuse of trust and I don’t even want to talk about it any more!
These methods combined with alphanumeric trick can be widely used, so beware. The alphanumeric trick itself is based on the fact that at this early stage Pownce is still using alphanumeric sorting when they have not enough of other information and as a result profiles and usernames starting with special characters or letters close to the top of Latin alphabet tend to pop up at the top more often.
Now we are able to compose a small SEO cheatsheet for working with Pownce. It will not guarantee to make you the number one Powncer but will certainly improve your chances and help to avoid the most common pitfalls and more importantly it can be used for other Social Networks as well.

1. choose username and account name close to the top of the alphabet
2. post your links as Links Type to avoid nofollow
3. concentrate on your Me Only and Link Type pages and optionally on other secondary pages while building your external and internal links to Pownce
4. be reasonable while building your network and don’t become a stalker and don’t annoy others with friends requests and mass posting - remember, your posts are turning up at all of your friend’s profiles
5. beware of malicious SMO tactics and especially on Pownce otherwise you are running a risk of your account page being effectively jacked (or Pownced) by spammers
6. remember that by default Pownce posts to all of your friends and doesn’t post to your stream (Pownce indeed!) so you need to switch from default all my friends to the public in pulldown menue

So this is in brief my small tutorial on how to make your Pownce account a SEO success and as a form of glazing to the Pownce cake you can even entirely subvert the Pownce structure by using your account as a subject group. All you need is to use your Pownce invite for another email address of yours, choose subject and start stalking Pownce users writing on this subject and voila your group is hot and ready. Check Pownce SEO Group for working example of implementation of this idea. I’ll write another tutorial on creating and managing Group Accounts on Pownce soon (time permitting). No, really, I promise!

Disclaimer: 1) I dont work for Pownce (I work for myself, remember) 2) Tips and Tricks and cheatsheet presented here a valid at the time of publishing. Pownce is a beta startup, so expect them to correct some of their most stupid mistakes in the future!

tags: google pr, google page rank, lzzr, lzzr linking, mybloglog, pownce, pownce invite, seo, seo cheatsheet, seo success, seo tip, seo trick, smo, search engine, sexyseo, social media, social networks, twitter, cheatsheet, eseo, experiment, exposure, link popularity, microblog, pwn, robot, stalking, startup, tips, traffic, tricks

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Posted by LZZR under Social Networks, bSEO | Comments (9)

Wordpress and Twitter

Just came across Twitter - for those who don’t know it is a microblog community that encourages people to share all pretty boring and extremely uninteresting events in their life with the whole world at a terrifying frequency. There you will have a chance to learn about digestion problems of people you would never want to meet in real life and intimate details of sexual life of pre-adolescent teenagers. Overall it’s an exiting Web 2.0 resource asking you just one simple question: What are you doing?. You are then urged to provide a quick answer as often as you can and as fast as you can possibly type. You can even post their with your mobile phone or IM client. Not surprising that most messages there vary within a rather limited range from reading such-and-such book or watching such-and-such movie to writing this very Twitter post. Remember you need to be short there is 140 words limit. A perfect abode for a community of compulsive characters with limited imagination, short attention span combined with attention deficit syndrome and good typing skills.
Believe me, I’d never mention anything like this to you, my reader out of sheer respect if it was not for a great Wordpress plugin by Alex King called Twitter Tools. Admittedly Twitter has a good API and the plugin is nearly perfect. It allows posting your twits as they are called to your Wordpress blog (I must confess I opted out, fortunately it’s flexible enough for this). In addition it makes possible posting your normal blog entries as twits which is something. From SEO point it’s a definite advantage that should be used in bSEO by default. So my advice – if you have a Wordpress blog get a twitter account, set up this plugin and on you go gaining more incoming links and additional exposure with no additional effort. I do and here is LZZR at Twitter for you.
There is of course a mild risk of heaving to deal with duplicate content issues but we aren’t afraid, are we?

tags: seo, web2.0, wordpress, bseo, community, eseo, incoming links, microblog, plugin, social

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Posted by LZZR under Social Networks, bSEO, Blog | Comments (2)