This Week on Many-to-Many

Ross Mayfield put up an "open post" based on an oversimplification: a two-by-two categorization of social software. (The JPEG matrix is here, the post is here ... and of course, this being Mayfield, the wiki that springs from the starter post is here.) Social software tools, sez the chart, can be implicit or explicit (Technorati vs. Friendster), and designer determined vs. user controlled (portals vs. blogs).

Mayfield reports that "Lee LeFever won the perfect pitch competition by highlighting the unique property of weblogs to capture context." The purpose was to explain the value of enterprise blogging, and LeFever's excellent three grafs are posted in their entirety.

Liz Lawley points to notes by Heather James about online etiquette in wikis. (Academic links and provence given by Lawley are abbreviated here.) James writes, "Wikis don't offer technical solutions to social problems; rather, wiki technology encourages or even forces the contributers to define and manage their rules of etiquette and behaviour. Through this process of consensus building, a culture is created that allows for a more complex set of interactions which is neccessary for people to manage and construct mutual understanding."