Whew.. really interesting article here about Social Softwares or how the heck you wanna name it.
“Several years ago, in the depths of the tech recession, there were signs of creative life in weblog and journal communities, conversation discovery with daypop and then technorati, the growth curve of wikipedia, mobile games, photo and playlist sharing. The liveliness was about the communities, and also about the culture of tool mix’n’match bricolage. Many of the attributes of social software -– hyperlinks for naming and reference, weblog conversation discovery, standards-based aggregation -– build on older forms. But the difference in scale, standardization, simplicity, and social incentives provided by web access turn a difference in degree to a difference in kind.
These forms grew without any forced discussion “how to incent participation”. People are compelled to write blogs and journals to show off and to share, to contribute to wikipedia and open source software projects for the joy of building things with other people. There are some lessons about social patterns and social affordances that this generation of social software communities and tools get right, are worth understanding and building on.”
* Tracing the Evolution of Social Software
(found via martine)