Other stuff at ETech that was interesting:
Brian Dear of EVDB and Eventful, a site for posting and finding event information, introduced Eventful Demand, which allows people to band together and ask for "speakers" -- musical performers, authors, anyone who might have a fan base or interested crowd -- to come make an appearance, put on a show, give a talk in their area. Dear hopes that creating a common space for this sort of demand-side networking will reduce the reliance on middlemen and allow artists and other "speakers" to connect directly with their audiences. For instance, a band that had a good number of people asking for an appearance in their town could then take that info to a club as evidence of ticket-sales draw -- or, more ambitiously, the "demanders" could organize the event themselves. You've heard of the "wisdom of crowds"; this is more like the "wishlist of crowds." At the moment, the hottest "Demand" on Eventful is for "The impeachment of George W. Bush - Washington metro area." Other than that, an awful lot of people seem to want Wil Wheaton to come to their towns.
Derek Powazek provided an update of the principles he expounded five years ago in his book Design for Community. "Web 1.0"-style communities, were, he said "company towns." As examples, he included Salon's Table Talk, which I think is reasonable; his own Fray.com similarly qualifies. In the "Web 2.0" world, he says, we're more like individual homesteaders, and that gives us potentially much more power and control. He's right, but I think he may, just a little bit, underplay the downside: once you own the house, you're stuck dealing with the insurance and taxes, the leaks, the grafitti and the natural disasters. Still, given the choice, most people -- at least most Americans -- seem to prefer the homeowner model. Derek's slides are here.
Other interesting talks at Etech about community, much-blogged elsewhere, included Clay Shirky's chronicle of "patterns" in online moderation, "Shut Up! No, You Shut Up!" (summary here). Shirky has set up a wiki to record these patterns, modeled on Ward Cunningham's original Pattern Language wiki for software developers.
Meanwhile, Danah Boyd offered a sociological perspective on recent models of successful communities -- Craigslist, Flickr and Myspace. My decade at Salon certainly made this passage ring true:
| | Passionate designers are hard to come by. The people in charge of Craigslist, Flickr and MySpace breathe their sites. They don't go home at night and forget about the site. They are online at 4AM because something went wrong. They are talking to users at midnight just because. You cannot force this kind of passion - it's not just a job, it's a belief system.
Unfortunately, it is not clear that even the most passionate people can keep doing it forever. This type of true embeddedness is utterly exhausting. It plays a heavy toll on the lives of the designers. Even in smaller communities, creators grow tired. |
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