McFilter

You can't separate out the technology in social software

In his latest newsletter, Clay Shirky has posted the full version of the essay that I blogged about in "Social structure of groups" - Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

It's an interesting discourse on social software, touching on some of the non-computer research into groups, and the evolution of computer social groups, and even a few suggestions about how we're getting towards a world where you can assume people have Internet access in real time.

So you can now run a chat session and/or a wiki in parallel with a conference call to augment the meeting - the chat can be used for marshalling who gets to talk, or disseminating written information (look at URL *blah*, or my email address is *suchandsuch*) that's easier to write and read than it is to speak and hear, and the wiki allows development of a record of what was discussed.

And although it was mentioned a few times, there wasn't an actual link to LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction.