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.