member interests and group norms

Hi,

I'm here mainly to read what others have to say about "knowledge sharing" and my main interest is, in fact, more towards the realm of social networks. I'm interested in what others have to say about social networks and how Drupal faciliates social networks.

For example, today I came across the article below. Although I've included the link, I've also included the full article's text because I usually have to sign in (after having registered) to read the articles on statesman.com (the need to register is similar to that of The Wall Street Journal).

Cheers,
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC

http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/05...

MySpace imitators abound
A major test of staying power for the Web's hottest address.
By Anick Jesdanun
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Monday, May 22, 2006

NEW YORK — It's only natural for companies large and small to want to capture some of the social-networking magic of MySpace.com, a Web site that has risen out of nowhere to become the Internet's second busiest by successfully figuring out what teens and young adults want.

AOL joined the pack this month with its own take on social networking, a loose term for services that help users expand their circles of friends by exploiting existing connections, rather than meeting randomly or by keyword matches alone.

The rapid growth of MySpace and last year's purchase of its parent company by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million "definitely accelerated something," said Greg Sterling, an industry analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence in Oakland, Calif.

"MySpace went from being this curiosity to a cultural phenomenon," Sterling said. "People started to think this is a really, really big opportunity."

MySpace offers a mix of features — message boards, games, Web journals — designed to keep its youth-oriented visitors clicking on its advertising-supported pages. The site has successfully built communities around music, becoming the go-to place for emerging bands, and it wants to replicate that success in film and comedy.

Driven largely by word of mouth, MySpace grew astronomically since its launch in January 2004 and is now second in the United States among all Web sites by total page views, behind only Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix.

MySpace's user base more than quadrupled to nearly 80 million over the past year, with as many as 270,000 joining every day.

Yahoo even announced a home-page redesign this week in part to fend off the rising threat, adding recommendations and insights about cultural trends culled from its community of 402 million users worldwide.

Others, mostly startups, are hoping to become the next-generation MySpace, offering more robust, easier-to-use tools or specialized features for niches.

CollectiveX Inc. launched this month as a network for professionals and other pre-organized groups. Groups are visible only to their members, and even within groups, a person's friends and colleagues are described only by title, not by name. By contrast, MySpace makes most profiles publicly viewable and users easily reachable.

Famoodle started in April as a MySpace for families. Founder Adir Levy figures that once people get married, they're no longer keen on meeting new faces on My- Space, where about a quarter of the users are minors.

"We definitely don't see us as becoming as big as MySpace, but we see ourselves as being the MySpace for the more mature crowd," said Levy, 25, who's getting married this year.

Relative newcomers Tagged Inc. and Varsity Media Group Inc.'s Varsity World are billing themselves as safe havens for teens. MySpace has become a lightning rod for warnings about the dangers posed by sexual predators online.

Even the British Broadcasting Corp., seeing rival News Corp.'s successes, is revamping its Web site to incorporate more user-generated features.

The most notable of the newcomers is AOL's AIM Pages, which is building upon its already substantial instant-messaging base of 49 million active users worldwide. Still, MySpace's number is higher: The active subset of registered users who logged on in March was 56 million, according to comScore.

"MySpace is doing phenomenally well," said James Bankoff, AOL's executive vice president for programming and products.

Nonetheless, Bankoff denied that AOL was positioning AIM Pages as "a MySpace killer." Rather, he said, the entrance by Time Warner Inc.'s Internet unit "points to the trend of consumers wanting to express themselves in a more powerful way."

AIM users get a page customizable with any number of drag-and-drop modules for maps, Web journals and other features, including those from rivals like Yahoo's Flickr photo site. By contrast, MySpace users must deal with HTML programming code to customize.

The offering, available in a beta test mode, underscores AOL's history of playing down innovation in favor of waiting until the masses are ready. It wants to be easy, not necessarily first.

MySpace wasn't first, either. But it surpassed Friendster Inc. in monthly visitors just a half-year after formally launching.

Analysts note that if Friendster can fall, so can MySpace.

"It's like the one hot bar or restaurant everybody descends upon," Sterling said. "Then it gets cold and people leave it."

Hi,

I am Sociologist interested in how people interact over computer networks in general and more specific in complex situations like group decision making. Interacting people by definition do share knowledge. Web2.0 features offer many opportunities, of which social software might be an important component.

I would like to see how the flow (process) of complex human interactions can be supported in DRUPAL., and hopefully this might stimulate developers.

What I can contribute is my expertise on complex human interactions

I am convinced this is an important area, and although I do not have as much time as I would like to dedicate to your ongoing work at this point, I want very much to stay abreast of what you are doing.

My main concerns, or interests, are:

In the fields of social and political organizing (how could meetings be held on the web, reports, how could a network mirror the life of a political organization and provide a convenient form of interaction and monitoring of influence and balance-sheeting of activities: doing away with the dreaded four-hour long meetings!);

education (Papert, but beyond that, some ideas based on the concept of "operative (learning) group" developed by certain social psychologists here in Argentina (Pichon Riviere, Bleger... just do a google search on "operative group Bleger"): in other words, if Moodle is a web application that declares it supports a given philosophy of education, but cannot reflect that in its software engineering, then, what can Drupal be made to do, on the basis of a given democratic educational philosophy;

( see http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030301studentasnigger.html ) :: this is not a problem of slic interface for "education", this is a problem of education, social relations of work and study, and a challenge to socially based software development.

and software development as a group collaborative effort (including the network of stakeholders, workers and exploiters, including all manner of technical teams): how to use Drupal to turn the Rational Unified Process, and "Just in Time" crisis driven Extreme Programming also, "on their heads": tools for software development as part of the construction of society upon new social foundations.

Included here are many studies I have made in the past on topic maps in general as well as topic maps applied through XML in such formats as NewsML categories, degraded into, for example, subject codes for the newspaper industry, see http://www.iptc.org/NewsCodes/nc_ts-table01.php .

I would like to contribute together with others who might share some aspect of my interests, on a given project we chalk out for ourselves; which would require getting some kind of recursive referencing ontology structure (FoF, RFD, Topic Maps...) into the core Drupal API ... somehow making taxonomy a node? ... does this have to do with referencing between nodes, hierarchies of nodes, workflows of nodes?

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar