The JP Allen Blog

My new book project has the provisional title The New Web: Knowledge Sharing as a Part of Everyday Life. The book is my attempt to explain what makes Web 2.0 sites successful, but more importantly what will make them significant for our culture and our economy.

My argument is that the best Web 2.0 sites have stumbled upon a set of capabilities that solve a big problem: how to share knowledge. Sharing knowledge is not something that businesses are good at, not something that governments are great at (see CIA), and, sadly, not even something that my beloved universities are great at, even though that’s supposed to be our raison d’être. The best Web 2.0 sites have made knowledge sharing so cheap, easy, and effective that it can be a part of everyday life. As time goes on, we will come to expect free access to the best available knowledge about anything. And that will change things in interesting ways.

My current five page outline (alpha release 1) is available here. As the project firms up over the next few months, I will be blogging various parts of the argument, case studies, and data that might be interesting on their own.

I am happy to take requests from potential collaborators, publishers, and agents. An extended 26-page outline is available on request.

What’s really new about the new generation of web sites and services?

Whether we call it Web 2.0, mass collaboration, online community, or social networking, I believe what’s really new is how large-scale knowledge sharing, and the services built on top of this knowledge, are allowing the web to deeply embed itself in normal, everyday life.

Research has shown how the boundaries between online and off, private and public, work and living are all being blurred by mobile phone use (see my review essay in The Information Society, January 2007, for more details). I argue that these boundaries are also blurring on the new web.

“Worklife is being affected by the ‘consumerization’ of IT, and everyday non-working activities are being subjected to analytic scrutiny normally reserved for the working world: detailed peer review, in-depth data collection and analysis, and rapid experimentation.”

The abstract for my presentation on “How the new web is embedding itself in everyday work and life“, to be delivered at the 2007 IFIP 9.1 post-ICIS workshop on Computers and Work is available online. Slides to come.

Slides from today’s social networking seminar at USF’s Center for Instruction and Technology are available here.

Do social networking sites like Facebook have any ‘real’ academic uses? It’s a controversy we tried to engage. The seminar gave some background on social networking and Facebook, how students use social networking, and case studies of how University faculty and staff are using Facebook. The seminar also dealt with two scenarios:

1. A student wants to be my ‘friend’ online. What should I do?
2. There’s a Facebook group about me (or my colleague)? What should I do?

A few takeaways for me from the discussion:

• There was very healthy staff interest in Facebook, probably more so than from the faculty.
• Groups about faculty, staff, and other students are already happening at USF. University Life does investigate Facebook groups as possible violations of our harassment policy, if brought to their attention.
• No matter how much data indicates that students are using privacy controls and ‘limited profiles’, staff and faculty are still very concerned that employers and others will see inappropriate photos and comments.
• There’s already a fair amount of online community education going on in University Life, and Career Services. As we educate the students, I hope we take the time to teach students about their total online presence (not just Facebook), and how to use their online presence as a positive as well as a negative–to showcase student skills and professional expertise. If the online search is becoming the new resume, we need to get students ready.

Thanks to John Bansavich at CIT for organizing the seminar, and thanks to Xeno (Xi Zhang), a master’s student in Computer Science, for contributing a student perspective to the seminar.

Question: Does writing half a paper, and having 40 online friends, make me an expert on social networking? Maybe!

I’ll be running a social networking workshop for faculty and staff at USF on October 24th. What I need are two (or more) students to stop by the workshop and chat for a few minutes about how they use Facebook. It will be fun, I promise! If you can help out, let me know.

The enticing workshop description (10/24/07, 12:15-1:15pm, Center for Instruction & Technology):

SOCIAL NETWORKING

Are you on Facebook yet? This workshop will either inspire you to connect and collaborate with your students and colleagues in exciting new ways, or leave you shaking your head in wonder. We will discuss: how students, academics, and professionals are using social networking; tips for how to cope with students being your “friend” and other interesting dilemmas; the new applications being built on top of social networking; and how social networking can fit into a larger online collaboration strategy that includes profiles, social bookmarking, blogs, wikis, and shared task lists.

During FastTrack advising last week, some of the new students asked “can you recommend particular teachers?” Not knowing the different first-year writing, math, and econ profs, I told them to check out RateMyProfessors.com — the market-leading faculty evaluation site, now owned by the noted research firm MTV/Viacom. Many professors are not big fans of the site, but that’s the back-alley where our undergraduates go for information because they have no good alternatives.

A recent study (somewhat surprisingly) showed that the online ratings on RateMyProfessors.com correlate very highly with the “official” teaching evaluations, at least in one state university system.

This result has been interpreted in at least two different ways:

1. RateMyProfessors.com is more accurate than we think
2. most “official” evaluations are less accurate than we think, being no better than the methodological disaster zone known as RateMyProfessors.com

Taking a break from my extensive summer duties, I downloaded the summary scores (‘quality’ and ‘ease’) for the 38 faculty categorized as Business or Business Administration at USF. Our average ‘quality’ score is 3.6 out of 5, with the average ‘ease’ score at 3.2 (5 easiest, 1 hardest). For our ‘chili pepper’ faculty, rated as ‘hot’ by the students, the ‘quality’ average jumps to 4.52! Cool! (Maybe our students can’t tell the difference between physical beauty and pedagogical effectiveness? Or are the beautiful just better than the rest of us?).

And to add to the eternal debate about whether faculty who are ‘easy’ get higher evaluations, the answer from RateMyProfessors.com is…seems like it. ‘Quality’ and ‘ease’ scores are correlated at 0.52 (p<0.001). When you remove faculty that have fewer than 5 evaluations, that correlation increases to 0.60 (p<0.005).

A big part of the web’s future impact on business will be through its ability to share knowledge almost effortlessly over large social networks. I call this ‘lightweight knowledge sharing’ (LKS – licks? lucks?), and in an upcoming presentation I’ll be contrasting LKS with what I call ‘traditional Knowledge Management’ (KM).

Traditional KM assumes that people need to be bribed or coerced into sharing knowledge. KM also requires a large up-front investment on pre-defined categorization schemes, and large knowledge bases. Lightweight knowledge sharing, in contrast, assumes that people want to share. Simple tools such as blogs and wikis can become a means for large-scale knowledge sharing through the combination of: 1) simple syndication (subscription), and 2) simple ‘social graphs’ that naturally define which subscriptions are of interest. LinkedIn and Facebook are two interesting examples of this trend.

Both the slides and the abstract are available online. These slides will be presented at IFIP 9.1 Computers & Work workshop in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

A draft version of a new position paper, “Web 2.0: A social informatics perspective“, is now available online. Any actual intelligence on its pages is the product of my co-authors Howard Rosenbaum and Pnina Shachaf, both at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.

We’ll be presenting the paper at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in Keystone, Colorado.

While you’re probably familiar with Web 2.0, you might not have heard of social informatics. Social informatics (SI) is an academic specialty that cuts across business, information science, and computer science. SI research looks at how technology design and use are affected by society, culture, and institutions.

When revolutionary new technologies emerge, the usual assumption is that technology will cause social and organizational change. SI argues it’s a two way street. Existing business practices, institutions, professions and culture don’t just sit back passively and let changes happen–they shape outcomes, and even the technology itself.

The paper has a short review of academic research on Wikipedia, which is interesting and growing.

It will be fascinating to watch the ‘people power’ revolution of Web 2.0 hit the complexity of large corporations, government agencies, and different national cultures.