Seduction of the Swarm
Understanding patterns of online participation

Hello
University of Maryland College Park

Sousveillance
Lifecasting as grassroots surveillance

What’s the big deal?
It’s like firing up all the light bulbs at once.

That “Web 2.0” idea
Web 1.0 = Browsing (passive)
Web 2.0 = Participating (active)

Collective Intelligence
“the capacity of a human community to evolve toward higher
order complexity thought, problem-solving and integration
through collaboration and innovation.” - George Por

On Coordination
the folksonomy example

Taxonomy
Dewey Decimal System: Religion
• 292 Classical
• 293 Germanic religion
• 294 Indic origin
• 295 Zoroastrianism
• 296 Judaism
• 297 Islam
• 298 Not assigned
• 299 Other religions
• … What about Buddhism?

Taxonomy
• From the \"to classify”
Greek verb:
tassein =
nomos = law, science, \"economy\"
• The science of classifying things
• Hierarchical tree-like structure
• Requires planning and expertise

Folksonomy
how photo tagging works

Folksonomy
photos tagged as “gadget”

Folksonomy
tagcloud of LibraryThing’s books
Source: http://www.librarything.com/tagcloud.php

Folksonomy
• Folksonomy = folk + taxonomy
• Open, democratic form of
organization
• Tags bridge structure and
meaning
• Tags reflect the social fabric
• “It’s like 90% of10 ‘proper’
a
taxonomy but times
simpler” (Butterfield, 2004)

On Cooperation
the wiki example

FluWiki
the bird flu pandemic

The New PR / Wiki
public relations industry wiki

What is a Wiki?
• The first Wiki, WikiWikiWeb, was created by Ward
Cunningham in 1995
• Named after Hawaiian bus service,Wiki Wiki
• “The simplest online database that could possibly work”
- Ward
• Allows users to easily create and edit Web pages using
any Web browser
• Encourages democratic use of Web
• Source: http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki

Wikipedia vs. Britannica
• Among 42 entries tested in both
encyclopedias, the difference in
accuracy was not great.
• On the topical area of science:
• Wikipedia had 4 inaccuracies
• Britannica had 3 inaccuracies

On Cognition
the wisdom of the crowds example

Wisdom of the Crowds
• Francisat a county fair accurately
Galton's surprise that the
crowd
guessed the weight of an ox
when their individual guesses
were averaged
• The average was closer to the
ox's true butchered weight than
the estimates of most crowd
members, and also closer than
any of the separate estimates
made by cattle experts

Wisdom of the Crowds
• Marketocracy.com’s community
of 60,000 online stock traders
tracks the decisions of its top
100 portfolios to set the
investment strategy for its
mutual fund.
• Its index in 11outperformed the
has
S&P 500 of the past 17
quarters.

Benefits of Participation
• collective intelligence - collaborative
• transparent - instant gratification
• non-hierarchical - democratic
• potential for passion - ownership
• open to public - reputation
• permanence - searchable resource

What make online communities unique?

Motivations of
the Gift Economy
•
• Need
Reciprocity
One may produce and
The most anticipated factor that
contribute a public good for the
motivates people to give.
simple reason that a person or
the groups as a whole has a
• Reputation
need for it.
The willingness to help others can
all work to increase one's prestige
• Attachment
in a community.
The commitment one has to the
group, one’s utility.
• Sense of Efficacy
The feeling an individual has that
• Side-effect
makes them feel that they have
Private behavior makes cost of
some effect on the environment
sharing near zero.
around them.

Nature of Digital Goods
• In an online community, the setting is a
network of digital information.
• Possible to produce an infinite number of
perfect copies of a piece of information.
• Information is being produced in a deeply
interwoven network of actors.

Nature of Public Goods
• Indivisible
A person's consumption of the good does not reduce the
amount available to another. e.g. watching fireworks display
• Non-excludable
When it is difficult to exclude individuals from benefiting
from the good. e.g. national defense system
• In most cases a public good will exhibit these two qualities
to some degree only; pure public goods are the exception.

Digital + Public Goods
• Information or “digital goods” are uniquely
suited to be exchanged in a gift economy
• “Pure indivisibility” – my use of information
does not reduce your ability to use
• Information on the internet becomes a
“public good”

But wait...
What qualities enable some web services
to be more pervasive than others?

Using Game Mechanics
• “Applying Games Mechanics To
Functional Software” by Amy Jo
Kim, Creative Director of
ShuffleBrain
• Five Game Mechanics
1. Collecting
2. Earning Points
3. Feedback
4. Exchanges
5. Customization

On Ambient Intimacy
• Leisa Reichelt coined the term
“ambient intimacy”
• Describes the genreby Twitter,
of social
computing apps led
Jaiku, and Pownce.
• Refers to the constant sense of
closeness users feel with their
circle of friends through
technologies that informally
reveal us to each other.

On Walled Gardens
• A socialbuilding and verifying of
network service focuses
on the
online social networks for
communities of people who share
interests and activities
• Mostare “walled social networking
traditional
sites gardens”
(e.g. Facebook)
• Trap user content to derive
ad revenue
• Can’t leave? Loss of coordination.

On Future
social cyborg = the human platform

Doom
first person shooter + cinema-verite

Strange Days
personal experiences for sale

Gordon Bell of Microsoft
(memory prosthetic)

Steve Mann
world’s first known cyborg

Jennifer Ringley (JenniCam)
1996 - 2003

Justin Kan (justin.tv)
lifecasting goes commercial

Testing wearable video over EVDO...
(Samsung EVDO phone, Sony Vaio UX, Logitech cam)

ZaoBao newspaper
(July 2007)

On You
what do you want to know?