Community, social networks, and technology at Supernova 2004

Some afterthoughts from the Supernova conference, specifically about social networks and community.  Though it's difficult to separate the different topics. 

A quick meta-note here: Supernova is itself a social network of people and ideas, specifically about technology -- more akin to a scientific conference than an industry conference.  And, it's making a lot of use of various social tools: http://www.socialtext.net/supernova/, http://supernova.typepad.com/moblog/.

Decentralized Work (Thomas Malone) sounds good, but I think there are powerful entrenched stakeholders that can work against or reverse this trend (just because it would be good doesn't mean it will happen).  I'm taking a look at The Future of Work right now; one first inchoate thought is how some of the same themes are treated differently in The Innovator's Solution.

The Network is People - a panel with Chrisopher Allen, Esther Dyson, Ray Ozzie, and Mena Trott.  Interesting/new thoughts:

• Chris Allen on spreadsheets:  They are a social tool for convincing people with numbers and scenarios, just like presentation software is for convincing people with words and images.  So if you consider a spreadsheet social software, well, what isn't social software?
• "43% of time is spent on grooming in large monkey troupes."  (But wait, what species of monkeys are we talking about here?  Where are our footnotes?)  So, the implication is that the amount of overhead involved in maintaining true social ties in large groups is probably very high.  Tools that would actually help with this (as opposed to just growing the size of your 'network' to ridiculous proportions) would be a true killer app. 
  
• Size of network is not necessarily a good metric, just one that's easy to measure.  Some people really only want a small group.
  

Syndication Nation - panel with Tim Bray, Paul Boutin, Scott Rosenberg, Kevin Marks, Dave Sifry.  I felt that this panel had a lot of promise but spent a lot of time on background and/or ratholing on imponderables (like business models).  Kevin and Tim tried to open this up a bit to talk about some of the new possibilities that automatic syndication offers.  At the moment, it's mostly about news stories and blogs and cat pictures.  Some interesting/new thoughts:

• Kevin stated that # of subscribers to a given feed follows a power law almost exactly, all the way down to 1.  So even having a handful of readers is an accomplishment.  One might also note that this means the vast majority of subscriptions are in this 'micropublishing' area.
• New syndication possibilities mentioned: Traffic cameras for your favorite/current route. 
  
• The Web is like a vast library; syndicated feeds are about what's happening now (stasis vs. change).  What does this mean?
• The one interesting thing to come out of the how-to-get-paid-for-this discussion: What if you could subscribe to a feed of advertising that you want to see?  How much more would advertisers pay for this?  (Reminds me of a discussion I heard recently about radio stations going back to actually playing more music and less talk/commercials: They actually get paid more per commercial-minute because advertisers realize their ad won't be buried in a sea of crap that nobody is listening to.)

More on some of the other topics later.