Clay Shirky has a great post on the term ’social software’ with some deeper links that are must-reads if you have an interest in this area of technology, particularly:

  • An astounding sequence of posts from Shelley Powers and associated comments (see here and here if you can overlook my horrible linking style) that involves the history of the term, an ominous pancake gathering, a fairly heated controversy, and ultimately an untangling that gets at an important social issue surrounding technology… all happening within an environ provided by social computing itself. Whoa– I think I just blew a circuit.

I discovered all of this, incidentally, through a marvelously intricate– and drop-dead-easy to traverse– network of social software tools including delicious, bloglines, multiple blogs, a blog aggregating other blogs, and a wiki. If that’s not fodder for a moment of contemplation about social software, then you need some sleep.