[photo by b d solis]

I first tried Diigo in January of 2006. I liked the idea, but not the execution. My interest was spurred again by their presence at the 2006 Emerging Technology conference, but the service still didn’t “stick” and was slow and buggy. I tried once in 2007, same thing. So here we are again, and Diigo is the now the hot new thing among some edubloggers.

I’m trying it a bit (the toolbar and the Diigo site have greatly improved) but for the most part it addresses needs I just don’t have. The idea of archiving pages that I bookmark has always been more interesting than the reality… most of the time I want access to a site to share with others, not as a research tool (I have, and am quite happy with, Zotero for in-browser research needs). Page annotations are really only interesting to me as part of some kind of focused group effort. Annotations from the web at large aren’t compelling (their value is decidedly less than the link to the site) and I don’t foresee any group I am working with taking to Diigo in a methodical, purposeful way… though I could envision that being a very powerful ise. In some ways Diigo feels like a more sophisticated, but less charming and fun, version of StumbleUpon.

While I’m not as radical as D’Arcy, I share in his belief that most of the power of the network is in the people, so for social bookmarking del.icio.us still feels like the place for me to be. And that is where the groundswell of Diigo enthusiasm might be most fruitful: as a prod to get the very slowly evolving del.icio.us service to develop a bit more quickly in response to a perceived threat. It would be nice to see some of the features that we’ve heard noises about for years see the light of day!

Farhad Manjoo has a short interview with Clay Shirky about his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing with Organizations.

Two brief quotes:

I’m somewhat more sanguine about the echo chamber than some people. I think a lot of what we feel on the Internet is not only about associating with people who share our views but also the sudden shock of exposure to people whose views are very different from ours. I think that eventually we’ll see that what we dubbed as the echo chamber effect is often produced by evidence that people don’t share your views, which causes the leaders of those communities to double down.

[...]

One of the most fun things for me in researching the book was going over the changes that happened after the invention of the printing press. It became clear that the story that I’ve learned in school — that the printing press comes along, and you get the Enlightenment, the Treaty of Westphalia and the rise of the nation-state — that kind of crosses over a hundred years of chaos and bloodshed. And for the first hundred years, the printing press broke more things than it fixed. You had a continent that truly did not know what to think, whose citizens did not know what to think about their allegiances.

Clay is way up there on my list of people who make sense and who I’d love to be more like. I can’t wait until my copy of his book arrives.

[Incidentally, Shirky's title puts him in good company. The Here Comes Everybody blog is a completely different project, but one I used to read all the time, featuring thoughts on writing by a variety of contemporary post-avant poets; the first Here Comes Everybody book is a study of James Joyce by Anthony Burgess that I've not read even once but has been recommended to me many times.]

I guess Danny Sullivan is just angry, because he certainly can’t be surprised that Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis are attention seekers whose rhetoric is explicitly engaged to drive traffic to their sites.

It’s not particularly surprising to me that as people start to really grok some of the implications of social networks they get excited. Really excited. I don’t doubt that Scoble is feeling a bit of real techno-enlightenment… add that to his constant drive for publicity and the result is often to go over the top. Yes, social search is not new. Yes, the revolution some have predicted hasn’t happened in that space.

But I’m bullish on the idea of utilizing one’s social network to drive search. It isn’t a zero-sum game. There’s no reason to abandon (or belittle) search engine development and optimization, since continuing to work with socially influenced search isn’t in competition with traditional techniques. Traditional search will be with us for a long time, and it should be. For the most part it works well enough. And if we’ve learned anything from the past few years of topsy-turvy folksonomizing and mashing-up of small, loosely joined pieces it’s that good enough is often– well– good enough.

But arguing against the value of social search based on past failure may not be that strong of a position. Many technologies “fail” for many years until the technology itself, time, culture, and the Magic 8 Ball of luck are aligned. Socially influenced search in particular is crippled for two reasons, one that will be surmounted in time, one that may not be. The

first problem is that participation in the socially networked space is still incredibly small. Until there is a large footprint, the results will continue to be less than generally useful. That being said, social recommenders and searches which literally take into account one’s social network are already extremely useful in the smaller case. I see no reason that the trend of participation won’t continue and the base from which search can be driven grow continually larger until it becomes relevant for the majority of search and searchers.

The second problem is more difficult: the silo-like nature of the social networks themselves. I agree with Danny that the walls around Facebook will come down and it will become another field for search engines to harvest. But the continued isolation of each network– even those which perform nearly identical functions– hasn’t changed a bit. I’ve been saying for a long time that what the good folks at del.icio.us and furl (and flickr and zoomer, and facebook and myspace) should be doing, in addition to providing the web applications, use their muscle to create a de facto standard for interoperability and portability of data. Opening the data and having an API are only part of the puzzle. The rough portability that having an open API and data create isn’t good enough. The ability to create mashups for particular needs is useful but not generalizable. A federation of data across services would open the door to real social search (given the increased participation noted above).

The grocery store grows up…

If I unplug, I lose my social intelligence.

From Bruno Giussani’s great blog-reports from the LIFT07 conference.

Do the Right Thing is a Digg-style news site focusing on corporate news… but instead of ranking popularity, stories are ranked (by readers) according to their positive or negative social impact.

The site is newly out of beta, but a couple of features I’d like to see soon: RSS feeds, a tuning of the rating mechanism to take into account the number of people who have voted. The current most negative story, for example, is what looks like a prank posting rated very negatively by one person… that shouldn’t be ranked higher than a story with dozens of people voting negatively…

These instructions for using Google Co-Op to create a search facility in Google Reader are interesting not just for Google Reader users, but for anyone who is interested in customizing searches to take advantage of their social network. For instance, here is a search engine that searches my Education, EdTech, and Cool People blog subscriptions (I imported the list of subscriptions from my RSS reader). The beautiful part is I can invite you (or others can ask) to participate and a collaborative, targeted search facility can be easily created and maintained.

My good friend Link briefly ponders this quote on the tragedy of the commons:

“The tragedy of the commons arises, after all, precisely because nobody owns the commons.”

I don’t think I’m overstating the case to say that Link’s discussion gets at what is probably the root of the vast majority of the suckage that pervades modern society: lack of responsibility towards anything and everything we don’t own or have any but the most clearly vested interest in. I don’t (just) mean charity and giving, but the communal interactions and sharing that make communities worth living our ever-lengthening lives in.
It may have always been thus, but as populations grow bigger and more dependent on services and goods provided through fragile chokepoints, with less and less time to worry about anything except survival, it sure seems worse.

Matthew Hurst is doing some amazing work visualizing blogs and social networks. For example, check out his interactive map of the blogosphere and some of his static representations.