Finding Joy in Snarkville

This is a live post. Forgive the lack of summary at the top of this one — call me unpreped, but we will all live, right? There are bunches of live-bloggers doing this, so I’m sure someone will do the formal summary thingie.

See: I’ve got it now:

Let’s get this whole thing started.

got a question, raise your hand. Got a burning question: two hands. Comment: Say it is a comment and Move on. Ok, got the rules now? good. Moving on.

Where did Flickr and blogger come from? Let’s review NOT doing what they do now. Blogger was a spin off of a project management tool and Flickr was a share thing that I fully don’t understand — i think a game of some type. A photo sharing part of a game and then it takes over. Can you believe this? talk about shifting focus.

(Sidenote: I’m now blind — there are flashes going off everywhere — including in my face — ok, fun huh?)

Quote: if we had set about to create a photo sharing site, we probably won’t have created Flickr.

Interesting, huh?

this is the boring shot of the front of our room.

You were creating a value-neutral platform, up to the end users to bring the value to it. Should you put more controls on the programs?

It is watching what you created be used for things you don’t agree with — example, using blogger for the war blogs post September 11th. Quote: I don’t want to facilatate this. they should learn HTML.

Using web originally for sharing recipes and photos of dogs, then we moved to the commerical world, and now we are seeing a coming of more of the personal sharing that the ‘net is returning to the ultimate vision.

Questions: “I’m loud. How has tagging capitalized connections in community?”

Answer: we didn’t know where it was going to go. We thought of it as organizing photos, but became a powerful tool for the social network. keywords weren’t working, but they weren’t in a social context. shared organizational tool.

tagging/blogging bringing buttterflies — because it made it possible to do what you wanted to do all along. it allows you to surface things and form adhoc communities. No one is organizing some tags and but it winds up growing a community through photos and words. Did you know there is a tag for “domestic violence”?

Groups grew in ways that Flickr was unexpected — building projects that no one dreamed of and moved the direction in new ways.

What’s the next big thing with video and blogging? As tool prices come down and barriers to entry come down, more people will do it and the medium will do. Hoping to find a way to break down a large forum into reasonable chunks — so you can reference a little piece of a show without doing the full editing process.

How did being a woman affect your roles or your tools? Has it changed from 1999 and today.

Blogging and Social Network sites have really changed over time. We have moved from these thing being weird to being something that people do. As for being a woman, they brought a piece of the sharing and social side to the companies. When these started, they felt like they weren’t really part of the dot com movement — lack of women in the other dot coms (and lack of fuzeball tables). They were a small team and the direction would move because of a female prospective helped build community.

(Maybe that’s the whole point: difference between men and women is really based on this need to share. men compete. men share but in the method of “I do this.” Women share. Women tend to say, “don’t you want to do this with me?” This is completely the base for what makes blogger and flickr unique — it is about sharing. It is about bringing more people to being part of this “family” or “culture”)

Flickr: you want the community to build its own neighborhood watch.

Growth into an International??

Blogger in the early days, there was a group of Dutch bloggers. They wanted the date headers to be in Dutch — so they e-mailed the names — so they grew the languages from people’s requests. That e-mail may have been ignored by others and yet it went to a woman who is active in responding to her e-mails.

Online communities come together in different ways and the balancing the cultures and moires. To soothe the alarmed while encouraging self expression without allowing pure chaos. It is truly tough job.

Geeky Question:

There is a learning curve with blogger and flickr — what did you do to encourage people to do take that step?

In the blogger beginning, pre-blogspot, you had to have your own site and then they would ftp into your site. they were able to attract the early adopters and then began to make it easier for people. This helped them build it — but in the beginning, it was confusing and frustrating. As political blogs took off and people knew what they were it grew easier.

The biggest key is to have people have already seen what these things are so they understand why and how it is used — and then the education becomes easier.

Dealing with Trolls:

it would be nice to build tools in the beginning, but there’s seems to be this V-8 moment where they should have realized that a spammer would have done something. And the Spammers are getting better and the tools to control them which is becoming an arms race.

Developing tools based on what people are asking for:

Does spamming affect the development of tools. Moving to development in the open and not stealth — letting users help you instead of putting something out there and then it would completely used differently.

Don’t try to build a perfect system, because if you build to the spammers you will never get them moving forward.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 7:24 pm and is filed under BlogHer: Liveblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.