Jon Lebkowsky on Friends and Tipping Points

Jon Lebkowsky wrote this quite a while ago on WorldChanging. I had started a draft post and never got back to it. While doing a little blog-keeping today, I found it again and it is worth blogging. (Just a warning… there may be a little flood of blog posts to “catch up.”)

Jon thinks about what we mean by “friends” online. The Value of Connections

I have a lot of connections on Facebook – 415, to be exact. When I go there, I see quite a few friends doing interesting things, and I always have invitations to connect, join groups, join causes, etc. Facebook is a very effective social network platform, perhaps because people like me like the idea of having a place where we can connect with people we know. But the more people we connect with, the more demands there are on our limited attention, and the less truly engaged we can be with anyone.

On the other hand, the more people I connect to on Facebook, the more who will see my stuff. So if I ever do have a cause I want supported, or a message I want to circulate, having a large network would be helpful. The downside is that it feels less social and more like the broadcast model of publishing: one to many.

I do want more Facebook friends, but there are some significant issues to think about if I want to use the network effectively and avoid wasting my — and everyone’s — time. And there’s a distinction to be made between “social” and “mass.” As you get more and more connections you have more social overhead; as you scale up you run into an inherent limit on social media’s ability to remain social. If I value a broad attention base or large audience over effective manageable relationships, I should work from a different set of assumptions.

I still don’t have neat boxes for these thoughts and concepts; I have more that I’ll get into within the next few weeks. Meanwhile I’d like to hear your thoughts…

As I’ve written before, I hit some sort of volume wall the middle of last year. I’ve written about how I am now more selective on adding friends to follow on Twitter. I mostly ignore Facebook friend requests. I totally ignore Plaxo requests. Just the management of the requests has gone over the top, and I can handle a lot. The people I work with in NPOs and NGOs most likely would never even consider the work it requires to maintain a presence on one of the social networks.

But the friends, the contacts, the network is so powerful. Where is the balancing point for any one of us?

Oh as a little side note – an interesting self test on your online identity! I wonder what the relationship is between being “digitally distinct” and overwhelmed by maintaining that status. Oi!

“Your online identity score is 9 out of a possible score of 10. Congratulations. You are digitally distinct. This is the nirvana of online identity. Keep up the good work, and remember that your Google results can change as fast as the weather in New England. So, regularly monitor your online identity.

Tony Tags me on 2007 Traffic Stats

Tony Karrer tagged me with his new 2007 Blog Traffic Stats – Hopefully a Meme (hopes its a meme!). OK, I’ll bite, particularly since I rarely look at my stats, but I was curious last week about how my reduced blogging impacted readership on the site. Otherwise I’m a bit oblivious to stats. I do like to see in my Bloglines readers how many subscribers I have. And I know I lost a lot of people when I moved from Blogger to my new WordPress powered site. But that’s cool.

Of course, this tells us nothing about folks who read this blog via their blog readers. Are you one of them? I’d love to know. I’m always curious about people who read this blog but rarely, if ever, actually visit.

Here are my Google Analytics screen captures. After them you will find an interesting disclosure!

Blogstats1
blog stats 2

There is one page on my website that has nothing to do with my blog but which gets a ton of traffic. It has been on my site since 1997. It is my son’s story about my grandmother’s ravioli recipe! 10% of all pageviews last year!

So, I’m not sure I’ll tag anyone. I have a slight discomfort that it may be implied that there is some sort of competition here. If you feel like doing it on your own, circle back and leave a link and any reflections on what you learned looking at your blog stats.

FLNW Event January 16 – Drawing Together Online

On Wednesday, January 16th at 22:00 GMT (check your local time) I’m throwing in a contribution into the online portion of the Future of Learning in a Networked World 2008 gathering. Why don’t you join us?

We have a FLNW Slide Sets space on Slideshare and I just uploaded the images I plan to use for this totally off-the-cuff experiment of drawing together online. Here is what I wrote as a teaser:

This is not a talk by any stretch of the imagination. It is an invitation to draw together to exercise our visual thinking. I have been doing F2F graphic facilitation work and it taps into something that I often feel missing online. So can we talk together, draw together then share our images to add to that conversation? What might happen? Let’s play.

See http://flnw.wikispaces.com/flnw2_itinerary for the full FLNW 2008 schedule, both online and on the ground in Thailand. Here is the Elluminate URL we’ll be using for the actual session. (Thanks, Leigh!) And here are the images…

Using Google Translation Tool in Wikispaces

In a couple of weeks I’ll be facilitating a multilingual event. We are using DGroups (hopefully – they are moving servers and it just got delayed a week into our week long event and I need a plan B) paired with a wiki. We want to keep it simple, we want to try and include multilingual participation and we don’t have any dedicated translation resources. So we need a community based solution.

The plan is we all start together (English, Spanish, French) in one email discussion thread to introduce ourselves. We are asking people to post their introduction in their home language on wikispaces page and then, we thought we’d translate them all. But darn, that is a huge task. So I poked around Google’s Widgets and thought I’d try their translation widget in my Wikispaces onlinefacilitation wiki. Wow, it worked pretty darn well!

After the first day of introductions, we’ll split into English, Spanish and French language groups for our topical discussions on Days 2-4. We will have each group do a quick summary each day on the wiki, which again, we can start translating with the Google widget, then improve upon it. (Sometimes the machine translations are pretty funny.) On the last two days, we’ll again work across languages in one list to close out, make meaning (in EVERY sense of the word) and have that experience of togetherness, even with our language gaps.

It will be an interesting experiment. I’m very excited about it. I’ll make sure to return here and report what we learn, plus the wiki will be available for others to review after the event.