I spent a great couple of days this week discussing ideas around Social Software with some people who are researching, developing and thinking about it.  A lot has been discussed under a blanket NDA however so unfortunately no names or product mentioned here.

A really interesting comment that came up which I hadn’t really thought about too much before, was that social software is inherently selfish software.  The idea behind this is that ultimately the tools and mechanisms that drive social software adoption are really self serving.  The beauty of course is that why social software works is that my selfish behaviour drives a collective good, but ultimately it’s selfish.

Let’s consider a few of these:

• Technorati lets blog authors track their authority and relevance.  Why do I ping them, because it lets me know who’s linking to me.
• Tagging of any form — tagging is about helping me find me content again.
• Blogging — because it’s the easiest way to (be heard; say something; speak to a crowd; insert your reason here).

The feedback mechanism that encourages users to participate on most social software type sites is also a selfish one in the sense the reward you derive is a personal satisfaction.  How many comments did I get? How many friend requests? How many notifications? How many links and ping-backs?  Would you keep blogging if no-one read what you had to say?

I went searching to find some sites that support this idea, but didn’t come up with too many standouts, however I did like this one:

• http://12frogs.com/12/work/iasummit2006/ I love the poster on this site as it really shows the circular nature of the software and how increasing usage feeds itself.

If I re-word selfishness, I’d say it’s self-reward that promotes the use of social software.  The best social software promotes me to interact and share with others because there is a direct link to a personal reward.

I’ve just returned from LotusSphere 2008 and had a great time.  While the presentations and demos are interesting, I found the most insightful part of the time there was spent in the Innovation and Development labs talking with developers about the advances they are making.  In the Innovation lab in particular, deep conversations can develop and you walk away feeling that some of the concepts will make it into a code.

 Loosely speaking, you can categorise a lot of the Web 2.0 tools and concepts into two very high level, broad categories like:

• Organisational Networks - LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, Digg, Del.i.cious etc.
• Collaborative Creation  (Wisdom of Crowds type tools) - Wiki’s, Blogs etc.

What’s clear from LotusSphere is that IBM are clearly taking these broad brush categories (perhaps more or less) and building out tool sets like Quickr and Connections that apply these into the corporate world.

There are many reasons why this is appealing to corporates, not least command and control within the firewall on what is going on, but the most interesting idea is how it relates to Knowledge Management (KM). 

In my nearly 20 years in IT, I’ve been involved in various projects in different companies that again and again have tried to address the issue of KM.  What these Knowledge Management 1.0 efforts have all had in common, and why they’ve failed, is that they try and formalise the capturing of knowledge that is expressed and documented.  When I have to consciously make an effort, through modifying my natural processes and procedures, to share with you, then ultimately the effort will fail.  It fails because ultimately, the value in it for me, is not as great as the value in it for you.  Once the latest KM drive loses steam, I’ll drift back to my old ways and the path of least resistance.

In KM terms this type of knowledge is called Explicit knowledge.

Nickols, F. W. (2000). The knowledge in knowledge management. In Cortada, J.W. & Woods, J.A. (Eds) The knowledge management yearbook 2000-2001 (pp. 12-21). Boston, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
It’s worth taking a moment to browse the citation as it gives an excellent summary of the three main types of Knowledge as described in KM terms, I’ve paraphrased what I think are the key three here:

• Explicit - What has been expressed and captured
• Implicit - What can be expressed, but isn’t captured
• Tacit - What can’t be expressed (so by definition isn’t captured).

As an aside, I suspect the categories of Tacit knowledge are decreasing over the years (biometrics probably couldn’t be expressed years ago, but now we have computers that can recognise faces in crowds).  Anyway, my point is this, while the Web 2.0 world and the categories of tools bring real value to corporations, one form of value I haven’t heard expressed until recently is that they will help corporations capture Implicit knowledge by mining my behaviours and actions.

When Lotus Connections 2.0 announced at LotusSphere promises to deliver a Colleagues version of the friending concept, it’s really building an Implicit knowledge network that can be mined for real information that is accessible to all users across the organisation.  Atlas mines your e-mail for your connections and expertise. Spock mines social networks for Implicit knowledge on who you are and who you know.  Wiki’s mine the knowledge of the crowd through the creation process. 

When corporations ask what value in Web 2.0 concepts and social networking, they are undervaluing what most would say is their greatest asset - the collective knowledge of their employees.  I believe that the real value in a lot of what we call Web 2.0 will be realised when these tools begin delivering ways for corporations to finally tackle Knowledge Management 2.0 — non-intrusive KM, captured by tools that work the way people work and ensure that the Implicit knowledge of the organisation is captured effortlessly by people simply doing their job in the way they want to do it.

Based on this, my final three thoughts are simply that:

1. The reason Collaborative Creation tools are being adopted by corporations today (and will be at an increasing pace) is because they deliver a form of Implicit knowledge that corporations (slowly and eventually) “get”.  Content is delivered in a relatively concrete way that mimics a document to some degree.  The stretch is less.
2. Social Collaboration tools will begin to boom as Corporations realise that they are a promising solution to unlock the Implicit knowledge within their organisations that they can’t see.
3. Discovery and Surfacing tools (of which Spock, Atlas and Particls are all examples of) will become even more critical.  Smart ways of unleashing the networks and information people are building to capture and deliver value that was not easily attainable before.

Chris posted on the need for a new metric which could supplement traditional page-view metrics.

I’m going to add to the call-to-arms from the Enterprise point of view.  The ability to understand not just what people click on, but the attention they give to elements of the new, rich media world is crucial.  Detailed information that goes beyond “IP Address loaded page X” and various derivatives of this is crucial.

I touched on this in my earlier post about Syndication in the Enterprise, the model I proposed there includes an attention client and engine which collects the data independently of the RSS browser, but this could do SO much more.

Chris is correct when he says that there is a vast range of attention data, for example, YouTube videos, flash movies etc. etc.  An open standard here for collecting and analysing this information would be a real boon to the emerging Attention arena.

Elias took up the conversation over here as well and raised an interesting point:

So before we come up with new measurement systems, lets spend more time determining why we are measuring. Simply saying we are better measuring what consumers are giving their attention to, is only part of the problem. We need to first determine what value we obtain from measuring that attention in the first place.

My push-back to both of them is simply this — I think we DO need a standard for aggregating attention data from all the different clients people use during a day, for the very simple reason that in Enterprises understanding what people are using and how they are using it is a crucial part of the delivery eco-system for information.  It’s the feedback loop that lets you know you’re getting it right.

It may be useful for bloggers etc. as well, but I think the problem should be focussed on the Enterprise as this is where the “real” need is (I show my bias here, but I don’t believe I as a blogger need to know in great detail who looks at what, but as an Entprise of 160,000 people globally I do need to understand where and how my information is flowing).

What’s new in all this is not the concept — Advertisers have been doing this for years with demographics, TV ratings seasons, market surveys etc. etc., however what is now being proposed is a very finely tuned attention engine that understands (and helps others to understand) that most unique of individuals — you.