This morning, TechCrunch posted a piece about online dating 2.0 that got me thinking about how our online and offline lives have merged. This is especially true of the 20-something MySpace crowd and the early adopter techie crowd. Both of these two groups, while having slightly different approaches, have moved to the point of doing almost everything online.

And yes, I have used online dating, and it was a great experience for me. Shortly after my divorce, I realized that all of my friends (and all of their friends) work at Intel, which is not surprising, since we are one of the largest employers in the area; however, by dating people at work you run the risk of eventually managing or working for an ex … not a comfortable situation. Around this time last year, I met the current boyfriend on Yahoo! Personals. His take on online dating reflects the views in this post: “we have moved everything else online, why should dating be any different?”

Most of us get our news online, rarely picking up those stacks of paper filled with yesterday’s news (my parents refer to them as “newspapers”). I immediately recycle the phone books that appear on my doorstep knowing that I will never use one when I can get the same information online without having to find a place to store these books that are now roughly the size of my couch. I rarely pick up the phone to talk to friends in favor of email and IM.

This does not mean that I have moved all of my interactions with the world into the online space, and I do not think that doing everything online would be a healthy approach. We need the offline interactions as well; however, the online interactions can facilitate the offline. Email and IM just seem to be more convenient ways to arrange an evening out. Many of us who blog “meet” people online as a result of comments back and forth in the blogosphere, but we take the opportunity to meet these bloggers in the offline space when we get an opportunity at a conference or other venue. After recently exchanging blog comments with Josh Bancroft, we realized that we both worked at the same Intel campus, and getting together offline resulted in him joining a session at OSCON next week that Danese Cooper and I are leading. Both online and offline interactions have their place, but it is interesting to see how the two are merging to the point where we do not even consciously think about how we use them both.

Danese Cooper and I are leading a series of lightning talks focused on the Art of Community at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland next week. The session features some great speakers including Mitchell Baker, Karl Fogel, and many more. If you are attending OSCON, please stop by our session!

The Art of Community

Track: Emerging Topics
Date: Thursday, July 27
Time: 5:20pm – 6:05pm
Location: Portland 251

Online communities have been a fundamental element of open source culture for years, and they are now becoming an integral part of the daily lives of more people every day. New people are joining and participating in online communities in everything from open source projects like Firefox to social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn. This session will offer guidance on how to create a successful community in the form of 5 minute lightning talks from a group of experts on the following topics:

• Introductory remarks: Danese Cooper, Intel and Open Source Initiative
• Benefits of having a community: Zaheda Bhorat, Google
• Corporate communities: Josh Bancroft, Intel
• Using Collaboration tools: Karl Fogel, CollabNet
• Leading a community and creating a community culture: Geir Magnusson, Intel and Apache
• Concerns and challenges: Zak Greant
• The Character of Intentional Communities: Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation
• Impact of web 2.0 on communities: Dawn Foster, Intel

The Washington Post had an interesting summary of the Pew Internet & American Life Project blogging survey. In short, here is the typical profile of a blogger:

• More than half are under 30

• Only 15% blog to make money

• They use blogs for creative expression

• Motivation tends to be personal (keeping up with family / friends and meeting new people)

Here are a few choice quotes from the Washington Post article:

They consider themselves digital natives.

They’re young. They’re addicted to instant messaging and social networks. And they’re more apt to dish about the drama at last night’s party than the president’s latest faux pas.

…

“The average blogger is a 14-year-old girl writing about her cat,” said Alexander Halavais, an assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

Typical bloggers are not ranting about politics or trying to be hard-core journalists, he said. “The survey shows that blogging is really a community-based activity and a way of connecting with people.”

Apparently, the TechMeme crowd (those of us over 14, not blogging about our pets) appear to be in a minority. The beauty of the long tail is that we can blog about a variety of topics and find an audience of like-minded people who share our passion for a topic. A 14 year-old blogging about her cat will have readers who care about her or her cat, while people who are passionate about open culture would be likely to read my blog.

Open culture is a fairly specialized topic, and I will never have millions of readers on this blog, nor do I necessarily want millions of readers. I would rather have a few dozen readers who are passionate and knowledgeable about the topic. The point is that within the long tail, we can each find our niche, regardless of what the research finds about the “typical” blogger.

This morning, Tim O’Reilly published four big ideas about open source that will guide his discussion at OSCON next week:

1. The architecture of participation beyond software. Software development was the canary in the coalmine, one of the first areas to show the power of self-organizing systems leveraging the power of the internet to transform markets. But it didn’t stop there. What we’re now calling Web 2.0 is a direct outgrowth of the core principles that made open source software successful, but in my opinion, many of the projects and companies that make up the Web 2.0 movement have gone far beyond open source in their understanding of how to build systems that leverage what I call the architecture of participation.

2. Asymmetric Competition. One of the most powerful things about open source is its potential to reset the rules of the game, to compete in a way that undercuts all of the advantages of incumbent players. Yet what we see in open source is that the leading companies have in many ways abandoned this advantage, becoming increasingly like the companies with which they compete. I have no concerns about the ultimate health of the open source development model or the vibrant creativity of the open source community, but I do question whether open source companies really grasp the implications of the new model. I think that if they did, they’d be Web 2.0 companies.

3. How Software As a Service Changes The Points of Business Leverage. Operations and scalability lead to powerful cost advantages; increasing returns from network effects lead to new kinds of lock-in. The net effect is that even when running open source software, vendors will have lock-in opportunities just as powerful as those from the previous generation of proprietary software.

4. Open Data. One day soon, tomorrow’s Richard Stallman will wake up and realize that all the software distributed in the world is free and open source, but that he still has no control to improve or change the computer tools that he relies on every day. They are services backed by collective databases too large (and controlled by their service providers) to be easily modified. Even data portability initiatives such as those starting today merely scratch the surface, because taking your own data out of the pool may let you move it somewhere else, but much of its value depends on its original context, now lost.

These are all important concepts for open source, but I am particularly drawn to the idea that open source has provided a foundation (technically and conceptually) for what we are now calling web 2.0. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about this relationship recently because understanding how open source works (my background is in open source) can help us understand web 2.0. This is particularly true in discussions about what motivates people to freely contribute to communities.

Eric Raymond wrote that “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” Within open source software communities, many projects are started to fill the developer’s need, and as the user of the software, the developer has a personal stake in the product’s quality. Linus started Linux to fulfill his personal need for a Unix-like operating system that would run on lower cost hardware. Other developers frequently contribute to open source projects to fill a need of their own to have a particular project ported to a favorite hardware platform or to add an additional feature that would make the product more closely meet their needs.

This idea can also be applied to other online communities outside of software. People join and participate in social networking communities, like the MySpace community, to fill a social need and have an online location to hang out with friends, coordinate social events, share new (or old) music, and blog about their ideas and experiences. Others join business-oriented networking sites, like LinkedIn, to make better connections with people in related industries and to network online with like-minded people. Some people join online news and information communities, like Digg and Newsvine, to share and discuss information with others.

These examples demonstrate how people can join online communities to fill a particular need, and how those needs can take many forms and motivate people in different ways. Keep in mind that motivation is incredibly complex. A single individual may be motivated to join and contribute to online communities for many different reasons, which when combined form a powerful set of motivators. The interesting thing is how the motivation is similar for open source communities and web 2.0 communities.

I just posted a new entry to my Trends in Web 2.0 blog focused on social software usage in the enterprise. This entry considers the changing workforce demographics with new employees raised on email, IM, MySpace, Facebook, and other social software just entering the workforce, and it discusses how we can use their expertise to help other people become more productive using collaborative, web 2.0 technologies.

You can get the complete entry from the Trends in Web 2.0 blog .

Firefox has always been built on viral marketing, and the SpreadFirefox campaign has been nothing short of brilliant. The latest initiative lives up to the SpreadFirefox legacy. For World Firefox Day, they are asking each of us to bring one friend into the Firefox family by September 15, and in exchange, they will immortalize the names of both the giver and the receiver in Firefox 2.

Please take a minute to visit the World Firefox Day website and start the process.

MySpace is frequently used as a prime example of web 2.0; however, I am finding that it has fewer web 2.0 characteristics than I expected. I recently used this definition of web 2.0: “I think of web 2.0 as a convenient shorthand for the collaborative, community oriented web where collective intelligence is harnessed and content is created by the many rather than the few. Users participate in an open fashion using technology that facilitates participation for those who are not serious coders in contrast to the static web of a few years ago.” (Trends in Web 2.0)

MySpace excels at creating a community of people who generate huge amounts of content in the form of profile information (about me, who I’d like to meet, interests, personal information, schools attended, employers, friends, comments, blogs, group membership, and much more). The volume of content is nothing short of amazing, and this content is promoted virally when friends encourage other friends to join. When all of your friends are on MySpace, you miss out by not joining, which is a strong form of peer pressure. In order to join, you need to share at least some information, thus creating more content. Absolutely brilliant.

However, I have been frustrated with the MySpace experience. I recently blogged about how I do not fit within the age demographic, so I find it less useful than someone closer to 25 might. I will put this frustration aside, since I cannot really blame MySpace for my age, and no change that MySpace could make would roll time backwards to make me 25 again.

Age aside, I am increasingly frustrated by how MySpace uses (or does not use) web 2.0 technologies. They have a very simple interface where the user types content into text fields and the content is displayed on the profile. This is great for novice users, but I would like more. Today, I wanted to add a quick Javascript snippet to display the RSS feed for this blog on my MySpace profile. I can enter HTML to format the content within the text boxes; however, Javascript is not allowed. I also wanted to move a few things around on the page. MyYahoo and many other sites have Ajax interfaces that allow drag and drop of widgets to rearrange them on the page. With MySpace, I would need to write this code myself or download an annoying template that would rearrange it for me; I cannot just drag and drop the boxes to a more convenient location.

MySpace also fails to leverage the expertise of their user base. For example, the MySpace help files are minimal and fairly useless. Here is an example:

Q. How do I add color, graphics, & sound to my Profile page?

A. Adding color, graphics, and sound to your profile page is easy and requires only a basic knowledge of HTML (the programming language used to create web pages on the Internet). Simply go to “Edit Profile” and enter the desired HTML coding where appropriate. If you do not know HTML, you can reach out and make a new friend by asking someone who has color, graphics, and/or sound on their Profile page how they did it. People on MySpace are friendly and always willing to help, so just ask! This is a great way to meet new people! (MySpace)

I am not one to be excited about writing help files; however, MySpace has a robust user community that could be leveraged to provide this information easily via a wiki or other technology. EBay has successfully implemented something similar giving users the ability to easily help each other. MySpace could easily set up a wiki that people could use to share tips and tricks, helpful hints, and other information. In the above example, the users could create detailed instructions about changing profiles including the code required.

MySpace has a lot of strengths in social networking and content creation; however, by utilizing some of the newer technologies, MySpace could feel less like a static environment and more like a dynamic and vibrant web 2.0 site.

Earlier this week, Kate Bevan from The Guardian said, “Firefox is wonderful. It’s up there with chocolate and sex on the grand scale of great things about being alive.” I am a huge fan of Firefox, but right up there with chocolate and sex? Hmmmm, no comment.

Richard MacManus, a ZDNet blogger, suggests that Firefox’s market share will continue to increase as enterprises begin to adopt it. I blogged on a similar topic earlier this week describing how “the tools that we use outside of work as consumers tend to creep into the enterprise.” MacManus describes this phenomenon and relates it back to Firefox with the following insights:

In a corporate blogging program that I’m involved in, a bunch of us were discussing the reasons why Firefox usage is growing. One person noted that in the XiTi survey of European patterns of use, Firefox is most often used at weekends. He inferred that this means personal and household adoption rates are higher than corporate ones.

This trend for Firefox adoption to be driven by the consumer market is a positive sign IMO, because we’re currently seeing a larger trend of ‘Web 2.0’ consumer apps infiltrating the Enterprise. Just today I was speaking to some Salesforce.com execs and one of them pointed out that its Skype mashup is proving very popular amongst its customers. I can point to many other instances of social Web tools becoming utilized a lot more in enterprises – IM, wikis, Web Office services, indeed the software-as-a-service tools that Salesforce.com runs.

My point is that I think Firefox market share will continue its upward trend, particularly when Enterprises start using it more. (ZDNet)

MacManus is right. The applications that we use as consumers will gradually creep into the workplace, and when enough people across the enterprise begin demanding the use of any application, IT will usually relent and eventually begin supporting it to appease the masses. This is especially true for a secure, stable web browser, like Firefox, which would generate fewer IT objections than an application with questionable security or stability issues. It also helps when you can convince a few key people in senior management to request the application just to light a fire under the IT department!

Today on TechMeme, I ran across two new tools using Flickr:

FlickrInspector takes a Flick username, userid or email as input and returns more information than I would have thought possible. It displayed profile information, most recent photos, oldest photos, most interesting photos, tag cloud with some statistics, sets and searches for blogged photos.

Preloader allows you to edit your Flickr photos completely online with no additional software installed on your computer. It allows you to tweak brightness, contrast, hue, etc. along with rotation, flip, crop, and many others. I’m terrible with photo editing software, so here are a couple of screenshots from other blogs.

The beauty in this is not that there are two more tools that work with Flickr (even though these are two pretty cool ones!) The beauty is that web 2.0 applications, like Flickr and many, many others, are architected to make it easy for people to write new applications using the information and value in Flickr in a slightly different way. For example, FlickrInspector was written by Nils K. Windisch aka netomer from Germany in his spare time to improve the user experience of Flickr in a way that made sense to him, and after writing it, he shared it with the world to enhance the user experience of others. Flickr is a great example of the Architecture of Participation in use and harnessing the collective intelligence of your user base.

Nielsen//NetRatings is taking a step in the right direction by starting to look at trends in podcasting, and they just published some fairly interesting statistics on podcast usage. However, the first paragraph in the report comes from the not quite getting it category:

Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research, announced today that 6.6 percent of the U.S. adult online population, or 9.2 million Web users, have recently downloaded an audio podcast; 4.0 percent, or 5.6 million Web users, have recently downloaded a video podcast (see Table 1). These figures put the podcasting population on a par with those who publish blogs, 4.8 percent, and online daters, 3.9 percent. However, podcasting is not yet nearly as popular as viewing and paying bills online, 51.6 percent, or online job hunting, 24.6 percent. (Nielsen//NetRatings)

Yes, they just compared those people downloading and listening to podcasts with those who publish blogs. This is sort of like comparing people who read magazines to the number of journalists who write newspapers to conclude that magazines are more popular than newspapers. This a classic case of comparing apples with watermelons. A better choice would have been to compare those publishing podcasts with those publishing blogs or comparing podcast listeners to blog readers.

Some podcasters are not happy with the strange comparison and want to see statistics on podcasts that they can really use. There were a few interesting tidbits from the report, but none are surprising. For example, podcast listeners tend to be younger and more tech-savvy based on the high usage of non-IE browsers and tech sites visited, and quite a few listeners also come from the Apple community. No surprises here. I agree with Scoble; we need more useful data on podcasting.