It’s interesting to run into an article about the deeper mindset, truth shared by a bloggger him or herself. Usually the established bloggers don’t show their inner thoughts, while focusing on professional, educational contributions through their posts. But in my case, for being a developer yet to be grown to become truly professional who can contribute significantly, it’s not easy to make regular posts. I wrote about “Why it’s hard for me to blog frequently“ previously and this article by Mr. Truant seems to recognize the beneficial effect of opening up oneself to the readers.

The problem with most blogs and most bloggers is that they’re playing it safe. They’re just “reporting” on things, playing by the rules of what a person should and shouldn’t say in public. If you can buck that trend and talk about what others are feeling but won’t admit, you’ll draw a reaction. Opening up, especially when it’s uncomfortable, will get you more comments.

I guess people often feel difficult to comment on the superior post which may not need any addition or editing. But if the post is about inadequacy of incompleteness of the author or the subject matters, it becomes much easier to add to or edit the inferior post by commenting. Identifying this idea, Mr. Truant listed how to get more comments:

1. Think of something that you feel or that is bothering/affecting you, but which you are reluctant to talk about.
2. Ask yourself if other people are likely to identify with it or to feel the same thing, but are similarly reluctant to admit it. There’s little point to confessing to something that only you feel. (So for instance, perhaps you have a deep desire to rub yourself with rats. It seems unlikely that others will share this desire. But maybe that’s me. Maybe I’m out of touch.)
3. Make your confession, showing yourself in full, naked glory.
4. Watch the comments roll in.

This works because everyone has foibles, but most people are too preoccupied with looking “correct” or “professional” to discuss them. By finding and talking about these “elephant in the room” topics, you’re being brave on behalf of your readers. You’re being the first person to say what everyone is thinking, but which everyone is afraid to admit. You’re giving them permission to feel the same way, to discuss it, to admit it in kind.

While it’s important in blogging to be able to guide and contribute by sharing special knowledge or providing better solutions to the problems, sometimes it’s meaningful to connect with the readers by having the vulnerable communication, making oneself seemingly weaker. Amazingly, people don’t easily attack or slander the humble and  sincere blogger.

But what people really want, I think, is a friend. Not some know-it-all who pretends to like you just so he can make a sale, but a living, breathing human being who is just as screwed up as you are and isn’t afraid to admit it.

Following excerpts are not as structured as a serious composition should be, merely combining the selected sentences I took from the book and translated back to English.

• Chapter 1: Emergence of Social Web Era
• Chapter 2: Framework for Social Web Development
• Chapter 3: Sincere Conversation
• Chapter 4: Bringing people to sign up

<< Previous Chapter 5: Keeping the users constantly satisfied

Selected excerpts from Chapter 6: Building collective intelligence

Sometimes, an individual must be sacrificed to provide better service to the mass.

Complex System is the mutually linked one, cannot prove its features or functionality when it’s disintegrated.
But when it’s integrated as one system, it shows more than one actual or potential features or functionality.

Adaptability is the capability to change flexibly throughout time.

It’s important for the designers and the developers to flexibly change the target users for keeping the system as healthy as possible.

The purpose of this kind of social system is to concentrate individual activities and bring out or create the most qualified and largest number of contents. The result of this process is called the collective intelligence.
The designer or developer can draw insightful ideas and information from this collective intelligence generated by many people.
In other words, the larger number of people can make the more qualified and accurate decisions, than the smaller number of people.

For this to be possible, activities of the users must be recorded and the innate or implicit patterns must be brought out using these steps:

1. The initial behavior like submitting a new content. The fate of it is determined by the system rules and the other users.
2. Exposure. The algorithm or the rules of the system based on the subject or suitability to the system. The exposure changes to display the good ones among different contents.
3. Feedback. The users of the system can change the exposure of the content by affecting the algorithm through positive or negative interaction like commenting to the content.

When your content is exposed with other similar contents, it would require only little effort to promote it.

Too much content of different quality causes confusion to the users. The system must be able to control the submission to encourage quality content exposures over others.
Entry barrier is the mean to gain superiority in the market, likewise adopting or abolishing the entry barrier in the web service is critically considered for keeping the service as healthy as possible.
These are three types of barriers:

1. Unofficial barrier: The special design or advertisement only work implicitly on special group of people.
2. Official barrier: Requiring signing up for an account, installing an application.
3. Extreme barrier: Invitation only, not open to the public.

Digg uses these kinds of barriers to ensure the quality of content submitted.
It is important to evaluate the suitability and the originality of the content.

Normally, people consider the well exposed content to be valuable.

• Exposure in the main first area
• Frequency of exposure affects the value
• Head position in the first page
• Higher rank compared with other contents

The purpose of most content is to draw a lot of visitor traffic, to the point of server error!

The ranking depicts the relevancy of contents to the users. Each user applies different combination for viewing conditions to the list of contents.

• Chronological order
• Popularity gained during certain range of time
• Level of participation
• Collaborative filtering
• Relevancy
• Identity of the content provider
• Providing different perspective to look at one’s own content

The ranking is important to promote better user experience. It allows the user to recognize the value of content by comparing it with others.
The value of news service is freshness, of search engine is relevancy, and of social network is relationship.

Interface of the service is the world where users dwell and play. What’s displayed through interface determines the user experience. People often rely on the decisions made by others to make their own. Unless, the interface of the service purposely not showing information about what others think of the content, people’s evaluation on the content is heavily affected by how positively of negatively the content is examined beforehand by others. Social interface changes user’s decision.

The implicit and explicit feedback to the content are combined together to construct the overall reputation of the content.
The implicit feedback is generated from the user activities like visiting the page, bookmarking, clicking the download icon, and purchasing.
The explicit feedback is like reviewing, commenting, expressing the user preference.
It is very important to make the mechanism for feedback to be so easy to use, like Digg button on a page.

Leverage point is the small thing of the service which can affect the large part of it. Opening this leverage point to the users to participate in building the quality of the web service is necessary for actively growing the social network service.

Next Chapter 7: Encouraging to share >>

Korean version of Designing for a Social Web

I have been posting selected excerpts from the book “Designing for a Social Web” by Joshua Porter. Translating back from the Korean version of the book, I just want to tell the readers that the serial posts of the excerpts is not authorized by the owner of book. I just wanted to share the excerpts so useful to my own projects, and thought the imperfect translation from Korean version back to English may be acceptable.

Following excerpts are not as structured as a serious composition should be, merely combining the selected sentences I took from the book and translated back to English.

• Chapter 1: Emergence of Social Web Era
• Chapter 2: Framework for Social Web Development
• Chapter 3: Sincere Conversation

<< Previous Chapter 4: Bringing people to sign up

Selected excerpts from Chapter 5: Keeping the users constantly satisfied

The real difficulty in running the web service is to find the way to bring people to use it constantly. The first impression which led to have loving relationship quickly fades. The answer is in motivating the users.
Keep paying attention to the users, and it will be rewarded with more ads and sponsors. Remember that these are the effect of the successfully running the service, not the necessities.

1. Understand why people wanted to sign up and use the service
2. Build the right interface which can motivate the users to keep using the service

Why people sign up?

Most people use the web service for simple reason. For example, the users of Amazon give and get helps from one another through reviews (reciprocity). They simply wanted to return the favors. They believe that sharing their experiences can help the other to make sound judgment.
Designing a social web service is not about economical problem, but about social capital problem. This is the list of things related to the social capital to be used in building the right interface:

• identity
• uniqueness
• reciprocity
• reputation
• sense of efficiency
• control
• ownership
• attachment to a group
• fun

Manage identities

We have rights to present our identities freely in online environment. Online anonymity is also about managing identities. If the power and the importance of identities is neglected or denied, these problems may occur:

• Spamming meaningless messages to the mass
• Abusing the service, or using the service not as what the developers intended it to used
• Inappropriate use of commenting
• Pretending to be someone else, deceiving others

Usually, lack of clear identities cause and condone bad behaviors. There will be no way to describe one’s action and to ask for responsibilities or reward the right behaviors if the identities are not known.
Depending on how the service manages the identity, the minimum requirement like using a nickname will be sufficient enough to prevent some abuses.
Profile page is closely related the concept and the value of the web service. Each different web service displays the user profile differently.
The content must dynamically updated and displayed to the users. These are the updating mechanisms:

• Lifestreaming. Showing the latest activities from every source.
• Commenting Wall
• Notification

Be aware of the problem of social network being deteriorated caused by lack of interesting activities beyond signing up and updating profiles.

Emphasize individual uniqueness

The web service should know: What’s it that only this person can do and no one else? What makes each user unique to one another?
For example, Netflix recommends movies based on the reviews the user has been made. The good service recognizes and responds to the uniqueness of the user. There are many ways to respect and encourage the users to express his or her uniqueness:

• Display special copies about certain activities which require participation
• Emphasize that the user can make positive contribution
• Bring out the benefit of his or her unique contribution
• Keep reminding him or her how unique he or she is
• Develop the unique contribution into the meaningful perspective or element used in the service
• Display the page which shows the differences between the contribution of the user to that of others

Maximize reciprocity

Reciprocity is about exchanging what the users gained from one another. People do have tendency to make contribution as a response to the favors they received from the other users met while using the web service. Being able to give is another form of having respectful authority.

Empower reputation

Reputation is built around the opinions of others so have strong objectiveness. The good web service has the clear system of managing and measuring one’s reputation. These are the example criteria:

• The number for friends or fans
• The number of posts
• The ranks of these posts
• The number of comments and their qualities
• The number of posts recommended by others
• The number of first submissions
• The length of being an active user

The reputation plays the important role in collaboration, and the result of collaboration affects the reputation. The three conditions for collaboration to occur according to Robert Axelrod in “The Evolution of Cooperation” are:

1. Possibility to meet again in the future. Staying as the users in the same service increases the possibility.
2. Ability to know about one another. Knowing the reputation alone is strong enough to decide whether to collaborate of not.
3. History of past activities of the users. The best way to judging the reputation is examining the user from the past records.

Promote usefulness

Usefulness can be defined as what benefits the users can obtain from the values of themselves using the web service. Rewarding properly to what the users contributed is how the web service becomes useful to the users.

Allow the power to control

The users often demand the power to control their own contents, whether it’s actually practiced or not. It’s important to the users to have the secure means to control the web service even if they will never use it.

Give ownerships

Let the users feel that this web service is specifically built for them, using the contents of them, and managed by them. Assure the users that it’s meaningful to use the web service. These are the effects of giving ownerships to the users:

• Adorn the contents to be more than what they seem to be
• When the contents are published, the owner takes more responsibilities, by taking care of them to have more values
• Some responsibilities to manage the contents are delegated to the owners, easing the burden of the web service
• The perception about the web site becomes more friendly

However, don’t let this ownership invade the ownerships or the user experiences of the others.

Provide model behaviors

For promoting the right ways to use the web service, the model behaviors of certain group of users can be used.

Develop attachment to the web service

The love for interacting as a group is one of main reasons why people use Internet. Most of the famous websites are for supporting group activities. Community is the very essence of social web service. People becomes the users of the service not only because it’s useful, but also it’s fun.
According to Kathy Sierra, if the web service can help the users to know more about their worlds, and to believe that the web service is exactly what they needed, they can see about themselves under the brighter lights. In other words, they will find themselves to become better than before, strongly motivated.
To receive passion from the users, the designer and developer must give passion to them first.

Next Chapter 6: Building collective intelligence >>