The Social Web

Two valuable links here to posts on the 'social web':


Firstly - A History of the Social Web - a draft chapter from Trebor Scholz:

This is a cross-cultural, critical history of social life on the Internet. It captures technical, cultural, and political events that influenced the evolution of computer-assisted person-to-person communication via the net. Acknowledging the role of grassroots movements, this history does not solely focus on mainstream culture with all its mergers, acquisitions, sales and markets, and the (mostly male) geeks, engineers, scientists, and garage entrepreneurs who implemented their dreams in hardware and software. This is a critical history as it traces the changing nature of labor and typologies of those who create value online as much as it searches for changing approaches toward control, privacy, and intellectual property. It shows strategies for direct social change based on the technologies and practices which already exist.

citation: Scholz, Trebor. "A History of the Social Web (draft)."
Collectivate.net. 26 Sep 2007. 1 Oct 2007

Secondly, 'Visualizing Wikipedia' generates a map of this social site -

The map is generated by first laying out the graph of Wikipedia (nodes are articles, edges are links between articles) and then decorating that substrate with colours (for topics: maths, science and technology) and images. Given the broad swath of science (green) articles, a question that springs to mind is: what is divided by this class - what topics are to the left and right?

-