Dave Snowden used to say that we can only know 150 people at any particular time or for any single network (read identity). This has been a useful rule of thumb for me in designing communities of practice but I…

By now everyone who’s paying attention realizes that something different is going on with this election. It’s something to do with grassroots, something to do with the internet, and it’s a phenomena that’s flown in the face of the conventional wisd…

Tom Morris has responded to my previous post on “mass amateurisation” with a thoughtful piece on the personalisation and decentralisation of the web: While personalisation and decentralisation may be just buzzwords at the moment, with the rise of the i…

Not as useful as actually writing something original, but more RSS and Email links I found interesting… Email’s Special Power RSS, Newbies and Naysayers (it is good to remember that until RSS support is built into a mainstream OS release, it’s going …

I usually try to be on the cusp of trends. I joined eBay in 1998 and Napster in Fall 1999. For some reason, it seemed for a time like too much work to set up Friendster, but last night I…

I’ve been reading connected selves on the 150 person limit for weak ties and its relationship to Friendster: “When i have 200+ friends on a site like Friendster, i’m not a social networks anomaly. What is actually being revealed is…

Perhaps your blog allows many more people to feel connected to you than you yourself maintain in personal memory…Perhaps technology is making 150 obsolete.

-Alex-

Deep within the discussion that Zephoria makes about the 200 people cap that Friendster has instituted, obviously to thwart the…

Another question that’s interesting to consider is whether the public articulation of these networks is a new form of “maintenance” that signals to the people we’re connecting to that the relationship is still active in some way, perhaps at a lower threshhold.

Maybe new forms of resource exchange are acceptable via these networks that would not be possible previously? For instance, asking whether a group of people are familiar with any academic papers relevant to a particular topic may be seen as more acceptable than asking a particular distance acquaintance for such information. Sending out this request to all of the people within a certain subset of your network may be seen as more appropriate behavior.