Session 4: Social Software
Posted June 10, 2010 
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Comments(0) This is session 4, on “social software” — software designed to be used by groups. We start by trying to find a way to moderate the comments on news stories that is efficient, fair, participatory, and produces good discussions. Along the way we look at pre-moderation and post-moderation, collaborative filtering, reputation and identity online, anonymity, badges, scores and social status, the politics of groups, and the concept of software as an enviroment that influences behaviour.
This class was held Friday, June 11, 2010.
Readings:
- Collective Knowledge Systems, Chris Dixon
- Social Software and the Politics of Groups, Clay Shirky
- Wikipedia Editorial Oversight and Control, Wikipedia
References:
- Slashdot Moderation, Rob Malda, Slashdot
- Anonymous Comments: Are they Good or Evil?, Matthew Ingram, GigaOm
- Tough love: Gawker finds making it harder for comments to be seen leads to more (and better) comments, Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism Lab
- Learning from stackoverflow.com, Joel Spolsky (video, first part is insightful general comments about social software design)
Homework: choose a news web site, and come up with a service that it could offer via social software. Give specifics on how that software would work.