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| It has begun - Friday, January 21, 2005 at 10:26 p.m. |
After reading one of Amanda neechan's many posts, I thought that I might as well give my brief social software biography.
At first there was nothing, and then there was light. That light came from within a pokeball...
Well, I first joined chat rooms when I was around 9 years old. However, there came a 2-4 years hiatus on that and I did not return until I was 12/13. When I did return, my former chat room of choice (freezone.com) didn't exist anymore. It didn't slow me down much as I went on to explore other sites and, powered by my undying love for pocket monsters, I stumbled upon a basic java chat room off the pokemasters.com site. I made lots of friends and eventually helped out with site, both in the chat rooms and the message forums.
This was my first time using message forums and I loved it. It was like a slow motion chat, no longer did I have to stay up late if I wanted to talk to my friends in Europe. I would simply chat with them on the forum and others may comment as well and I could ignore them if I liked. It was ideal. Even though pokemasters eventually shut down, my love for forums continued...I joined those for gamewinners.com, megatokyo.com, etc. No matter what the main focus of the site is, the discussions in the forums are always widespread. There are talks about philosophy, interests in anime, even complete chess games are played on forums.
Recently however, with the development of blogs, activities on forums have slowed. Even I have abandoned the forums and left to pursue other interests. Currently I am co-heading a spoof ring on xanga where all members have the passwords to all the other spoofs blogs and can spoof anyone's real blog or even themselves. For example Moses of Hanes is a spoof of Rose of Pain.
From one kind of online community I have moved to join another. I have decided to follow the social software of online communities. However, because many things fall under this category, I have decided to limit myself to communities that utilize the karma system. To me, this feels like the next logical step up. It integrates the concepts of both forums and blogging. There is the sense of wholeness that forums give, you do not have to hunt around for various blogs that might interest you. The system is basically like a blog where anyone can post and anyone can comment. In order to keep chaos in control, commentors can grant positive or negative karma points that would affect the poster's status within the community. This has a few effects:
1. It encourages quality posting
2. Most people post links to interesting finds and this allows other quality sites to get exposure
3. Need to know news and other current events are posted quickly since posters would be fighting for karma points.
4. Allows good "citizens" to have more power in the community (such as having more influencing in granting karma or even mod powers)
A quick example of a simple karma system site would be Slashdot however an even better site to see karma in action is SE A word of warning, however, the contents of SE is considered to be quite dodgey. However, I've been following the site for the past week or so now and the porn to interesting stuff ratio seems to be at about 1:5...so there are lots of interesting things to be seen there.
Next post: I'll do some research and see how the karma system evolved. Hopefully my findings will support my hypothesis that this is the next logical step from blogs and forums.
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Cheers,
MrScaryMuffin |
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