... at least it is on MySpace.

I'm late getting to this, but I've been sifting through Ze's stuff lately. This video from "the show" talks about ugly MySpace pages or what's been called the MySpace problem. I know, I keep piling on more of the same stuff in this blog, but I do that kind of thing to accrete knowledge in a topic area. More is better in my book. But this was fun to watch because it's probably where some of the ideas from his Web 0.2 discussion emerged.

In the video Ze is talking about an Ugliest MySpace page contest that he must have proposed. He goes on to talk more about the impact of consumers conversing in the language of visual designers, namely, the deterioration of "good" taste.

"Ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damned cool. ... Over time as consumer created media engulfs the other kind, it's possible that completely new norms develop around the notions of talent and artistic ability.

I doubt that anyone really believes that though or that it would ever happen. Ugliness could be accepted, just as grunginess in music and fashion is accepted as a representation of different ideas that may have appeal to some. But, remember that his point is mainly about experimentation with tools and the language of design, not about ugliness. Ugliness is just a painful result of that process, along with crashing my browser and making me listen to horrible music.

My recent post on Ze Frank on Web 0.2 continues my exploration of the topic of information use with regard to web users and the conversational nature of technologies that support peer to peer discussion, collaboration, and multimedia publishing. As you may know, the ideas about society, culture and the impact of these supporting collaborative technologies are cemented for me in the cluetrain and validated when the blogosphere and social software universe are viewed as information ecologies But what is missing is the literature examining the culture and behavior of enterprise users in these new technology-supported, social network environments.

In response to my post about Web 0.2, a colleague asked,

Does anyone address the question of the distinction between the public user/consumer and the organizational user/consumer? Speifically I mean that users of the "Internet" have desires and they have nothing to lose by freely expressing those desires whiteand pushing for tools to fulfill them. Whereas in the corporate environment there are politics, secrecy/info hording issues, and other factors that may cause "Intranet" users to silence, suppress or censor their desires, leaving us unsure what is really wanted. Or am I making up this distinction?

No. To my knowledge, no one makes that distinction in the literature or blogs that I've read. When we talk about Internet users, we're talking about the public and for the majority of the time we're talking about young , middle to upper class consumers who are active users of ecommerce and social software sites. They are the ones playing with social networking, creating, editing and publishing multimedia -- having conversations using the traditional language of the designer. Consumers are becoming prosumers because they have the means and time. They take risks in breaking rules because they don't know them. They publicize their lives on Flickr, MySpace and YouTube, eschewing privacy because they're being raised in an era of blogs and reality TV. But the main point is they are conversing openly and without fear.

But the corporate environment is obviously different, especially with regard to large enterprises. We don't appear to have as consistent a picture of the corporate intranet user and their behaviors as we do of the prosumer. But my colleague's impression of Intranet users, while insular with regard to its picture of a large enterprise user, is most likely valid. The constraints of a cultural and political environment might affect this type of users' ability or desire to converse in these new media languages and engage in a culture of collaboration, open conversation and risk. I think the degree to which a corporate Intranet user will risk engaging in these behaviors is also dependent on the corporate cultural (e.g. an open culture like that implied at Google vs. that at an older, large enterprise) and on the influence of an employees participation in the more open, collaborative culture of the public Internet. A flickr and MySpace user who happens to work at a huge corporation might be more inclined to act against a cultural norm that's characterized by witholding knowledge rather than sharing it.

I haven't come across any references to published literature researching environmental influences of corporate users yet. But then, I don't spend any time searching deeply on that topic either, e.g. in journal databases. It's a good question. One that I hope to begin exploring. In the meantime, I'm going to ping a few colleagues to see if they can point to any research in this area which might be found, I think, in ethnographic study and incidental findings based on user surveys.

Update: Articles on this topic provided by colleagues

I received some great feedback from colleagues, which I've listed below. Also, see the references added in the comments at the bottom of the page. I will be skimming this literature in the coming days and report back on how they relate to my questions, most importantly this one:

When describing the difference in behavior between the risk taking and openness of the public Internet Prosumer vs. the corporate intranet user are methods discussed that make the evolution of the behavior of the business user more like the prosumer?

1) Lilia Effimova blogged the following.

Work of Dirk Stenmark on intranets (I referred to his paper earlier in knowledge vs. information discussion):

• Stenmark, D. (2005). "How intranets differ from the web: organisational culture's effect on technology (PDF)". Proceedings of ECIS2005, Regensburg, Germany, 26-28 May 2005.

I could also imagine relevant things in the work of Jonathan Grudin - one of his interests is in corporate adoption of "internet technologies". This one should be on the topic:

• Messaging and Formality: Will IM Follow in the Footsteps of Email? (MS Word) T. Lovejoy and J. Grudin, 2003. Proc. INTERACT 2003, 817-820. (PDF)

2) Nick Kings provided an article about the Ben Schneiderman's model for trying to describe differences in behaviour. Schneiderman's book, "Leonardo's Laptop" is available on Amazon. Nick touches upon it in a paper he submitted to a workshop on semantic tagging.

3) Abe Crystal offered references from ASIS&T Digital Library.

• Informational environments: Organizational contexts of online information use. Roberta Lamb, John Leslie King, Rob Kling.
• Maintaining knowledge management systems: A strategic imperative. Kevin C. Desouza, Yukika Awazu.
• INTRANET USERS? INFORMATION-SEEKING BEHAVIOUR: AN ANALYSIS OF LONGITUDINAL SEARCH LOG DATA. Dick Stenmark and Taline Jadaan. ASIS&T Annual Meeting - 2006 (ASIS&T 2006). Austin, Texas, November 3-9, 2006
• A Perfect Storm for Intranet Search: How One Company Navigates. Moderator: J. Gregory Moxness, IT Fellow, CTO Missile Systems, Raytheon

4) Boris Mann offered a related link on the topic of incenting collaboration. The topic references game theory, karma and corporate communities.

• Komment Karma -- "Private and Small World is game proof as there is no benefit in gaming it. (Except inside corporate communities. Workaround there is to ration the Karma so that it gets spent wisely)."

5) Stacy Surla offered this paper:

• Onomi: Social Bookmarking on a Corporate Intranet. (PDF)

6) James Robertson reminded me of their paper:

• When intranet discussion forums work

7) A colleague suggested that I look at the Sociology literature and work by Lee Sproul. He also told me to go back and re-read Shirky and Englebart on related topics.

• Social software as a term. Clay Shirky. Many 2 Many
• Social Software and the Politics of Groups. Clay Shirky.
• Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems. Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish.
• Process, Work Practices & Social Software. Mike Gotta.

I had the opportunity to go to An Event Apart in NYC this week. In addition to meeting some very cool people and get schooled on some areas I haven't been aware of (e.g. Tantek's microformats pres) I also got to experience Ze Frank's Web 0.2 presentation, which was described as "a personal, down-in-the-trenches view of how the technology revolution impacts the way we communicate with a mass audience."

Take aways:

• Conversations resist top-down control
• Users/Consumers want to have a conversation with designers/developers by conversing with prosumer tools and media that were previously only in the professional's domain
• They will show you what's interesting
• Designers/Developers are facilitators of the the conversation
• Web 0.2 gives designer/developer an amazing amount of data to start using in the conversation

His observations are partly drawn from all the literature about the bottom-up evolution of conversations, viral phenomenon and the web itself. It's not new, but it's a very profound reminder he provides by showing us that the most interesting developments are user/consumer driven, e.g. MySpace and YouTube. This is where the conversation gets interesting because the mass of consumer use drives the medium and affects it in terms of economics and sustainability.

It's the same idea, really, as Nardi and O'Day's in their Information Ecology thesis. I keep returning to this over and over every few months. The idea just seems to keep getting validated. The analogy of sustainable biological ecologies seems to apply to so many different information ecologies, whether it's in describing media consumers and their internet publishing/use ecology or the information ecology of enterprise knowledge workers. Sustainability comes from organic growth and localized need or desire.

In any case, the message from Ze for embracing this is the same message many of us have adopted for evangelizing the use of the new wave of grass-roots-oriented enterprise software. He referred to Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0" article in order to give this advice, which I believe paraphrases O'Reilly.

Create architectures that encourage participation and conversation and build value as a side effect of the ordinary use of an application. From the passive to active to interactive.

Excellent stuff. I'm off to finally read that O'Reilly article. I've put it off because it seemed so long, but I see that I can't ignore it.