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Not quite the post I was expecting to be making at 2am (what? not in Second Life?) in the morning but I could not resist making a link to YouTube ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
... an aesthetically pleasing and beautifully visualized take on Web 2.0 technologies from text to hypertext to Web 2.0 and the democratic paradigm of user content production . All put together by Michael Wesch, assistant professor of anthropology at Kansas State University.
As [W]web 2.0 has come to represent more of a marketing term than a set of technologies the meaning of social software also seems to be evolving and shifting - one only has to track the additions on wikipedia which are constantly expanding the term.
I have always quite liked:
"Where normal software links to the inner workings of a computer or other network, social software links people to the inner workings of each other’s thoughts feelings and opinions" (Coates and Butterfield, 2002)
... or others might see something in a more recent appraisal of social software from the 'Devil's dictionary' as commented on by Clay Shirky:
"Any arbitrary collection of algorithms, protocols and metadata that allows friendless agoraphobics to pretend otherwise."
One approach to grasping the term is to trace a history of social software, for example see the evolutionary trail that Christopher Allen uncovers starting with a device called a 'memex' conceived in the 1940s. Yet in many ways one can take simply take the term at face value and perhaps see it not as a hard category but more as zeitgeist - a reflective phrase which merely reflects the current changes in the way that we understand our interactions and connections through the the medium of the Internet. As Tom Coates acknowledges in the subject line of his approach to describing social software ... it is a 'working' definition.
It looks like the BBC is quietly responding to the shifts that are ongoing across the Internet and adding its own, not inconsiderable, presence to the 'web of data' with the appearance of backstage.bbc.co.uk - the beebs new developer network which has been designed to encourage innovation and support talent by allowing access to feeds (and following soon APIs) for remxing and repurposing content. The site was not exactly launched in a blaze of fireworks (there were a few choice words from Ben Hammersley) and so far not much visible activity from the developers as yet but this promises to become one of those sites to watch. And if the supertanker that is the BBC can be this agile then whatever next?
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