Sometimes discussions about computers and Internet give me a déjà vu feeling. As if I read about it in the sociological and cultural studies literature before. Yesterday I had such feeling with the concept of social architecture. The association might be not that obvious, so I may be just using two different ideas to develop my own. Anyways…

According to wikipedia.org, social software is a kind of software that lets people communicate and collaborate through computer networks. Using this software people create shared, interactive spaces. As I understand from the post about social architecture as the foundation of the blogosphere (see the link above), social architecture refers to a combination of components of human-computer interaction based on social software.

Three components or "social agents" are present in the blogosphere: the human creators, the human readers and the social software (machines). Humans leave social traces or "gestures" (by linking, tagging, etc.), while machines analyze the blogs to provide relevant or valued information according to users’ needs. Again, I'm not sure I understood the idea completely, but it seems that social architecture consists of humans who somehow connect and communicate and software (and hardware?) that allows them to do it. This idea (of agents, gestures and relationships) reminded me of the idea of a cultural diamond.

W. Griswold in her book "Cultures and societies in a changing world" (2003, 2nd ed.) talks about a cultural diamond that represents elements of culture and relationships between them. Four points of the diamond are cultural creators, cultural receivers, cultural objects (symbols, beliefs, values and practices) and social world (the context in which culture is created and experienced). A complete understanding of any cultural phenomenon requires understanding all four points and links between all of them.

The blogosphere as a cultural phenomenon can be represented with a blogging pentagon.

Understanding the blogosphere and its social architecture characteristics becomes clearer and richer if we take the blogging pentagon into consideration. Some points of this pentagon need further elaboration (e.g. What a blog gesture would include? Or why it's social software and not the software-hardware-networks combination) but 5 points and 10 relationships should provide a comprehensive list of emerging issues to deal with. And it should be better than the concept of social architecture because it refers directly to the blogosphere and implies multiple relationships between various elements.

If anybody is interested in political blogging, here is a report on emergence of the progressive blogosphere from the New Politics Institute. The report provides an overview of the politics of blogging and the comparison of the progressive and conservative online political communities as well as gives suggestions for involving blogs and bloggers in political campaigns.

I'd say it's a very general report but it has some insights on what's going with political blogging.

Wikispaces - an online space for groupwork for ordinary people.

Wikispaces is a place for people to easily build web pages together. Anyone can join the site for free, create a space, and begin contributing within a matter of minutes.
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We're firm believers that wikis can be revolutionary tools for building communities. But most wikis are very engineer-focused: hard to use, buried under busy user interfaces, full of features only a geek could love. Wikispaces is our attempt to build a wiki that's easy to use and easy to adopt for all kinds of audiences. We've kept the tool simple so that you can focus on building content, talking with other members, and growing your community.

I wonder whether wikis can (will) be as widely adopted as blogs.

Even though Wikinews project has been up for quite a while, I just discovered it. From Wikinews manifesto:

We seek to create a free source of news ... build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.
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While Wikinews aims to be a useful resource of its own, it will also provide an alternative to proprietary news agencies like the Associated Press or Reuters; that is, it will allow independent media outfits to get a high quality feed of news free of charge to complement their own reporting. ... Even if our articles will initially be few, they will be free, permanently available and not require registration before reading.
While we are faced with many new challenges, Wikinews will adopt the key principles which have made Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia websites what they are today: neutrality, free content, and an open decision making process.

Very exciting project, it'd be interesting to get data on readership, authenticity and patterns of collaboration. I wanted to start the Russian section but then realized that I'm not sure why I would want to do it (besides that it's fun). I can understand Wikinews in English - the ideas of independent and grass-root media as well as the idea of wikis are quite wide-spread. But Serbian or Ukrainian Wikinews? Does anybody read them? Can people even find them?

I volunteered to maintain a new collaborative blog (ASIST SIG-BWP) created to support the ASIST special interest group on blogs, wikis and podcasting. As its name shows, the blog will collect and post information related to blogs, wikis, and podcasting (news, conferences, resources, etc.)

In addition to being another read in the relevant area, for me it will be a great chance to be in the community of smart and like-minded people.