The changes that Digg made to its promotion algorithm are coming back to haunt them. Diggers are pushing back, and in doing so are highlighting the difficult challenges of social design. I chronicled Digg’s Design Dilemma back in September. At that point, after yet another claim of gaming had been made against them, Digg decided […]

Continue Reading: Digg’s Disincentive Highlights Social Design Issues Clearly

Tim Berners-Lee: “People have, since it started, complained about the fact that there is junk on the web. And as a universal medium, of course, it is important that the web itself doesn’t try to decide what is publishable. The way quality works on the web is through links. It works because reputable writers make […]

Continue Reading: A Fundamental Truth of the Web

Faithful reader Taddeus Szewczyk points us to an interesting site called Social Design, run by John Emerson. John says he’s still working on his definition of “social design”, but it includes projects that are: are affordable and sustainable are made of renewable materials use energy from renewable sources and increase energy efficiency reduce consumption and […]

Continue Reading: Know any Social Designers?

“The Web fails to capture the nature of social relationships. We want the Web to be more responsive to the existing relationships people actually have,” So says Daniel Wentzner, principal research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), in announcing a new initiative to study the Web, called Web Science Research Initiative […]

Continue Reading: Google, MIT, and IBM to invest in Social Web Research

A common question I get, when people find out what I do, is “How do I get on the first page of results on Google?”. This is the goal of lots of people, from relatives with web sites to small-business owners to huge organizations to bloggers. They want to be in that first window of […]

Continue Reading: Social problems need social design