For next week, pick a topic to write your final paper about. This will be due on the last day of class.

Your topic should have the following three characteristics:

1. It should involve some aspect of a group that communicates with one another partly or wholly using social media.

2. The group should have some shared goal other than the pleasure of one another's company (Linux Kernel developers and My.Barak.Obama yes, ITP mailing list and Stickam no.)

3. The group should be observable by you.
The paper can be analytic -- how does or did this group come together, and how does it work today? -- or it can be projective -- how could this group be changed for the better? (Including the possibility of designing a way for latent groups to come together around some external activity.)

There is no fixed set of analytic models (users/goals/tools, logic of collective action, etc) and no standard set of questions (as with the 'proposed change' question from the midterm.) Instead, the design of the questions you want to ask yourself is part of choosing the subject.

--

Notes on Group Analysis) by Clay Shirky
1. How many people? XS ~ 6 S ~ 12 M ~ 50 L ~ 100 XL ~ 1000
2. How was it founded? happened --- external/internal ---planned
3. What constitutes membership?
4. How tightly bound are the tools?
5. What is the boundary condition? center --- edge --- horizon
6. What keeps people coming back?
7. Do People in the group transact?
8. Does the group act?
9. How much "real world" is there?
10. How synchronized are the interactions?

--

LibraryThing Notes:

experience, utility
-
LibraryThing is a new site for book lovers.
It's basically two sites in one.
LibraryThing helps you create a library-quality catalog of your books. You can do all of them or just what you're reading now.
And because everyone catalogs online, they also catalog together. LibraryThing connects people based on the books they share.

LibraryThing is VERY easy to join.

You don't have to type everything in. LibraryThing gets all the right data from Amazon.com and over 78 libraries around the world, including the Library of Congress.

Your catalog shows all the books you've entered. You can look at your catalog in either "list" or "cover" view.
You can search your books, sort your books, edit book information, and apply "tags."
You can rate your books and write reviews.

LibraryThing knows a lot about books.
The book information page gives you library-quality data.
The social information page shows you who has the book and what they think about it.
LibraryThing cares about books, not about SELLING books.

Your profile connects you to everyone else on LibraryThing. If you want, you can tell people all about yourself and your library. (Or, you can keep it completely private.)
Your profile connects you to people who share your books. With over 190,000 users and 13 million books in the system, you'll find some "eerily similar" libraries.

You can create and join groups on LibraryThing. You can make a group for a club, a place, or even a private group for just your friends.
You can talk in the group forum, search all group members' libraries at once, or check out the Group Zeitgeist to spot shared books.
With Talk, the forum system, you can see the conversations happening in all groups, or just your groups. You can also find just the topics that mention your books.

LibraryThing knows how books connect, providing some of the best recommendations on the web.
LibraryThing can analyze your entire catalog and come up with 100 or so books you might want to check out.
The UnSuggester will give you humorous recommendations of books you probably wouldn't enjoy.

Got a blog? The LibraryThing blog widget tells people what you're reading.
Got a cell phone? You can check your LibraryThing catalog while standing in a bookstore.
Don't believe us? Here's SOME of what people are saying about LibraryThing.
You're DONE.
-
13 million vs 1.3 million tags

Amazon’s shortfall matters. To do anything useful with tags, you need numbers. Pg 3

Some tags by ISBN, pg 4.