Joe's Jottings

Many years ago there was a joke in techy circles that likened Microsoft to the Star Trek aliens ‘The Borg’.  It appeared at the time (mid 1990s) that Microosft were indeed determined to assimilate everything they encountered and absorb the technology of other companies in to their own.  Well, like the Borg in Trek, Microsoft finally found that they couldn’t assimilate everything.  But today there’s a new Borg Queen on the block, in teh form of Google.

Google Buzz was launched as an adjunct to Gmail, and Google got themselves in to hot water at the launch by having the system automatically follow everyone in your Gmail contacts list.  This was regarded as pretty heavy handed on Google’s part – and Google obviously concurred to some degree as they introduced changes to this part of the system.  The problem for Google is that they have a lousy history of handling privacy issues in both their Search tools and Gmail, and I guess starting a new product off with a similar disregard for the perceptions of their users was not a sound move.

So, how relevant is this move by Google?  I have to say that I’m not convinced that Google will actually represent major competition to Facebook or Twitter with Buzz (or, for that matter, with Wave).  The lock in to Google’s infrastructure of Buzz is something that Facebook doesn’t have, for instance.  I don’t have to have a Facebook email account, and I don’t do my searching through Facebook.  And therein lies the problem for me – and it all comes back to Google’s database of intentions that I’ve mentioned before in this blog.  The more Google can derive about the way in which people use Search, who they interact with, what ‘clusters’ of interests people have – even anonymously – the more value Google’s database of intention is.  You might want to take a look at some of my previous articles about Google – Google and The Dead Past, The importance of Real Time Search and Google seeks browser dominance - to get a feel for my views on Google.   Google’s strategic moves have been consistently to get Google’s search into everything we do.  Gmail was their first crack at this with personal communications, and now with Wave and Buzz they have the tools to map social networks, and the search behaviours of people on those social networks, especially if people remain logged in to Google accounts whilst the do their searching.

Let’s pretend…..you are logged in to your Buzz account and you search for something.  Google can link your search interests to those of the people in your social network, and vice versa.  They can thus add the collective behaviour of your searches to their database of intentions – remember what I said about the Borg?   And we’re not even thinking about the additional data provided by Google Apps…

 Google are also purchasing a ‘Social Search’ tool that allows people to ask questions of their social groups; I think we can safely assume that the responses will be squirreled away somewhere for future use.

Even when anonymised, this sort of information builds in to a very valuable commodity that Google can sell to future ‘partners’.  Google’s behaviour at the moment seems to be to develop or acquire a series of discrete elements of Social Networking technology that they’re bringing together under the existing account system of Gmail / Google Accounts, which makes perfect sense.  At one time Microsoft filled in some of the gaps in their various offerings in a similar way to allow them access to market segments that they were still trying to penetrate.  Perhaps Google have learnt from the software behemoth.

But they have a way to go – here are what I consider Google’s biggest challenges.

1. The attitude of the public towards Google is not entirely positive, and whilst Facebook have had numerous privacy problems their defined market presence in Social Networking and not in Social Networking, Search, Email, Productivity tools, kitchen sink manufacture, etc.  
2. Facebook may easily lose market share to a good competing service; their constant re-vamping of User Interface and buggy code upsets users but at the moment there is no viable competation for most people as Facebook is where their social network is.  Google would have to get people to migrate en-masse and over a short period of time to get the sort of success FB show.
3. Wave is certainly buggy; Gmail and Buzz are designed to not run on IE6 and it’s debatable how long Google will support other Microsoft Browsers – I wonder how many people would want themselves tied in to Google at the level of software as well as applications?  Like I said earlier – Facebook doesn’t require me to have a Facebook email address.
4. What’s Google’s target market; Wave seemed to be a solution looking for a problem; Buzz seems to be a similar ‘half way house’ affair that in some ways would have been best placed in Wave. Twitter and Facebook tend to provide specific groups of users with a defined user experience and functionality.  Quite what Buzz and Wave and Gmail together provide that isn’t available elsewhere is not clear to me.

So….my thoughts?  If this is Google’s attempt to park their tanks on Facebook’s lawn, then they’ve invoked the ‘Fail Whale’.

As anyone who’s ever heard me rant about the ‘numbers game’ side of networking – especially on sites such as Ecademy, Linked in or Facebook – will testify, I’m a great believer in quality rather than quantity, and until the software on such sites can do more for me than it currently does in terms of augmenting my memory and the cognitive abilities I apply when trying to remember ‘Is Fred interested in Mousterian Variability or is that Jill?’ then I use these sites to more conveniently keep in touch with roughly the same number of people I would via non computer based means.

So I was pleased today to read this item, suggesting that the brain has a top limit on how many people we can keep track of.   It’s called Dunbar’s Number and is suggested by anthropologist Robin Dunbar to be about 150.  It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s been realised for years that there are optimum sizes for small teams of between 6 and 10 people, which fits with the old military idea of the ‘Brotherhood of the table’ – the ideal size of a small, self contained, fighting unit being a section of about a dozen men.  In such small teams personal loyalties develop and the team bonds quickly.  Larger groupings are employed in companies, but few large companies now look to any ‘business unit’ as having more than a couple of hundred people in them, as management becomes impersonal and the whole unit becomes less effective.

I’ve held for many years, even before the advent of Internet social networking sites, that the quantity over quality brand of personal networking is more to do with train spotting, stamp-collecting or the MI5 Registry than it is to do with maintaining close and friendly business or social relationships.  The numbers approach reduces everything to the level of transactions -’What can ‘x’ do for me today?’, or ‘I need to know ‘z’, who can help me?’  Whilst this is indeed part of social relationships, the more is beautiful version of social networking makes it all there is to having a network, which is painfully sad.

The natural extension to this approach is what we’re seeing now; many ‘numbers based’ networking sites end up as platforms for the exchange of low-value ‘opportunities’ between people, which are rarely of value to the recipient.  Spam may be too harsh a word, but what else can you call it?  If you have a network of 2,000 people, then you’re much more likely to feel OK about ‘cold calling’ them all than you would if you had a more tightly defined network of respected confidantes, friends and valuable professional associates.  Same on Twitter – it’s easy to spam 20,000 people with marketing messages in 140 characters because you simply cannot know them all.  You’re working as a publisher.  there’s nothing wrong with that but don’t fool yourself in to believing that your relationships with those 2,000 or 20,000 people are anything other than, in most cases, opportunities for you to push your message to them.

Of course, true relationships do develop from these large numbers of what I call ‘transactional friends’, but they enter in to the 150.  The vast majority of these thousands of friends and followers seem, therefore, to be just stamps in a collector’s album.

I for one don’t want to be a collector!

I’ll admit it.  Deep within me is a snob.  As far as I’m concerned, the online world started heading down hill when you no longer had to know how to install a full TCP/IP stack to use the Internet.  Most online discussion forums should, in my opinion, have an intelligence test before you’re allowed to post on them – basically the ability, for an English language website, to string together English sentences without text speech or foul language is a good starting point.  OK…where was I….oh yes. 

Seesmic, the company who produce  the popular Twhirl Twitter application, are producing an application that they basically believe will bring Twitter to the masses of online users who are yet to Tweet.  The software has been endorsed by Twitter and developed in collaboration with Microsoft, who may be planning on installing it as part of Windows.  The program, called ‘Look’, is designed to be used by people who’re not currently tweeting and who may not feel that they have much to say – looking at it I’d say that it appears that twitter are starting to commoditise their platform – increase the numbers of users and volumes of traffic prior to some efforts towards monetisation of their network.  In yestreday’s piece about BlippyI mentioned the ‘database of intentions’; perhaps Twitter are looking towards a massive increase in numbers of users to swell the flow of data that can be used to generate another part of this database.   Twitter’s traffic / user levels have also been flat for a while – perhaps twitter see this move as a means of breaking through the current plateau and getting things moving again before the next new thing comes along.

Now, as you can gather from the title I have a few issues with what’s happening.  To some people, the idea of ‘dumbing down’ Twitter may sound daft – after all, many folks think it’s pretty dumb already – so let me explain what I mean.  Twitter is a platform that carries messages which users can filter and hence determine what they see.  In principle, therefore, a large influx of new people shouldn’t necessarily change the culture too much; after all, people filter which Tweets they see.  If Twitter does become a hotbed of text speech and obscenity (OK, even more than now! ) then it shouldn’t affect most of us because we can filter out the noise.  This is a different proposition to spam email or discussion Forums where the signal to noise ration – i.e. the amount of good stuff compared to the dross – does decline radically when larger numbers of users come on board.

However…all this new traffic will be using Twitter’s infrastructure, and unless the twitter infrastructure is improved I can see many more occurrences of the ‘Fail Whale’ in the months after the introduction of this new package.

As for the dumbing down; I am concerned; if Twitter are going in this direction to play the ‘numbers game’ then I can see good content becoming harder and harder to find.  Twitter’s search facilities are pretty poor; using them to search through large amounts of juvenilia for the valuable nuggets of content is not going to be easy.

I’m old enough to have used an address book and still have a Rolodex on the phone table.  When I actually sit down and think about the people with whom I have reasonably regular ‘quality’ contact in a 3 month period, either electronically or face to face, it probably amounts to no more than a hundred or so.  I guess it’s safe to say that in the world of networking I’m a ‘quality over quantity’ sort of fellow.  I’ve never been a great collector of large numbers of business cards or people details – collections are fine for stamps, coins and locomotive numbers but are kind of creepy for people.

Back in the late 1990s / early 2000s I used a networking site called Ecademy – I stopped after a while because it seemed that people were making contact with you purely from a sales oriented viewpoint.  Allow me to explain – if I’m interested in AI, and someone brings something to my attention that’s even vaguely related to the field – that’s cracking!  That’s exactly what I’m there for – and hopefully I’ll be able to reciprocate.  On the other hand, if someone steams in with a ‘Hi, I’m Fred, I’m in marketing, blah, blah, blah’ I get the feeling I’m receiving a boilerplate message which is likely to end up as a boiler room selling attempt.  The site seemed to encourage numbers of contacts over quality – and that’s one of the reasons why I eventually jacked it in.

I’ve noticed in recent days that I’m being followed by people who are following thousands of others.  And the odd thing is most of them appear to be selling something that is as relevant to me as a comb to Sir Patrick Stewart.  The ‘Bio’ of one such follower (soon to be ex-follower in my daily purge) – “A Business Dedicated to providing free online MLM training videos, articles, books and webinars”.  If I received an email like this I’d call it spam – pure and simple.  I know that Twitter has policies around spam, but my point is that most folks following 20,000 people seem to be in the MLM, ’sales and marketing’, ’social media consultancy’ sort of areas.  They’re cold calling – they sure ain’t networking.

Bottom line – there is NO WAY, realistically, that the content generated by the 20,000 people these bods follow is ever registering in any meaningful manner with these people – I assume it’s simply being harvested electronically and searched for keywords that might suggest a sales lead. 

Joe’s categorisation of Twitter users…

1. Vast number of followers, smallish number of followed – publisher / celeb.
2. Vast number of followers, vast number of followed – probably sales / mass marketing
3. Smallish followers, large number of followed – probably spammer
4. Smallish followers / smallish followed – personal / business networking

OK – it’s not a brilliant classification but it works for me.  Just watch out if you’re in category 2 or 3 ‘cos I’m binning you!

 Whilst I was drafting this yesterday, I came across this piece on the same topic:  http://juliorvarela.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/when-twitter-numbers-are-meaningless/

Don’t get too hung up on your numbers on Twitter.  If you’re following lots of people, just check WHY.  Do they add value to your day?  Amuse / entertain you?  Educate you?  Guide or enlighten you?  If not, ditch ‘em.  And those following you – just take a look at their numbers and think about what I’ve said.

And I hope you don’t chuck me off your lists.

Long before it was the title of a movie, it was a fairly well known saying. 

In the UK it was more likely to be ‘What happens in Blackpool, stays in Blackpool’, or, as time passed, what happened in Estonia stays in Estonia. I was a mark of secrecy that was usually associated with the ceremonials of secret societies; it didn’t matter that you’d abseiled down Blackpool Tower naked except for a sock on your head, carrying a crate of beer and singing ‘Unchained Melody’ at 3am.  If you found your boss in flagrante delicto with Myrtle from accounts, playing strip-poker, well, that’s something you were not going to be allowed to use in blackmail.  Because of the simple, unwritten law of the hard playing world of the works outing / stag weekend / hen weekend / mate’s trip to Skegness.   

‘What happens here, stays here’.

It used to be up there with the other rules of social nicety.  Basically, if you did get up to alcohol fuelled high jinks on one of these events, you were OK.  It wouldn’t get home or back to the office (unless you contracted some social disease, got pregnant or turned up in the local  Magistrate’s Court or A&E).  You might have shown yourself to your friends and colleagues as a hypocritical, deceitful, lecherous alcoholic but you were given the ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card of the event falling under the rule of  ’What happens here, stays here.’

Just to be serious for a moment, there are even ‘legitimate’ versions of the rule – self-development weekends, religious retreats, etc.  What happens there, stays there, unless you want to share your OWN experiences – but no one else’s.

It’s an incredibly sensible rule for the latter type of event, and to be honest I reckon it can be a reasonably sensible code of behaviour to abide by for participants in the other events mentioned above.  

And it’s a way of life and social behaviour that is slipping away.  Whenever you go out these days there will inevitably be someone taking photographs which within 30 seconds show up on Facebook.  I’m one of those people who hate having a photo taken – apart from looking 20 pounds heavier than I am, I always get photographed with a stupid expression on my face or doing something daft.  That sort of thing showing up online is OK to deal with – it’s the other stuff that gives the running commentary of what happened, who spoke to who, who sat next to whom – even for a few minutes, etc.  The minutiae of a social event that to be honest is of fuck-all relevance to anyone who wasn’t there.  Those who are there, know what happened.  Those who weren’t there, rarely need to know what happened except out of vicarious curiosity (OK…nosiness!)

I don’t necessarily want to be photographed when I’m slightly drunk at a non-work related, social event when I take a quick trip and spill drinks.  What would once have been a momentary source of amusement for all who witnessed it that you probably wouldn’t even have remembered the following day now becomes a cast in stone moment on Facebook.  If you’re REALLY unlucky and surrounded by geeks, it will also be Tweeted – which isn’t as bad as the Tweetstream is pretty ephemeral – but you get the idea.

Please people – just go back to taking and posting a nice big group photo at the beginning, share any candid snapshots between you and people who were there directly rather than through your 200 friend Facebook page, and let what happened in the pub, stay in the pub, in 2010.

I’ve always been one of the world’s great hoarders…one of those folks who hangs on to things because they may one day be useful, one who starts something and then has to sweat cobs to get it finished.

I guess it’s when I noticed I had 3 pages of accounts, user names and passwords that I thought I might have some issues of spreading msyelf a little thin around the online world!  A few more minutes of checking some of the accounts out – and finding that I’d last used them constructively maybe 3 or 4 years ago – made me realise that dragging behind you a load of digital deadwood is similar to having an attic, cellar, garage or study full of physical junk.  And the nature of the online world is that it’s really difficult to get back to where you left off – even if the site’s still up and running.  

We’ve recently been spending a lot of time tidying up around the Towers here – sorting out books, clearing out old stuff, and it struck me over the weekend that maybe I need to get some online tidiness and focus as well.  And the relevance of the blog item title?  I’ll get there eventually….

So…what to keep, what to throw, or is it what parts of me to keep, what parts of me to throw away?  Ironically, especially considering my previous posts on the subject, top of the keep list are Facebook and Twitter, followed by this August publication that you’re reading right now.  My plan is to:

1. Suspend my accounts on various discussion forums, and focus on stroking my ego through my Twitter and Facebook accounts and this blog.   Seriously – I think I am spread waaaay too thin out in cyberspace and really want to be in a position to publish some ‘words with weight’ when I want to.
2. Close the shutters on a few hobby sites I’ve run for a few years.  They’ve never attracted much traffic and I’d rather take them ‘off the grid’ rather than leave them looking forlorn.  Good backups will ensure nothing is lost, and who knows, one day they may return – alternatively they may simply be allowed to disappear forever.  My last shot at an Online Community - Coffeehouse Chat - is already mothballed.  Shame on you who offered support and never came…
3. There should also be a commensurate loss of email accounts.  I don’t know abouyt you but I find that whenever a new web site gets set up you almost always set a new email address up to go with it….
4. Kill off the accounts on any number of sites that I’ve tried before buying and found wanting – The well, LastFM, Ecademy, etc.  Probably even Linked In and other business networking sites.  I don’t believe that my brand is, as yet, ‘hot’ enough to warrant being on these sites.  I get buried under all the other software developers, wannabe entrepreneurs, etc. 

I suppose my bottom line realisation in the last 12 months is that a lot of my current online (and offline) world is of greater relevance to the Joe Pritchard of 5 or 6 years ago than the Joe Pritchard I live with today.  It can’t possibly be healthy to live in the past – there’s not going to be room or even inclination to move forward to fresh fields and pastures new if your world is already full.  Various things have conspired to chop off quite important anchors to my past, and I’ve become increasingly aware that people have impressions of me that are no longer true, but are like looking at some image of me in some sort of Dorian Gray style painting of how I was some years back.  Hopefully, by clearing out the crud I’ll give my self space to move on to new things, whilst still keeping in touch with the people who really matter to me in the here and now.

And the title of this piece?  Rick Nelson bought it all home to me in these lyrics:

I went to a garden party to reminisce with my old friends
A chance to share old memories and play our songs again
When I got to the garden party they all knew my name
But no one recognized me I didn’t look the same

But it’s all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see you can’t please ev’ryone so
You got to please yourself

Smart bloke.  Time to re-invent.

OK….I remember a year or so ago saying i’d never join Facebook, and then making myself look a pudding within a month or so when i started using Facebook to keep me in touch with friends after I stopped using another online service.

Now, around the same time I also made a brief investigation of the Twitter service – some more information here.  Whilst I can’t argue that it’s popular, and has attracted a vast amount of traffic and interest, including being used in the Australian bushfires and the Mumbai terrorist attacks, I’m still yet to be convinced of the value of telling the world precisely what I’m doing in 140 byte chunks.

Let’s face it, I’m too busy / idle to maintain my Facebook status more than once a day on average, so the idea of me managing to ‘tweet’ happily several times a day on the Twitter system is probably minimal.  And I’m not convinced of the overall value of most of the content that seems to be generated on Twitter; allow me to explain.

Too short!

To begin with, 140 characters is shorter than an SMS message, and unless you’re skilled at putting highly informative short messages together, the informational content of such messages is limited purely by the size of the message, unless you send a string of such messages.

Too distracting!

We then move on to whether Tweeting encourages the attention span of a boiled potatoe; it’s a disruptive technology in all the wrng ways – it simply disrupts your attention by a string of pointless inanities appearing in your Phone, Twitter client or web browser.

What does it do that other media doesn’t?

In terms of brevity you have SMS messages or Facebook statuses.  In terms of information content you have Email, blogs or Forum posts.  Tweets are ephemeral – they’re not naturally persistent and are as short lived as real birdsong.

So, what the Hell is it all about?  I’m aware of the use of this sort of technology in crisis situations but is this genuinely making appropriate use of the available technology?  I’m yet to be convinced that Twitter is anything but another toy for the technorati, and one whose lifespan in it’s current form is probably going to be limited by the emerging financial realism in the world.  I’ve heard of alternative uses – people using hardware to automatically place Twitter messages in to the ‘twittersphere’ form such things as potted plants and the old standby of IT departments, the drinks machine.  These messages are then picked up by a piece of software listening on Twitter for ‘tweets’ from the appropriate account.  This is nothing different to using UDP packets, for example, but at least there’s a more easily accessible interface here.

But I’m not convinced – someone, anyone, convince me of the value of this application, PLEASE!

I came across two articles today which are related – one informing us that Facebook had finally made it to number 1 in a league of social networking sites:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/06/facebook_over_only_in_islingto.html

 and the other telling us that minining the social netspace for business is a waste of time and energy.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/17/isosystems_networking_talk/

Like many things in life I was a late comer to Facebook and within a few weeks of me joining was being told by all and sundry that Facebook was a spent force and that all the cool kids were probably going elsewhere.  My first thought was ‘Thank God – no more being poked by a dead sheep’ or whatever, followed by a quick examination of how many contacts I had in Facebook overlapped with contacts in my E-Mail directory.

Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I was reading an old favourite of mine ‘The Networking Book’, by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps
http://www.netage.com/pub/books/NetBook/netbook.html

In one chapter an interesting observation was made about the nature of networks; should a network be regarded as a salad bowl or a melting pot?

Before you start wondering whether you’ve encountered the rogue ramblings of a wannabe chef, I should explain; a ’salad bowl’ network is one where the individual members retain their identity and collaborate together, much like a well designed salad’s ingredients do.  The ‘melting pot’ network, on the other hand, is one in which the individual members no longer retain their individuality but become ‘one’.

This observation was made about a ‘real world’ network, but it is equally applicable to online networks and communities. My own preference is for the salad bowl, but with a few safeguards.  After all, whilst it’s great to have the individual flavours of the ingredients of a salad be distinctly noticeable, if whole cloves of garlic and a few anchovies were to be added to a salad bowl supplying a whole table, those who didn’t want the strong flavours would be rather annoyed. So, it kind of makes sense to not throw all the strong ingredients in to the bowl when only a few may want to have them; why not have a few alternative salad bowls, or even small side dishes with garlic cloves and anchovies in (and a further dish with walnuts for those of us suffering from nut-allergies) that diners can take from at their leisure without inflicting their tastes on others.

Electronically, therefore, the analogy would be create a community that meets the needs of the vast majority of people, whilst either providing sub-sections of the site for specialists, or even pointing those who require something slightly spicier to other sites.

A classic example here is the frequent cry for ‘Adult Sections’ on web sites, or ‘Games’ sections to include Flash or other online games.  These would, to me, be the garlic cloves or anchovies; a ‘Warez’ section or part of a site that suggest locations for illegal copies of media would be ‘Walnuts’, as such a section is likely to get you in to big trouble with the authorities, just as a walnut where it’s not expected can cause serious illness for an allergy sufferer.

My own approach is that there are already many sites offering these options for people; rather than re-invent the wheel, it may well be better to direct people away from your salad bowl to someone else’s.

Well, after 4 years I recently left an Internet Forum which I’d grown very attached to.  The reason I left was pretty straightforward to me, and in my ‘Bye Bye’ post I simply commented that I was leaving because the culture of the site had changed.  I’d always told users of the site that if they didn’t like the place they should just move on rather than throw hissy fits at how the place was run, so it would have been hypocritical of me to do anything else!

I thought that I’d made my reasons pretty clear, until a user of that Forum posted a comment questioning what I meant by culture.  And it’s a good question, that has set me thinking.  So, for what it’s worth, here’s some thoughts on online culture and when to move along.  So, here’s a few thoughts.

First of all, what is meant by culture in general?  As always, you get a lot of choice with definitions.  I liked these three:

1. a particular society at a particular time and place; “early Mayan civilization”
2. the tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group
3. patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. …

I believe they apply equally to an Internet Forum as they do to a ‘real world’ community; what differs is the way in which the culture is expressed.  Online it will be in words and other media, either in real time or time-shifted; offline it will be in words, media, activity and face to face interaction, again either in real time or time-shifted.

I started also considering ‘Ethos’:

“The disposition, character, or fundamental values peculiar to a specific person, people, culture, or movement ”

so I guess that the Ethos of an Internet site is the outward manifestation of it’s culture? 

Which led on to ’Rules of Conduct’, which I’ve always regarded as the stick with which to support the two previously defined carrots.  Within any comunity, there are always rules of conduct backed up by consequences which help maintain the culture.  On an internet site these rules of conduct may range from none existent through to fairly tight. Ignoring for the time being the ‘Laws of the Land’, I think it’s fair to say that in general terms the Rules are rarely required if all users of an Internet site follow the Ethos of the site and respect the underlying culture.  This is, at least, what I’ve always thought to be the case.

Culture isn’t static; it evolves.  The degree of evolution (or even revolution) depends, I believe, on the following:

1. Rate of turnover of users of the site
2. Strength of the culture and the degree to which the ‘Site Elders’ (old established members and the controlling authorities of the site) support the existing culture.
3. The comfort of the vast majority of users with the existing culture.

When the culture changes, there is often going to be a correspoinding change to the ethos of the site, and hence eventually to the Rules.  Should the cultural change be the equivalent of a ‘hostile takeover’ then it is up to the elders to apply the rules of the site to maintain the culture;  should the change be evolution or the acceptance of the need and desire  to change by the population of the site, then the role of the elders is simply to accept the cultural shift and smooth through it’s effects by amending the rules.

My own feeling is that whatever the cause of the change, changes to Ethos and Rules are a given if cultural change takes place or is allowed to happen.  Should those changes not happen, the result is a community which is almost schizophrenic; the culture may have changed but the public ethos and rules may not have altered to go with that change, resulting in inconsistency.

And so to the rule of two feet…

The ‘Rule of Two Feet’ or ‘Law of Two Feet’ was something I encountered many years ago; “If something isn’t working for you, go somewhere else and find something that WILL work for you”.  Another, rendition of this Law is “The people who attend are the right people”.  It is a Law driven by culture and ethos; if follwoed by people it does tend to prevent cultural change and development in a community except in very specific ways.

1. If enough people walk away, the culture may collapse or be changed to stop the loss.
2. The people who walk away may, if sufficient in number, gather together to form a new culture with which they are happy.

What usually happens to people who follow the Law is that they find communities with cultures and ethos’ that suit them.

Which brings me to my final observation…why, if an online community has a culture and ethos that someone finds unbearable, do they spend large amounts of time and energy fighting to change it?  Why not go and establish oneself elsewhere?