Newsapple
design, internet
June 29, 2004, 03:18 PM
I came across a video of the next version of Safari's news aggregator capabilities (via Andy, via Dave). I was struck by one thing; damn, but it looks a lot like Newsable! Right down to the sort and archive (or "recent articles") options. Of course, I can't really tell that much about its full feature repertoire from peering at the short and small video, but that's the impression I got about the core interaction, anyway.
I'll admit, it's improbable that Apple really got the idea from me (though it wouldn't be the first time ;), but it is encouraging to see that what I came up with was very similar to their design. Seems I must have been on the right track, at least.
On the other hand, this does cast Newsable's future into a certain amount of doubt, since I'm not sure I want to compete with the likes of Apple. Chad and I had some ideas for new directions we could take Newsable (not gonna tell you what they are; Apple might steal them), so maybe we'll have a chance to work on that someday. In the meantime, though, maybe it's time to start thinking about that WYSIWYG blogging tool I've been meaning to write...
Gmail and the Desirability of Scarcity
internet, society & sociology
June 28, 2004, 12:23 PM
I haven't made a big deal out of it, but I've had a Gmail account since around the time Google publicly announced the service (thanks to Kevin). It's a great little webapp, perhaps the best email client I've ever used, but that's not the point of this post.
Since April, Google has given current users of the service the ability to invite a limited number (2 or 3) of their friends into the fold. This has had the effect of introducing an artificial scarcity of Gmail accounts. I'm guessing that it's also had the effect of making them much more desirable than they otherwise would have been.
When Kevin first sent me the invite, my first thought was "ho hum, another webmail service". But then I got curious, largely because I felt rather privileged. I was cool enough to know Kevin and get early access to this new service. So I signed up, and wound up moving all my email to a webmail client (something I'd never expected I'd do).
Granted, Gmail's superior design and storage capacity were critical factors in this decision. Had Gmail failed to differentiate itself from its competition, I would have taken a look but turned away and gone back to Entourage. But the invite system was enough to convince me to take that first look. Often the weakness of good human-centered design is that it isn't always apparent at first glance, so people may never buy the product even if it would turn out to benefit them greatly. The invite served to make that jump, at least for me.
And it seemed to work for other people as well. During the first round of invites Gmail accounts were going for upwards of $50 on Ebay (now that they're much less scarce, their price has dropped dramatically, of course). The website Gmail Swap was created for people looking to trade things in exchange for Gmail accounts.
I don't know whether this was intentional on Google's part; there are certainly other reasons they might have done it. After all, handing out limited invites makes it easier to control how quickly the application scales so that Google's server admins don't get deluged with an unexpectedly high numbers of new users. But the marketing angle is more interesting; one wonders whether it would apply to other products. Perhaps this is a form of computer-based social networking that 1) doesn't rely on colored bubbles and lines and 2) is actually practically useful.
While we're on the subject, it has been brought to my attention that Google is branching out in new directions. Their next project involves producing a tangy, cheese-based cracker spread. When released, it'll be called "G-Whiz".
Ok, that was bad.
Posted by Robert on October 12, 2004 at 01:16 PM
Some good insight and analysis of Gmail. I've enjoyed the move to the new e-mail service, too.
Of course, now it is not scarce and I'm wondering what is in store when they roll it out for everyone to use.
On another note, I'm curious, what blog software are you using? It appears to be Serendipity in functions/layout. The template/style looks like a modded Serendipity template.
Just wondering what your experience has been with it. I've experimented with many blogging packages. I was wondering what your evaluation is i.e., functionality, etc. I moved from Serendipity (but liked it a lot). I couldn't effectively moderate/control the 'comment spamming' thing.
But, i see that you've effectively incorporated a 'number' fill-in function. I'd love to know if it is available as a plugin.
Nice site!
Thanks.
Email Rob:
Making Web Log Analysis Tools Better
design, information, internet
March 05, 2004, 12:22 AM
We're starting our final project in Mapping and Diagramming, which is self-defined. I've decided to focus on designing visualizations of web log data (not to be confused with weblogs, although webloggers are my primary user group), since I've always been of the opinion that the visualizations generated by most current tools tend to suck. So far I've come up with a few sketches and a description of the project.
Some things I want to explore include:
- Better maps of what paths people took through the website (including most frequented paths).
- Information on how long people spent on each page.
- New ways to diagram other important web issues, like page bandwidth consumption, where people come from (referrers), etc.
- Interaction designs for mechanisms to show how these usage trends change over time.
And possibly others as well. I'd like to check out more existing web analysis tools as well as look over some of the relevant research that's been done on the subject, so if anyone has some good pointers, let me know.
Oh, and Dan is doing something wacky with linking together the music people buy, or something.
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Autolinking URLs in Movable Type Comments
internet
January 25, 2004, 06:42 PM
Consider this a followup to my nifty MT plugins post.
Movable Type has a feature to automatically turn URLs embedded in comments into links. Unfortunately, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, you cannot enable this feature and allow HTML in comments at the same time. Fortunately, I found a post on The Girlie Matters that explains how to use Brad Choate's Regex Plugin to autolink URLs in comments even when HTML is enabled.
Make sure you add a no_html="1" attribute to the MTAddRegex tag, however, or the regex will munge valid link tags by trying to turn their href attribute values into links, which you probably don't want, needless to say.
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Ratings and Online Forum Design
design, internet, society & sociology
January 25, 2004, 01:54 PM
Many large online forums such as Slashdot and Kuro5hin support collaborative filtering mechanisms for user-supplied content. The general purpose of these mechanisms is to help make the content people do want to read visible and to hide the content people don't want to read. In both communities mentioned above and many others besides, this takes the form of "moderation", where some users are given the authority to judge whether content supplied by other users is "good". As an aside, Paul Resnick, my former CSCW professor, has a CHI paper coming out on the topic of Slashdot moderation.
Moderation is a feature that tries to deal with many problems at once. The "quality" of a comment or story is subjective and may be based on many factors, and one person's notion of quality may or may not impact another's desire to read the content. Some of these factors may include:
- Spam is generally frowned upon by everyone, and easily identified by everyone. The filtering system need only mark content as "spam or not spam".
- Trolling is harder to detect, and feelings on it are a little more mixed. One person's troll is another person's devil's advocate. Also many people accused of trolling are simply espousing an unpopular opinion, which many forums may wish to actively encourage. So the solution here is less clear; there may need to be more consensus about a comment or story before it gets marked as a troll. And even then the appropriate solution may not be to filter out the content, but merely to mark it as a troll as a warning to other users.
- Information accuracy is theoretically objective but in practice is hard to determine. Truthfulness may be better determined through comments presenting supporting or contradicting evidence than moderation.
- Information interest and relevance may be supported well by moderation, depending on the diversity of the community and how specialized its interests are. A diverse community may have many conflicting opinions among its readership as to what is interesting and relevant, whereas a more specialized community may enjoy more consensus. Community designers need to take into account the type of community they are designing for when judging how (or whether) to address this issue.
- Unpopular opinions can be squelched through collaborative filtering, and again community designers must consider the type of community they wish to create and whether their design goals include encouraging or discouraging heated debate.
The point of all this is not to (necessarily) recommend a more complex moderation system (moderation systems are probably overly complex as it is) but rather to suggest that filtering community content is a complex issue that needs more thought put into it to come up with an appropriate yet simple solution.
The major difficulty with designing collaborative filtering systems is that you must keep the needs of two very different types of users in mind: the reader and the filterer (and possibly the poster of the filtered content as well). The reader wants to see the most interesting content without having to wade through a bunch of crap, but the filterer needs the proper incentives to contribute to the filtering system, and often there is little or no direct benefit to him. How much you can demand from your filterers depends on the type of community; it's worth remembering that the majority of users are social loafers and free riders in any online community (although these terms seem overly harshly judgmental in this context). Its for this reason that I'm always suspicious of collaborative filtering as a panacea; many designers are excited by its potential but, I believe, often ignore the subtle complexities of the design problems it introduces.
Posted by Chad on January 26, 2004 at 10:33 PM
I agree that the terms 'social loafers' and 'free riders' mischaracterize the vast readership who simply doesn't have time to get involved in every discussion they come across online. That was one of the things that bothered me most about the CSCW class last semester: treating low participation rates like it was a something to be remedied. A very - sorry, gotta say it - social science view on things. Why not consider a wider set of activities as 'participation', instead of just contribution?
Posted by Rob on January 27, 2004 at 09:05 PM
'Lurkers' may be a better term, although that also has negative connotations to an extent. But I agree that there's often no reason to think it's a problem; in many online communities having a large number of people who read but don't post adds value to the community, and indeed if everyone contributed content, the community would quickly become unwieldy and break down.
But my point was just about collaborative filtering. In order for the concept to work, some people must contribute time to filtering, and there must be enough of these to filter a reasonably high percentage of the content. The question is: what motivates these people to filter? Do they have a motivation? Often filtering is menial work once the novelty wears off. And do they have the "right" motivation, i.e. the one that will make their filtering decisions useful to the readers? These are questions designers need to be asking. And I believe they are often hard questions, and that it's easy to get the answer wrong.
Posted by Chad on January 28, 2004 at 08:45 AM
Re: some people: I spent a couple of months in a group who was trying out wikis and weblogs. The weblog thing didn't take for most of them, but the wiki did. What was interesting was how some people took up housekeeping roles for filing and creating an information architecture for the site. If I remember correctly, the housekeepers weren't the same people who set up the wiki in the first place.
Maybe there's something about making roles that need to be filled more obvious to users. I'm hardly a sportsman, but there might be a comparison to a football or basketball team. It's possible to play without having specialized roles, but knowing and playing the roles makes the level of play much more interesting, and, I imagine, gratifying.
Have you seen any literature about the roles people play in various CMC systems? I've read about moderators and trolls in discussion groups, but it seems like you could expand the discussion to other systems as welll as across time, as a particular instance of a system evolves...
Posted by Rob on January 29, 2004 at 10:17 PM
I can certainly see your point about the importance of roles from my own experience. I don't know of any research about roles in CMC systems in particular, although I know Bob Kraut claims there's research that indicates assigned roles make people more productive in general. Chapter 4 of Community Building on the Web discusses roles in online communities (although not necessarily research-supported).
Certainly one design direction for a collaborative filtering system would be to make the filterer role more clear and perhaps even to try to make it a desirable position to hold. But it depends on the system, of course. It's hard to talk about these things in the abstract.
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Nifty Movable Type Extensions
internet
January 17, 2004, 09:44 PM
While working on Heimdall, I came across a number of helpful-seeming plugins for Movable Type, so I'm giving them a plug here. Some of these I actually incorporated into the site; others I may incorporate later on but they seemed nifty enough to deserve a mention.
- The comment notifier plugin is what's powering the "Email me responses" option in my comments field, which emails all new comments on a post to anyone who has commented already. An essential feature if you want to encourage discussion on your weblog, since otherwise commenters have to keep coming back to the site and checking your old posts to see whether you (or anyone else) has responded to their words of wisdom. Do note that if you follow Jay's directions for modifying the Comments.pm source, you must have comment emailing enabled in the MT configuration in order for comments to be sent through the notifier. I spent a good couple of hours trying to figure out that one.
- SimpleComments is poorly named, but useful. It lets you intermingle comments and trackbacks, under the theory that they are both forms of commenting on a post. I've had it in use here for awhile now.
- The CAPTCHA anti-spam plugin uses a CAPTCHA to foil spambots from posting junk on your blog. CAPTCHAs are those little images with random words or numbers on them that you have to read and retype into a text box to prove you're a human. You might recognize them from Yahoo or Hotmail or other free email services, which employ them for the same purpose.
- The Bayesian anti-spam plugin was done by the same guy after his CAPTCHA solution was criticized for being inaccessible to the disabled. It takes more work on your part, but it's less of a burden on your users.
The most comprehensive source for plugins is the MT Plugin Directory but there seem to be several that aren't indexed there, so it's worth searching around. O'Reilly has an article on developing MT plugins if you're interested in screwing around with Perl yourself.
I'm still hunting for an MT plugin tag that works like an <MTArchiveList> tag except that its sensitive to its archive context, like <MTEntries> is. In other words, if I'm listing all the weekly archives in a monthy archives context, it should only list the weekly archives for that month, not all the weekly archives in the weblog. If anyone knows of one drop me a line.
Posted by Mark on July 31, 2005 at 09:37 AM
Hi there. I too have been looking for a way to display context specific archive lists. I don't think there are any plugins to do so, but I ended up using the calendar functionality. It seems to work reasonably well, even if it isn't the first way you'd think of accomplishing the task. In my case, I was looking to generate a list of individual entries within the same contextual month as the individual archive entry you are viewing. This is how I did it:
[MTCalendar month="this" category="Articles"]
[MTEntries]
[a href="[$MTEntryPermalink$>"][$MTEntryTitle$][/a][br /]
[/MTEntries]
[/MTCalendar]
Worked like a charm:) (I had to use brackets to get the code to show up)
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A Deeper Look at CSS
internet, software development
January 07, 2004, 02:37 PM
I've been working hard on my new website design, which is why posting new entries has been so slow of late. Rest assured that I have many things lying around that still need saying, however. The well of my verbosity is far from dry.
I did want to offer a few words of apology to the CSS standard, which I have maligned somewhat in the past. CSS's attention to logical page elements and their properties makes it much easier to work with (and get good results out of) than the standard approach of mucking around with using tables as layout guides. There are still some important things missing from the current CSS standards (I spent all last night trying to get rounded borders on some of my divs, and wound up resorting to tables) but on the whole it's a reasonably well-crafted document formatting metaphor.
That said, there's still two major obstacles that are real showstoppers:
- Lack of a consistent, correct implementation of CSS in the most common web browser. You wouldn't believe the ugly hacks people have to come up with to get even some pretty simple things to work using CSS in IE.
- No usable CSS-based authoring environment. It's still easier to create a non-CSS page in Dreamweaver than it is to create a CSS page. And no editor has arisen with a sufficiently usable alternative to get people to switch.
The standard's getting better, though, and hopefully the browsers will catch up with it. But until the perfect solution is crafted, here's some advice on switching to CSS for those who just want to get it done:
- Make a mockup of the page design before trying an HTML/CSS implementation. You'll need the mockup to identify the main logical sections of the document that will need to be styled separately, and thus need to be different classes. I was really glad I had mine handy.
- Don't be afraid to go back to tables for some elements, if it won't interfere with your technical design goals. The semantic markup people would shake their heads at this, but unless you really need a semantically clean document, it's foolish to waste time hacking the CSS to work on buggy browsers or support features it doesn't yet. It's good to have a clear idea of what you're using CSS for, so you can make intelligent decisions about these things.
- As always, when problems arise, Google is your friend. Chances are someone else has had the same problem. Google around and the solution is probably just a few mouse clicks away.
- But a human friend is still even better! Without Dave's advice, this effort would have taken way longer. If you don't already have a friend who is familiar with the ins and outs of CSS, make one.
Now that I've got the main document structures nailed down (so hopefully the worst is behind me) I'm glad I made the switch. I'm excited about the new design; it's getting difficult for me to use the old site now that I know something better is just around the corner.
Posted by Dave on January 08, 2004 at 10:37 PM
Yeah! I got the Rob cred. I am on a high baby...
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A New Year and a New Look
aesthetics, announcements, internet
January 01, 2004, 01:11 AM
The witching hour has come and gone and the year 2004 is now upon us. In this spirit of newness, I've been working on a new design for roBlog as well as the rest of this site, which I'm calling "Heimdall" (the name of the current design is "Odin", in case I never mentioned that). These changes will (hopefully) include:
- More useful categories
- Monthly and comprehensive archives
- The "looking forward / looking behind" feature I mentioned a long time ago
- Proper print versions of every page
- Numerous usability-related tweaks
The information architecture of the site shouldn't change much, but I have come up with a proposed new visual design template for the site. Note that this sketch is intended to give a sense of the visuals only, and thus I've left out some page elements like some of the sidebars and the comments sections. In the interests of participatory design, I humbly submit this sketch to you, dear readers, for comments and criticism. If you love it, hate it, or have thoughts on how it could be better, please leave a comment below or send me an email.
Heimdall, I should note, was the Norse god who slew (and was slain by) Loki at Ragnarok, the end of the world. In hopes that it won't spell the end of me, I'm making a New Year's Resolution to complete this project by this time next year at the very latest (and hopefully soon before); a feat which is far from certain since I'm at least as bad as Kevin at completing all the projects that I undertake.
Posted by Rob on January 02, 2004 at 12:50 AM
Today's Diesel Sweeties struck me as amusingly relevant.
Posted by Dave on January 02, 2004 at 09:41 PM
Oooooo....roundy-corner-type-dealies
Posted by Dan on January 05, 2004 at 10:53 AM
A few comments...from a man with a fairly ugly site himself. :)
I'm not sure the color palette works very well. The blue and green really clash. The top navigation links disappear. Plus, the colored bars overwhelm the page: your eye is drawn to them and not to what we're really interested in: the text of the entry.
I suggest you stick with the blue, personally, and make the top nav that blue and the side nav a lighter blue (#8AA8E6 perhaps).
I don't think you need two "previous week" bars. The one at the bottom probably would suffice.
How about moving the green bar to the very top of the page and moving the breadcrumbs below it? Breadcrumbs are awful big, btw.
I'd watch out from using those lines, too. They add a lot of unnecessary noise.
/time elapses...
Oh hell, I just did a quickie mock-up for you of what I'm talking about (with the exception of changing the color palette).
Check it: http://www.odannyboy.com/images/HeimdallDesign_ds.jpg
My rate is $75/hour. :)
Dan
Posted by Rob on January 05, 2004 at 09:22 PM
I uploaded a revised mockup that takes Dan's comments and others I've received into account. Right now I'm mostly working to get some css-ified Movable Type templates put together so that I can tweak the real thing.
Any further comments are still much appreciated, though. And Dan, your check is in the mail ;).
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Weblogs: An Antidote To Misquotes?
internet, politics
December 06, 2003, 05:40 PM
One of the biggest problems for people who are in the public eye is published misquotes from reporters or other mass media producers. This ranges from quoting out of context to inaccurate paraphrasing to flat out made-up statements, whether intentionally or by accident. There are several cases of bright careers getting ruined by misquotes, and many more of badly damaged reputations.
Declan McCullagh, the politics-and-technology writer, recently attacked Lawrence Lessig for allegedly promoting the elimination of anonymity online. Fortunately for Lessig, he keeps a weblog, and provides his side of the story there.
This is a direct benefit of personal publication; if everyone has their soapbox, they can use that soapbox to make responses such as these available to the entire world as soon as a potentially damaging misquote hits the public consciousness. This won't guarantee that people will believe them, of course, but at least it removes the barrier of enforced silence through a lack of publication resources. Beyond that, technology can no longer help, and your reputation must stand on the merits of your arguments and the trustability of your data.
Posted by Kevin Fox on December 06, 2003 at 06:58 PM
Another interesting example happened last week regarding the Washington Post and Google. Derek Powazek and Dave Winer are not happy.
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SSL Certificates - Unusable and (Mostly) Useless
internet, usability
November 11, 2003, 02:40 PM
Matthew Thomas has an interesting rant about the poor usability of the SSL Security Certificate system, the mechanism pretty much all web browsers, email programs, and other internet clients use to establish secure connections to servers over the inherently insecure internet. He argues that the usability is so poor that the security mechanism is rendered useless in the vast majority of cases, and demonstrates this with a description of what really happens in an Alice-and-Bob scenario.
I tend to agree, and I can vouch firsthand for the absurd level of difficulty involved in procuring and setting up a certificate from a major certificate authority, since I had to perform this very task for my last job. It took me hours, and required a high level of technical sophistication. Had our security requirements not been so high, I would likely have given up and gone back to my programming tasks, which were already behind schedule.
SSL certificates are just one example of a system that has been studied and engineered to death, but has stopped just short of a usable, human-centered solution. By failing to take that step, we've effectively destroyed all the benefits the system was supposed to provide. I've pointed out that all software quality attributes, including security, are related to usability before. Although there's been some work on designing usable security systems, this area is still sadly lacking in answers. How many compromised systems, virus debacles, and internet-smashing worms do we need to suffer through before someone decides to do something about it?
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Weblog Home Page Design Idea
design, internet
November 05, 2003, 04:51 PM
Mark Pilgrim has an interesting redesign of his own weblog's home page that he posted recently. I'm not sure if I agree with the page as it stands, but it's given me a few ideas for roBlog that maybe I'll try to flesh out and implement when (if) I get a chance. I'm interested in trying out some design solutions for roBlog that get away from the standard "linear news" format and move more towards visualizing it as a personal knowledge management system.
Posted by Andyed on November 05, 2003 at 11:55 PM
Cross-platform DHTML RSS loading at the name link and rendering to a not-very-usable DHTML view. But, if the code comes in handy to play, be my guest.
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Why Trusting Pretty Web Sites Is Rational
internet, society & sociology
November 01, 2003, 10:41 PM
Paul gave a lecture in CSCW yesterday on the topic of economic analyses of reputation systems. One of the points he discussed relates to an earlier post of mine on how people judge the trustworthiness of web sites. The upshot of that post was that the quality of the site that was most relevant to its perceived trustworthiness was how pretty it looks, that this is bad, and people are dumb (implied).
Turns out that conclusion is wrong. Paul presented an economic analysis that explains why a rational, self-interested actor should choose to pay attention to things like the visual appearance of a site. The argument goes like this:
- Imagine a marketplace which, like most marketplaces, has some number of high-trustworthy sellers and some number of low-trustworthy sellers. Imagine you are a buyer. You have to decide who you are going to buy from, but you don't know, a priori, which sellers are which.
- Consider the position of the sellers. Both types of sellers have some interest in sending signals to buyers that they are a professional, trustworthy organization that deserves your business. These signals may include trust-focused advertising campaigns and/or spiffing up their website design.
- The high-trustworthy sellers know that any money they invest in sending these signals will attract customers who will be satisfied with their transaction and will continue to be customers of the business. Thus, they invest a good deal of money into making their website attractive.
- The low-trustworthy sellers know that money they invest will only have a limited return, since they can't scam you forever (eventually you'll find out that they are violating your trust) and then they will lose your business. So they will not invest as much money in making their website spiffy, since the rate of return for them is lower than it is for the high-trustworthy sellers, and thus the market is against them.
- So as a buyer, you have reason to believe that a site with a spiffy visual design is trustworthy, since high-trustworthy organizations have a greater interest in spending their money on such pursuits. Therefore, it is perfectly rational to associate an attractive visual design with trustworthiness (even though it is hardly a strict guarantee).
Of course, as several people pointed out in class, this "ideal" model doesn't hold true in all markets. For instance, this model assumes that it's easy for a buyer to end a relationship with a seller as soon as he realizes the seller is untrustworthy. But this isn't always the case; for instance, in apartment rental markets, buyers must generally sign year-long leases that commit them to staying with the same landlord even if the landlord reneges on his responsibilities. And even after that year is up, the expenses of moving may keep many tenants in situations they otherwise wouldn't accept had they known before they moved in. So, like any general economic analysis, you have to think about which conditions it will hold under and which conditions it will not.
Still, it's an interesting counterpoint to my more cynical earlier comments.
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Online Community Currency Analysis
internet, society & sociology
October 29, 2003, 09:42 AM
The ever-insightful localroger has an article on K5 analyzing comment moderation system currencies (like Slashdot's Karma and K5's Mojo) and providing some design recommendations for improving these virtual economies.
Although I'm filing this under Meta it is not a specific suggestion for immediate changes to Scoop. Rather, it is a set of ideas I've been mulling over based on what e-community engines like Scoop, Slashcode, and various web BBS packages are all trying to become, and how the next generation might do it even more effectively.Whether you call it Mojo, Karma, "Standing," or something else, all content rating feedback systems have some sort of currency. While there are many different ways of acquiring and spending such capital, nobody seems to have implemented an economy varied enough to be robust. And this is the key to building a system which can be stable in the long term.
Some of Roger's ideas seem good and others need work, but he's on the right track. We should be doing more of these comparative analyses and reasoning about the effects of community features on the social structures they're supposed to be supporting.
Analyzing Roger's ideas using the social science design principles we're developing in CSCW is left as an exercise for the reader.
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