My Paper

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Drupal thought it would be funny to just not save my first version of this post. HAHA drupaul. I FUCKING KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE.
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I have to agree with Ayça's comment on federation based reputation. The internet is totally not about some central governing body winning the right in an auction to verifiy people's identity. It's about distrubuted resorces and distributed trust.

It's also about technology driving forward use, not policy (which is sadly true with web standards and Internet Explorer... but changing).

I think that in the near future as web sites begin to interact more with each other, our reputations will precede us. Imagine associating your goals at 43things with your images in flickr, your links in delicious, and your news stories on digg. Who you are online will follow from site to site (if you choose) and people will likely be more trusting of people who seem more "real" by existing on several sites.

I really not amazed that online reputation systems work. Cynical game theory researchers might be surprised that people often act contrary to what is in their own best personal interests, but that's just how people act.

Despite the fact that the intenet puts huge distance between users and makes it infinitely easier to con someone since much of our ability to notice deception is based on in-person communication skills most people are still able to navigate the supposedly scary world of the internet and not be screwed over.

I have a theory: people aren't evil. Sure, there are going to be scammers and people looking to take advantage of the gullible on the internet, just as there are offline, but the majority of people are perfectly fine with being honest.

Hello everyone not doing paper topic #1 (analyzing an existing eCommunity).

I keep trying to get a feel for who is choosing the second and third options for the assignments in this course. I know it's in the profile, but I'd love to have it all in one place.

I'm also wondering if anyone wants to get together for coffee as a group and trade ideas back and forth. I know we are the minority, and I'd love to hear what my other oppressed brothers and sisters think about the assignment, how it relates to the course and readings, where you got the idea for your project, and what made you want to do it instead of analyzing an exisiting community.

Sorry for missing class last week, not posting, and not commenting lately. I went to the doctor on Monday and was diagnosed with a massive inner ear infection (which explains the dizziness, headaches, lightheadedness, and sudden bursts of tourette-like swearing).

I've been medicated and out of it for just about a week now as my body adjusts to the codeine and antibiotics.

Cheers!

I wanted to briefly explore the idea of reification by addressing one of Wenger's statments:

Classifiying people under broad categories can focus attention on a kind of diversity, but the reification can give differences and similarities a concreteness they do not actually posess

That statement (p 62, if you're wondering) really popped out at me as great way to describe something that seems very static and unchanging to a lot of people: sexuality.

I'm not saying that a person's sexuality is highly dynamic (I'm not going to magically become straight one day; sorry ladies) but that society's concept of gender categories is a process of practice and reification.

I was in the office of my department's director yesterday chatting about a project I am working on (an intranet redesign, in case you're wondering). There was a lull in the conversation and my boss's boss said "So, there's two things we need to talk about. First, is it ok if Lisa works with CDE on their next catalog?"

The CDE catalog is the bane of my damn existence, so of course I said yes. I'd rather have bamboo shoots shoved under my finger nails or have to use Windows on a daily basis than keep doing this catalog.

Then she said "The other thing is the digg article. Jerry [ the school's editor ] saw it and asked me to have you edit your comment from the story. Something about you looking for dates?"

Wenger's first vignette is about a work day in the life of a young claims processor. Without too much knowledge about what the book contains, it seems like Wenger uses this example to illustrate just how much complexity most jobs and job cultures have.

On several occasions during the day Ariel (our imaginary claims processor) uses knowledge she admits cannot be taught in formal training to get her job done.

I worked in a place like this years ago; the processes we used on a daily basis were just too complex and too dependent on external situations to properly training people. So, we would train new staff in the "right" way to do things, but they would quickly discover all the better and faster ways of getting the same tasks accomplished.