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Randy Holloway at Microsoft

Blogging from the field.
Social Computing Research Symposium Exclusivity

Kevin Schofield writes about the upcoming Social Computing Research Symposium at Microsoft Research, which Scoble has mentioned also. In looking at the list of attendees, I was surprised to not see any attendees from Google, Six Apart, or UserLand. I'd like Kevin (or Robert) to comment and explain the thought process behind excluding the makers of the leading weblogging tools. While Kevin's explanation does makes sense with respect to having the event be exclusive rather than open, why not include the folks that are making a lot of these tools work for real users?

UPDATE- I should have linked to this post from Kevin on social software/blogging “groupthink” also.  I think that he's over the top here, this sounds like something out of the Register.

Posted: Saturday, March 27, 2004 12:14 PM by RandyHolloway

Comments

John D. said:

Surprising to see that Dave hasn't been more vocal on this topic (http://archive.scripting.com/2004/03/27#When:6:41:03AM).
# March 27, 2004 12:17 PM

Kevin Schofield said:

I actually didn't make up the invitation list, so I don't know exactly why there is no one from Google, Six Apart ot Userland on it. There may be a harmless explanation; it may very well be that we invited them and they had to decline for one reason or another. I honestly don't know, hopefully Lili or Shelly will chime in with better information. I know we tried super hard to be very representative with the attendee list.

Google is interesting. For the last couple of years they have been hiring researchers like crazy. We see them at research conferences, but they don't talk much and they aren't publishing anything. So at least from a research perspective, it's hard to say that they are really an active part of the research community right now. We'd welcome their participation in the research community.

Wow -- it's not very often that I get accused of writing something fit for the Register. :-) I'd like to hear more from you though as to why you think I'm wrong.
# March 27, 2004 12:53 PM

Randy H. said:

Kevin,

My Register comment was a little off- what I really meant to say was that the groupthink comment is one that it is often made by those that think "social software" has little or no value (particularly blogs). I think you're right about making every conference/event open to everyone- clearly that can lead to a lot of noise. However, I do think that weblogging or IRC at events is about sharing information, and clearly that is of benefit to more people and is seen as "better". To call that groupthink trivializes the benefits of of the information sharing.

It would be great if you can get Lili or Shelly to share more on the process for selecting attendees.
# March 27, 2004 1:10 PM

Kevin Schofield said:

Thanks for the clarification. I hope it's very clear that I think there is enormous value in social computing. My main complaint is that there is a strong bias towards thinking of social computing only as about building huge interconnected social networks where everyone is constantly blogging and chatting. And unfortunately, that notion is self-reinforcing. Blogging and IRC at conferences adds huge value -- not only for the attendees but also for the speakers and the people who couldn't be there. But sociology is a rich and diverse space, and our approach to social computing needs to be equally rich and diverse or we're going to miss opportunities.

Lili or Shelly hopefully can chime in, but also keep in mind that they may not say much for privacy reasons. If we invited someone but they had to decline for personal reasons, they may not want that shared publicly and we of course owuld respect that. Once again, I don't have any direct information on this. But life in the blogosphere is interesting, isn't it?
# March 27, 2004 1:22 PM

Robert Scoble said:

I know that many of the above were invited and couldn't make it.

Joi Ito, by the way, sits on the board of Six Apart and Technorati. He's coming, I believe.
# March 28, 2004 12:45 PM

Randy Holloway said:

http://raindrop.msresearch.us/tb.aspx?id=1000109
# March 29, 2004 1:40 PM
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