Alfred Hitchcock used to say that he never made a "Whodunnit" movie. His movies were "For whom was it done?" In fact a lot of his movies begin with the crime. In some, the victim of the crime turns out to be the criminal himself. In all of Hitchcock's films, we the audience witne...

In client work recently I have come up against the the importance -- and difficulty -- of satisfying multiple user positions and experiences. Social media work because the author and the reader are satisfied. Sure, social MEdia need to be satisfying to me, but if they are to scale and succeed, the s...

This post is a follow up to the first law . There are two more coming. The second law of social interaction design is that the functionality of social media is contingent on social practices that use them. Notice that there's a double contingency there. Social media functionality is contingent on us...

This is a short post I want to put out there to get discussion going on structure in social media. As I'm still thinking about talk tools, and short-form messaging ("status culture") in particular, I'm having to contend with some tricky conceptual stuff around structured user experiences. ...

I was thinking last night about an essay Michel Foucault once wrote about two competing concepts of the Self in major world religions. It's been so long that I don't now recall which essay it was. Foucault is known for theoretical "archaeology" of western thought. And for his work on the t...

The first law of social interaction design is the law of user centric design. The user centricity of social media is obvious. Social media are voluntary, and they mean to their users what their users put in and take out of them. Users are interested users, not needy or obliged users. Even users who ...

These screenshots are taken from Radian6, social media monitoring application that I've been using for the past couple of days. This screen shows topical clouds taken from twitter accounts of several social media influencers. Shown here are Tara Hunt (missrogue), Chris Brogan, Adrian Chan (gravity7 ...

I've been having a fascinating time reading through papers on NextStage Evolution, a company in the business of metrics and online media analysis. And I'm compelled to write briefly on some core methodological principles, primarily because the methodology behind social analytics warrants careful con...

I happened on a local bookstore going out of business yesterday and raided the psychology section, picking up a number of cardinal texts at $2.98 a pop. One of them was Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, of the Keirsey personality test. Actually, they call it temperament, not ...

In my ongoing binge to ferret out the social mechanics of twitter third party sites and tools, hashtags deserves attention. Here's a basic example of hashtags. It's small, and by all appearances might die on the vine, which would be sad. But if the great culling whose season draws near were to remov...