This is the transcript of the Digital Methods Initiative Advanced Program Projects week 2 opening talk on Issuecrawler 1.0 and Social Media by Anne Helmond.

The 2.0 denotes an ‘improved’ or progressional version of the web that builds upon and develops Web 1.0. [...] Implicitly rooted in this vision of the web is a sense of teleological progress, of purposeful and directed development, of continual and designed improvement. (Beer 2009: 986)

Instead of looking at Web 2.0 as the “next” version of the web, we can also look at the changes in the structure of the web, specifically looking at web native objects. In this view, Web 1.0 consists of the static page, whereas Web 2.0 consists of dynamic pages filled with the web native object of the status update or the post. This may be seen in the blog and specifically in RSS – denoting changes to a page-, which could be considered a main object of study in the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and in the social networking site with its profiles that display a page (The Wall) filled with posts. An important shift has taken place in the structure of the web: in Web 1.0 hyperlinks mainly link to static pages and objects and in Web 2.0 the hyperlink links to dynamic pages and objects. This shift affects the way we map and analyze the web.

In general terms, Web 2.0 is a concept that forms part of the lexicon of a range of emerging accounts that commentate on a large-scale shift toward a ‘participatory’ and ‘collaborative’ version of the web, where users are able to get involved and create content. (Beer 2009: 986)

This ‘participatory’ and ‘collaborative’ web has created new objects and new types of hyperlinks that characterize Web 2.0: the subscribe, the like, the share, the nr of retweets, the submit to Digg, the save to Delicious, the social network profile, the shortened url, etc. The question also becomes, are these new characteristics forming a new currency of the web? In Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web, Jill Walker describes links as the currency of the web and asks what its currency is. Even though there is a black market for links she notes that “The more common form of trade in this economy of links is barter exchange. Reciprocal linking and link exchange are common practice, and are loosely organised as favours or more systematically in web rings and blogrolling.” (Walker 2002)

Is the hyperlink still the currency of the web in Web 2.0?

If we want to map the current web, how can we use, or adjust, the IssueCrawler to deal with these new objects and new types of links? How do we map a dynamic web? Currently, the IssueCrawler collapses all social networking links from platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Current web mapping and analysis focuses on the interrelations between users on for example Twitter by isolating it. How can we map the current web by not looking at these platforms in isolation but as part of the so-called “ecosystem” they are part of?

The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The “velocity of information” is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. […] The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool. […] Internet culture is a culture of nowness. (Gelernter 2010)

The lifestream is characterized by both time (which we will deal with later) and cross-syndication. The interwoven social media platforms gathered into a central source. How can we analyze cross-platform syndication, which tools do we currently have at hand and which tools do we need to perform such an analysis?

The profile is a common feature of Web 2.0, and is the place where information is gathered about us, our activities, our choices, tastes and preferences and so on. (Beer 2009: 996)

One way into operationalizing Web 2.0’ifying the IssueCrawler is looking at the structure of different social networking sites and platforms. Profile structures may be checked by looking into username checkers. A second way is, instead of categorizing sites by their domain name (.edu, .us, .nl) is by type of platform. A third way is to move beyond the hyperlink as the prime object of mapping as proposed by for example Greg Elmer (2006).

How are networks formed in 2.0? One could argue that a network is formed through liking, sharing and saving in addition to linking. What are the web native objects and characteristics that form networks in the 2.0? What is the role of platforms in the formation of networks in 2.0? Considering the politics of platforms (Gillespie 2010), are some platforms more central than others? How open or closed are these platforms and how does this affect mapping?

The text above describes three meta-issues, which would translate into three projects:

1. Issuecrawler 2.0 > How to deal with the 2.0 in the network?
2. Types of 2.0 links/The link 2.0 > Is the hyperlink still the currency of the web in Web 2.0? How to compare recommendation objects? Hyperlink vs. the like or the share? What do they do to the quality of the web?
3. Cross-platform syndication > cross-spherical comparison of platforms? Content circulation analysis has become difficult in the social web
4. Platform dependency > Changing linking practices > Dutch Blogosphere. How and where to find issues in 2.0? How do you define what an actor is?

A few hours ago the following tweet by @librarycongress appeared in my timeline  “Library acquires ENTIRE Twitter archive. ALL tweets. More info here http://go.usa.gov/ik4”

All your tweets are belong to us

This is big. The ENTIRE archive containing ALL tweets? But if we read the official announcement on the Library of Congress blog it states “all public tweets” which seems like it will not include protected accounts and direct messages. The LoC blog went down due to the amount of attention so they decided to post the announcement on Facebook (as it contained more than 140 characters ;)) where a discussion immediately started off. Users are either surprised by this acquisition because they don’t see the value in it, or they are upset because they have acquired their personal tweets. However, as Manuel Magaña notes on Facebook, everytime you press “tweet” you agree to Twitter’s Terms of Service. Even if Twitter feels like a common good, it is still a company that can sell your personal user generated content. However, the Library of Congress is a “federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress” (About) and as such serves the members of Congress which may raise critical inquiries of using Twitter’s archive for political purposes and investigations.

Twitter as a historical tool

So how could the LoC tweet archive be used by researchers? In response to the value of the Twitter archive Randy Rice on Facebook describes how Twitter may serve as a people’s history for historians. With the Digital Methods Initiative we have previously used Twitter to write about the Iran (Green) Revolution by using tweets containing the #iranelection hashtag. Twitter is currently very limited in its use for historical accounts as documented by people present at events. Twitter’s search archive only goes back two weeks and only a custom built scraper may be able to retrieve older tweets. This is not within the skills of the sociologist or historian but an accessible archive may open up a new, huge, sourceset. How does one make sense of an enormous database filled with tweets? One way is to scrape hashtags for a certain event. Two questions remain: 1. will the entire archive become public? 2. will it contain a search function?

A mosaic of humanity

Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s “I Want You To Want Me” is an installation that documents our search for love on online dating sites. By scraping all the public data from dating sites it is “a very fertile ground for building a mosaic of humanity” according to Harris. When we enter our thoughts and feelings into databases we can use these for datamining to say something about our culture. And that is exactly what the Library of Congress seems to want. It acknowledges that not only books are part of our cultural heritage but also the updates on Twitter:

We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations. (Raymond 2010)

I love widgets, those easy drag-and-drop plugins, copy-paste pieces of code that form customizable apps. But I think I’m just going to call them thingumabobs from now on.

I just love these synonyms for widget.

A few weeks ago I noticed during the BrightNight event that my tweets did not appear in the backchannel. After extensively searching the Twitter Support pages on ‘Tweets Not In Search/Hashtags not working‘ I found out that for some reason Twitter had blocked/removed my tweets from search.

After some shout outs on Twitter, it appeared I wasn’t the only one. The initial Support pages said that the issue would resolve itself over time but after a few weeks I was getting impatient. Hashtags have become an important feature of Twitter and I felt left out during conferences, not being able to participate in the backchannel.

Yesterday @bertboerland sent me a link to file a request to be remove the constraints that have been put, for unknown reasons (I might have been marked as a spam account), on my account. Within a day I received word from Twitter that my tweets appear in search again.

Search is a core feature of Twitter as it is being used to retrieve hashtags related to a particular event for backchannels. Search could become even more powerful if Twitter would extend search retrieval beyond two weeks. It would make extensive analysis possible without scheduling a scraper.

Facebook seems to have overtaken Google as the number one entry point to the web according to the new Hitwise data. Even though they serve two different purposes (searching versus social networking in its broadest sense) it marks an important turning point for the increasingly central role of the social web:

Starting with the web means to start with Google as ”the start page for the Internet” (Dodge, 2007) becae “Google has become such a commonly used resource that people are beginning to regard it as synonymous with the Web.” (Searls in Gudrais, 2007) (Helmond 2008: 22)

The web has always been social, with ‘Web 1.0′ systems and software like e-mail, mailinglists, fora, IRC and ICQ but Social Software and the social web is typically associated with Web 2.0 platforms that enable one-t0-many broadcasts and publications to many-to-many. The social web is taking over from the information web as the starting point of the web.

via the Next Web.

The Web Ecology project published the first study (an initial survey) on the new web hype ChatRoulette where a user is randomly paired with another user for chatting. Randomness in the informational web can be found on Google with its “I’m feeling lucky” button, on StumbleUpon with its “Stumble!” button and on Blogger with its Next Blog link. Randomness in the social web is less common but may be seen in the practice of adding random contacts or ‘friends’ in order to gain more followers (which is often considered to be a marker of popularity).

One of the main research questions of “How does the structure of ChatRoulette shape general modes of participation and cultural practices on the platform?” led to an interesting conclusion:

The technical code of ChatRoulette plays a key role in influencing the culture fashioned on the platform. However, unlike other structure for community creation on the Web like Facebook or Twitter,ChatRoulette enforces social rules that depend on the inverse proportion between the temporal and the social: as more time is spent with one user, you encounter fewer other users. ChatRoulette prioritizes the one-on-one (or, group-on-group) relationship that other social networks bypass when they strive to collect larger and larger groups of friends, colleagues, followers, etc. (Alex Leavitt & Tim Hwang 2010)

The code of a platform restricts and allows for certain social interactions. At first sight, ChatRoulette seems to be a platform for random and short-lived communication with the popular next button. However, the underlying code of the ChatRoulette platform privileges longer communication with a single person. In contrast to social networking sites where status seems to be measured by the amount of friends, ChatRoulette prioritizes one-on-one relationships.

My first ChatRoulette session (with support from my colleagues in the background) was actually with a Dutch guy who read about ChatRoulette in the newspaper this morning:

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.