I was excited last week to have Ezster Hargittai, a sociologist, as a guest speaker last week at Wiki Wednesday in Palo Alto. In the Web Use Project she and her team gather data and analyze ways that young adults use the Internet. What are their skills? What explains differences and patterns of use, consumption, and creation? Eszter’s research into online skills of thousands of college freshmen expose subtleties in the digital divide. Some social inequalities persist strongly even though people have nominally equal access to the Internet. Class privilege, gender, and race correlate to patterns of digital media use. My detailed notes on Eszter’s talk are over on the Wiki Wednesday site, and “A Framework for Studying Differences in People’s Digital Media Uses,” a paper related to the talk, is here on Eszter’s site.
When Ezster asked what web apps we thought had been most often used by her sample of college freshmen, we all got pretty excited and wanted to show off. I predicted (wrongly) that YouTube would be more popular than Wikipedia and that Myspace would win out over Facebook. In fact, the top results were Wikipedia, 85%; YouTube, 81%; and Facebook, 79%. We also had fun contemplating her survey asking users to assess their own familiarity with various internet terms like “bcc”, “podcasting”, “social bookmarking”, and of course “wiki”.
Her research should be a touchstone for anyone who creates Internet applications. Usability and user interface designers, developers, technical writers, and product managers especially should take a look at her work to get ideas about how to communicate with users more effectively. Especially since most software is created by people who come from privileged backgrounds, I think it is important for them to look at their own assumptions and “check their privilege” against data like this.
After a break we heard short demos from several people. Tim Bonnemann asked some questions about how we can design wikis or wiki software to facilitate political conversation. We had no easy answers, but concluded that the most active political wikis started out as extensions of existing online communities. Gordon McCreight showed us how he is keeping his wedding planning information on a site that scrapes information out of a Socialcalc spreadsheet. Then he gave a cool demo on some further extensions of pageoftext.com. This simple idea, which I think started at RoCoCo in Montreal, now has links and RSS capabilities. But the nifty bit that made me think was the way that visibility of links functions as access control. In pageoftext, you can only see a page if you know its url — for instance, http://pageoftext.com/gordon_mccreight. The url functions as the password. But now since links on a page give you the urls to other pageoftext pages, changing the starting root node gives access to a tree of other wikis.
After Newton Chen demonstrated his mashup of Flickr, Google Maps, and upcoming.org, Steve Bang and Peter Kaminski had an interesting conversation about adoption and use patterns in large companies. Then we watched a short video made at the Vancouver Wiki Wednesday by Luke Closs, showing off his wiki hack, a bug tracker:
Meanwhile, London had another huge and fantastic Wiki Wednesday with many speakers and great writeups of what happened by David Terrar, with links to even more blog posts by participants like Paul Youlten and Dennis Howlett, who describes “wiki thinking” vs. “wiki tools” — in other words the tools cannot competely determine the culture surrounding the use of the tools. “IT is a fashion business where consultants can readily sell in new concepts that sound cool but which are capable of being hijacked by managements insistent upon hierarchical control.”
Coming up this week in Stuttgart and Kiel there are two lively looking Wiki Wednesday events. Stuttgart has over 30 people signed up. Also in SF, there was a Wikipedia meetup that unfortunately I missed!
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