Clay Shirky on social software

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "David" <dfrankiswork at n...> 
wrote:

> > <http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

Your post finally got me to read the article. I could throw in a 
couple of nitpicks about Many to Manys before the Internet -- CB 
radio in the 70s, ham radio for a geeky clique, mimeographed 
publications CALLED M2Ms (short for Many to Many) and APAs, even 
the ancient form of the Round Robin manuscript, that is passed from 
member to member by hand or post and each person writes on it before 
passing it to the next. CB was destroyed by problems of scale and the 
others were too inconvenient to become popular. 
> 
> what is forking?

Someone else can give the technical UNIX definition of forking a 
process. As far as us stupid users are concerned, it's named after a 
fork in the road. In the document, when he spoke of trying to fork a 
discussion into seperate 'social' and 'technical' discussions, he was 
referring to what HPfGU did when it forked into separate Main List and 
OT discussions.

> what is a wiki (and the Wikipedia - if it's what it sounds like it 
> is, it's my vision of several years of what the internet could be)?

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
Wikipedia is a user-created encyclopedia. It must be respectable, 
because One-Look includes it among its sources. 
http://www.onelook.com/index.html

> What is e-bay's 'reputation system' (I have never used e-bay)?

Nor have I.