Follow up on Social Computing meeting

Kevin Shofield posts a follow-up of the social computing conference at Microsoft Research:

There were many good parts, but my favorite was a breakout group on the second afternoon specifically focused on discussing priorities for the research agenda. The top six areas we came up with:

1. The social effects of "continuous connection" to other people over a long period of time.
2. Defining explicit metrics for measuring social connections vs. using implicit ones.
3. Continuous partial attention -- measuring whether people can actually split their attention effectively and measuring the effects on social environments.
4. Permanent discourse and permanent identity: what happens when the Internet becomes a searchable archive for everything a person has ever said and done?
5. Creating a better taxonomy of how different cultures around the world are driving different technology adoption vectors.
6. Game theory applied to social computing, particularly the prisoner's dilemma and the logic of collective action.

The video recordings of the conference are said to be online somewhere next week.