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:
- The social effects of "continuous connection" to other people over a long period of time.
- Defining explicit metrics for measuring social connections vs. using implicit ones.
- Continuous partial attention -- measuring whether people can actually split their attention effectively and measuring the effects on social environments.
- Permanent discourse and permanent identity: what happens when the Internet becomes a searchable archive for everything a person has ever said and done?
- Creating a better taxonomy of how different cultures around the world are driving different technology adoption vectors.
- 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.