Today’s Tech Monday supplement in the Austin Statesman includes a very good article by Lori Hawkins about the Google Wave Meetup Kevin Leahy and I have been hosting for the last few months. [Link]

Social Web Strategies colleague Rob Matney described one way he’s using Wave:

Matney said he thinks Wave will be ideal for a new project he is beginning with Austin theatrical director Graham Schmidt. They are just beginning to brainstorm on their next production, a play by Anton Chekhov.

“Wave will allow us to grab images and video and sound from the Web that we can use as inspiration for the production,” Matney said. “We can translate Russian text, and we plan to work with scholars in Moscow, who will be able to join the Wave and add their own content.”

Wave, he said, will preserve thoughts and observations that often get lost when e-mail is flying back and forth in a large group.

“I think it will be kind of a dripping pan underneath the work that will let us catch what was valuable….” he said.

The Obama Administration is moving Whitehouse.gov to the Open Source Drupal platform, based on a set of requirements for a platform “where dynamic features like question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools could work more fluidly together with the site’s infrastructure.”

The Personal Democracy Forum explores the social relevance of the decision to adopt Drupal, which is known for its interactive community features:

Let’s really try to extract the last drop of possible meaning from a choice over a CMS. Squint a bit, and it’s possible to see the White House’s move to open-source software as a move towards the idea that collaborative programming can inspire — or at least, support — a more distributed politics. That idea bubbled up in 2004, when young programmers experimented with using Drupal itself to turn the Howard Dean campaign into the Howard Dean network. [Jon Lebkowsky of Social Web Strategies was part of that effort.] This idea, that a politics crafted by the people could be a powerful thing indeed, emerged in a slightly mutated way during the Obama presidential campaign, but has arguably receded below the surface during the first nine months of the Obama Administration. First the WhiteHouse.gov CMS gets more open, then the White House OS? Perhaps.

Clay Shirky: “If a community thinks it’s a success, it’s a success.” YouTuberated for Open Hack Day. (Yahoo!)

Evolution of the social web: while we were thinking about the implications of Google Wave and starting the Austin Google Wave Meetup, Facebook was arranging to buy FriendFeed, our favorite digital lifestyle aggregator. Smart move? Depends how Facebook integrates FriendFeed, but it feels like a helpful crack in the Facebook walled garden. Friendfeed takes feeds from all kinds of content, has useful discussions, and you can upload images and files. It already integrates with Facebook and Twitter. Playing with these tools (and the iPhone) is a realization of our early 2000s vision of the web as an operating system, an environment for many media and many platforms that should, dang it, be interoperable, mashable, jammable. We often say Facebook is the AOL of the 21st century, a walled garden that could fail fast as convergence synapses start to fire across the open web. Facebook has to find a way to hold those eyeballs and rub ‘em against ads, tough to do if people keep walking outside and climbing the virtual trees, getting a view of the bigger World Outside. Buying FriendFeed is like buying a few of those trees, bringing them inside the garden… and maybe the future is in building a few treehouses with telescopes and ads on various surfaces. Hope we won’t see Zuckerberg brandishing a chainsaw.

Gaurav Mishra accompanied Dave Evans of Social Web Strategies as he conducted a series of social media workshops in Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai, sponsored by 20:20 Media, which has launched a new social media company, 20:20WebTech. Every workshop was full to capacity, and Dave’s on his way back to India tomorrow for more… [Link]

On June 18, Dave Evans and I were part of the Texas Hospital Association’s day-long workshop called “Where Social Media and Health Care Meet – Harnessing New Media Tools.” We found an excited and diverse group from hospitals around and outside Texas. They understand how hospitals can benefit from social media, and I suspect many will follow the example of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, which is making effective use of various forms of social media (including Facebook and YouTube). They also have clear, well-considered, published blog policies and guidelines. Aaron Hughling summarizes my presentation with Jennifer Texada of M.D. Anderson: [Link].

I made another presentation, and overview of social media. Here are those slides:

Good quick overview presentation by our friend Ross Mayfield, cofounder of SocialText. Social software at work!

What’s a hashtag? On Twitter, it’s a tag preceded by a hash sign (#), and it’s a way to tag “tweets” (posts to Twitter) for aggregation. Amy Gahran has a useful post that explains “How to start a Twitter hashtag.” When you’re social tagging – i.e. trying to create a tag that others will use – it’ll be most useful if you get buyin. Says Amy, “Once you find a good, short, intuitive hashtag, start promoting it right away — to your Twitter followers, on your blog, in your media-sharing accounts (like Delicious, Flickr, and YouTube). Also, if you’re running the event, make sure you promote the event hashtag on the Web site, in e-mailed materials to attendees and media, and everywhere.”

Good overview of practical social network theory in Aliza Sherman’s post about a conversation with my friend Ross Mayfield of SocialText. I was a first beta (actually alpha) tester for SocialText, and Ross and I did some theory-swapping in the early 2000s. He talks here about “how our networks have dense cores (strong ties) surrounded by dynamic peripheries (looser ties).”

The core of an organization – such as the leadership team – tends to work closely together. They process information well and can usually make decisions quickly and effectively. The rest of the team, however, is the dynamic periphery and there is strength in these weak ties.

Ross talks about how communication within the enterprise is often disorganized – email and attached files. The SocialText “wikiblog” is a platform for organizing communication and information more effectively.

Instead of focusing on files as the crux of collaboration, Socialtext focuses on the people who are creating the documents and sending the messages. You can follow who you want, connect with who you choose, and build your own organizational directory based on your needs and goals so you can tap into the right people to help you get the job done. Socialtext makes the dynamic periphery visible and helps everyone tap into the critical talent, knowledge and skill that may not be situated in the dense core.

Useful intelligence from David Recordon about Google’s adoption of OpenID. [Link]/a>

The piece that Google is currently doing differently is requiring pre-registration of each OpenID Relying Party before users can login to a given site. This does break the common deployment of OpenID on the web today, but Eric Sachs of Google has said on the OpenID mailing list that this is temporary as they work to stabilize their OpenID Provider:

We just need to do the standard scaling, stability, translation quality, etc. evaluation to make sure there are no major problems. If we are lucky, that won’t take much time. However it is more then likely that we will need to tweak things in our user interface to make it easier to understand, and unfortunately translating any such tweaks into 40+ languages takes awhile.