CIVILITY AND SOCIAL NETWORKING by Mike Davidson of Newsvine

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Local New Media Crowd at Seattle P-I Headquarters

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We've just had pizza [yum] and now we're listening to the CEO of Newsvine..Mike Davidson speak about social networking.

Jordan's take:

Fishkin says, people are a**holes. (I disagree, at least most of the time)
Sites from Amazon to eBay and beyond add value with user-gen content. Some thrive with it, some don't. With wikis, there is a tragedy of the commons, where quality is not centrally controlled. In terms of news, that can mean that news can drift into opinion and conjecture.
Community isn't a ready-made product, but the result of an ongoing relationship between users.

Trolls: some people are just jerks. Okay, I kind of agree with that, but they aren't necessarily a lost cause. Negativistic approach... on the other hand, people crave community. That's why we use facebook, myspace, etc. It's also what drives total strangers to contribute to a news site, to spend their valuable time working with total strangers, sometimes interacting with others who live in countries they can barely find on a map.  

One-off comments versus true discussion. Some people like to soapbox and not account for their words, i.e. not participate in the discussion it creates. 

The Dunbar Number (as per anthropologist Robin Dunbar): one can only think in community sizes of 150 people or less-- anything larger becomes a faceless crowd. Ergo: not just one large online group, but several (hundred? thousand?) interaffiliated subgroups.  Newsvine is highlight-only, then... not the same as what we do. WHilst we use the highlight tool as a jumping-off point, NP comes into its own with user-generated stories.

Victoria's take:

Code of Conduct: no more than 6 cause people don't want to complicate their lives

Conversation tracker: engage your readers, don't let fly by comments ..fly by

Conversation tracker helps the reader not loose track of where the conversations are..it's patented..and everyone is laughing.

comment thread indicates friends that are invlve: difference between conversation and comments

let users organize themselves into a groups [hyperlocal] Dunbar Theory 150 person group at max

Newsvine is not into self-promotion, racy headlines, porny things, press releases...and they have an automated emails that go out that kind of remind people to watch it... so they have a greenhouse type of an environment where they test out "viners"

lady says she couldn't live without the conversation tracker: the three things at the top left cuse it's cool 

I asked where Newsvine gets its original photos and videos: Mike says from AP..Killfile's wife works at Vriginia Tech and called him when the shots rang out