Jonathon on social software. “Jonathan puts well why social software is becoming important. I liked what Phil Windley had to say also. (I wrote about this topic here. Dave Winer wrote here about why he thinks it’s over-hyped.)…” from Joho the Blog.
I think Dave Winer is right in pointing out that there’s nothing new here, but what I suspect he might be missing, too close to see, is that there is something new in the attention being given it, in the way it is being used, and in the integration of blogs and forums and wikis into a more cohesive networked whole. Just as design patterns (Gamma, Helm, et al) didn’t change object-oriented programming as much as classify it and provide a new vocabulary for OOP programmers to be able to communicate rich concepts with simpler phrases. Social Software may provide us with new taxonomies and phrases to talk about interrelationships between different posting idioms.