There were some good, practical examples of social software in action at ETCON, which has been encouraging for those of us trying to make these ideas work in the real world with good old-fashioned groups and organsations. We heard some interesting ideas about using social software in new ways and in new contexts, and saw some useful demos of tools and services:

Disney has made a major commitment to RSS as a way of sharing information within the organisation, and as Ross Mayfield notes, they are making practical use of enterprise weblogs and wikis, with RSS readers rolled out throughout the company.

James and Will from iSociety did a presentation on the Skyhouse project, which aims to deploy social software in a brand new London skyscraper, planned for an area on the Greenwich peninsula. They looked at different types of ties between people in common spaces, from weak ties based on shared infrastructure through stronger ties based on common tasks and activities to strong ties derived from common interests and culture. The purpose of the talk was to think through the pitfalls and potential dangers implied by using software and technology to mediate or support these different types of relationship. The project will aim to gently and inconspicuously support social interaction between residents of the building, which is a suitably cautious aim given the fragility of social systems in high rise buildings generally.

Molly Steenson and Michael Kieslinger from IVREA showcased a project called Fluidtime, which began as an experiment into using technology to help students coordinate their use of a common resource - in this case a washing machine (see session notes). Whilst it is hard to see how these ideas could be practically employed outside of the innovastive, futuristic IVREA environment, it was a well-worked project that can teach us something about combining physical and virtual artefacts to convey shared information. The implications of combining Skyhouse with Fluidtime don't bear thinking about - letting people who are comfortable with technology have an advantage over the usage of shared resources in a building is potentially a recipe for disaster.

Fiona Romeo spoke about research she has been involved in at the BBC concerning the use of social software by children and teenagers, and tried to imagine what a children's wiki, perhaps about collecting or another shared interest, might look like. See Fiona's blog for background.

As a testament to the power of simplicity in this field, Joshua Shachter's work is hard to beat. He was behind the successful memepool project and more recently launched the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us, which is utterly brilliant as a demonstrator of the value of simple, bottom-up metadata and discovered linkages. he project he showcased here this week was GeoURL, which is a very basic means by which weblogs and websites can include geo-coding tags based on their longtitude/latitude and area of coverage so that people can find content by place as well as by person or theme. Joshua developed GeoURL over a weekend, and it has over 100,000 registered sites in its database already, with hundreds being added every day. He did, however, leave us with a warning, which was that organised and quite crafty spammers are very quick to start trying to 'game' a system of this kind by pumping dubious links into the database that link through to sites they represent in order to improve their Google pagerank by association.