Social Documents and Online Communities

TechCrunch: EtherPad shows Google Docs How it's Done

The introduction of Web 2.0 was a definite game-changer for our relationships with other people, how we interact with each other and how we do things. The internet has been praised for its ability to bring people closer together, forming communities that are dislocated geographically, but are brought together in a virtual space. While the internet is now very multimedia-orientated, a lot of communication is still done via text: on twitter and facebook and email and instant messaging. I remember reading in the First Monday article, The Social Life of Documents, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, about how important it is for communities to have access to the same documents in order to feel like part of a group, no matter how far the people of the community is spread.

The virtual space of the internet is good at bringing people together, and making access to the same documents easier, forming new types of communities online. But a big part of Web 2.0 is the ability for everyone to publish and share information, and even write documents together. Previously this could be done through email, but email is a delayed system and does not have the immediacy of physically being in a room and being able to talk in real-time. This is why I find sites like EtherPad interesting. It allows a certain amount of people to write and edit the same document in real-time, in a similar style to a chat room. The article linked above outlines the features and advantages of using EtherPad.

EtherPad played a large role in the creation of documents for an online community that call themselves 'Nerdfighters'; they used it to write songs, compile lists and gather information. EtherPad has since been bought out by Google, when Google Wave (a similar service available to those with Google accounts) was big, and subsequently shut down EtherPad's servers. However, as the article states, there are now EtherPad clones on the web, so people can still create documents in the same way without having to sign up for anything.

The above is a screencap of an EtherPad document. As you can see, each author is represented by a different colour so that the parts that were written and edited by different people can be identified. A slightly more serious and ~active demonstration of the power of this type of service is here at PiratePad (an EtherPad clone), where the users were asked to list all the community's inside jokes. In alphabetical order. So, you can see how that works.

These types of services change the way in which documents are written, and how people interact with each other, which is a big part of social informatics. Right? Right.