My friend Karl Hakkarainen (who blogs at )pointed me to a wonderful article on Life with Alacrity about the history of social software. It roots the idea of using computers as tools to support individual memory, people-to-people, content-to-content, and people-to-content connection and coordination. From idea to experiment to practice, the language has changed and evolved as real applications have been envisioned and then made real.

When I first skimmed the article, I felt as if my professional life was passing by. I was working with text editing software in 1982 when I attended an ACM SIGOA conference in Portland, where I heard Charles Goldfarb talk about generalized markup. I went back to Digital and designed and created a document markup language and software system that produced technical manuals — and a hypertext help system. A little later, also at Digital, I met John Whiteside, one of the founders of the ACM special interest group on computer-human interaction, which inspired the SIG on computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). From there to knowledge management, a renewal in the development of collaboration systems, and on to social software. The language has evolved with times.

Hence, over in Corante, there is a dialogue about the term “social software,” its connotations, and alternatives.

I have a large section in my Ark Report (KM and the Social Network, or some such title not yet confirmed) on “social software” — broadly defined — and how different tools enable network-building. I have “finished” my draft and am now in that angst-producing time between the writing and publication, during which I come across, or people like my friend Karl send me, new articles and thoughts and ideas that, had I had them a month ago, would have found their way in the fabric of my written thoughts. Grrr.