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I was trolling through some project folders today and found a couple of papers that were never published. I am sure any research scientist would understand the grief of coming across an old paper representing months or years of work that somehow never made it past the review process into a respectable journal or conference. It’s a grief that, well, i don’t think bloggers would identify with at all. Why wait six months to get your words into a conference, or a year to get a paper into a journal, constrained by the biases of the review process, when you could just get your message out online Today?

In any event, I thought I would put a couple of my favorite unpublished papers online. They’re a little old now, in blogger time, but still full of meaningful lessons…. Here are titles and abstracts, with links to full papers:

Research in Social Computing (written Feb of 2005, an overview of the topic of social computing) Abstract: People have begun to accept technology as a matter of course in the day-to-day areas of their lives. As a result, the development and proliferation of social software has enjoyed exponential growth in the past several years. In this paper we argue that as researchers and practitioners who create social technologies, we must take a “social engineering” approach, actively designing social applications to help users achieve their social goals. We then review current trends in innovation in social technologies, and discuss some of the hard problems that need to be addressed by the field in the next several years. We expect that as social technologies continue to innovate in areas such as social networks, social navigation, lightweight authoring, and mobile and ubiquitous computing, we must increasingly envision an integrated social computing experience: that is, a social computing platform.

Approximating Social Networks from Public Mailing Lists (originally written in 2003, describing a particular research project) ABSTRACT: Online social networking tools may facilitate knowledge exchange by allowing users to share information and develop relationships with others near them in their social network. However maintaining complete, u p -to-date social network information is challenging, requiring users to provide continuous, explicit access to their personal relationship data. We explore the viability of using public mailing lists in a corporate environment to automatically approximate social relationships. We found that co-memberships in mailing lists provided a reasonably accurate indication of who works with whom. We then explored whether people would find such social networking information valuable in seeking out or providing information to others. We found that organizational distance, social status, and informal social connections had a meaningful impact on whom users would chose to meet for sharing knowledge.