I enjoy browsing flickr, for procrastination or for finding pictures of local things (and, you're right, A2 is a well-documented area.) But I've never really "used" flickr - since I don't really take pictures, I don't feel like a participant in flickr, and don't feel any community aspect of it.

MySpace is good in concept, but every little thing involves three too many clicks and ten too many ads. Along with the frequent browser crashes it induces and the relative lack of meaningful interaction I've had with people through it, well, *shrug*.

I like wikis (and I use mine for things like recipes, reading lists, class notes, etc). As mentioned above, Ypsiwiki hasn't really taken off, mostly, I think, due to a bootstrapping problem of lack of real purpose and lack of participants. I am a true believer in Wikis as occupying a valuable place online, though.

Upcoming, ditto. I (heart) Upcoming, especially since most of the e-mail we've gotten on the AU list over the years has been event announcements, which we can direct people to post to Upcoming. I somewhat resent MySpace, actually, for horning in on territory that I think Upcoming handles much more elegantly, and therefore sapping Upcoming's potential userbase. I'd much much rather see bands announcing their shows on Upcoming than on MySpace.

I'm tempted to make statements like, "It's unfortunate that a bad piece of social software (MySpace) is crowding out good ones (Upcoming)," but I suppose the fact that MySpace has the mindshare means that it's "better" in some way. At any rate, I've never really gotten into pure networking sites (tribez, orkut, friendster, facebook), and MySpace has the same lack of appeal to me. Blogging remains my favorite form of social software, as a combination of habit + taste. (The latter being the fact that I'm much more a text person than a photo person, for example.)

We've discussed switching to some system that allows readers to log-in and filter posts by category / poster / etc. Further, the suggestion was made that we could allow any reader to maintain a personal blog on AU, with posts not displayed on the front page, but promotable by the core group - creating a more editorial role. This didn't happen for various reasons, including the question of whether we really wanted to empower anybody and everybody to maintain a blog under the AU masthead. I think we felt it was easy enough for people to start their own that we didn't need to be that service provider.

As far as categorization goes, I think the "tagging" model that flickr (or Drupal) allows is far more useful, for the reasons you note, than "categorizing". AU's categories have never been either presented in a very user-friendly fashion, nor do they partition the topic space well. Considering what AU has become, it would be more useful, say, to label something with "downtown, parking, transit, historic preservation" than "local, environment", but nobody knew it would be a planning page when it was set up.

You had, what, like, 20 posts on some days? You were right up there with Instapundit on the mystery of where you found the time. (Not to mention enough interesting links to justify that many posts...)

I don't think the Wiki learning curve is any steeper than the blogging learning curve, and, in fact, I'd say easier in a lot of ways. "click edit, type, click submit" is far easier to walk somebody through than any blogging howto I've ever sat anybody down for.

I'd say blogging has a few major things going for it over wiki:

Familiarity: "blog" is a familiar part of the English language. Businesses have blogs. Politicians have blogs. 13-year-olds have blogs. Authors and newspaper columnists have blogs. Everybody's heard of 'em, even if they haven't actually seen one, so it's treated as a normal thing. You can often trick people into using a certain tool by calling it a blog, because they say, "Oh, a blog. I've heard of those. This must be doable. "Wiki", on the other hand, is still much less familiar. And the leading example is not blogger or livejournal, but Wikipedia, where I think the extent serves to daunt and intimidate, rather than show that any idiot can do it.

Comment boxes: "leave a comment" is a much more comfortable gateway drug than "edit me". People are willing to tack a little comment on the bottom of a page in response to what people have written. They fear the freedom to actually affect the body of the page. People are willing to get in the habit of leaving comments, and then call themselves bloggers for it; wiki doesn't offer that. In my first go-round at a personal wiki, I had people make exactly that complaint to me, so I coded up a "leave a comment" box into my wiki interface. Rather than presenting people with the whole text of the page at their command, this allowed them to just type something and hit "submit" and have it appended onto the end of the page. This also, though, led to phenomenally easy spamming, and to thousands of comments from a Brazilian Ben Affleck fan club.

Clarity of purpose: Everybody knows what to write in a blog comment - just respond to whatever the post is! Everybody knows what to write in their own blog - whatever you darn well please! If nothing else, write about your cat! When using a wiki, especially one where the purpose is "whatever you want, within a loosely defined ideaspace", it's much harder. People feel the pressure of appropriateness weighing down on them. They can't handle the freedom - they need the stricture of having somebody set the agenda for discussion.

So. I agree that users find wiki model daunting. However, I don't think it has anything to do with the interface or a technological learning curve. I'd submit that the learning curve is purely social. And the only way to get over that, I think, is to make people more familiar with it.

I think what I was getting at, mostly involves what you said in the "Comment Boxes" paragraph above, as well as the fact that most wikis have different (non-html) code that the user has to learn to make links, format text, etc. Most non-computer literate people I talk to still don't know what html is. That's the reality you're starting from. The other problem I alluded to but didn't really explain, is that the people who, for example, might know the most about ypsilanti, are NOT the ypsilantians who are most likely/capable of/interested in editing a wiki. I'm thinking of- not to generalize, but - a group of elderly citizens who have lived here their whole lives, vs. a group of IT majors at EMU, most of whom couldn't care less where their school is even located. Yes, there are EMU students interested in Ypsilanti, just as there are senior citizens online (I recently heard something about AARP actually having a campaign to encourage such). However, those are the exceptions to the rule in both groups.

A wiki can be as easy to edit as a blog comment, but to keep beating a dead horse, I've met lots of very intelligent people who have also never even heard of a 'blog', and I'm usually forced to call it a 'personal website', which they generally understand. Just because you and I and most of our friends might have mad skillz, I've come to the conclusion that this is a very unrealistic view of the average computer user. I think the only interface that might be somewhat easily adopted by the masses would have to have buttons for every tag (links, images, italics, paragraphs, etc), detailed instructions on how to use them, and essentially a wysiwyg design. I also say this just because I don't think, personally, that standard wiki markup language is that intuitive or great, arguably not any better than html, and thus I'm hesitant to encourage a bunch of people to learn something that may not have any other applications.

That's my two cents. I could talk about usability all day, but I'll stop for now.

The one other thing you said, concerning the pressure of changing a page vs. just appending it, I agree with as well. There isn't really much I can think of to override that problem, except just to give society more time to get comfortable with the basic concept of getting up onto the 'electronic soapbox' and letting the whole world hear what they have to say. Issues of anonymity aside, I've found the most interesting aspect of this in regards to blog comments- there seems to be three basic groups: people who are already blogging themselves, people who don't want to go that far but might feel comfortable just leaving a comment, and those that are capable (technologically) of commenting, but still find even that too intimidating. Over time, I think the proportions of the three groups will change, but basically what you said about just adding a comment to a wiki page is that magical cut-off point between "Blogger" and "Commentor" which a lot of people don't want to cross.

The subject of getting people to engage in online participation- regardless of the site's purpose- is a very important one, I think, and that psychological element is usually neglected in usability studies I've read.

Yes, there are certainly plenty of smart people out there with something to say who don't know what a blog is. However. I think that those people are people who won't be served by ANY internet-based tool. You make a comment later about "those that are capable (technologically) of commenting" - that's a category that includes basically all internet users. If we sample "all internet users", rather than "all humans", I think we will find very high awareness of "blog".

For those folks who don't do computers - you use the example of senior citizens - obviously, the wiki vs. blog usability question is moot. There is, of course, a sneakernet-varient of wiki possible: print out all the pages and stick 'em in a three ring binder, with space at the bottom of each page for comments and plenty of blank pages. Then transcribe.

And participating online doesn't need to be any harder than that, really. You make the comment that wiki markup probably doesn't have any other application. That's true. However, you don't need to learn wiki markup to type plaintext. That's what WikiGnomes are for - they come through later and do the wikification of the plaintext typed by people who don't know wiki markup.

And don't get me wrong - I certainly don't think that online participation is necessary or better than in-person participation. As I've said before, online participation often doesn't use any geographic definition of "community". As of a few years ago, I think Ann Arbor and Ypsi both were pretty unique in the degree of online civic activism that they saw.

But I think the major use of online participation is as a supplement to in-person community participation, and as a hook to draw in such online-savvy but traditionally under-participating (on a local level) demographics like the college students you mention. I think the front porch, block club, bowling league, neighborhood association, and those people you see every time you go to the pub are still (more) important forms of participation and need to be encouraged. Community blogs, forums, and wikis are only one, very immature branch of community information.

(It is, of course, for discussions like this that an eventual phd in my hands will come from an information/library school.)

Yes, the City Manager pointed out that I was in the paper. I don't know how many column inches I think I deserve in the world of Ypsi blogging, yet. I think I mostly qualify as a *legacy* blog celebrity at this point.

I'm impressed by the range of people DuChene interviewed and collected into one article; coordinating bloggers is like herding cats. (which seems like a familiar analogy somehow...) The article does read a little choppily, though - perhaps an effect of trying to compile so many threads related only by "they're online and they care."