TheyBlinked

12/27/2004 05:31:00 PM

December 27th: The Third Day of Christmas
Social Ownership

It is good to be an owner.
It is good to share.

The values you learned in pre-school and the values you learned in b-school are no longer in conflict. With SmartCommons sharing and ownership go hand-in-hand.

Just as Flickr is about social photography and Judy's Book social commerce, SmartCommons is about social ownership: Labeling, managing and sharing what you have in common with the people you trust.

Like all social software tools, in SmartCommons value is created through the meaningful connections afforded by data. Getting the data into the system in the first place is the initial hurdle. This is often an incremental task. You upload a few photos into your Flickr account every week. You write a Judy's Book review on the amazing plumber or excellent child care you encounter every few months. Over time these entries build up with those entered by everyone else in the system and the value created is greater than the data itself. Getting relationally meaningful data into the social ecosystem is the first step to this place.

In SmartCommons you can get data into the system in four different ways:

Import Your Amazon Purchases: Click the Settings button (top right) once you are logged into SmartCommons. Enter your Amazon.com credentials and everything you have purchased from Amazon will be added to your SmartCommons Collection. If you want the system to automatically synchronize all future Amazon purchases just tick the check box (your credentials will be decrypted by a server-side process only for sychronization and will never be seen by a human).

Search For Items By Keywords: Log into SC and go here to search for items by author, keyword, manufacturer, et al. If you have Collection installed you can click on the "Add Items" menu item under Tools or press F1.

Scan Item Barcodes: Log into SC and go here. Click on the "Scan Items" button. If you have Collection installed click on the "Scan Items" item on the Tools menu or press F2.

Manually Enter Items: Log into SC and go here. Click on the "Add Items Manually" button. This is an excellent way to put homemade items, self-published books and other non-commercial items into your commons.