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Blogs

There are many people that are doing some sort of "field" research in online communities and produce insightful analysis on user behavior the role of social software and future trends. Following them on twitter is a must for anyone interested in this research field :-)

Clay Shirky is one of the pioneer thinkers on distributed systems and user behavior. He has written about p2p systems, on-line communities, and social software. A good summary of his thoughts is available in his recent book Here comes everybody.

Danah Boyd is interested in social networking sites such as Friendster, Facebook, and Myspace. She has followed them from their very beginning and she has a deep understanding on the behavior of young people online.

Howard Rheingold: an untiring guru of social networks. Check also his cooperation commons project: http://cooperationcommons.com/about

Thomas Erickson: has introduced (together with Wendy A. Kellogg) the term "Social translucence" which refers to the "design digital systems that support coherent behavior by making participants and their activities visible to one another". (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_translucence and his papers which are very well written)

And many more ....