Jumping off from my last post, about the link between journalism and social network sites, I wanted to highlight Danah Boyd, who has been studying the emergence of social websites at U.C. Berkeley.

Boyd realized there wasn’t a good timeline of social network sites and since it would serve her work, has launched a public wiki dedicated to tracing the history of social network sites.

“There is a lot of collective knowledge, a lot of things other people know that I don’t and I wanted to tap into that,” said Boyd in a phone interview.

I’m interested in seeing how this history wiki turns out. The emergence of social network sites has been somewhat short — but jam packed. Only with a comprehensive timeline can one really step back and get the complete picture.

“I found myself sending out emails asking ‘when did that thing happen.’ I didn’t mark down a lot of events before I was studying these sites academically, so I didn’t want to hold on to them. But other people did, some for business reasons.”

Social network sites are changing the media landscape and as hot web properties are sold for millions of dollars. But what are the assumptions behind these moves? — a descent timeline is a good place to find out.

As Boyd opened up the wiki to the wisdom of the crowd, one thing she found was that they needed some steering, at least to serve her purposes.

She is interested in a timeline for social network sites, a small niche of social networkgING on the Web, said Boyd. They turn on the particularly recent move where a profile and a network of friends are public — as opposed to an AIM buddy list, which allows for connections online, but remains private for the invidiaul.

A similar distinction could be made for network journalism, which is a niche of citizen journalism. One could say that the Web has always been about citizen journalism — giving everyone the chance to publish. But network journalism — pooling knowledge together to do reporting — perhaps that deserves a timeline of its own.