Modus Cooperandi

Convergence and Procreation

Over the last several months, there have been several concepts floating around that I'd like to tie together this morning.  In the end, they all reveal something important: People's expectations in relationships are fundamentally changing.  This is probably evolutionary but is being triggered now by how our relationship to people, ideas, and things are now more controllable.

On-demand television means we watch whatever, whenever.  Videos, the same.  E-commerce means we can buy what we want, when we want, for a good price, get comparisons with like goods, discuss it with other users, etc.  All of this to the extent that we want to.  We don't have to do any of this, but there is the option.

The Unconference is a great example of our new relationship.  Google it.  Unconferences have grown out of people's growing lack of satisfaction for being talked to.  The egalitarianism of the Internet has led many to expect that they will be in on the conversation - not a recipient of unchallenged wisdom.

For years people have said that the value of any conference is the mixers and not the seminars.  That's because we learn more from our peers than we do from experts, surely.  But more importantly, it's because we care more about things we actively engage in.  We retain more when we are active.  We get more when we give.

Are You REALLY Atrios?

Today's Yi-Tan conference call discussed an emerging theme amongst the blogophilic.  The base problem, as opined more technically by Mary Hodder, is:

How can we properly guide viewers to relevant blog content and community?

The nutshell problem is this:  Most search engines (Google, Technorati, etc.) look for links-in and links-out as a primary indicator of the social worth of a web page or blog post.  Anyone who has delved into the muck of the web for something specific knows that regardless of the impressiveness of current systems - you often find primarily e-commerce sites.

Danah Boyd (earlier post) wrote about gender issues in linking and link strength.  In essence, that men tend to link a whole lot more and a whole lot less selectively than women.  This ends up causing an imbalance in the relative strength of links WRT issues of importance to women and other factors.

So the issue here is how do we invent metrics to judge the relative social worth of one blog post over another.  The analysis needs to take into account the fact that gamers of this sytem are flooding the internet with content-free blog posts and web pages that contain key words and copious links.  These sites are primarily aimed to get eyeballs to make money for the people putting up these sites.  They are web spammers.  Web spammers are very good at gaming rankings like these and defeating their purpose.

Community is measured differently by different people.  Some measure it by the amount of participation in discussions. Some measure it by linking.  Some measure it by blogrolling.  But all these are, at best, indirect measures.

Direct measures may be no better.  If our solution is merely to tag links by their relative importance, those tags are easy to spot and easy to fabricate for web spammers. 

Ultimately, the issue at the moment is that there is no personal identification code for someone on the web.  There is no unique identifier.  Therefore, we have no content fingerprint with which to weed out serious content from spam.  We have no way of creating real reputation management.

Nancy White's quest for the ultimate community indicators is an element running along side this activity.  The ultimate answer to both question probably lies at their intersection somewhere in the future.  When we can measure via indirect means the strength of an emerging or emerged community then perhaps we can evaluate the relative worth of its members' contributions.

In the meantime, I will direct you again at Mary's post which provides a weighting of many different metrics which is either skimming off the existing metric soup or it may be a good Wisdom of Crowds approach.   It might be harder to game, but it may also be harder to obtain a good ranking because there are so many indicators to satisfy.

Other posts by other people on this topic can be found here.

Potential Pervasive Populist Panopticon?

It all came to a head in the London Tube.

David Brin's Earth (fiction) and The Transparent Society (theory) examined the impacts of varying degrees of transparency in society.  The concept here is that if government can have implements to view deeply into our private lives, the citizenry should have the same views into the operations of government.  The extension is that we also have that view into the lives of each other.

Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs sees this as a popular revolt enabled by emergent technology.  Cell phones, digital cameras and pervasive networks (both social and technological) can rapidly transmit organizing messages to the masses.

Larry Lessig's book Code describes the evolution of copyright, intellectual property. and information control in western culture.  It goes on to describe how these notions of the permanence of intellectual property were necessary, but are becoming increasingly less so.  Thoughts like this have become the bedrock of the open source movement and the Creative Commons.

Also, in this mix, is Duncan Watts expands a bit on a topic from his book Six Degrees in this article from Slate a while back.  Here Duncan discusses how superior intelligence can be gathered from diversified sources rather than overly-centralized sources.   This theme is also discussed in detail in The Wisdom of Crowds and a whole lot of other books at the moment.

So ... as I said, it all came to a head in the London Tube.

People entered the tube on a normal workday to do normal things.  They were living as Londoners, as tourists, each playing their part in a normal London day.  Then the extraordinary happened.  At that moment, their relationships changed.  Reordered.  Mutated.

They added to this list:  Terrorism Impactees.  Some were injured, some were killed, some heroically pulled others from cars, some fled in a panic of self-preservation.  But they all shared that. 

Many of them, armed only with their Nokias, started taking pictures, taking video, documenting.  I blogged about this recently in a different context , the context of the ownership of one's life.

Over the last several weeks, there has been a mild but discernible backlash against the people who took these pictures.  Against news agencies that paid for pictures or video from amateurs.  Against the concept of taking a picture in a moment of emergency.

Building the 4,000 Legged Monster

Monsters are not always bad.  In Japanese sequels they're often the protector of little children. 

Robert May wants to build a 4,000 legged business monster on-line.  The site will provide a somewhat MMI (Massive Muliplayer Incubator) for a new business.

Participants join, toss in some ideas, the group discusses the ideas, votes and a business pops out.  Particpants are equity stakeholders in the new business.  I wanted to blog the site's existence now.  I'm going to go take a look its operations and report back.

Do Not Operate Heavy Machinery After Blogging

Good night nurse....

Canada's Canoe reports on Flu Bloggers who are smartmobbing the potential upcoming flu outbreak.  This is an ad hoc community gathered rapidly and naturally from a concern looming on the horizon.   There are several elements of this that interest me.

Natural ad-hoc cohesion - Most of these bloggers came to be associated with each other due to a common interest that they, themselves, started in isolation.  After the start of their blogs, they were able to join together as a network.  So they started as radical, isolated nodes and achieved cohesion due to the instantaneous selective searching capabilities of the internet.  They could not have formed as a group without starting as inspired individuals.

Internal Discord and External Accord - Like most groups, these participants see the benefits of the entire group but also its warts. Conscientious researchers are paired with wacky conspiracy theorists due to the open structure of the internet.  In the aggregate, however, these bloggers learn from each other and refine their posts to build on information learned and analyzed.

Hard Science meets Human Interest - These situations leave the door open for many possibilities.  Researchers, finding a community of interested people, could tap this resource for article research, case studies and distributed computing.  Imagine if you were studying a particular strain of influenza and needed to model its growth.  There are many ways to model a contagion, but you only have the computing power or time to do a subset.

Politics meets an Informed Populace - The flu is more than something that sells Nyquil.  It's an issue.  Flu vaccine distribution, community health preparation, school system policy, worker compensation, quarantine rules, and many other factors are intrinsically linked to the flu.  As situational blogging like this grows (and it likely will), the "special interests" that currently are credited with influencing public opinion will both draw from and be challenged by these communities.  Lawmakers will find themselves being educated by these bloggers and find these bloggers formidable and sophisticated foes should they find themselves on the wrong side of an issue.

Take a look at a few of the flu blogs and see how you feel....

Now is the time for all good to come to the of the Party

MSN Spaces, a blogging and social tool from the Microsoft Corportation has opened service in China.  The predecessor of MSN China was MSN Asia which stumbled mightily with amusing or tragic cultural missteps.  With the launch of MSN China, MSN Spaces makes the first steps of cultural sensitivity by banning words like "freedom" and "democracy" from entries on its blogs.  Amusingly, here's a story from MSN about it.

Cooperative Cover Girls

You will see more stock trading designations in this article about cooperation than any other, I'd imagine.  But this week, Howard Rheingold and the IFTF's Cooperation Project gets lots of ink and the cover of Businessweek.

This article goes beyond the usual summaries of cooperative theory and talks about how companies are applying new methodologies and technologies and acheiving tangible, serious, and profitable results that, in the end, help create a better world.

Reviewing SquareSpace

SquareSpace is one of the most impressive blogging applications we’ve seen.  SquareSpace’s graphic design, features, and attention to detail are top-notch.  We were stunned by its beauty.  How often can you say that about a blogging tool?

The site’s complexity means there’s a bit higher learning curve than most blogapps.  The site is also not free.  You can test drive for 31 days, but you’ll need to shell out some bucks otherwise.  For a multi-user blog, this can be a little spendy.

Fantastic Features (Claws that Catch)

Creative Commons – SquareSpace allows you to easily create and display your standard copyright or creative commons notice. 

Statistics – SquareSpace has the best statistics we’ve seen thus far.  Full access to usage logs as well as helpful up-to-the-minute reports.

Number of Modules – There’s a lot of extendibility to SquareSpace.  You can add photo albums, threaded conversations, file storage / download, Amazon wish list, change tracking, IM and others.

Post Alerts – strong system to alert Technorati and other engines that you have posted and send out trackback pings.

Fatal Flaws (Bandersnatch)

No SquareSpace Trackbacks:  No trackback ping URLs for your posts, so people can’t easily alert you.

No Technorati Cosmos links:  The obvious thing to save grace from not having trackbacks would be to have Technorati do that for you.  Since the system is already alerting technorati that your post is there, it isn’t much harder to put in a Technorati cosmos link to track interest that way.

Hidden Features – You really have to dig for the features.

Still Some Bugs – A few features made our browsers crash and some were dependent on Internet Explorer to work.

Read the full on review (coming soon)

Rankings (outta 10)

Jim – 8

Ken – 8

Composite Collaberwocky Rating: 8

Note .. we are currently trying to figure out which service to host the reviews we are writing.  We would like to use SquareSpace, but the lack of Trackbacks or a Cosmos link is giving us heartburn.  The problem is, every blog hosting site has some fatal flaw!

Choosing the Wrong Technology

Sweet beautiful irony.  In this blog entry on ZDNet David Berlind interviews Ross Mayfield from SocialText about blogs and wikis and when to use which technology.  They have a long chat about it and, in the end, Berlind ends with the statement:

OK.  So, if you didn’t know what a wiki was before, but are ready to get one now, raise your hand.

This is because the interview itself is circular and confusing.  Mayfield is commenting on how it's sometimes hard to grasp which technology to use in a given circumstance.

But the irony here is that he conducts the interview with Ross entirely over IM.  And then reprints that chat. So, he used the wrong technology to interview someone about the appropriate uses of a given technology.  This was apparently clear enough to Mayfield that before the interview was published, he blogged what he was really thinking.

IM rewards terse verbiage.

So what came from Ross in the ZDNet interview was a smarmy, off-the-cuff set of answers that were obviously made to economize typing and not to communicate subtleties.  His follow-on blog entry is much more thoughtful.  It is likely that in a voice interview, some of his statements would have been different.

Certainly, check out Ross' blog entry above.  It's a very good read.

Throwing the Wiki out with the Blogwater

In this Tech Republic article Ramon Padilla, Jr. misses the ball. Mr. Padilla, Tech Republic’s eGovernment writer, wrote this article to mini-extol the virtues of the wiki over the blog for Government. He believes that blogs are not good for government.  I disagree.

Probably a hint of his misconception is this statement:

…giving government employees a bully pulpit on the intranet would probably result in a negative cost-benefit analysis.

This is the crux of his argument for both internal and external use. Government cannot be effective if government employees are allowed to make statements that may contradict the “official line” of government policy.  ... That government cannot be trusted to blog.

But government already does blog. (Mayor Tom McMahon of Reading, PA, Cuyhoga County Planning , etc. ) And they don’t do it enough.

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