Evolving Web

Better Communication is not More Communication

A few weeks ago, my business partner Corey and I were having a conversation about process maturity.  I said, “Better is not More.”  That’s become a mantra for us and it’s showing up everywhere.

Today Mark Evans has a post about this in communication.

He says:

My read is consumers of digital services and content are being swamped, and madly scrambling to keep up. As a result, I think there’s going to be a growing demand for tools that filter and synthesize things to reduce the amount of noise.

Social media has put is in the middle of a cocktail party.  Lots of conversations to track, lots of interesting people.

However, tabbed browsers and multiple applications now mean that we are attending several cocktail parties at the same time.  Or at least we can if we choose to.

I set a cap at 10.  And ten is still pretty insane.  So my standard tab set comes up with 10 social media apps every morning. 

I’ve made a point to make Google Reader one of these and that’s non-negotiable.  Why?  Because immediate communication is enticing.  So Twitter and the like are like crack.  I force myself to go for the slower world of blogs.

I’ve killed off FriendFeed, Plaxo and others like them – apps that go mental on trying to bring you 40 services at once.  With 100s of people in that world, information goes by faster than anyone can process.

So, go for quality and and not quantity.  Join the conversations you can actually participate in.  Slow down and think.

Technorati Tags: mark evans,social media,corey ladas,better is not more

Spam Arrives on Facebook Chat

  One of my friends in Singapore's Facebook account has apparently been hijacked by spammers.  Every day at 11 am her account now sends me spam via Facebook chat.  Since it's 4 am in Singapore, I can't believe that every night she climbs out of bed to tell me about Macy's gift certificates.

I tried to reach Facebook about this, but they weren't interested.

Has anyone else seen this?

Technorati Tags: facebook, spam, social media, social networking

Knowing It Will, Waiting for When

Last month while in Beijing I had the good fortune to have a nice plate of Wikipedia.  Of course, I blogged about it.  There was some initial attention but, honestly, I'd fallen off (still haven't fully climbed back on) the blogging wagon and my pageviews showed it.

But I figured that one day, someone would notice the Wikipedia post and it would go crazy.  It was just too good and the pictures Pockey took were excellent.

So today, a cascade of sites picked up the Wikipedia post and my pageviews, which were seriously depressed, did this:

Now I feel like Thomas Dolby Robertson - I have this huge back catalog of really great work and all people are going to remember are my novelty posts.

Of course, this is largely my own fault.  When I was posting regularly my daily traffic would hover at better levels.

What's also interesting about this though is that the instigating site was, apparently, a food site, then spread to kottke, geek press, and Waxy (Nov 28th).  And from there to a host of other sites, like this much appreciated summarization by Dan Bruno.

So this further confirms a few things I've long expected:

(1) Geeks are actually migrating away from Jolt and Chips to fully embracing food culture.  In many instances, my food posts have raised as many comments as my better tech posts

(2) Write it and they will come.  In England they are warning kids that Blogging is Forever.  Two edged sword obviously.  But, if you leave nice nuggets up, people come back to them.  I've been watching this fairly closely as I've been writing less.  When I was getting around 200 or 300 pageviews a day, much of that was coming to new content.  When there was no new content, my pageviews fell to half that.

(3) Network effects extend naturally outside of predictable network paths.  They are not linear.  LinkedIn and other social networking sites currently do not recognize this.  Facebook allows you to be a member of a variety of Networks, but only one of them can be geographic.  What is up with that?  I belong to three geographic networks:  Seattle, The Bay Area, and Beijing.  Who is Facebook to cordon me off to merely one?

Two final interesting things about (2) above:

(A) New subscribers kept coming even when I wasn't posting (I suspect because going directly to the site was no longer rewarding)

(B) Certain articles started gaining in stature as I was dealing more and more with natural search traffic.  The clear winner in those?  Aggregation pages. 

I'll blog more about my natural search observations later.  But, now that I've firmly profited from my own "Blinded Me with Science", I need to quickly go write up my "Hyperactive!"  

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, kottke, seriouseats, dan bruno, geek press, waxy, natural search, blogging, thomas dolby

The Significance of Music in Second Life

co-written with Johnvon

Music has always been a social art form, created and enjoyed by people in groups. Some argue that music was one of the primary means by which early groups of humans communicated and maintained the social bonds that held their communities together.

Since the invention of music recording however, about a century ago, technological developments have made the experience of music a more and more private activity. Once music could be purchased for listening at home, the possibility of enjoying music in private by yourself became a more and more popular alternative to attending performances. This has led to our current iPod era, where the most iconic image of a music listener is of a solitary individual dancing with mp3 player and earphones attached, rather than the more social concert or club audiences of earlier periods.

More recently, networking and new online media technologies have reversed this trend to some extent, giving us new ways to form communities around music. Napster showed us all how badly we want to share our music, and in spite of the dogged resistance of the 'mainstream' music industry, technologies for sharing music and other media online continue to grow in sophistication.

Most recently, virtual world environments such as Second Life have introduced a significant new development, creating a virtual 3d space in which groups of fans can listen to and experience music together in real-time. Of course virtual reality tech like this has been around since the early 90s, but the last couple years mark the first time that they have been easily accessible by a large simultaneous user base.

We anticipate that virtual world technologies are likely to have a major impact on the world of music in the near future. We will focus on Second Life here as it currently has the most sophisticated in-world music scene.

Sharing the Experience of Music

People want to share music. This doesn't only mean passing mp3 files back and forth, it means sharing the experience of music. It means sharing feelings about it, sharing opinions and reactions, and talking about it in real time. For example, we all spent time as teenagers lying on the floor listening to new music and talking about it, and for many of us our musical tastes were one of the main ways we identified with our friends.

While Internetworking technologies have revolutionized the modern music scene, they have fallen short of replicating this one key element of musical experience: shared reception, whether of one's own recent music purchases or of a live concert.

The Internet, the Web and related networking technologies have brought great change to the music world in the past decade, from mp3 music distribution to the profusion of indie bands and producers promoting themselves on a MySpace page or through their own websites.

Last.fm is a great example of how Web 2.0 technologies such as tagging, folksonomies, ratings and recommendations from users with similar tastes can be used to help listeners find new music they will enjoy.

However, although Last.fm bills itself as the 'social music revolution' and tries its best to connect you with other listeners, even going so far as to show you a page of images of other users whose tastes are similar to your own...

...yet just seeing some names of people who like the same music you do is not the same thing as actually being with them and hearing the music together. The 2d asynchronous nature of the Web does not allow for this level of interaction with others. Until now none of these online technologies could replicate the experience of going to see and hear a live musical performance in the company of other listeners.

Second Life provides an interesting and exciting extension to this. Through avatars, users can seek out not only social experiences to listen to new music in a shared context, but they can also search worldwide for the musical subculture that best meets their tastes. A Second Life user can experience a live performance from their dorm room in Ames, Iowa while the performer may be in Berlin and other listeners/clubgoers scattered around the world.

While the user's avatar is dancing, the user can be speaking to fellow attendees from all over the world. Casual conversations can easily happen, even more easily than they could in a real life club.

Add to this one very un-real element of Second Life -- distance is never a barrier. Users can teleport from one club to another merely by using the search utility, finding another club with music they like, and clicking the teleport button. The barrier of time and space is utterly nullified. The only barrier to leaving would be social.

But, regardless of where the user ends up, she'll be there with other people. They will experience the music at the same time, they will "share" the experience of the music in the truest sense of the word.

Are We Not (walk)Men?   No!

Until the advent of Second Life and similar virtual world technologies, the Internet had really only extended pre-existing trends towards music listening as an asocial private activity. As with iPods and the Walkmen before them, listening to music online has been largely a solo activity so far. The iPod advertisements were somewhat foreboding in this respect, the individual reduced to lone dancing silhouette -- action without social interaction. In so many situations, we listen alone.

However, Second Life is re-creating music online as a truly social event. The music played live and streamed through Second Life is simultaneously experienced by those gathered. This is a fundamental shift -- with Second Life broadcast media and experiential media coalesce.

In Second Life, individuals gather to listen to live music and DJ mixes from unknowns and mega-stars -- all from their own homes. Clubs in Second Life are often hosts for after-hours parties. After clubbing in their home cities, people will log in to Second Life to wind down before bed, visiting their favorite virtual clubs and seeing their SL friends. As an artist is performing, so is the audience receiving, experiencing and sharing his performance together. The artist can also communicate easily with the audience via text chat. During a performance, the audience will frequently react to a particularly impressive part of a song in group chat. Concerts and other performances become interactive, they become participatory.

Impact

Stay Tuned

In upcoming days Johnvon and I will examine Second Life and Music more closely. Articles will include:

• Culture, Networking and Music
• Monetization and Sales of Music heard in Second Life
• The flow of music from real life to second life and back again
• Music Production in Second Life
• Leveraging of External Networks in Second Life

Technorati Tags: second life, music, lastfm, social networking, social media, monetization, broadcast media, experiential media

Friends Make You Healthy

So we all know that I joined Walker Tracker a little over two months ago.  It's largely been a positive experience.  I feel better, I know I'm moving around more, and I have ... proof of it.

One of the big problems with general exercise is you have few ways to answer questions like: 

• Am I doing better?
• Are my goals realistic?
• What is actually impacting my goals?

These questions have two guideposts ... you v. you and you v. others.  Walker Tracker helps with all these.

Jim Against Jim Smackdown!

First we'll look at me v. me.

Here I am over the last 40 days.  We can pretty much pick out days where I was flying or sitting in a car by the dips.  But at the end of last month (days 22 thu 26) I just totally felt sluggish and sat around.

My monthly walking goal is an average of 10,000 steps per day - about 5.6 miles or 9 kilometers.  I usually try to push that up 6 miles or 9.5 km.  Anyway, we can see a sudden rise and plateau during the last two weeks at about 11,000 steps per day.

Why?

Because of this:

Walker Tracker let's me know my overall highs and lows for my history, but check out my average last month.

Yes, 8.943 - largely due to the massively irregular amount I was walking every day and my fit of laziness at the end of the month.

So this month I redoubled my efforts to maintain a consistent regimen.

Now, consider this, what I now consider days of extreme laziness I used to call

"days".    The existence of the rolling metric changed my perception of what makes a successful day.

So, in Jim v. Jim, Jim suddenly has to keep up with his own expectations - and knows full well when he does it.

In addition, I'm slowly covering the world with walking paths in my walking map.  Zoom in on a given point to see my walks through several cities over the last two months.  Wow, 11 cities and 5 states in two months!

Jim Against the World!

This is all well and good, but these stats are cold and lifeless.  They are Jim in a void.  No friends, no walking comrades.  One shudders to contemplate the ambling isolation.

But Jim does have Comrades.  One of which, Heather, is a pedo-maniac and nearly impossible to keep up with.  So we know, overall how we stand, but that's not the whole story.  So let's select a few near me and see how things are on a daily basis.

Here we can tell some stories.  Everyone has good days and bad.  Prentiss Riddle who is 4th on the list, also (at the end there) the one with the record number of steps (over 22,000) in one day of hiking around Spain.  Brian Kerr has a day that beat all of mine.

What I get from this is that my routine will get me my goal, but I'm having very few (none in this instance) breakout days.  We saw above, my highest step day, ever, was a little over 16,000, well below Mr. Riddle's effort. 

Now, if I were to add Heather back here, we'd all look like sloths.  So what I have here are peers in my walking / jogging weight class.

Community in Walker Tracker

The "usual" community is certainly present in Walker Tracker.  I'm pleased to see the number of comments my step blog actually gets.  Beyond that, people discuss technique, proper shoes, the lifespan of shoes, how to tell if your shoes are worn out (mine were), motivation, and so forth.

Communities seem to form around almost anything now.  It seems expected and almost effortless.  Support can come from almost anywhere at any time.  And, at least in this instance, it's made me healthy.

Technorati Tags: walkertracker, walker tracker, community, support, shoes, rankings

Communities Do Not Live Alone

 Historically, US Foreign policy has been chaotic.  Why?  Ask Kevin Rose.

Yesterday, the HD-DVD decryption code was hacked and someone posted it in a blog.  Where would one expect that to show up first?  Did you say Digg?  Well of course you did!

That's where it ended up.  Kevin Rose and the Digg crew received a cease and desist.  So the Digg crew started to cease and desist.  They removed dugg stories and those that linked to them.

They told people to knock it off.  When they didn't knock it off, people were suspended.  This was the diplomatic response to external pressure.  It was Digg's foreign policy.

Why?  Because communities do not live alone.  And communities often have different desires than their leaders.  The Digg community of people who would care about this code live inside Digg.  There are other communities in Digg that don't care about the code.  Digg lives inside other communities.  The social media community.  The startup community.  The Web 2.0 community.  The VC-funded community.  The corporate community.  The legal community.  And on and on and on.

Digg initially tried to respond to the outside pressure.  But then digg users went crazy and dugg a jillion stories with the code in it.  Soon nearly everything on Digg had the code.  What's a Digg to do?

They had to give in to the internal demands and change their foreign policy. 

The Digg users are a democratic organization at best, a mob at worst.  But like The Moral Majority, the NRA, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, NARAL or any other democratic mob - they knew the way to get their agenda on the table was to take direct action.

Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and the rest of the Digg crew responded to protect the community from an outside threat.  The community on the inside rapidly responded that curtailing freedom in its defense was unacceptable.

In the end, the Digg crew stopped deleting stories.  They stopped searching and destroying offending posts.  And threw up this internal community white flag:

... after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Commentary on the cease and desist order may come later from me, but right now, I'm once again fascinated by the parallels of on-line communities to other human communities.  How we act and react.  How governments and citizenry debate.  How policy is generated.

"Yeah great," Kevin Rose is thinking, "meanwhile I'm the guy that has to pay the lawyers..."

 

Technorati tags: digg, kevin rose, emergent democracy, foreign policy, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Blogged at the Interbay Starbucks in Seattle Using Windows Live Writer

Free Services Are Unaccountable Stewards

Is your information important to you?   Your email?  Your contacts?  Your conversation histories?

GMail, Yahoo!Mail, Hotmail, and other free web-based email services are free.  They also are contentious.  Being so, they don't save secret copies of your email.

This week, Google had a glitch and it nuked the email of about 60 Gmail account holders. 

Here's Google's note to Techcrunch, explaining the issue:

We saw your post today about Gmail and wanted to let you know what was going on.

Regretfully, a small number of our users — around 60 — lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th. Once we found out about this issue, we worked day and night to confirm that only a few accounts were affected and to do whatever we could to restore as much of the users’ accounts as we could. We’ve also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have.

We know how important Gmail is to our users – we use it ourselves for our corporate email. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect email stored with Gmail and we are confident that this is a small and isolated incident.

In the Web 2.0 world, we put a lot of our important information in the hands of benevolent strangers.  They operate according to the whims of funding, bugs, advertisers, worms, security holes, and the Department of Homeland Security (or local equivalent).

At any time, your personal information is at risk when using these systems.  It's up to you to measure that level of risk.

I use typepad because I can download an OPML file of my blog at any time and save it.  I try to do this quarterly.

Typepad and SixApart are bang-up people, I truly trust them.  But Fate ... well, she's a different girl altogether.  And even with backups, Typepad has been known to lose a day or two there.  Not because they are negligent or stupid - but because that's how computers work.

Some things I have to just trust.  My del.icio.us information or my network in LinkedIn are entirely unprotected from loss.  And I rely on them.

When Ed Vielmetti's laptop broke in October, he arrived at my doorstep heavy in a state of withdrawal.  I loaned him one of my laptops and watched the life seep back into him.  The color returned to his face, he stopped hyperventilating ... but that was just net access.  (Slight exaggerations, mine.)

One of the things Ed told me he was most reliant on was his del.icio.us links.  What if someone developed a del.icio.us worm that ate the whole database?  Or even just Ed's account?  For Ed, Ed's account is really important.

In the terms of service, no one promises to save your data from harm - ever.  So, don't blame Gmail if you lose your vital information.  You choose your level of risk.

Technorati tags: gmail, google, yahoo, risk, data loss, backing up, responsibility, ed Vielmetti

Blogged from the Sai Oak in Ocean Shores, Washington

Image borrowed from DnDAdventure.

If it has a shape, you can map it.

I've created several posts over the last six months about ways we might map conversation, thought, and information.  I have been focusing on the use of information.  How we use it to tell a story.

Alex Pang, in the meantime, has been cataloging ways in which cyberspace actually manifests itself.  In a series of posts, Alex has found evidence that virtual people have carbon footprints and that cyberspace has weight.

I will note, oddly that the weight of cyberspace appears to be almost the same as the alleged weight of the human soul.

A map is a manifestation of our understanding.  How we understand the world is shaped, how we understand we move from place to place, how we understand Napoleon's troop losses occurred when marching to and back from Russia, etc.  Cyberspace is starting to have all sorts of interesting mapping implications.

For example, if the average Second Life avatar really does use the same amount of electricity as an average resident of Brazil ... how would we map that carbon footprint?  Is it by the locations of the servers (the physical location of the virtual person), by the location of the user who created the avatar (the physical location of the intent to use resources), by the impacts in transmission - charting the other avatars and players with whom that character interacts (the locations or movement of purpose), and so on...

I wouldn't mind getting my hands on some of that data and going map-happy with it.

Technorati tags: second life, carbon footprints, cyberspace, mapping, GIS

Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

Collaborative Life After Jimmy Wales

Okay, everyone loves Wikipedia.  But I am always amazed at how it is an integrated component in normal on-line conversation.  "I heard once that ..." is now dead for conversation.  Wikipedia is an instant backup for everything. 

Today I had two simultaneous conversations one which involves relative sizes of urban areas and another which involved a tuna melt.  An active NDA means I can't show you the conversation about the urban areas, but I am under no legal restrictions in showing you the tuna melt conversation:

[13:37] rowdenw7: doesn't "tuna melt" by definition have to have... something... melted?
[13:40] OurFounder: (tuna) (melt)
[13:40] OurFounder: well, it doesn't have an emoticon

[13:41] rowdenw7: mmm-hmm
[13:41] OurFounder: But, yes, it does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuna_melt

William's dissatisfaction with his tuna melt has been backed up by wikipedia.  As I was supplying William with the Tuna Melt entry on wikipedia, so too was a person in another chat window supplying me with this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_urban_areas_of_the_United_States.

It was all natural.  As if conversation has always been that way.

Technorati tags: wikipedia, tuna melt, conversation

Blogged at Gray Hill Harbor Offices in Seattle using Windows Live Writer

The Map of a Informational Journey

Yesterday I posted about wanting to map mental journeys - map movements through information and cyberspace.  I'm not quite there yet.  But this is the first step.

Any map generally provides a set of wayfinding points - explicit or implicit and a set of instructions.  For example, here's how to get from the Pan Pacific Hotel to Seasons in the Park restaurant in Vancouver BC, via a story.

And here's a map

So, yesterday I told the (verbose) story of this map:

 As we can see, this map is sort of a hybrid.  If provides both the concepts and the context.  It isn't as strict a visualization as the mapquest map is.  The mapquest map however, does rely on non-visual cues for the reader.  The map has street names, park names and "Start / End". 

But what the maps allow one to do is quickly trace the flow of information from the start to the end of the story.  While the Concept Map relies heavily on words, it is not nearly as verbose.  You can very quickly trace the main concepts of the story in yesterday's post.

Now, the key to this cartography is that the geography is reliant on how I framed my own story or my argument.  This is the map through my journey beginning at the intersection of Kevin Lynch and Peter Morville.

Maps, even those of merely land formations, always are in dispute.  The map is not the terrain, as the quote goes.  The terrain will always be open to interpretation (there's that word again).  So all maps are visualizations and interpretations.

The concept map is not quite visual enough for me - but visualization techniques are complex and varied.  I would imagine that there will be no set way to create a map of this conceptual terrain.  Just as I can make you any number of maps of physical terrain (street maps, topographic maps, riparian maps).  

With GIS, I overlay stories on physical maps.  These can be heat maps, impact maps, movement maps, and so forth.  As information needs to be digested quickly, maps can be simplified and as they are simplified they are more interpretive.

Here's a map-based application we did to show real-time traffic for MTC in the Bay Area.  This is the traffic.511.org web site.

As you can see from this zoomed image, the map is somewhat simplified.  Not quite a schematic, but not entirely showing every curve in the Bay Area freeway system.  Our goal was to provide a highly readable map that didn't over-simplify and leave out visual cues for the locations of given congestion.

Another interesting thing here is the choice of symbology and colors to depict information.  Here at the evening rush hour, we can see that there are bad and good parts in the familiar red / yellow / green color bands we've been raised on.  Red = stop to yellow = slow to green = go is now an international color progression.

But what if you can't see the difference between red and green?  The system provides a variety of color schemes to compensate for color blindness of macular degeneration.

This map is immediately bizarre to most people, but to people with red/green color blindness it is vital.  And that's part of their story.  By looking at this map now, we are getting even the slightest, strangest glimpse into the world of color blindness - simply through this visualization tool.

So maps can provide insights that might otherwise elude us.  They provide alternate vocabularies with which to express ourselves.  Stories are vital but there is more than one way to tell them.  Here's an example:

STORY

There's a woman sitting.  She's slightly smiling and kinda attractive in a forlorn sort of way.  You're left wondering exactly what sort of mood she's in.  Somewhere between happy and sad.  Maybe feeling a touch of ennui.  She watches the horizon for something unspoken.

MAP

Now, granted, my prose could have been better.  And if the Mona Lisa had been written as a poem that may have been different.  But it wasn't. 

Next I will work on getting the CMap maps to be interactive.  I seem to be having some trouble getting on their servers.  I'd love to have a dialog with anyone who has ideas of interesting ways to visualize this.  I'd also like it if people would send me links to any visualization tools out there and I'll start mapping stories in them and compare.

Technorati tags: Cmap, mona lisa, peter morville, kevin lynch, visualization, storytelling, wayfinding

Written at the Star House Starbucks in Kowloon, Hong Kong with Windows Live Writer.