Navigating Our Lives, Our Economy, Our World with the Cellphone,

The cellphone has been a basic tool of micro-enterprise in numerous countries for sometime now. On a local level, it provides a relatively cheap means of communication, organization and control. Now it is beginning to create a new paradigm on a global scale. Two articles, again from the New York Times, provide a contrast between the potential of world connection and the realities of global markets, one although abstract is becoming a reality, the other a reality could change how we think about doing business.

SCIENCE | February 17, 2009 The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives By JOHN MARKOFF
Cellphones have changed how we communicate with others, and now they are changing how we think about information.

The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.

With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map. “The map underlies man’s ability to perceive,” said Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who was a pioneer in the use of maps as a generalized way to search for information of all kinds before the emergence of the online world.

TECHNOLOGY | April 28, 2009 In China, Knockoff Cellphones Are a Hit By DAVID BARBOZA
An industry building look-alike mobile phones for as little as $35 is tickling China's pride in rebellious creativity.

“Five years ago, there were no counterfeit phones,” says Xiong Ting, a sales manager at Triquint Semiconductor, a maker of mobile phone parts, while visiting Shenzhen. “You needed a design house. You needed software guys. You needed hardware design. But now, a company with five guys can do it. Within 100 miles of here, you can find all your suppliers.”

Even Chinese mobile phone producers are losing market share to underground companies, which have a built-in cost advantage because they evade taxes, regulatory fees and safety checks.

There are environmental dangers posed by this black market technology, but their is also a sense of backroom disruptive innovation going on as well.

Some experts say they believe the shanzhai phenomena is about being creative, Chinese style.

“Chinese grass-roots companies are actually very innovative,” says Yu Zhou, a professor at Vassar College. “It’s not so much technology as how they form supply chains and how rapidly they react to new trends.”

Related Posts:

• Being There, Being Everywhere, Being Where It Counts
• Even In A Digital World It Takes Real Heart To Make Change
• Unplanned Obsolescence
• Innovation, Disruptive Milestones for the New Millennium
• Combining Efforts, Connecting People - Nokia and Pangea Day Work on a Paradigm Shift
• World changing paradigm shifts come from all directions

Using Technology To Help People Change Their Own Community

Web 2.0 and the Internet are a new medium, but they are not an end in themselves. At some point all of this has to come off of the computer screen and go on to the streets. This is all of little use if it only applies virtually to Second Life worlds. MIT has had a number of conferences and seminars on the use of the Web for community building but this particular one is a bit more person on person in its approach. The authentic voice is from the community, helping to find and express that voice can be assisted using the tools of Web 2.0.

• Technologies Changing Communities, Communities Innovating Technology | MIT World

  “With community-based media projects, you must believe with all of your heart that people in that community have the best knowledge of anyone in the world about their own community.”
  

  Alexa Mills
  

• tags: innovating, MIT, colab, community-planning

  • The best way to help a community help itself, say Dayna Cunningham and Alexa Mills, is to enable its members to find their voices and talk to each other. In several projects in the U.S. and overseas, the two speakers are developing methodologies for enabling communities to express and define themselves, so they may become more engaged in a larger civic and political process.
    

• Colab | About

  tags: colab, MIT, innovation, community-planning, innovator

  • The Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) is a center for research and practice within the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP).
    

    CoLab supports the development and use of knowledge from excluded communities to deepen civic engagement, improve community practice, inform policy, mobilize community assets, and generate shared wealth.
    

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Inform, Engage, and Empower During Your Freetime

One new set of connections created through my Milestones for a New Millennium blog was through becoming one of the moderators for the Orkut group End POVERTY / Fim POBREZA.

I find that Orkut offers more of a conversation regarding relevant topics than does Facebook. It is an international conversation spanning the globe. Lately the direction of the discussions has been on the best means of directing the discussions. The basic format for the discussions is the web itself and more particularly Orkut, but we are open to numerous avenues of communication. The question is which avenues are best for both open dialogue and advancing the cause of the Millennium Development Goals?

A recently learned term is Slacktivists, basically well-meaning but all too often ineffectual (at least until a tipping point is reached) social activists hanging on and together through social media. At the other end of the continuum are professionals (as in "gets paid for it.") in the social media/Web 2.0 arena. Most of us hope to be somewhere in the middle trying to help when and where we can on a part-time and unpaid basis.

Slacktivists may be those who take no more effort than clicking a button to join a petition, but they are still a step above those that don't know and/or don't care. I try to put a good deal of information on my blog to make it easier for others to connect in the hope they will pursue their own pathways. The basic web connection is information through shared self-education. Then comes engagement which does sometimes mean signing online petitions. There is also the potential, as the Obama campaign has demonstrated, for empowerment.

It is not just the IT-intelligentsia's road, it is a journey for all of us. Ethan Zuckerman discusses Technologies and Emerging Democracies: Building a Better Gatekeeper in an MIT video. I agree with both Zuckerman and others in my Orkut conversations that Hi5, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Zuckermans's favorite Reddit among dozens of others offer their own unique impressions regarding their areas of interest, but it also means that the Web is balkanized. Are we "Gatekeepers" or are we attempting to break through the gates?

Is there a way to better leverage the collective wisdom of these international connections being created through these groups? Just trying to keep up with all the information and maintain my two blogs is an effort. Then there is that pesky real world day job. I try to rise above being a slacktivist or at least attempt at being a fairly prolific slactivist. Without the educational background and professional expertise in the Web 2.0 world, how does one best use these online resources to endeavor to connect and make a difference in the world?

I have a good deal of respect for experts in this field, but their professionalism is often related to the medium not the message. The question is how best to connect? One earlier post exploring this idea which I revisited and reedited was Being Human, Working, Writing Stories, Being Human.

Learning To Be A Good Netizen - Not A Well known One Perhaps, But A Good One

My new blog Milestones For A New Millennium is turning me into a netizen.

The word netizen seems to have two similar meanings. A citizen who uses the Internet as a way of participating in political society (for example, exchanging views, providing information, and voting). An Internet user who is trying to contribute to the Internets use and growth....

Source: www.synergy-uk.com/glossary.php

A Netizen (a portmanteau of Internet and citizen) or cybercitizen is a person actively involved in online communities. ...

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netizen

Starting this weblog gave me an online personality, now I am becoming engaged in World Wide Web citizenship. The new blog engages both the World Wide portion of that concept in the work with the Millennium Development Goals and the Web portion because I am making a concerted effort to get the word out to a greater degree than with this blog.

I am trying a number of new things, more on that later. I am also attempting to avoid some of the faux pas of the Internet. The first was deleting two posts that I have on Newsvine that linked back to my posts. That turns out to be frowned upon, and I want to establish some trust with this endeavor. I honestly thought that since my post had additional links to other information that it was the best which to link plus it was easier since the Newsvine button is below every post. I am going to leave that to others since reputation is more important than forcing numbers.

I still have limited impact as a netizen with my online persona. In some ways though, I have greater impact on the World Wide Web Stage as a netizen than as a voter in the "real" world. In the real world, my particulars can be fairly well known, fairly easily. It is my vote that is secret and only combines with others in aggregate. On the World Wide Web, my particulars are for the most part of no consequence and it is my publicly accessible vote through my blog posts that define me. My vote may not at this time reach more than 10 people, but it has a chance to cascade and there are millions of others making the same cascading votes on these issues (I get to do it on my own blog). This means that there is a force beyond the aggregate of people passively voting for whatever program is put in front of them to a level of actively engaging in the issues on an ever expanding platform.

Connecting Through Common Technology Connecting Through Common Humanity

This weblog uses FeedBurner the same way naturalists use radio tracking devises on animals, to see where it goes and what it runs into.

Recently somebody, from Taipei evidence suggests, looked up diigo on their version of Google. For whatever reason, my recent post Being Human, Working, Writing Stories, Being Human post showed up on the third page of the search and seems to have resulted in a visit.

What was more interesting was that on the first page of the Google search was a hit from the diigo blog China Earthquake ~ A picture is worth a thousand words. This struck me as being a very human story and one rather well suited for the World Wide Web. The "news" from China provides numbers that are incomprehensible. The degree of tragedy would be hard for anyone to fully express but there are also small miracles to be found. Finding these miracles is part of writing the stories of being human. The change is now we are doing it with computers rather than cave walls.

Another post from the diigo blog provided some more factual information.

Diigo’s development temporarily interrupted by the 7.9 magnitude earthquake.

On Monday, May 12, at 2:28pm Beijing time (6:28 GMT), a major earthquake, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, jolted southwestern China’s Sichuan Province. To give some perspective on how severe 7.9 magnitude is on the Richter scale: according to wikipedia, it’s equivalent to 600 megatons of TNT explosive, or energy released by the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption! Mother Earth has lot of unsettling energy!

Being Human, Working, Writing Stories, Being Human

My weblog recently featured two posts that together speak to a perspective that I have been formulating over time regarding the Internet.

The first was from this weblog's blogroll Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: McLuhan's web - Diigo Annotated His blog post has all the links.

diigo tags: mcluhan, writing, storytelling, blogging, marketing

My column in today's Guardian looks at Marshall McLuhan's second life as a prophet of internet media. A couple of my references had to be cut from the column for space reasons.

According to Nicholas Carr, "Reading, to put it simply, is a lonely pursuit, while speech is a social one." So what does that make blogging? Carr talks about sacrificing our shared, tribal consciousness and became locked into private consciousness. I have to believe though that the rise of individualism, as it relates at least the cognitive ability that would later be applied to the specialization of jobs in factories, came before printed text. I would go so far to speculate that cognitive individualism gave rise to the need for the printing press.

Kevin Kelly, one of Wired’s original editors, suggests that what McLuhan “was really talking about was the Internet—two decades before it appeared.” Paul Levinson, in his book Digital McLuhan, argues that McLuhan’s ideas help explain the “dynamic of increased and enlightened human control” that characterizes “our digital age.”

The internet doesn’t really fit into McLuhan’s “hot” and “cool” dichotomy. It is, as Scott Rosenberg wrote back in 1995, a “lukewarm” medium. It encourages participation but it also sucks up our attention and dominates our senses. When we gaze into a computer screen, we tune out everything else.

Are we becoming part of an electronic tribe when we tune into the computer screen and tune out from everything else or are being confined to our own individualistic and to a great extent self-created web identities or is it a fusion of both.

That would depend on how we use the web to communicate because that is what the Internet basically is, a form, a medium for communications. Which raises the question, what is the purpose of that communication? That brings up the second post from Seth Godin.

Which comes first (why stories matter)

via Seth's Blog by Seth Godin on 4/1/08

Most of the time we do the work. The work is our initiative and our reactions and our responses and our output. The work is the decisions we make and the people we hire.

The work is what people talk about, because it's what we experience. In other words, the work tells a story.

...if you decide what the story is, you can do work that matches the story. Your decisions will match the story. The story will become true because you're living it.

The story creates the work and the work creates the story.

It is both the work and the story that makes us human. The story more so, because it is what we use to connect with each other. There are different ways of telling the story and different means of telling the story. Millions have chosen the net and web 2.0 as the most viable means. The loss is when we stop telling our own story and let the machine define us rather than the other way around.

Write Like A Blogger, Though Not Necessarily Like This Blogger

It has been almost a week since I did a post for this weblog. The real life/day job reality has been more demanding. It has not only meant a decrease in the number of posts, but it has served to make hollow my resolution about improving my writing. To be honest, my problem is that I often write these posts late at night after work and my internal self-editor often works on a 2 to 3 day delay. So looking over past posts after a week or so, I find "advise" instead of "advice" or "principals" instead of "principles" and other errors. Past posts attempting to justify typos don't really resolve anything.

This though raises the question, why even worry about it? As this is not a professional weblog serving any viable business enterprise and it has limited range within the blogosphere compared to so many others, why worry?

For me, what is of importance is that this weblog is a learning tool and one means of demonstrating understanding is being able to communicate that understanding.

Seth Godin's Blog back on On April 7th provided some other insights. I am, however, going to start with the questions he ended with.

What would happen if every single high school student had to have a blog? Or every employee in your company? Or every one of your customers?

I would imagine that many would look like this one, not in terms of the details, but as thousands of small pools connecting to others with 4 to 6 active readers, 1 or 2 clicking a link or 3 or 4 visitors a day. Others would be far more socially-oriented than this blog or have particular expertise but the vast majority would have limited reach and be linked together through multiple degrees of separation. They would though be connected. This weblog's best used link, which was to the World Health Organization website on children's health issues, got 128 clicks according to FeedBurner. While a minor number in world wide web statistics, what happened to those connections, was there a cascading benefits effect? If every high school student had a blog could the voting age be lowered to 16? So while the writing of this weblog has only minor effect by itself, it does add to a larger conversation that can have great impact.

Seth Godin provides a number of ways of achieving this through his advice to write like a blogger. Only bulleted summations of his main ideas are here (which are pretty much bullet-oriented already) along with my comments, more can be found at the original link.

You can improve your writing (your business writing, your ad writing, your thank you notes and your essays) if you start thinking like a blogger:

1. Use headlines. Which I do, coming up with them is part of the fun. I don't know really know how well they work though.
2. Realize that people have choices. blog writing shorter and faster and more exciting.
I can agree with this for the most part, but it all writing is summarized and bulleted how does anyone get any depth of knowledge from the Internet?
3. Drip, drip, drip. Bloggers don't have to say everything at once. We can add a new idea every day, piling on a thesis over time.
This one I definitely agree with especially using the Internet as a learning tool. I am continuously building upon what was written before
4. It's okay if you leave, include links
   
For this weblog the focus is on the links. The weblog posts are intended as a narrative thread to organize the knowledge in an understandable manner.
5. Interactivity is a great shortcut, reading your email or your comments makes it easy to stay relevant.
This weblog claims no expertise, only the offer of sharing what is discovered and hopefully learned from.
6. Gimmicks aren't as useful as insight. If you're going to blog successfully for months or years, sooner or later you need to actually say something. Same goes for your writing.
Meaning that blogging and writing are two different things. This is something I want to explore more.
7. Don't be afraid of lists. People like lists.
Like this one?
8. Show up, waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.
9. Say it. Don't hide, don't embellish.

Fulfilling A New Year's Resolution And Getting Back To the Original Pathway

There have been no new posts to this weblog for about two weeks or so. The time has been spent learning from the websites that have been found rather than trying to find and write about new ones. There have also been a number of experimental changes to this weblog that have not been addressed prior to this point.

I have partially fulfilled one of my New Year's resolutions of Resolving To Learn More About Web 2.0 by creating my first Squidoo site on Creative-Destruction. It is still experimental but it does seem to have the potential to become a useful tool. It also seems that much of what I learn with Squidoo will be useful in other areas of the web 2.0 world.

A blogroll from blogrolling.com was also recently added on the left-hand column. Called "Blogging Roads Less Traveled", to convey the idea that although the visits to them were not as frequent, they still provided numerous ideas and avenues for new exploration. The web is made for the curious.

An interesting web 2.o tool AideRSS , introduced by Businesspundit way back on 1/17/08 has been included in this weblog. AideRSS - Interesting New Tool.

The ranking though is based basically on popularity or how many people tag it rather than the actual quality of the articles themselves. Because I am interested in topics or perspectives on topics others are not, I would not depend upon it for my own reading selections to the degree suggested by either the Businesspundit post or the AideRSS site itself. It is interesting though seeing how articles stack up.

It would seem, according to the last two weeks, that writing or not writing in this weblog makes little difference to the ability or willingness of others to partake in the offerings here. However, since the original design of this weblog was to find and organize websites on topics of interest to me, so that they could be studied more throughly, and it has succeeded in that endeavor far better than I would have imagined, I find little reason to complain.

New Marketing Authenticity Over Exaggeration

GapingVoid raises the question, which I have been pondering for some time regarding new marketing.

gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": so what's all this new marketing stuff, anyway?

• 
  

Part of the answer comes from this article from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.

Authenticity over Exaggeration: The New Rule in Advertising — HBS Working Knowledge Annotated

tags: communications, marketing, web2.0

The new rules

But what does this all boil down to for companies that want to be successful in this relatively new environment? In the working paper, Deighton and Kornfeld discuss 5 aspects of digital interactivity, including



• Thought tracing. Firms infer states of mind from the content of a Web search and serve up relevant advertising; a market born of search terms develops.


• Ubiquitous connectivity. As people become increasingly "plugged in" through cell phones and other devices, marketing opportunities become more frequent as well—and technology develops to protect users from unwanted intrusions. A market in access and identity results.


• Property exchanges. As with Napster, Craigslist, and eBay, people participate in the anonymous exchange of goods and services. Firms compete with these exchanges, and a market in service, reputation, and reliability develops.


• Social exchanges. People build identities in virtual communities like Korea's Cyworld (90 percent of Koreans in their 20s are members). Firms may then sponsor or co-opt communities. A market in community develops that competes on functionality and status.


• Cultural exchanges. While advertising has always been part of popular culture, technology has increased the rate of exchange and competition for buzz. In addition to Dove's campaign, Deighton cites BMW's iative to hire Hollywood directors and actors to create short, Web-only films featuring BMWs. In the summer of 2001, the company recorded 9 million downloads.

Stumbling Through the Crowd On a Path To Wisdom

One topic running, at least in the background, through the recent posts of this weblog has been crowdsourcing. Despite having a working definition for this newly created term, I am still wrestling with fitting it within related web 2.0 jargon. At its most basic it seems to be an individual or entity with an entrepreneurial bent using the labor of unnamed masses transforming services into commodities.

How does this differ though with what was considered under the Challenging The "Popular" Theory Of Group and Individual Interaction regarding social influence? What factors move the process from crowdsourcing to collaboration or is it to a great degree a matter of perspective? All these perspectives would seem to depend upon one degree or another on some form of the wisdom of the crowds concept, without ever knowing what elements make up the crowd. We become connected without ever knowing who we are connected to, but does being connected to hundreds intimately to accomplish a specific task that is part of a larger goal really make any sense? Maybe if discussing one's favorite pizza, but preparing the financial statements for a business plan?

Some people, as this Wired article demonstrates, can make this aspect of the new economy work for them. Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing.

One arena of the crowd networking with the crowd is the new StumbleUpon community I recently joined. This StumbleUpon site that I sent to myself includes a companion piece to The Rise of Crowdsourcing article on the 5 rules of crowdsourcing labor. It also goes beyond that utilizing the wisdom of the StumbleUpon crowd to find other sites through related concepts. At least as far as I related them.

StumbleUpon

Discover new web sites

Wired 14.06: 5 Rules of the New Labor Pool

wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/...

reviews crowdsourcing, creativity, management

---

BrianDRPM has sent you a site he found with StumbleUpon

Finding Gigs in the Crowds

BrianDRPM
briandrpm@gmail.com

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Language Programming The Human Decision System

The following links are from a MIT symposium, Where Does Syntax Come From? Have We All Been Wrong?. To be honest, it is a laundry list but if one is into computers and cognitive psychology it's a pretty good one.

A number of this weblog's posts have been dealing with issues of marketing and communications, all of which involve language. The analogy of the human mind being like a computer is standard, but with concepts such as crowd-sourcing and social networking through Web 2.0 environs the extension of computer coding being analogous to language becomes all the more interesting. One area of particular interest would be human group decision making or interaction between groups with different language structures. The following MIT departments were involved in the symposium.

LIDS: Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems Annotated

This is an Overview of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems/LIDS Annotated

The Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) is an interdepartmental research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It began in 1939 as the Servomechanisms Laboratory, an offshoot of the Department of Electrical Engineering. Its early work, during World War II, focused on gunfire and guided missile control, radar, and flight trainer technology. Over the years, the scope of its research broadened.

MIT : Brain and Cognitive Sciences Annotated

MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences stands at the nexus of neuroscience, biology and psychology. We combine these disciplines to study specific aspects of the brain and mind including: vision, movement systems, learning and memory, neural and cognitive development, language and reasoning. Working collaboratively, we apply our expertise, tools, and techniques to address and answer both fundamental and universal questions about how the brain and mind work.

MIT Computational Cognitive Science Group Annotated

We study the computational basis of human learning and inference. Through a combination of mathematical modeling, computer simulation, and behavioral experiments, we try to uncover the logic behind our everyday inductive leaps: constructing perceptual representations, separating "style" and "content" in perception, learning concepts and words, judging similarity or representativeness, inferring causal connections, noticing coincidences, predicting the future.

Other talks will be added when the become available. A bit of web-trekking resulted in discovering this site at the University of Pennsylvania.

Neuroethics Publications Annotated

'Neuroethics' is the ethics of neuroscience, analogous to the term 'bioethics' which denotes the ethics of biomedical science more generally. It encompasses a wide array of ethical issues emerging from different branches of clinical neuroscience (neurology, psychiatry, psychopharmacology) and basic neuroscience (cognitive neuroscience, affective neuroscience). These include ethical problems raised by advances in functional neuroimaging, brain implants and brain-machine interfaces and psychopharmacology as well as by our growing understanding of the neural bases of behavior, personality, consciousness, and states of spiritual transcendence. This collection brings together the work of a growing number of Penn researchers from across the academic disciplines who are contributing to the neuroethics literature.

diigo tags: brain, decisionsystem, language, mit learning psychology science video
neuroethics

MIT World » : Human Simulations of Language Learning Annotated

This workshop, explains Michael Coen, is an effort to engender temperate, collaborative discussion of a matter that inspires hot dispute: whether machine learning helps explain how humans acquire language. In particular, says Coen, machine learning advocates believe they have evidence against Noam Chomsky’s “poverty of stimulus argument,” which in essence states that language is built into us, that “children don’t receive enough linguistic inputs to explain linguistic outputs.”

MIT World » : Explorations in Language Learnability Using Probabilistic Grammars and Child-directed Speech Annotated

How do kids manage to figure out that the word “dog” applies to a whole category of animals, not just one creature? Joshua Tenenbaum wants to understand how children and adults manage to solve such classic problems of induction. Throughout cognition, wherever you look, he says “we see places where we know more than we have a reasonable right to know about the world, places where we come to abstractions, generalizations, models of the world that go beyond our sparse, noisy, limited experience.” Tenenbaum’s goal is to come up with “general purpose computational tools for understanding how people solve these problems so successfully.”

Past posts in my blog also dealt with the evolution of language. I am wondering how this plays out in larger organizational and social systems and the interaction of different systems i.e. Americans in Iraq or other situations. Especially with the web accelerating communications even when it is not directly connected to everybody within a culture. - diigo post by brianddrpm

MIT World » : The Computational Nature of Language Learning Annotated

Niyogi believes that an “evolutionary trajectory” links how acquisition happens at an individual level, and how variation in language springs up from one generation to the next. But rather than inheriting the grammar of your parents, you have to learn it. Examining language variation over time as if it were genetic variation, “you get a different mathematical structure…and probabilities start playing an important role.” Small differences “can have very subtle consequences giving rise to bifurcation in nonlinear dynamics of evolution.” For instance, 1000 years ago, the English were speaking a language that’s unrecognizable to us today. How has it come to be that “we have moved so far from that point through learning which is mimicking the previous generation?”

Niyogi explains that within a single population two varying languages may be in competition (say, a German and an English-type grammar). While a majority may speak the dominant variant, some children will likely be exposed to a mixture of the two. There’s a “drift” in language use, “and suddenly, what was stable becomes unstable.”

MIT World » : Machine Learning of Language from Distributional Evidence Annotated

Christopher Manning thinks linguistics went astray in the 20th century when it searched “for homogeneity in language, under the misguided assumption that only homogeneous systems can be structured.” In the face of human creativity with language, rigid categories of linguistic use just don’t help explain how people actually talk and what they choose to say. For every hard and fast rule linguists find, other linguists can determine an exception. Categorical constraints rise, then come crashing down.

Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion

Previously, I quoted Seth Godin as saying.

One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm's point all along.

I agree, but it's actually the concept of passion and people that I agree with, not what is Malcolm's Gladwell's point. I am even more sure that it is not Duncan Watt's point. Also raised a point regarding what had been said about the quality of feedback to and from a subsystem within a larger (information) system when dealing with unintended consequences.

What was missing from these discussions was the concept of collaboration. Both the posting on Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and the posting on Unintended Consequences raised by the Freakonomics involved basically unilateral communications or at least the appearance of it.

If there was two-way communication, it was not conscious, purposeful nor intentional. The example of inter-ethnic violence cited by the British Psychological Society Research Digest blog, featured in past posts best illustrated the disruptive capacity of this, while the most illustrative example of decentralized crowd wisdom collaboration was undoubtedly Cosmic Variance's starlings used in a previous post to discuss greed and the human condition.

I realize that statistically we can see trends moving in certain directions and ignore the actions of the individual. But I am also reminded of the words of Krishinamurti.

History of Visual Communication | Myth of Dream Communication

This was put aside for a while without fully realizing how cool it actually was. Besides the link below provided by Jason Kottke, there are others links resulting from some more web-mining.

Elif Ayiter is a lecturer at Sabanci University and PhD candidate at Planetary Collegium.

Sabanci University is a private research institution located in Istanbul, Turkey. Founded in 1996, it is the only college in Turkey that offers a liberal arts undergraduate curriculum.

Planetary Collegium is a research center where artists, theoreticians and scholars from many parts of the world meet to develop their research into new media arts. The hub of the Collegium is based in the University of Plymouth, with nodes in Zurich, Milan and Beijing. This network provides support for research at the highest level. The PhD is awarded by the University of Plymouth.

I found what has to be one of her most beautiful works at Architecture + JeanRicard Broek's blog.

Entre Loup Et Chien

This woman's work is to my lay person's mind very extremely impressive, both aesthetically and functionally. The entire Google Reader link is here from kottke.org. I fully expect to see a TED video featuring her at sometime in the future.

Bookmarked for some weekend reading: The History of Visual Communication...from...via kottke.org by jason@kottke.org on 2/1/08

Bookmarked for some weekend reading: The History of Visual Communication...from rocks and caves to the avant-garde to the computer. (via girlhacker) (link)

Subscribe to kottke.org using Google Reader

Challenging The "Popular" Theory Of Group and Individual Interaction

Kottke.org by jason@kottke.org puts his two cents in on the Fast Company article By: Clive Thompson regarding Duncan Watts' research.

Duncan Watts' research is challenging the theory that a small group of influential people are responsible for triggering trends as explained in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires:

"And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."

Jason has more here of what he has previously covered about the topic of the article.(link)

Seth's Blog by Seth Godin has its own perspective on Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point plus that of some other Web 2.0 elite via The Hyping Point.

As I understand it, people are influenced by the people around them. That we act, like buffalo, in a herd. The idea that a single influential individual (even a blogger like Guy or a talk show host like Oprah) can individually change the herd is crazy, and I don't think anyone has argued that.

What should be really clear, though, is that people with big audiences certainly count as one of the people around you. If the guy down the row at work buys a Mac Air, it counts. If Guy buys a Mac Air, it counts just as much (or possibly a bit more).

Since people with big audiences have more 'friends' and have more 'people down the hall', they have more influence. Not because they count for more, just because they 'know' more people.

Cory Doctorow's take on it is here. Steve Pyke provides a guest perspective at Guy Kawasaki's blog. Steve agrees with Seth that this is One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm's point all along. I can agree with that

Seth uses his own Unleashing the Ideavirus as an example which he says, didn't spread because 'important' people endorsed and promoted it. It spread because passionate people did.

I can't fully buy Seth Godin's thinking on this one. He seems to be trying too hard to keep everybody happy. One issue is that we are looking at this from a very slanted and narrow perspective - marketing. At least narrow when compared to the larger fields of human psychology and sociology. We could even go one step further and talk about organic and inorganic information systems and how they interrelate. This weblog has posted previously to the ability of birds to communicate individual data that is transformed into group decisions in flight, basically bird-brains can effectively work in unison. While humans afflicted with ancient hate have the same deterministic predictability as inorganic chemicals. Seth is right in that it is a matter of balance, but as has also been argued in a previous post Nature Is Better At Balancing Complex Systems Than We Are. The problem is that this seemingly goes against what was said about feedback to and from a subsystem within a larger (information) system when dealing with unintended consequences. This is going to take a bit more thought.

Who You Know And Who You Trust And Who Trusts You

From Seth Godin's Blog: Who you know

One of the mantras of networking (and the many social networking sites that people are flocking to) is that it matters who you know. The goal of having a thousand or more friends online is that you're well known. Connected. A click away.

I wonder if there's a more useful measure: who trusts you?

Which brings up my question. How do you establish virtual trust? It is not a question that I find necessary to ask in the day job/real world. It's mostly sensed whether I can or can't, but what establishes trust in the web 2.0 world. There are a number of bloggers that I trust. Seth being one of them, but what is it that makes them trustworthy? The fact that they are recognized as trustworthy by so many others? My readings tell me that there is more to it than just that and that,whatever it is, comes through their writings. Besides asking the question,Seth Godin also provides an answer, at least for longer relationships.

Seth's Blog: Making promises

Is that what marketing is all about? I think so. Make promises and keep them.

Some organizations work very hard to weasel in the promises they make. They imply great customer service or amazing results or spectacular quality, but don't deliver. No, they didn't actually lie, but they came awfully close. The result: angry customers and negative word of mouth.

It's very easy to overpromise. Tempting to shade the truth a little bit, deliver a little bit less to save a few bucks. Who will notice?

The consumer notices.

If you need to overpromise to make the sale, don't bother. It's not worth it.

The best way to generate word of mouth is simple: overdeliver.

Forwarding webpages with highlights and sticky notes, powered by Diigo

Can Any Of This Make A Difference?

One of the questions of this ongoing web 2.0 experiment is whether all of this can make a difference in the real world? A post from CharityFocus Blog: Do Online Communities Lead to Offline Action? gives support to the idea that it can and does. Whether or not it will on the individual level is a whole other question.

"People always ask, "Ok, this online stuff is fine and dandy, but how does it improve our real world?" My meta-level response is usually that the Internet gives you the power to create long-tail networks that gives momentum to niche revolutions. Those niche ideas may or may not serve humanity well, but we'll collectively be better off when those voices are heard. "

• Social Activism: 64.9% of folks who participate in social causes online say they are involved in causes that were new to them when they began participating on the Internet. And 43.7% of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities.
• Online Communities: 56.6% of online community members log in at least once a day!
  
• Member Interaction: whopping 70.4% of online community members say they regularly interact with other members of their community while logged in.

Finding Meaning In Creating Meaning - Rewrite

Seth's Blog: Seven tips to build for meaning

Seth Godin provides seven tips to build for meaning. Then he asks, "What happens after I click on your Google ad?"

OK, he's a marketer so from that perspective it makes sense.

"I was thinking about great Squidoo pages (lenses) yesterday, and realized that many of them, along with many blogs, have the same goal: give someone a handle, a sense of meaning--context--so they can go ahead and take action."

I have taken the position that this should be true whether we are speaking of business and making money or social change to bring about beneficial paradigm shifts. The seven tips:

1. Use numbers and bullets. People scan. Based on the idea that people don't read, this is not one that I use a lot because I use this weblog to mold my own ideas, but I should and am trying to be more concise.
   


2. Give people a place to go. The best meaning-building delivers the reader to a new place, in context. The really interesting parts of this weblog are the websites it links to, my writings just helps to organize the information for better understanding.
   


3. Use pictures. Pictures communicate quality and information. pictures that tell a story. I do less of this and should try to expand on this.(though I don't actually get Seth's example)
   


4. Have an opinion. If you're giving meaning, you're also making an argument. I have opinions which should be fairly apparent but this weblog is not a soapbox, its a learning tool.


5. Don't be afraid to compare. I do compare though am less likely to make judgments or if I do more likely to rethink them.
   


6. It's a brick wall, not a balloon. Built brick by brick, a little at a time. You learn what works and do it more. Here's a fine example. This one I definitely do. This is still an experiment and I try not to be worried about success or failure. (though now having reached 11 subscribers on Feedburner is cool)



7. It's okay to be long, if you're chunky. Long letters always do better than short ones. That's because once you've sold me, I'll stop reading. But if I'm not sold and I get to the end, you lose. The web is infinitely expandable. So go ahead and tell your story. I am trying to be more chunky, focusing on particular ideas. I also try to get similar or related chunks together especially across time. Sometimes in my own reading I need to go back a few times more to be sold, but I need to want to go back.

Define How We Communicate Define Our Culture

What is Civic Media and Fair Use?

MIT World » : Copyright, Fair Use, and the Cultural Commons
I am still on about the Fair Use debate. There was, my memory was telling me, another MIT panel discussion on Copyright and Fair Use. The links to the MIT World video and the websites that are cited in the post's synopsis are again being added to the "What is Civic Media and Fair Use?" online folder. The other choice, which will likely be taken as well is to tag the related websites with a common link. Still haven't decided which is best. Perhaps focusing on a specific subject is good use of the diigo webslides.

ABOUT THE PANEL DISCUSSION:
Moderator William Uricchio sets the scene for panelists' discussion of current copyright wars with a brief historical overview of copyright protection. In 1790, when news traveled by horse and carriage, copyright protection was good for 14 years. Today, when a digital, networked society enables instant transmission of data, protection lasts 70-plus years. Uricchio notes, "Bizarrely, the faster information circulates, the longer we're extending copyright protection. It seems totally at odds with where our constitution framers and case law emerged from."

Copyright came into being not just as a way of protecting authors' rights, says Wendy Gordon, but as a set of liberties for the public as well.

There is also a further aspect to this which gets into the expansion of culture. MIT and other resources have dealt with in insightful that I also want to explore.

Knowing Its A Rose By Any Other Name Doesn't Make You A Horticulturist

Businesspundit: Management by Semantics

Businesspundit had an interesting post that is applicable both the my recent posting on tagging or labeling and to business communication. It also mentions Richard Feynman, who is one of my favorite people.

Richard Feynman's father told him an interesting story about words and meanings:
See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird.

In Rob's perspective the problem with many in business today is that,
"They know business ideas in the sense that they know what they are called, and what their definitions are, but they really don't understand them. They can't explain them or apply them. "

"Thinking that you know and understand something when you really only know what it is called is exactly the type of thing that gets incompetent people promoted. And it's probably more dangerous than not knowing the terminology in the first place."

Language has been another topic of interest for this weblog. This post brings its proper application a bit closer to the street and everyday use. Its hard enough to communicate when your face to face with someone and have that other 80% of communication through body and eyes to fall back on, but when your communicating across continents and cultures the challenge is even greater. There is still that danger of getting sucked in by those who sound or look like experts but are all veneer and no substance. On the other hand, if you do manage to develop some substance then how do you make sure it gets through all the other flash on the web?

First the Wind-Up Then The Pitch

Making the Pitch advices The Entrepreneurial Mind on 12/3/07 is one of the most daunting challenges for entrepreneurs. To help, he provides a link to Suite101.com , which he calls,

"a nice summary of what it takes to make an effective pitch under pressure."

"When they have to make a pitch for their business. It might directed to a potential investor, a banker, that first customer -- or in some cases to their spouse! This pitch has taken on the nickname of the elevator pitch, as you often have only a very short time to get your message across (imagine a short ride in an elevator with the investor before he or she has to get off on their floor)."

I would call it practicing on-the-spot concise thinking.