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Our filtering of information pouring off the network is starting to resemble the activity of a NASDAQ market maker. A market maker is a buyer and seller in a set of tickers on the electronic market. She’s always looking for pools of liquidity, ways to match up a buyer and sellers in whatever trading or crossing network that provides the acceptable transaction.

We are buyers and sellers of information. Techmeme, Delicious, Twitter, Google Reader, Technorati, The Gang and NewsGang, The NY Times, MSNBC, YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, MySpace, CNN, your favorite Blogs, Meg Fowler, Chris Brogan, KR8TR, Karoli, C-SPAN, The New Yorker, The Public Library, News.com, TechCrunch, Mahalo, Google News, Yahoo News, ESPN, Digg, TWIT, Your personal network, and Your friend’s networks are all pushing information into the marketplace. You choose what to buy. You also sell your own writing, photos, music, films, radio into the networks you have access to, the pools the provide the most liquidity.

Just like a Hedge Fund, or a portfolio manager, we try to put together the best portfolio of feeds, and pick the best stories and pieces out of the stream. The term we hear these days is “curator” or “editor.” But the sense of time is not of the long term investor, but rather of the day trader or the market maker.

Meg Fowler threw up her hands and finally said, “This is what I do.” She was trying to explain how Twitter goes to some new users. It’s a question that surfaces naturally with the uninitiated. They examine the “rules” and the capabilities, and then answer the question “What are you doing?” But somehow that doesn’t seem to adequately represent the buzz of talk surrounding Twitter.

The first thing new users observe, once they start following veteran users is that the question about what one is doing is only occasionally answered. What are the rules they ask, what are the rules about what to put in to those 140 characters, if you’re not answering the question?

This is where words begin to fail us. How to explain all that is not answering a question? How to explain who hears and who doesn’t? How to explain the river of talk that one follows? To explain one’s experience of Twitter, is to explain one’s self. Everyone’s experience is slightly different.

Meg Fowler’s description brought to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of how we learn and use language in his book Philosophical Investigations. Certainly we can talk about rules when we speak of language. But that’s not how we learn and eventually use language. Rather than learning a set of rules, it’s more a case of “this is what I do,” and you must do what you do.

Asking what one should fill the 140 characters with is like asking what words one should fill one’s voice with. Many social network sites attempt to provide context and set the rules of engagement. Following rules is what machines do, not what people do. I’ve often thought of human-computer interaction as the encounter between a world purged of ambiguity with a world filled with ambiguity. Twitter thrives on the ambiguity of its purpose, it’s a machine that leaves room for the human.

And Meg Fowler, why look to her as an authoritative voice? In a medium where most of use are finding our way and learning the landscape, Ms. Fowler has filled in those 140 characters more than 11,646 times.

The opening reception for Christine Cariati, Liz Hager and Mark Ulriksen’s group show at Back to the Picture is tonight (Saturday, March 29th) at 7:00pm. You can find all the event details here. I’ve already dropped by the gallery and the work looks great.

Learn more about each of the artists on their web sites:

• Christine Cariati
• Liz Hager
• Mark Ulriksen

The image at the top of this post is a detail from Christine Cariati’s painting “Vuillard’s Garden.” The painting is, in part, a tribute to the intense pattern work in the paintings of Edouard Vuillard. The medium is gouache on paper. Gouache is opaque watercolor, and a notoriously difficult painting medium. Cariati’s natural landscapes are filled with color, beauty and spirit, even as the figures portrayed act out a darker Darwinian drama.

Liz Hager’s Digital MetalTypes are a revelation. I’d never seen photographs printed on to a bright copper metal sheet before. Hager incorporates self-designed textile patterns, 19th-century studio portraits and her own botanical photos into a series of captivating photo-montages. Through these images and the stories that accompany them, the viewer is invited into a private world filled with the secret thoughts and unconventional associations of its inhabitants. The viewer decides where to draw the line between fact and fiction.

Mark Ulriksen is well known for his covers for The New Yorker magazine. Over the years he’s had some of the great ones. Most recently his cover “The Emperor’s new clothes” was a wry comment on the troubles of Eliot Spitzer. Ulriksen creates acrylic paintings for most of America’s major publications, book publishers, advertising agencies and graphic designers. He paints pictures of the famous and infamous, newsmakers and homemakers, musicians and athletes, dogs and politicians. This show will exclusively showcase his work for The New Yorker.

The viral contagion that is Twitter is directly related to its simplicity. Twitter is one of the smallest possible connectors of nodes on the network. Follow. Unfollow. Block. Post 140.

Some think we want more complexity. We want more depth, more features. But the fact is we want to build up complexity out of simplicity.

If your business is now selling digital copies of something, you can’t use the economics of your prior state. Every business would like to maintain that kind of pricing power. However, if the marginal cost of making the digital copy is close to zero, and you’re selling into a mass market, how do you justify your pricing? Why isn’t free the right price?

When is free the wrong price? When you’re selling digital copies into a niche or small market and producing the master copy is expensive and requires highly specialized talent. This could be a picture of the software business, the music business or the movie business. The digital has changed the very DNA of these industries. You can’t accept the price cutting power of the digital on the production side, if you don’t accept the price cutting power on the distribution and sales side. The digital can’t be quarantined.

For the record, music is not recorded music. A photograph of a painting is not a painting. A video of a play is not a play. Seeing a symphony in person is not the same as listening to a CD. In point of fact, the digital itself is a copy at it’s origin, it never inhabits time the same way as the performing arts. The digital replicates without effort, cost, talent or skill. Compare and contrast to performing music live, acting in a play, painting a new work.

Because a large industry has grown up around selling recordings, the recordings are often confused with the thing recorded. Of course there are recorded works that only exist as recordings and cannot actually be performed. Then there are records put out by musicians who can’t actually play their music live. But once these recordings exist in digital format, it’s nothing to make an extra copy or two. Or ten thousand or a million.

The great thing about music is that it’s different every time. That’s why we go to see plays and operas we’ve seen before, see bands we’ve seen before. It was the recording industry that taught consumers that there was only one version of a song, the one they were selling. And that was the moment where musicians were cut off from their music. Recordings create an artificial kind of perfection that stands outside of life. Life is imperfect, filled with mistakes, errors, moments of passion and virtuosity. Recordings can simulate the depth of life, but cannot capture the living.

As the cost of making and distributing recordings continues to approach zero, musicians need to understand what the digital means to them. It could mean you’ve got many versions of the same song: the unplugged version, the one you did in Austin, the desperate one you recorded in that little club in New York. The one where that great harmonica player sat in and changed the way you thought about the melody. It could mean multiple mixes, it could mean letting the fans create their own mixes. Or even computer-generated random mixes. Let a thousand flowers bloom and capture all the beautiful moments of imperfection in all their glory.

As we think about identity in the online world, we come to realize that the “I” that the identity is meant to correspond with, is multiple. Not in the sense of schizophrenia, or multiple personalities, but in the sense that there are many facets that make up and individual. When we buy a bottle of single-malt scotch, we want to only show the facet that says “over 21.” But there is a sense in which we are many different people. We have one persona at work, another at home. One mask online, and another with our children. We have one identity with our parents, and another when we tell a joke.

We have a work email address and a personal email address. Sometimes we have more than one Open ID. We have one persona on Facebook, and a different one on LinkedIn. We are one way on Twitter, and a different way altogether on our blog.

The poet Pablo Neruda wrote:

Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
They are lost to me under the cover of clothing
They have departed for another city.

We prefer that people be a single identity. We call people with more than one identity, two-faced. We think of grifters, tricksters and shape-shifters.

Another thread of the conversation from the Bible, Luke 8:30:

And he asked him, What is thy name?
And he answered, saying,
Our name is Legion: for we are many.

Legion is a man possessed by many demons. Demons that are cast out to leave the individual soul. Identity and soul are closely identified. Can we have many identities and a single soul? Is that the true center of a human being, the thing that is singular about a person? Should that individual thing be represented by a single online identity? The Dean of Grace Cathedral, Alan Jones, often comments on the fact that in our modern age, we see the idea of the soul extensively discussed in our secular literature. We live in an age where many can only believe in the soul, but nothing more.

We are many, and as we externalize our many selves into online identity, we’ll find things to be a lot less precise, and more crowded than we expected. While at some level we yearn for clarity, ambiguity is at the heart of our ability to maintain our privacy and anonymity. Will our many selves be built into the identity infrastructure that is peering over the event horizon? black jack onlinecasino no deposit bonus codeplay free black jackcasino baccarat,baccarat the internet casino game,baccarat casino gamevirtual online casinocasino free gambling game online,card casino free game online,free online casino gamedueces wild video pokerbet casino online uk,uk online casino,uk best casino onlineplay free online slots,play free online slots game,free online slotsvideo poker practiceonline casino gamble,casino gamble,best casino gamble internet onlinefree casino downloadonline casino slots,game casino online slots,slots onlineplay free casino slotsplay free casinofree slots and video pokerhow to play video pokerblack jack gamblinghow to win video pokercasino bonus sign up game online,gambling casino online bonus,online casino bonusvideo poker for winnersonline gambling casino,gambling casino online,online game gambling casinovideo poker tutorialfree casino game downloadvideo poker machineplay bingo onlinebackgammon downloadcasino roulette download,casino roulette,roulette casino gamebest gambling online roulette,online roulette gamblingvirtual casino gamblingmultiplay video pokerplay blackjack online,blackjack money online play,play blackjack online freeonline casino guidefree internet slots game,free slots game,play free slots gamefree online video pokerfree internet casinofree online blackjack gameonline casino gambling site10 best online casinoonline bingoplaying video pokerfree on line video pokerplay casino gamebest video pokerbackgammon free ware,free backgammon,free backgammon softwaredouble bonus video pokerinternet rouletteonline baccaratdeuces wild video pokerblack jack betting strategy

In the book “This is your Brain on Music,” Daniel J. Levitin talks about the “ten thousand hours theory.” Levitin is writing about the brain, music and, among other topics, how long it takes to become an expert musician. In study after study the number 10,000 keeps coming up, talent matters, but time matters just as much. If you practice (effectively) for 10,000 hours it’s highly likely you will achieve a “level of mastery associated with a world-class expert.” You can think of 10,000 hours as three hours a day, or 20 hours a week for 10 years.

Levitin thinks the 10,000 hour rule applies to any pursuit, and that brings to mind the new media. How many bloggers have logged 10,000 hours of blogging? How many have 10,000 hours of Twitter? With new mediums like Twitter is it even possible to have 10,000 hours of experience?

When we talk about the professional and the amateur, we usually operate within the context of “mainstream media” vs. blogs; or traditional revenue model vs. adsense vs. free. Perhaps rather than talking about money, we should think about what makes quality?

The primary skill for both blogging and tweets is writing. A person with 10,000 hours of writing experience will have achieved a master level. 10,000 hours of experience in a particular subject matter (coding, politics, humor, short essays on life, the future, the direction of technology, enterprise technology, philosophy, human behavior, social networks) results in a high level of mastery.

When thinking about the idea of quality and depth, one might ask: how many things do you have 10,000 hours of experience in? How does each inform the other in relation to your writing, or photography, humor, film making, music or ability to make friends?

I’d seen it before, but I was reminded again today driving and listening to the radio. It was a show about the 6 word biographies collected by the folks over at Smith Magazine. The 6 word biography is based on a six word novel by Hemingway:

For sale, baby shoes, never used

The interesting thing about the limitation of six words is its liberating effect. Professional writers become addicted, and “everyday writers” are enabled to create great work. This brings to mind the two-way web and the ability of users to write, take photographs, make music, make movies, create complex hypertext documents. But what users have really embraced are things like the structured life narrations via social or interest groups, and short creative forms like Twitter.

With Twitter it’s the simplicity combined with the constraints that produces the outpouring of writing. It’s biography in 140 characters; it’s a novel in 140 characters; it’s a dialog among citizens of a democracy in 140 characters; it’s the conversation about what’s going on right now in 140 characters. Twitter is one of the most successful forms of the two-way web because it stays out of the way and lets the voices come through.

Sometimes it takes a long time for an idea to reach fruition. The names that come to mind are Vannevar Bush (As We May Think), Ted Nelson (Hypertext), and Doug Englebart (GUI HCI), among others. One that you might not think of is Bertolt Brecht. After listening to the Friday, March 14th NewsGang and Gang podcasts, I think Brecht would be smiling. Here’s something that he wrote in 1932:

…radio is one-sided when it should be two It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction.

Radio has begun genuinely moving in two directions. We live in interesting times, and according to Brecht, we seem to be moving in the right direction.

One by one, Apple is taking on the lousy interfaces we have to deal with every day. The mobile telephone has had a terrible interface forever. When you’re selling the subscription to the pipe, the device is meaningless. The iPhone isn’t really a phone, and that’s the revolution in the device.

Cable television listings are impossible to search and the remote control is ill suited to the task. The economics are the same. The cable business isn’t about the user interface, it’s all about selling cable subscriptions. As long as it’s not an active negative, the method of finding, selecting and recording televisions will never improve.

There’s a revolution hidden in fixing television’s interface, because the new schema will include both hundreds of television channels, on-demand shows, music channels, and all the multiple media channels of the internet. We’ve become so used to working with terrible interfaces that we don’t even understand that something better is possible.

As with the iPhone, software will be the key. Cable television’s interface cannot iterate except in extreme circumstances. The software model is key to moving the interaction forward, and Apple seems to be the only company positioned to the HCI experiments at the edge into the mainstream.