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Category: collaboration

A Cloud of Unknowing: The Machine and The Tribe

Published May 6, 2008 by cgerrish

Cloud

The number of web pages on the network is at around 20 billion. The rate of growth of that number continues to rise. We describe the “space” that these pages occupy as a cloud. The number of travelers through the network cloud continues to increase as well.

The cloud is opaque. While everything is a click away; visibility is close to zero. The only visibility we have to other locations is through the presence of hyperlinks on a page. Were we to stand at the boundary of a collection of pages and attempt to peer in to the cloud to see contiguous space, we would see nothing.

Think of destinations and starting points on the network. Where do you start and where do you end up? A search engine that indexes all 20 billion pages can potentially link you to every possible destination on the network. A start page, or portal, provides a curated collection of links giving you visibility into the new and the popular. Sometimes the hyperlinks of a portal are only inward looking within its own small collection. Other times the links connect outward as well. While portals provide search, they are fundamentally different ways of looking into the cloud.

We are blind as we travel through the cloud; we cannot see beyond our current page. To understand the success of search engines as a business you must realize that they provide a sense of vision into the darkness. A third method of seeing is emerging, and its impact is growing daily. We are gathering as tribes on web sites that enable social networks within the cloud. When we want to know what’s out there and what’s worth traveling to, we ask our friends.

When confronted with a cloud of unknowing, do we turn to the absolute knowledge of the machine or our flawed set of human relations?

 

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Learning what else you can do with a Juniper Berry

Published April 27, 2008 by cgerrish

Juniper berry

Clay Shirky’s comparison of Gin and Television as mechanisms by which pain is soothed, and a cognitive surplus created, connects with a number of things I’ve been thinking of recently. The appropriate response to Shirky’s essay is to create another essay, or perhaps a photograph, that comments and connects to it. We live in a consumer society, and thanks to folks like Ralph Nader, we have some rights as consumers. But we are coming to the end of the era where we define ourselves by what we consume. 

With the vast new set of consumption choices flowing through the network, the issue of gluttony arises. You can’t just eat everything. Human beings don’t scale, and human attention doesn’t obey Moore’s law. What happens when our total number of waking hours, and not just for today, but for the rest of our lives, can be filled with high quality “content” programmed by the best curators and editors on the planet? Fill out a profile, push a button, and the entire sequence can be put into a feed ready for your attention. As material is consumed, and new material becomes available, a constant recalculation of your feed will occur assuring that you will always have the highest quality and most appropriate “content” available. Philip K. Dick is smiling somewhere.

The assumption built into this model is that we just need more and better gin. Shirky points out that if we went on the wagon, we’d have a tremendous surplus of time on our hands. And if we look at what the digital natives are doing, we’d see that 100% consumption is boring. They want all transaction to be full duplex, read/write, consume/produce. At its origin, Tim Berners-Lee created a 2-way web, but the conversation shouldn’t be limited to the network.

If we become a nation of producers as well as consumers, won’t there even be more content to consume? Yes, but there will be no obligation to consume it all. It’s also important to remember that all conversations don’t happen with words (written or spoken). A photograph can speak to an essay, so can a melody, a video, a dance, a scribble in a notebook or a painting. With a whole new set of tools and media widely available, I see a nation returning en mass to their parlor pianos and singing a song about “gin and television” and then uploading a video of it to YouTube.

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Conversations by means other than language

Published April 24, 2008 by cgerrish

There’s something so perfect about this video that I’ve returned to it several times. It’s been featured in lots of main stream media, but it’s a kind of exemplar. It’s a perfect conversation between a song written by Jonathan Coulton and a dance by an actress named Emily. I’m not sure how many times the song has been heard, but Emily’s performance has been seen more than 300,000 times. It’s a conversation between two artists on a single theme. Each performance is at a very high level, each performance brings something out of the other. When the cost of the technology falls away, it’s the art, the talent and the people that shine through.

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Surrealistic Democracy: An Approach to Twitter Feature Requests

Published April 8, 2008 by cgerrish

Surrealism - Magritte

The practice of Surrealism often takes the form of connecting unexpected things into a single object. Magritte often used this technique, as did Meret Oppenheim. The fur-lined tea cup is beautiful example. Innovation also takes the form of connecting the unexpected to create the new.

The churn of innovation in the Twitter space is running at full speed. And the tools for a new approach to making feature requests and creating requirements are ready-to-hand in the network. As a user of Twitter, I’d like to view Twitter channels, streams made of specific sets of Twitter users. I found a site called TweetPeek which allowed me to put together some crude channels. These Twitter channels are analogous to the RSS channels on NewsGang.net.

Amy Bellinger took my idea and extended it by putting the RSS feed for the Twitter channel next to the feed for the Audio MP3s in GRAZR.

Amy would like to see live ‘show notes’ for the NewsGang podcast via Twitter. GRAZR doesn’t allow the MP3 to play while the Twitter Channel is updating, but you get the idea.

The channels I’ve sketched out are really rough outlines. They don’t update as quickly as I’d like, I’d really like them to be XMPP based so the flow was real-time.

And the Twitter channel I’d really like to see is the one that features the delegates and bloggers at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Two things need to happen to create this primary source information stream:

  • We need real-time twitter channels, both XMPP and RSS
  • We need to get the word about Twitter to the floor of the convention.

Take this idea and move it forward. If you’re a technologist, think about the technical problem. TweetPeek is a start, but it’s not optimal. If you’re connected to the Democratic convention, spread the word about Twitter.

As the Trashmen said in 1963…

A-well-a everybody’s heard about the bird
B-b-b-bird, bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a don’t you know about the bird?
Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird’s the word
A-well-a…

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