I can’t help it, I’m facinated by Steve Gillmor’s stream of consciousness. As usual he ranges widely and predicts the future boldly. I agree with his thoughts on the iPhone. The chatter around the iPhone seems to assume that it’s no big deal twisting the giant telcos around your little finger. No one should underestimate their power. I’ll grant that they’re the biggest impediment to getting real bandwidth over a wire to our homes, and through the air everywhere else. They still believe that voice is a qualitatively different kind of data than text or sound. It’s all just ones and zeros and the more of them you can stuff through the tubes of the internet, the more interesting the possibilities become.
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We like top 100 lists. The best films of all time, the most influential books, the best baseball players and the best cars. We like the best, the best is good. The problem is figuring out what the best means. Mahalo wants to create portals to the top 20,000 Web pages. “Top” in terms of most requests. Calacanis bemoans the it next list. Techmeme has begun to rank its “contributors.” Scoble thinks that it’s the end of blogging. Frankly, not appearing on a list is not the same as death.
Cole Porter had an interesting list of the “top.” It included Mahatma Gandhi, cellophane, turkey dinners and Garbo’s salary.
You’re the top!
You’re the Louvre Museum.
You’re a melody from a symphony by Strauss
You’re a Bendel bonnet,
A Shakespeare’s sonnet,
You’re Mickey Mouse.
You’re the Nile,
You’re the Tower of Pisa,
You’re the smile on the Mona Lisa
I’m a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, baby, I’m the bottom you’re the top!
Top stuff lists are meant to drive traffic. The popular is by definition popular. But the popular is, as Leonard Cohen says, just what everybody knows.
Comments closedMasterpieces of the cinema are entering the public domain. There’s great promise for the creation mashups and quotation. Nosferatu has already had many new scores written for it. I remember going to an art movie house to see this film. It was a great rarity. Now you can watch the whole film on echovar.
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Does Dave Winer have the power to squash a meme? The term “Social Graph” recently began an infestation of TechMeme. While tied to the interesting issue about who owns a user’s attention data in the context of social networking, the term itself obscured rather than opened the dialogue. Dave Winer objected to the use of the term, even though it was one he was familiar with given his background in mathematics. After reading Winer, Nick Carr was pleased to find that he understood what the term referred to, even if the signifier was unknown.
Can you capture the meme, remove the “Social Graph” signifier, re-attach the “Social Network” signifier and release the meme back into the wild? Can a meme survive that kind of catch and release? After all, it’s not as though “network” doesn’t have plenty of depth for those interested in going deeper. Network theory has a very interesting emerging literature, and has many ties to the mathematics implied by the use of the word “graph.”
Generally the usage of words to signify concepts is determined by common usage, the marketplace of conversation. In this case, the conversation is really a political negotiation for the right to own one’s attention and social network data. The math is the least of it.
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