network – Page 54

Day trading the information stream: Reading and Writing

Published April 1, 2008 by cgerrish

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.

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Twitter: A Simple Tool for Connecting Two Nodes

Published March 27, 2008 by cgerrish

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.

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Online Identity: We are many, we are a swarm

Published March 19, 2008 by cgerrish

The Swarm

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?

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The commons and the cloud, the network and the tribes

Published February 25, 2008 by cgerrish

The commons and the cloud, its the direction many of us see the world of personal/corporate technology moving. We’re starting to trust the cloud to hold our data, keep it safe and secure and provide it to us where ever and when ever we need it. Although there have been some notable failures recently, we assume that things will simply get better and better. The richer the cloud and commons become the better it is for all of us. The internet itself was built to route around failures in nodes of the network.

There have been a few signals that not everyone has signed on to that dream. In particular, I’m referring to the undersea cables recently cut to eliminate internet access to whole countries. And more recently the attempts by Pakistan to censor YouTube that made the service unavailable to everyone.

As we grow more and more dependent on the commons and the cloud, we have to understand that not all cultures and political systems are compatible with the level of openness that currently exists in the network. Is it a future moment of science fiction where a war has broken out between the network and the tribes? Or is it something just around the corner.

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Category: network

Day trading the information stream: Reading and Writing

Twitter: A Simple Tool for Connecting Two Nodes

Online Identity: We are many, we are a swarm

The commons and the cloud, the network and the tribes