Category: social graph

Out of Band Messages: Signaling Xmas

Published December 27, 2008 by cgerrish

Music plays a large role in the Winter holidays, Christmas especially. As popular music turned to rock and roll, it was still part of the family. It played the role of the rebellious teenager— but it still resided well within the boundaries of the nuclear family. In 1963, the Beatles joined the family for Christmas with an out-of-band message delivered through the special channel of the fan club.

As ‘Rock and Roll’ lost its ‘Roll,’ left home and 1960s exploded, Christmas was left behind. The family holidays were left to the ‘family-oriented‘ music acts. As Rock music matured and started families, Christmas returned as a theme. But the new songs didn’t attempt to regain innocence; the real world and the politics of the times couldn’t be kept out of the sound. As we look back across the span of popular music, it’s interesting to observe which artists and styles of music intersect with the Christmas holidays.

The Beatles Christmas message made use of a very simple and direct technology. There seemed to be little more than a microphone, a tape recorder, the band and a loose script outline. This kind of casual production method was a far cry from the intense rehearsals and refined production methods of George Martin. The off-the-cuff nature of the message makes the communication all the more genuine; we don’t feel as though it’s constructed for our entertainment, but rather an actual message.

The sophistication of video and sound production has grown tremendously over the years. Its costs have skyrocketed, and then plummeted to an almost commodity level. By chaining together a Flip video camera, the Network and YouTube Christmas theatricals can be produced and distributed easily. The cost of the idea and the time to produce them far outweigh the cost of the technology.

Aimee Mann has left the recording industry cartel to become an independent microcaster. She records albums, tours with her band, and is one of the artists who has intersected with Christmas. Each year, for the last few, she’s put on a special Christmas show. Without the heavy machinery of the record labels, Mann has found ways of connecting with her audience using low-cost and no-cost technical tools. The production costs are low, but the communication/connection value is very high. This combination of high and low modes of production is a new model for all forms of mass media. Even newspapers have become broadcast networks, a printed paper is just one output of the content.

It’s a much more straightforward proposition for a performer to construct a persona for the highly produced recording. Like the transition from silent film to talkies, it’ll be interesting to see which performers still shine off-the-cuff and on-the-run. But mastery of low tech production modes is only one element of the equation. Video isn’t a one-way medium any longer. Messages can travel in both directions, and the best performers know how to listen.

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Tracking Voices: Attack, Sustain, Decay

Published November 16, 2008 by cgerrish

In trying to understand something like “Track,” I find that as a new angle is uncovered I need to make note of it before it slips back into the aether. Part of understanding is explaining something to yourself, and then trying to explain it to someone else. It’s turning a shard of a mental image into a story. Understanding the signal-to-noise ratio in that transmission is one measure of success. Sometimes a transmission can carry the payload of a dense and ambiguous metaphor— something that is neither signal nor noise.

Noise is something we can’t or don’t want to understand. Signal is communication for which we already have a framework for understanding. Ambiguity is a different kind of payload in a signal. Sometimes it’s important to drive toward clarity, other times it’s important to let something remain in an ambiguous state and allow for the meaning of play and play of meaning to unfold. The usefulness of track is something largely undiscovered. The tools we use to track the idea of Track are both primitive and highly sophisticated. We talk to each other; we listen; and then we talk to each other some more.

The small piece of the picture that came into focus for me today was the distinction between “who” and “what.” Distinguishing “track” and “search” seems to have some conceptual value. Search is more associated with what; track is more associated with who. Either can be used for the purposes of the other, but there’s some value in making this distinction.

There’s a sense in which track can be used to understand the current presence status of a person on the Network. We use a status indicator on IM to indicate to our personal network of reciprocal connections our level of availability. Tracking a person or a topic keyword tells you who is currently speaking on the Network. Who, not what. Speaking, through microblogging (tweeting), is a form of indicating your presence and availability.

An essential component of track is its basis in the real-time stream. One way we make conversation is through making sounds– and sounds have a physics. Finding the presence of speakers must occur within the context of the sound envelope— track must do its work in the period starting at the end of the sustain and finishing at the end of the decay.

The decrease in amplitude when a vibrating force has been removed is called decay. The actual time it takes for a sound to diminish to silence is the decay time. How gradual this sound decays is its rate of decay.

Once the sound envelope has completed its decay, the presence of the speaker can no longer be assured.

A directed social graph, or affinity group, can be followed to understand current presence status. Track can also be used for that purpose, and additionally to discover new speakers on the subject of one’s affinity. Condensing value out of that stream returns us to the beginning. A story emerges, a melody emerges– from the attack, sustain and decay– of the voices in the stream. A thousand flowers bloom in an eternal golden braid.

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The Power of Track: Top Down, Bottom Up

Published November 9, 2008 by cgerrish

Any discussion of ‘Track’ seems to require a brief definition. By now we’re familiar with ‘Search,’ it’s the process of examining everything in an index to find keyword matches– and then ranking the results in the most useful order. ‘Track’ is a filter on the firehose of information generated by the microblogging space. It’s stuff that’s not in the search engine index yet, it’s what people are saying and thinking right now. The ideal time parameters around track are the rhythms of the conversation. Tracked results should reach one quickly enough to be able to respond to a question or statement without the thread of the conversation being lost. Track expands the public instant message dialogue beyond a personal directed social graph. When I track a topic, I’ll see messages from anyone who uses the words I’m tracking.

Our recent Presidential campaign featured diametrically opposed approaches to organization. One campaign employed a bottom-up strategy; the other preferred the top-down approach. This got me thinking about track and the difference between top-down and bottom-up strategies. A top-down strategy is easier to support in that the tracked keywords are very limited and they don’t change unless consciously changed. The creation of an intentional scarcity of tracked keywords also lays the foundation for an economic model.

Here are two approaches to a limited track keyword set:

A bottom-up strategy is harder to support, every user in the system could have a separate list of keyword filters for the full stream. That’s a lot of computing that needs to be done very quickly. As events unfold around us in the world, each user’s set of keywords would change to aid in the discovery around the new topics emerging. The full set of track filters would be constantly shifting and morphing.

Search uses a top-down strategy to prioritize keyword results. You probably want to see the results that most people want to see or think are important. The brilliance of the modern search engine is that it makes that calculation for everything it indexes. It arrives at top-down through bottom-up voting on importance. Services like Mahalo attempt to only provide extended results for popular searches– converging to the top of the pyramid.

Here are some examples of services trying to create lists of what’s popular:

If you track what’s popular, depending on the community providing the attention data, you quickly converge on the least interesting topics. You’re only seeing what everybody knows.

And the broader the community, the more quickly you end up with The National Enquirer or the World Weekly News. Now that the election is over, take a look at the trending topics on Search.Twitter.com. Occasionally you’ll see a micro-community poke through with a hashtag for a particular conference or event, but mostly there’s little of interest.

Each of us is a unique nexus of connections tracing our path through the world. Our individual curiosity provides the fuel, the focus, the set of keywords we carry with us to make sense of, and create, the future. The difference between all of us having the power to track the stream and only the most popular keywords being tracked is the difference between all the books in the world and the magazines available at an airport bookstore. For a short period of time we all had track, now track is the privilege of the few.

For some reason, I’m reminded of a song by Laurie Anderson for tape-bow violin based on a quote by Lenin:

Ethics is the aesthetics of the Few-ture

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The Trace, The Scent, and the Link: Tracking the Moment

Published September 29, 2008 by cgerrish

Consuming the multicast, looking for traces of import, and then switching and focusing. Lyndon Johnson was famous for watching all three television networks at once during news broadcasts. But he didn’t consume each stream in its entirety, he was looking for cues to dig out the segments that mattered. He assembled his own narrative from this highly engaged viewing activity.

Politicians need to keep their finger on the pulse to be successful. Elvis Presley also watched all three networks at the same time. He was looking for cues to crack a different kind of code. He scanned the frequencies searching for the scent of cultural information, then quickly switched and focused.

This model was taken to the extreme in the film The Man Who Fell To Earth. David Bowie played a space alien who absorbed the local culture through a raw feed of all available broadcast channels.

The television remote control made switching simpler, but unless you could visually monitor each of the frequencies, you might miss the sign that signaled the necessity of a switch of focus. Cable television allowed the number of channels and networks to explode. Scanning the frequencies is no longer a job that can done by an individual. The Internet multiplied the possible number of channels into the millions.

Originally it was the VCR, and later the DVR and YouTube that made filtering and copying these valuable moments into a buffer for ready Network access a simple affair. Scanning the raw feed pouring off the network is now done through social media filters, perhaps most effectively by Twitter through communities of interest. A tweet containing a hyperlink is the most compact channel switcher, the most efficient pointer to items of interest.

These pointers we share through the Twitter feed point to locations in the cloud. We click and activate on-demand content that streams in to our computers. Today we think about the text, video and audio we access as a substitution for traditional broadcast and print media. But almost anything that can be expressed as software can be on the other side of that hyperlink. Here we are only limited by our imaginations.

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