Facebook is fast becoming a larger part of the Blah, Blah! Technology future direction. Right now, almost 100 people have signed up with the blog’s page on Facebook — and I’d like you to join, too.

So what’s in it for you? All the benefits of Facebook, combined with the spirit of the Blah, Blah! Technology blog combined. If you’re a subscriber, then here’s your chance to connect with some of the many hundreds who have also subscribed.

I’ll feature some of the articles I find and add in my own unique commentary. You become part of a growing community, where you get to share your own thoughts, and share articles with your friends and colleagues.

Once you join, you’ll get a steady stream of articles fed straight into your Facebook home page, covering the whole spectrum of topics you’d expect to find right here on the Blah, Blah! Technology blog, including my comments and links to related articles.

So if you’re interested in up-to-the-minute discoveries, insights, know-how and world-changing ideas, join the Blah, Blah! Technology page on Facebook right now!

Given the impact of social media, do we need a new way of measuring trust and authority on the web? I think so.

In the previous installment, I discussed the rise of the re-Tweet and the likely impact on Google’s PageRank. In this final installment, I’ll be looking at how we measure trust on the social web and the impact of social media on authority.

Making a case for TrustRank

The idea of a rank of trust (called TrustRank) isn’t new. So it’s clearly a way forward, considered very seriously by some very seriously-minded people. For authority to exist, trust must first exists — for without trust, there is no authority to be given.

Now, we all know that PageRank is, whether rightly or wrongly, broadly seen as a measure of authority. Also, whether rightly or wrongly, Google are seen as the owners of this perceived authority. In reality, they’re not. Google simply perform the calculations. Whatever authority there is in a blog or a website resides within that blog or website itself.

A link, or a URL is essentially an indication of trust, however tacit of succinct that link might be. And if the act of re-Tweeting a link is eating into the act of linking back, then surely those links count, too? Not quite. Twitter currently blocks the flow of authority along those links, so the value is greatly diminished, certainly from a PageRank point of view.

So is there a new kind of authority emerging? Possibly. On the face of it, you could argue that Twitter offers a simpler, more transparent and democratic kind of authority. However, where Google simply calculate authority, Twitter becomes the authority. And that to me is a concern.

We could sit and argue about the subtle distinctions all day long. Ultimately, we’d come to agree that the source of the problem is in the architecture of the web itself; a measure of trust ought to have been a consideration when the web was first imagined. Perhaps. But that’s a different story.

Do we trust Twitter more than Google?

In simple terms, if Google were to just vanish, so would their PageRank. In similar fashion, if Twitter vanished, so would this new measure of authority arising from the number of re-Tweets. But the big difference is that Google are only counting up all of the links from all of the web pages and articles all over the web. Whereas this new Twitter-based authority is confined to the data silos of Twitter first and only. The former is far more robust and resistant to data loss, while the latter would suffer catastrophically if Twitter blipped off the web.

My concern is that we shouldn’t rely on any one source at all, and any measure of authority should be a collective, holistic group of metrics and not an algorithm that made perfect sense yesterday but not today.

I suppose the simple answer is that we just count up all of the good votes and subtract the total number of bad votes. But we would have to decide where we choose to count all of our votes from, that is in itself a a question of trust; which social media websites and social networks are trustworthy to use as a metric?

We’re at a stage where social media is becoming bigger than Google’s search and their algorithms. The way in which we interact with the web has changed and is still changing both enormously and rapidly.

This social universe

Google and their venerable PageRank no longer sit at the heart of this now social universe. Instead, we are at the very centre, amidst a constellation of stars, whose light is brightest for those sources of information that is prized most and dimmest for those articles who are least valued. Meanwhile, out there in orbit, Google, Twitter, Digg, Facebook et al revolve around us — we influence them and they in turn influence us.

Trust is enormously important on the web, because there’s no simple way to compensate for the lack of face-to-face contact, which the real world offers. Trust is like gravity, with enormous attractive properties, felt over vast distances. The greater the trust, the more we gravitate towards those sources. The more prolonged the source of trust, the greater the likelihood of that trust transforming into authority, further accelerating the attractive force.

My feeling is, social websites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg have to accept their sphere of influence and be willing to be the founding participants of some kind of TrustRank. We need some method of measuring how we gravitate towards these celestial social bodies, and conversely, how we’re sometimes repelled away by what we find.

So who owns your authority on the web? If we use Google’s yard stick, the web does. If we use Twitter’s yard stick, the social collective does, so long as Twitter exists. That to me could either form an irresistible force, like a black hole, or a powerful disruptive force like an exploding star. The former is much too dense to support the diversity of the web, creating a sterile homogeny, while the latter would result in a fragmented, chaotic array of small social satellites, too small and weak to support everyone.

It would be a sad irony if our value of trust was measured not by the depth and the breadth of our social network, but by the narrow and confined channels through which we choose to communicate…

Recommended reading

• The rise of the re-Tweet puts pressure on PageRank
• SEO: To link is to like is to luv
• TrustRank algorithm
• The URL explained
• Social Media bigger than Google’s search business?

Shock! Horror! Google are losing ground to social media? While the numbers are small, they are also an inevitability:

“Seeing the hard numbers of how social media search queries on sites like Facebook has gained in popularity is not a surprise to most … however, in the comScore numbers reported by Search Engine Watch was the slight step backwards that Google took by recording 2% less search queries in May vs. April of this year.”

To me, this was nothing like a shock. I predicted this would happen way back in November 2007, when I saw a trend emerging that I realized had enormous implications for Google and all of the other search engines. In simple terms, social media was on course to kill Google’s search algorithm:

“Instead of ‘Googling’ for something, we find stuff being sent to us as emails from friends, in our profiles, in a friends’ lists of favourites, or any number of user-generated websites, ‘blogs, RSS feeds, Social Networks and Social Media portals.

While we’re busying ourselves voting and commenting on this stuff, we’re not using Google’s search algorithm, and we’re not clicking on Sponsored Links, either.”

Google’s losses are social media’s gains

OK, so the knock to Google is small, that I’ll grant you, but it’s a number that will grow. Why? Because despite having some of the brightest minds in the world working for them, Google don’t have clue one when it comes to social media. And for their part, Google still don’t have much of a clue how to deal with social media, as an entity, let alone as a function of their own products. Right at the very top, Google’s Marissa Mayer struggles to grasp the fundamentals of social media.

Fast forward a few years and another trend begins to emerge, that also coincided with a drop off on my part; I’m not writing nearly as prolifically as I once was due to work commitments. So for me to see the total number of back-links drop off would at least seem to make sense, directly correlating with the slow down in my writing.

However, that might not be the whole story. What if the number of back-links to blogs was dropping off as a whole, across the entire blogosphere? The question is, why?

Louis Gray might have the answer. You see, as re-Tweeting grows as a social activity, there has to be some impact to blogging, as a whole:

“While most of my posts only get a few dozen tweets, some have numbered over a hundred. And as this occurs, in parallel, the total number of links back to the Web site from other blogs is decreasing.”

But this isn’t just about back-links. I’ve had a number of people ask me why their PageRank has dropped off recently. In some cases, quite precipitously. The number one reason is likely to be that Google has determined there are fewer links pointing in your direction, therefor your PageRank decreases commensurately.

If this is the result of people spending more time active within their social networks, sharing what they find, and spending less time writing about what they discover, the implications for PageRank as a measure of value, and linking as a measure of trust and authority could be terminal.

Assuming that back-links are beginning to dwindle, taking with them a key measure of trust, we have to ask: who owns your authority on the web? A question I’ll help decipher tomorrow…

Recommended reading

• As re-Tweeting rises, linking continues to decline
• Social Media to kill Google’s search algorithm?
• Google doesn’t get Social Media
• Google’s Mayer questions value of Social Media

I’ve long maintained that if conditions like progeria (accelerated decrepitude) exist, then there has to be a condition that predisposes someone to extended longevity. And a little girl called Brooke Greenberg (video) could well be living proof of that theory of mine:

“She is not aging, but it seems that her body is developing as independent parts out of sync. If you were to look at photos, she is unchanged, and there’s no indication that she would be in fact getting any older, and as far as everybody knows, if this continues on, she has no reason to die. She also has a sister, but she’s perfectly normal, so there aren’t any hints here to help solve this mystery.”

Brooke has an unidentified condition that has left her physically and mentally stuck at the stage of infancy. “Stuck?” You say. Yes, because Brooke is 16 years old. And as far as those who’ve studied her are concerned, she may be stuck that way for all eternity.

What a price immortality

There are, however, some odd and perplexing moral and ethical issues, here. If we assume Brooke was to live for another two hundred years, what quality of live would she have? While she is undoubtedly alive and healthy, probably capable of feeling pain and experiencing basic pleasure, she is and forever will be an infant. Is the expense of keeping her alive justified, if her existence is without meaning, given her inability to progress any further than the developmental stage of a toddler?

To keep someone or something alive for the sake of life alone is no life at all, and with all emotive issues set aside, illogical and foolish.

So what is death? Well, death is a biological mechanism, one without an obvious “off” switch. And many have looked. It’s probably as well to look at death as being like the wiring loom of my Audi S3, which has been installed with the intentions of foiling attempts to steal the car, since the wiring is purposefully interwoven in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to isolate the immobilizer — remove the fuse for the alarm system and you’ll probably disable the EMU (engine management unit), and so on.

So what are the origins of death? Ancient, by any measure. Imagine the very first primordial, microbial life, swimming freely in vast shallow and warm oceans. Such organisms had the run of the whole planet, with access to near limitless resources. With such an abundance of resources, what need is there for death? But that other biological mechanism came into force. Evolution. And quickly (relatively speaking) those microbial organisms began to fill whatever environmental niche best suited their needs. So diversification became a natural force.

At some point, the theory suggests the death mechanism evolved. But why? Let me ask you a question: what do you do when you buy a new gadget? You usually throw away its predecessor, to make room. And now we know better, we recycle what we dispose of.

It would seem that mother nature was well ahead of us in this regard, because that is precisely the point of death. As a new organism emerges, it is tentatively accepted that it is biologically superior to its progenitor. So to avoid competition for resources, the progenitor has a time stamp encoded within every cell.

A matter of life and death

OK, so let’s assume death came about later on. If we assume this, and that the early Earth was much like a gigantic Petri dish, wouldn’t it be possible for some of those early immortal microbes to have survived? Theoretically, yes. In practical terms, probably not. Unless the conditions conducive to their existence continued to exist.

The problem is, the very earliest life forms would find the modern world totally hostile to their kind of life. At some point in the distant past, the Earth was anaerobic, which is to say mostly free of the gaseous composition we rely on today to breath. Later, something happened that changed that, rapidly transitioning the vast majority of the planet to an aerobic environment, triggering the first mass extinction, most likely as caused by the emergence of the first stromatolites.

Right now, out there in some ocean, scientists sit aboard ships, sifting through core samples taken from deep oceanic floor sludges. These anaerobic environs would be a perfect retreat for the immortal microbes of the very early Earth.

If we consider the sheer numeracy of bacterial reproduction, for example, the biomass of the early Earth would have been staggering. But also, the amount of time that has passed since then is equally staggering; some 3.8 billion years. If such a microbe is to be discovered, that will, in my opinion, be one of the greatest discoveries ever.

But all of these fancy and intricate stories aren’t even fairy tales to baby Brooke Greenberg. But she is probably as big a part of this story as those miniscule, ancient microbes. She may hold, within her cells and her genes, the instructions to decoding and turning off death. At once, interrupting one of the most powerful mechanisms in nature.

The question is, should we? The planet is already fast approaching a point where there are too many people alive consuming too few, dwindling resources. To have walking amongst us immortals would create a new sub-class — everyone else who wasn’t immortal.

Right now, out there somewhere, of all the people that have been born over the last few millennia, we could imagine one amongst us having walked more than most. Seen things most of us have read about in history books. Have taken part in events of historical significance. They could carry within their genes a mistake, a capricious moment in human evolution, imprinted into and encoded within their very DNA.

For the ancient microbe and Brooke Greenberg at least, the source of their immortality can wait a while longer. After all, they may well have all the time in the world…

Recommended reading

• Predicting the evolution of everything
• Genetically engineered super soldiers
• The smallest symphony in the universe
• Is there alien life in the universe? Part 1
• Is there alien life in the universe? Part 2
• Nanotechnology to kill the “upgrade cycle”?
• Gesture recognition signals Surveillance 2.0
• Bionic eye in sight?
• The ultimate party drug? Part 1
• The ultimate party drug? Part 2
• Cloaking device
• Smart goggles offer a “pre-vision” of the future

So what have the recent elections in Iran, Skittles and Trent Reznor got in common? All three represent what happens when social media and censorship collide.

If we can’t curate our comments and manage our messages, do we run the risk of not only losing the signal in the noise, but the noise itself becoming the signal? For all its failings, Digg points the way to a new kind of democracy on the web. However, a free-for-all does not for free speech maketh:

“Free speech is not the right to talk crap, insult people and generally be an idiot. While I will always defend the rights of the individual to exercise their individuality, if those individuals are incapable of recognizing their failure to offer something of value to everyone else, or to remain at least reasonable and calm, then someone has to make that decision for them. That’s not censorship, that’s citizenship…”

Reznor’s on a razor’s edge, slashes his social profile

Case in point, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame backs away from the social web:

“Reznor’s withdrawl comes just days after Michael Arrington pulled the plug on TechCrunch’s official FriendFeed account, partly because of a massive influx of comments riddled with personal attacks.”

But why? The guy’s had enough of being bombarded with inane, insulting crap, that’s why. The more high profile a person you are, the bigger a target you become. Trent just became a huge crap magnet.

Skittles scuttled by Twitter twoddle

Depending on who you ask, the recent Skittles marketing hustle was either a roaring success or a case study in how not to effectively use social media to raise brand awareness. Just hop onto Google and search for: “Skittles Twitter campaign” to see what people think. My favourite headline being: “Skittles viral campaign holds a mirror to twitter”. Indeed.

In the end, the whole Skittles + Twitter thing descended into an expletive-ridden farce. I am approximately 99.99975% sure the likes of Disney, Nike, GAP et cetera watched the proceedings with great interest, wisely concluding that the execution of such an open campaign is open invitation to disaster.

I clearly remember reading about the proposed marketing campaign and clearly imagining the outcome in my mind, which was mirrored by the events as they unfolded. The sad thing is, the predictability of the whole saga relied entirely on the very predictable nature of people, when gifted with editorial privileges.

A fundamental weakness of social media is the unhindered access people have, which also happens to be the greatest strength of social media. The power to influence is phenomenal. Equally, the power to demolish, damage and decry is frightening.

However, some balk at the idea of censorship, citing all manner of Orwellian nightmare scenarios as possible, inevitabilities. I disagree. On balance, if we look at the mean quality of blogging and social media as a whole, the ratio is low. If we then consider examples of censorship in media, its use is usually to raise perceived quality, maintain impartiality and reduce the likelihood of impropriety. And where are you most likely to see the judicious and mainly correct use of censorship? In the top five percent websites that constitute the higher end of the quality ratio.

The fact of the matter is, few businesses in their right mind would willingly expose their brands to deliberate attempts to being undermined and abused. Given the tools to censor such things, they will nod appreciatively every single time.

If you think censorship has no place in a modern, media-saturated world, think again. Why would WordPress, one of the most high profile content management systems give you the option to edit, moderate and even delete comments if censorship wasn’t on the agenda?

And if you think you personally wouldn’t condone censorship, then I suggest you stop using Digg with immediate effect. Every time you vote an article down, you’re effectively moderating and, consequently, censoring those articles. And if you’re a power user, you can kill an article dead and buried.

In reality, censorship (or a lack thereof) is all around you; from the moment your mother or your father tell you to be quiet to the politically sensitive or personally invasive story on CNN.

But when the web is the medium, how do you shut the whole world up? There’s such a thing as brand management, which is the pro-active effort to build a consistent image of your business. Then there’s reputation management, which is more a case of managing the damage inflicted by unfavourable reviews, for example, after the fact.

In so far as the former, you’re effectively attempting to paint as clean and as happy a picture of your business as possible. Regarding the latter, you’re just trying to gloss over the cracks and shout louder than the guy you somehow annoyed, and is voicing their anger. For its part, social media is the battle ground, where both parties are given the tools and the audiences to do with as they see fit.

In this respect, there’s little room for direct censorship. Instead, you’re trying to saturate the media channels with as much positive stuff about you and your business as possible, which should relegate the negative stuff to cold and less traveled regions of page three and onwards on Google.

There’s little doubt that big businesses have taken a shine to social media. However, the perils and the prizes are so intricately interwoven, the final balance can be exceptionally fine, as the guys behind Skittles discovered.

When censorship becomes citizenship

So what did we learn? It’s easy to say that people will be people and therefor can’t be trusted. But that theory quickly erodes when you consider the groundswell of global support for the pro-democracy protesters in Iran, all powered by social networking and social media:

“The episode demonstrates the extent to which the administration views social networking as a new arrow in its diplomatic quiver. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton talks regularly about the power of e-diplomacy, particularly in places where the mass media are repressed.”

So is it a question of motives? I think there’s an element of that. If there’s social momentum and a feeling that right and correct thing must be done, citizen censorship comes into effect, and those who decry the movement are often compelled to be silent and move along.

The difference between what’s happening in Iran and say for example, Holocaust denialists and the laws enacted to forbid such things, one is censorship while the other is citizenship. And therein lies the future of censorship through social media.

In the end, censorship will be a shared movement; with the media and the politicians on one side and the people and their global social networks on the other. As the years and months pass, we’re going to see social media mature, and with it, we’re also going to see censorship evolve into something both shared and coveted, not vilified or ridiculed…

The world is changing around us in ways that are mostly imperceptible. Huge change isn’t something we see a lot of, and when we do, it’s often very disruptive. The changes I’m talking about started a few years ago, when someone somewhere made a business case for the environment and sustainability. Prior to that, it was far more cost effective and cheaper to just take what was needed and to hell with what was left behind — usually very little of any use, of just the waste and cast-off of what we couldn’t make use of.

For my part, I saw the moment environmental awareness, business and energy conservation came together, in the form of a TV commercial. I’m sure most people really didn’t think too much to B&Q (a national DIY and home improvement chain) advertising solar panels. No major national retailer had committed advertising budget to that kind of of product. So this was, in many ways, a watershed moment.

Prior to this commercial going out on British TV, solar panels were prohibitively expensive, and were the domain of those living out in the wilds of some remote Scottish island or islet somewhere.

Keeping with the Celtic theme for a moment longer, more recently, Irish company Surface Power has launched what it claims is the world’s most efficient solar hot water panel:

“Certification by testing house TUV Rhineland has shown that the innovative product is up to 131% more efficient in morning and evening time and 76% more efficient at midday than other panels … Surface Power also believes its product could reduce domestic and commercial hot water bills by up to 70%.”

But this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, one that’s melting very quickly due in no small part to global warming, most probably.

Testimony to human ingenuity, alternative energy technologies abound, such as cargo ships pulled by giant kites, massive haulage air balloons, kinetic road ramps that produce electricity every time something runs over them, concept steam engines (external combustion) for automobiles, combined with regular petrol or diesel engines (internal combustion), solar “cell” technologies in the form of a paint, as well as the human body itself.

This is to say nothing of ultra efficient solar panels, underground water heating systems, waste reprocessing, mobile phones that draw energy out of thin air, or of power stations that run on manure and of transmitting solar energy from the ink black of space to the surface of the Earth.

So what does all of this amount to? There are now so many technologies that are working their way through feasibility studies, laboratories and field trials all over the world, offering ways of either reducing our energy usage, or ways of producing energy cheaply, that our dependence on the energy utility companies will demising to but a drop at the pump and a solitary Watt through the wires.

I say energy and not electricity specifically, because I’m talking about a fuels too, such as bio-diesels, hydrogen, ethanol et cetera. So not only am I talking about the company that you buy your electricity from, but also the company you get your petrol or diesel from. To be more ruthless with my words, and to pour scorn on the idea of an energy crisis:

“Because we’re now looking at different, renewable and highly fault-tolerant, often isolated methods of “off grid” energy production, the cabals and cartels running the energy empires of today will enjoy only short-term prosperity in the near future.

Over the long-term, energy production will become dirt cheap and abundant. So abundant that, if my theory is correct, controlling any energy source will be almost pointless, since no one energy source will ever be more significant — either technologically or economically — than any other.”

In the short-term, as the myriad novel energy conservation and production technologies come on-line one by one, the utilities will start to hike their prices up. But over the long-term, they’re not going to be able to compete and people will, by then, be aware of the alternatives.

So all the efforts of the utilities to gouge the populous for what little energy we do use will only hasten our mass exodus towards alternative energy sources.

Our homes will be so energy efficient, we will produce a surplus.

In this new, open energy economy that’s presently gathering momentum, we become the producers of an array of energies, silently supplying each other with power, well away from the measured, duty-charged and heavily taxed gaze of both the government and utilities…

Recommended reading

• When it comes to the environment, we can do it if B&Q do it, too!
• Irish company creates world’s most efficient solar hot water panel
• Alternative energy technologies of the future
• Nokia phone charges by drawing energy out of thin air
• Europe, US make the most of manure
• ‘WiTricity’ wireless electricity for all?
• Open energy project
• What global energy crisis?

Microsoft say Bing is about making decisions. OK, let’s see what Bing has to offer. Because if Microsoft are telling me they can help me make decisions, they better deliver on that.

Let’s say I want to go Italy, so I type in: “travel to Italy”. If I’m wanting to make decisions around that specific activity, then Bing is skipping a lot of initial steps and making assumptions. I might be a first time traveler. Bing knows at least where I’m from, in this case I’m in England, so that adds some geographic context to the mix. Yes, this context is reflected in the results, but not in how they’re presented, which should be as a series of tasks related to making a decision.

As an example, in Europe, we need a EU (European Union) travel insurance card. It’s not mandatory, but if you’re likely to get attacked by the police who’re trying to steal your cash card and mobile phone, as was the case with me in Tenerife in 2006, then you’ll appreciate good health insurance once you end up in hospital.

I can see a listing for the British Foreign Office (FCO), entitled: “Italy travel advice” so it would seem obvious to me to break this result out and give it special relevance, related to the activity of traveling to Italy.

Also, and obviously, I’d be needing flights, accommodation and transport to and from the airport, as well as exchange services for changing my money into Euros — none of these things are specifically grouped into categories, based around those very specific tasks.

Similarly, if I type in: “how to make an apple pie”, I’d expect some key decision groupings, like health advice, lists of basic ingredients et cetera. Bing scores points for the “Related Searches”, which is positioned in the top left, rather than at the bottom, as Google do, but that’s about it.

I’d also like to see some pre-defined searches / comparisons, like: “Pepsi or Coke”, or: “Barnes & Noble versus Amazon”, with lots of reviews and blog articles from trusted sources. Contentiousness aside, Bing is supposed to be about decisions, right? So far, Bing does absolutely nothing different to Google, or any other search engine.

In fairness to Bing, Google barely does any better in that regard, but Google aren’t calling themselves a decision engine, which to me sounds like Microsoft got caught out with Wolfram’s Alpha, the “computational knowledge engine”, and thought they’d tack on a similar moniker, in some feeble attempt to differentiate themselves from Google et al. It didn’t work because Bing is definitely not Google and it is in no way Alpha.

The way I see it, when Alpha launched, the genie was let out of the bottle. Even though Alpha is still a work in progress and lacks computation width, people can see the potential and are suitably impressed by what they see. Bing on the other hand offers nothing even remotely like Alpha.

So what Microsoft are left with is a product that’s neither one nor t’other, falling between two stools, and schools of thought. Over on The Register, Gavin Clarke barely conceals is dislike of Bing:

“Having finally settled on a name — Bing — Microsoft’s marketing drones probably believe they’ve come up with a clever wheeze against Google by adopting that old trick of redefining the market and thereby defining the competition out of that market. Bing is, therefore, not a search engine, it’s a ‘decision engine’.”

And who can blame him?

So what is Bing? Well, it’s MSN / Live re-branded. And will Bing change your search habits? Unless you’ve just been born a full-grown adult on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington, no.

The thing is, if Microsoft had just gone down the same old route as all their other desperate re-branding exercises, then no-one would really care. But the problem is, there’s so much money in search, they just can’t afford to concede to Google. So they roll out Bing, touting it as one thing when it’s quite clear it’s not.

I’ll leave it to Joely to sum up the sentiment surrounding Bing:

“Not only does [Bing] fail to deliver on its promise as a ‘decision engine’ (which of course is how we fall out of love with brands) it fails to do what MSN need it to do; offer enough value to users to break the Google habit Australia possesses. Let’s face it, we no longer search for information, we Google it.”

Of course, you could argue that Bing is still firmly in beta mode and all of these issues could be resolved. Personally, I doubt that. And, by releasing Bing early, in a form that’s clearly not fit for human consumption, people like Joely & I will be resolutely underwhelmed and reluctant to go back and try again.

Given a choice, what if Microsoft had directed their marketing budget into Bing’s development budget, instead of wasting all of their spend on the usual avalanche of irrelevant, misleading and ambiguous sponsored research and marketing drivel they seem so keen on. What might Bing have really turned into?

Hmm, decisions, decisions…

Remember when “flashing” video cards was all the rage? Now you can “chip” everything from video games consoles to cars.

For those not in the know, video cards are often supplied with exactly the same hardware, the only difference being the software on each. So if you bought the entry level model, only a small portion of the hardware’s power be available to you. Pay the big money and you get everything the hardware has to give. Thing is, someone figured out a way to force the video cards to open up all of the options, so by-passing the restrictions, a technique called “flashing”.

In a similar fashion, cars are often limited, in terms of BHP (break horse power) by the EMU (Engine Management Unit), which governs the various aspects of the engine, as its name suggests. Again, someone figured out how to make the EMU open up the extra BHP reserved for the higher range models, a technique called “chipping”.

So why not the iPhone? According to sources close to Apple, differentiation by software could be in the iPhone’s future:

“… the same core hardware to which a series of different software bundles could be attached would allow Apple to combine the cost/volume benefits of producing as few models as possible with the ability to push different configurations at different kinds of customer.”

Now consider Apple’s venerable operating system, Mac OS X. Since the moment Apple switched to Intel for their microprocessors, people have been working their socks off to get OS X working on beige boxen, in total contravention of Apple’s EULA (End User License Agreement).

So if they can get OS X to work on a vanilla-flavoured PC, I don’t see any major problems for some enterprising developer getting the iPhone OS to “see” hardware Apple have told it to ignore.

And if we’re talking about hardware specific to telecommunications, the carrier partners will have a fit, especially in the US, where they are extremely restrictive on connectivity options, like Bluetooth, for example.

Let’s face it, unless Apple come up with some exceptionally novel way of nailing down the hardware of the iPhone, I’m willing to bet my pound to your penny that within the first seven days of Apple going live with such an iPhone, someone will have figured out a way to open up the otherwise locked hardware, and will have shared their exploitation with the world…

Recommended reading

• Apple to look to software to differentiate multiple iPhone models

Apple articles

• Technology: how Apple builds a better widget
• Got a Mac? iPod as SatNav, shortcuts, screen shots and special characters
• Got a Mac? A business user how-to guide for Address Book and Mail
• Apple’s new media republic
• Apple’s benign digital dictatorship

What’s a socneter? No, it’s not someone who plays soccer (football from 99% of the world’s population) and scores tons of goals. It’s shorthand for social networker. I thought I’d just made that word up, but after a quick Google, sadly not. At least I get to claim ownership of advertorialinsultomercialist.

As an aside, according to a client of mine — whose job it is to know such things — Emily had this to say: “… as it’s a new word, it’s a neologism, or more specifically, a protologism in that it’s a suggestion for a new word, but isn’t (yet) in common usage.”

So there you go!

The difference between social networking and social media

In much the same way data and information aren’t the same thing (data is the numbers, while information is data formatted into something human readable), social networking and social media are two very different things.

If you use websites like Digg, Reddit, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon or Mixx, then you’re using a social media website, one that hosts, aggregates and disseminates content based on a variety of different rules and criteria.

If you’re using Facebook, Twitter or MySpace, then you’re using a social network, through which people often share on and / or publish to the things they find on a social media website.

Intriguingly, places like StumbleUpon, Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter bridge the gap between social networking and social media, blurring the distinction — and therein lies some of the mystery and the potential for lost time.

Building a social workflow

How many people in Britain have signed up to Twitter because of people like Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry and more recently people in the US because of Oprah Winfrey? And how many of those people have since sat there, wishing they could get back the time they wasted signing up to Twitter in the first place. No answer required, I think we all know.

Like almost anything in life, if you want to make the most of your time, you need a plan. Without a plan, unless you’re guided by a friend, or astoundingly lucky, the void where the plan should be will be quickly backfilled by an accumulation of unrecoverable time, most of which is completely and utterly spent.

So what plan should you have? For the purposes of this article, we’re going to look at this issue from a business perspective, but don’t be put off, I think much of what follows will be applicable elsewhere.

If you want to know why you should follow Oprah on Twitter, go ask Mashable. They’re the go-to guys when it comes to socnet soap oprah .. I mean opera.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what your business background is. All that matters is that you follow a few simple, basic rules that will help insure your time is well spent…

Rules for social networking

• Follow people in your industry, such as thought leaders and even competitors, to keep up-to-date with what’s going on, to get the inside know-how and to pick their brains.
• Find industry news sources to keep abreast of new techniques, rules, laws, up & coming and / or major players et cetera.
• If you have a company blog, consider sharing your articles with your social network, or even consider asking those in your social network to write guest articles for your blog.
• Don’t be afraid to say “Hi!” and be polite on Twitter. Some consider this kind of thing to be the principle source of lost time. Sure, if all you’re doing is making polite conversation, but there’s no reason to not be polite and start a conversation. However, if you do strike up a relationship with someone, take that conversation to Facebook or even Skype, if things get that way.
• If someone posts an article that you like, make that appreciation known and pass that article on into your own social network. The key thing here is appreciation through reciprocation — share and share alike!
• Be aware that there are a lot of people out there who are simply gaming the social networks for their own gain and care very little about those people they choose to “befriend”.
• Don’t be a bore, don’t use too much bad language and don’t moan. We all have our own problems and having yours laid bare in front of us really isn’t going to make us suddenly want to care!

Rules for social media

• If you’re an avid reader, try to stay on topic in terms of industry-specific articles, news coverage, updates et cetera, and avoid posting similar / same articles from different sources.
• When you share, avoid overlap — don’t be posting the same articles to different places and have them all end up in the same place. The exceptions to this rule (by virtue of how these services are connected) are Facebook and FriendFeed, which both act as aggregators.
• If you have a company blog, try not to post too much of your own content too often.
• While this may sound heavy, ethics plays a major role in my social work flow and I have three strict rules concerning social media submissions and voting.
• Learn with a purpose in mind — if you find something interesting that segues with a current project, or might be of interest to a client, make use of that knowledge.
• If finding and sharing interesting stuff is your thing, make that known. Right now, as I predicted back in 2007, social media is undermining search. So you could become a very valuable point of contact for a lot of people in your industry.
• Share with the intention of helping others — keep a mental checklist of the things those in your social network are on the look out for and be sure to help if you can.
• Be aware of the difference in time for the people in your social network — one person’s lunch break is another person’s early morning commute, so be aware of the best and the worst times to submit articles, be they your own or someone else’s.

My social work flow

I have a modest spread of social media and networking activities, all of which is centered around sharing what I find, and here’s how it works:

I’ve written an article…

1. I share my newly-written article via Twitter, using HootSuite to publish to my 3 Twitter accounts, depending on the theme of the article. This can, on occasion, trigger some re-Tweeting amongst followers. HootSuite lets me track the number of clicks on my links.
2. I share my article via the Blah, Blah! Technology Page Facebook. Again, depending on the theme, I might also share with my friends from my profile, which is often the case.
3. If I think I’ve written something of special interest, or unique in some way, I then begin the process of sending my article to specific friends on StumbleUpon, Twitter or even Digg (but this is very rare because of the effort and hassle involved), requesting they share, but I don’t do this often.
4. Meanwhile, my FriendFeed account is grabbing everything I do.
5. I then use Clicky’s real time web analytics to track the traffic to my blog, and then perhaps interact with mentions on Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook etc live, as they happen.

I find an article that interests me…

1. I share my newly-written article via Twitter, using HootSuite.
2. I share my article via the Blah, Blah! Technology Page Facebook, and / or from my profile.
3. Depending on the theme, I bookmark the newly-found article. At a minimum, I post to StumbleUpon and Delicious, where Delicious automatically posts into my Twitter profile via my Octane account.
4. I may then share the article via my Mixx profile, and if it’s of special interest, I’ll add the article to the Blah, Blah! Technology Community on Mixx, too.
5. If I think I’ve found something of special interest, or unique in some way, I then begin the process of sending my article to specific friends on StumbleUpon, Twitter or even Digg.
6. Meanwhile, my FriendFeed account is grabbing everything I do.

Where it’s all @

A common rule to both social networking and social media is being aware of the time you’re spending in each. That amount of time is critical because it’s the difference between being an investment and being a waste.

Another common rule is to be sure you’re attending the right venues; there’s little point being on one social network if few of your potential clients or peers are. So do a little research and find out where the key players are hanging out.

If you’re totally new to social media, don’t worry! I’ve got that covered, too. Why not download my ebook, The Beginner’s Guide to Social Media…

Recommended reading

• The “Hi!” efficiency of social networking
• My 3 rules for Social Media voting
• Be just one click away with Skype
• Social Networking and blogging for self-masturbatory egomaniacs — a guide
• Want that post to go popular? Here’s the best and worst times to post it
• Social Media to kill Google’s search algorithm?
• Enhancing timely content with SEO and Social Media

David Bradley, science writer and fellow blogger gave some fresh air to a (minor) rant of his on the subject of schizoid Luddites:

“Is this post just a rant about people who are less adept at using the common tools of the modern world? I suppose it is in one sense. But, what scares me is the pride with which many of the people who claim they don’t understand ‘computers’ brandish their ignorance.”

He’s not wrong. But then again, it’s an issue that’s sort of beyond simple right and wrong, much the same as evolution — so now you’re wondering what the hell evolution has to do with people not “getting” technology.

He goes on to retell the story of a friend of his, Kim Woodbridge, whose experiences with her colleagues became endlessly frustrating, because they couldn’t be bothered with learning anything new and just wanted Kim and her other colleagues to “just make it work”.

But there’s another way of looking at this, and it’s sort of Darwinism for technological development.

Essentially, people’s reluctance to use new technologies forces us (those that will) to consider ways of creating not just new, but novel technologies that are simpler to use.

Apple understand this only too well, mostly because they keep asking “what if?” and “why?” all the way throughout the many / various stages of development, saving us the trouble.

Citing technical reasons isn’t anything like an excuse. And for all their technology smarts, even Apple aren’t immune, with the on-going Adobe Flash support and background process sagas testimony to such problems; people just want those things to work. But for technical reasons, Apple are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

In fairness to Apple, the reasons for their technological impasse are entrenched in the minutia of software security, device stability and battery life. But their customers just don’t care — other mobile phone manufacturers can handle it, so why not Apple?

So now Apple are the hapless victims of the extremely high expectations their customers have come to expect from their benign yet extremely well managed digital dictatorship.

Indirectly, people are asking the innovators to make them a better widget, one that’s less hassle and simpler to use than the last one.

Those that can see the legitimate value of feedback hidden within the complaints are the ones who realize the fullest potential of their ideas, turning them into the innovations people love…

Recommended reading

• Talking Computers with Spam-fisted Luddites
• Of technophiles, social networks, telecoms and neo-Luddites…
• Just what is technology?
• Apple’s benign digital dictatorship