So what’s all the fuss about with these newfangled lists on Twitter anyhow? Well it’s really very simple: assuming most users are exceptionally lazy, for them to go to the effort of actually making a list and then adding you to it, I’d take that as a big fat endorsement.

Lists as a measure of trust?

But what about all the his-list-count-is-bigger-than-mine moaning and griping crowd? There’s where my dearly departed mother and her oft cited truisms comes into play. Would you rather be in / on five lists for some of the most influential people in your social network, or would you rather be in / on two hundred lists for people you don’t really know or even consider influential? If you had to think about that, leave now.

All of which brings us rathe neatly to the who and the what of social networking — it’s what you say and do that gets you noticed and then onto the lists, and then it’s the who that will propel you out into the Twittersphere.

When people add you to a list, it’s a very visual and public endorsement of their appreciation of you in some way, and the name of the list can be considered the context of that appreciation: “engaging people”, “friends”, “real people”, “social media” and “tech” et cetera.

People can also follow lists. Being on notable and popular list means you just jumped right to the head of the popularity queue. You could also interpret being included on a list as an indication of trust. I’ll leave you to think about that for a moment or two and how monumental a change to the Twitter landscape that is.

Life. Love. Lists

Within hours of the erratic roll-out of the long-discussed lists feature for Twitter, if there was a hash tag for the mood, it would have been #inequity.

“Pft! you can stick your lists!”

“So how come [insert name of user here] is on 52 lists and I’m only on 5?! She’s a freakin’ MLMer, goddamit!”

Look familiar? Just for the record, I’m on 26 lists. Come to think of it, as I look around, I see more and more people using lists, so people can’t all be lazy. At least some of those following me aren’t.

For those not in the know, Twitter first rolled lists out back in 2008 over in Japan, then called groups. So it’s not like they’re a new thing. Lists have been a long time coming. What I can’t quite figure out is why such a feature lite service as Twitter should have such a preponderance for pondering over features for such a long time. Anyway, that doesn’t matter because they’re here now.

Sorry, you’re not on the list!

So, we have lists. You’re not on as many as you’d like, eh? It’s still very early days. If after a month or so there’s no change, then Twitter — by way of your followers — is telling you something very simple: you’re not compelling enough for people to make the effort to add you to a list.

Shock! Horror! Also true.

What I find most amusing is the sheer level of unadulterated hypocrisy amongst a great swathe of Twitter users. Cast your minds back to those periods when the fail whale rules and Twitter is down for the count, and who suddenly appears on the collective social network radar? Why, it’s FriendFeed of course! But we don’t want to use FriendFeed — it’s complex and there’s too many features:

“We routinely use exceptionally complex software each and every day of our business lives. Do we balk at using Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop? No, we don’t. There are alternatives to both, but the fact of the matter is, if you want features, then there’s a commensurate level of complexity associated with those additional features.”

But using Twitter was never an exercise in Zen social networking, or minimalist communication. No, it’s herd mentality and group thinking writ as large on the web as anywhere else in society. So for the most part, my protestations largely fell on deaf hears.

Well now there’s another feature on the way soon, too — the re-Tweet button, which Twitter appears to be working on behind the scenes. I wouldn’t expect too many people to acknowledge their idiotic ambivalence towards FriendFeed from earlier in the year, even less so now since FriendFeed is presently being absorbed by the ever-expanding Facebook empire.

And then there’s an even darker side to Twitter lists. Or at least, there will be. People being people, I predict money changing hands; one person paying another to be included in a very popular list of theirs. It’s unethical. It’s also inevitable.

With that as a backdrop, who the hell needs a Follow Friday, anyhow? After all, she / he who pays most wins!

Twitter is now in some respects an established communication tool. Despite its limitations, there are those that have risen to the challenge of an economy of words and shone brightly. With the introduction of lists, Twitter is now offering us a unique and constant alternative to #followfriday that’s specific, visible and always on…

Recommended reading

• Of celebrities, non-business models and the Twitter tax
• 1 reason why FriendFeed struggles while Twitter succeeds
• The rise of the re-Tweet puts pressure on PageRank
• 1 million reasons why Twitter is no better than a street corner call box
• Twitter embraces SEO, bolsters brands

I suspect intuition is a mental attribute not unique to humans. In fact, many of what we perceive as uniquely human attributes are shared with other animals. Intuition always feels like an involuntary response to me, like a reflex, and not an artifact of my consciousness. And to my mind at least, consciousness always seemed to be something we make too much of.

There’s not much chance of me making a case against being self-aware, or our apparent consciousness. But to me, there are more important things to consider. Such as how best to control the mental faculties we have at our disposal, instead of squandering them, as we often do, on trivial personal agendas.

So imagine how keen I was to watch an episode of Horizon on BBC2 earlier this week, entitled The Secret You:

“Professor Marcus du Sautoy goes in search of answers to one of science’s greatest mysteries: how do we know who we are? While the thoughts that make us feel as though we know ourselves are easy to experience, they are notoriously difficult to explain. So, in order to find out where they come from, Marcus subjects himself to a series of probing experiments.”

Marcus works his way through some very heavy material in an engaging fashion, helping to shed light on the processes deep within the soft folds of our brains. My suspicion was that I might not learn a great deal, but I was hoping I would be wrong. I wasn’t wrong and most of what was discussed I’d either read about before, or simply confirmed my own theories.

Marcus spoke of his own feelings of a duality; that his soul and his body were separate entities. A symbiosis? I for one have never felt that way. My intuition tells me that my consciousness is simply a byproduct of neurological complexity and not a deliberate evolutionary adaptation.

To some, this might seem counter-intuitive. But ask yourself this: why is it that no scientist has an explanation as to why we blush? It’s a pointless physiological response to being arguably too self-aware. Moreover, it reveals our emotional state, which isn’t particularly advantageous.

Delving deeper, Marcus was the subject of an experiment that he found deeply unsettling. He was given two click devices (two small buttons), one for each hand, and asked to click at random while being scanned with a fMRI (function magnetic resonance imaging) machine, a device capable of scanning the brain very quickly and in great detail.

The results of the experiment left him shocked and clearly shaken. The scientists were able to predict his apparently random decisions a whole six seconds before he was aware of making those decisions. To him, he saw this as being “held hostage” by his subconscious mind. To me, this demonstrated that our intuition was hard-wired. And when you think about it, that makes perfect sense.

In a more natural environment, away from the world we live in now, the criticality of rapid decision making is the difference between life and death. Why delegate such things to the conscious mind, when the entire process is so long? This to me is yet more evidence that our consciousness is a relatively recent mental attribute, one still being fine tuned and honed. An attribute that one could argue just gets in the way of things.

For me, this experiment didn’t go far enough. Sure, a left and a right click might tell you something, but what about making more complex decisions, based on more variables? Of course, the apparatus used would need to be more sophisticated, and more would need to be known about the brain and how certain decisions are represented within the brain. But my intuition tells me that although we would see the self same deep responses emerge from our subconscious, the complexity of the tests would require a conscious interpretation, therefore possibly over-riding, adjusting or even enhancing those subconscious decisions with more abstract details.

Marcus’s interpretation of this was curious; he appeared to see the subconscious as being separate to the rest of his mind. That I found odd. While I can see why he might feel that his sense of self control is being undermined, I have to wonder how he thinks his subconscious arrives at those decisions in the first place. Our subconscious is making decisions based on our knowledge, in the same way we believe our conscious mind does. I have to admit, at the point when this revelation unfolded, I was wearing a rye smile.

So what is consciousness?

No one knows for sure what consciousness is (if indeed there’s any way of providing a clear definition), but neurologists at least have an understanding of where our consciousness resides — consciousness exists in the upper surfaces and layers of the brain. There is no one lobe or region. It would appear that consciousness bestrides many regions of the brain, and in line with my own intuition, our consciousness would appear to be almost like the glow or the hum and buzz of our brains.

This would also go some way towards explaining why so few other animals exhibit self-awareness; the brains of most other animals lack sufficient complexity to give rise to something as complex as a consciousness.

Humans are very social creatures and we have enjoyed a surplus of time during our lives, time enough to ponder and reflect. Being able to draw upon past experiences and consider them afresh is also an artifact of our conscious mind.

So if complexity is part of the reason for consciousness, what are the implications for so-called Artificial Intelligence, or AI? It’s clear that intelligence and consciousness are two entirely different things; many animals have demonstrated problem-solving abilities in the absence of what we might view as being self-aware.

Let’s then consider a robot of humanoid proportions with the wherewithal to perform similar activities to a human. Right now, there are scientists all over the world working on different aspects of robotics, such as cognitive abilities and the associated skills required to deduce and analyze the real world, visual systems such as object acquisition and face recognition, problem solving, as well as physical dexterity such as walking, catching moving objects and carrying.

Of course, we humans are capable of much more, but if these abilities were to be combined into a system that is built around the same physical structures as a neural network (the essential fabric of the brain), might we not see some kind of consciousness arise out of this apparent complexity? If this sounds all overly simplistic, then we must consider that life itself is complexity derived from simplicity.

Since we don’t fully understand what consciousness is, would we recognize such a thing if it did emerge within a robot? Moreover, even if we did identify some unexpected mental state within these machines, might we interpret them as being somehow aberrant, or defective? Many a science fiction novel and film has a robot with a consciousness on the run as their principle protagonist.

The prospect of accepting these self-aware robots as emergent forms of life presents even greater challenges — those robots would be entitled to rights of their own.

I have another theory, one that segues neatly with an observation shared with science writer David Bradley: our failure to grasp such things as quantum physics, as well as human consciousness, may well be because we’re incapable of comprehending such things. For all the imagined power of the human brain, I believe we have hit a fundamental barrier.

So what’s next? A leap. An adaptation of the human brain that gifts that person with a capacity to reason and the faculties of logic beyond that of anyone who has come before them. If I’m right, even the greatest minds throughout history would be cast into deep shadow by the mental prowess of this person. And if we have learned anything about the patterns of the universe, if there’s one of anything, then many more will follow.

While we ponder the almost imponderable complexities of consciousness, life moves on — people still murder, save endangered species, pay their taxes, conscientiously object to conflict, eat processed foods, fight wars, help the poor, wonder why their kids are so unruly and recycle some of their household waste.

What decisions we make are ours to make. Their outcome often reflects only upon the lives of the people making those decisions. But there are those amongst us whose decisions affect us all. And it is to these people we entrust our lives and hope that their decisions are made in good conscience, above all other things…

Recommended reading

• Humans are not unique
• Artificial Intelligence: a pattern of things to come
• Serious Science: is there alien life in the universe? Part 1
• Robot rights for the wrong reasons?
• DNA hardwired into the universe

Chris Packham is a rare variety of the lesser spotted English naturalist, rare in the sense that he dares to have an opinion that doesn’t revolve around the emotive, overly sentimental drivel people bizarrely seem to expect, despite the best efforts of Sir David Attenborough, and he instead focuses of the economics of nature, and in turn, the ruthless rules of natural selection.

To this end, he had the temerity to voice an entirely sensible opinion regarding the even lesser spotted Panda, and explain to the egregious masses, clutching their cuddly Panda soft toys, that the aforementioned is essentially a lost cause and a money pit, and that conservationists should spend what little money they do have on those animals that can actually be saved from political pressures, war, poaching, human encroachment, as well as environmental, ecological and biological Armageddon.

As you can imagine, his views were about as welcome as a fart in a lift traveling non stop to the toy section of a department store, where people are hoping to buy a cuddly toy Panda, presumably.

So here’s my attempt to give some more meat to the bones of Packham’s Panda argument, in equally simple and blunt terms.

The extinction of common sense

Organisms are allowed to go extinct. It happens. And, it’s been happening routinely for over three and half billion years, which just happens to be the approximate amount of time life has been present on Earth.

If organisms didn’t go extinct, things would be quite different and very unpleasant. If we choose to ignore the more recent fauna and flora or the past one hundred and twenty millions years or so, and ignoring just about everything prior to that, right back to the primordial broth of bacteria of say, two billion years ago, if all bacterial life had survived, the entire planet would be a seething gelatinous mass of snot-like goo, many tens of miles deep.

We humans didn’t invent environment pressure, that’s something that has almost always existed — there is nearly always some other organism competing for the same space as another. Who survives is a combination of factors, including blind chance (as was the case with the mammals just after the Chicxulub impact of some sixty five million years ago, which dispensed with most of the large reptiles of the period). As a broad rule though, it’s the strongest that survive.

The meek won’t inherit the Earth, despite what effete and fanciful nonsense you may have be told at Sunday School, unless luck is on their side. And even then, their meekness will be the basis of their demise at some later date.

We humans survive and thrive because we are incredibly adaptable, versatile, agile, omnivorous, dexterous and intelligent. Any one of those attributes is enough for any one organism to eek out an existence. Well we have them all. And here we are, at the top of the tree of life, shittin’ on everything else, or at least what we haven’t eaten, or hunted for sport, or turned into furniture.

The most remarkable thing is, what we’re doing isn’t unnatural. And I’m sure many of you will recoil in horror when I say we are simply doing what all other animals do, and are predisposed to do.

When was the last you saw a dog, or a Panda for the matter, pick up it’s own shit, pop it in a bag and dispose of it in a more environmentally responsible way? Aside from some odd kids animated movie perhaps, you didn’t, nor will you. If we had seven billion dogs shitting, we’d have a problem, wouldn’t we? Of course we would.

Humans make a mess, as do all other forms of life. The problem is in 1. our sheer number, and 2. that we have broken from the more natural order of things, that might have mitigated some of this mess, while finally 3. we don’t just shit to make a mess anymore.

The bear truth about Pandas

So what about the Panda? Well, it’s likely that the Panda is an evolutionary dead end. Doomed to extinction by its eating habits, or even its habitat, or perhaps both. As I said, extinction happens and is an inexorable force of nature.

It is also likely that we have hastened the extinction of the Panda, but you could also argue that pressures placed upon the Panda could very well have forced our usurped ursine to evolve and adapt. Clearly this is not the case. In this case, the agents of change are too powerful and rapid. In the words of Packham himself: “That’s evolution, adapt to changes or die out.”

An evolution of human stupidity

Sadly, people are mostly stupid and they make emotional decisions. This is the reason why successive governments of various countries (with the obvious exception of China, ironically enough) daren’t even consider imposing a limit on the number of children each couple can have. It is, after all, the logical decision, which would have an almost immediate impact on the growing human population.

There are a ton of aid agencies working to remediate the infant mortality rate in places like India, but we’re doing relatively very little to educate people enough to have less kids. Hindering those efforts, Catholic missionaries are teaching those same people that contraception is wrong. It is no coincidence the most populous regions on Earth, such as Africa and Asia, are those that are most deeply influenced by Catholicism.

So the natural forces that would keep the population down are being disrupted by well-meaning but largely stupid people and the human population of the Earth is then left to grow out of control, and unchecked.

Economics usually has the final word, but no one is listening, because people are mostly stupid and they make emotional decisions.

We are at a point in time where we are beyond incremental changes. To make the changes that are required to save the planet from the human race, we must undertake extreme and exceptional measures. But no one is listening.

So ignore me and ignore Packham. Do what the good book tells you and go forth and multiply. And at same time, say “Fuck you, too!” to every other living thing, including the Pandas of this world, because if we’re too stupid to save ourselves, what the hell kind of chance is there for anything else…

Recommended reading

• Why we shouldn’t save the planet
• The myth of Global Warming
• What global energy crisis?

While I imagine some of you may interpret this leap in thinking as an admission of a creator being, steering all life in another worldly direction, I would hasten some caution. It’s much more likely that the originators of those organized faiths of the world saw the outline of something very profound in the ancient past, but lacked the mental faculties to articulate what that force might actually be. In short, the idea and very origins of gods and goddesses are most probably borne out of a primitive attempt to anthropomorphize (to give a human face to) a force that was as beyond comprehension then as it is now.

Or is it?

Life, naturally

To the best of our considerable collective knowledge, life appeared on Earth at the earliest point when our planet could sustain such complex and ordered things. Life is a powerful force, one that is eager and hungry to exist. So what if life was an inevitable force of the universe? As inevitable as the formation of galaxies, stars, their attendant planets and their moons.

“A recent mathematical analysis says that life as we know it is written into the laws of reality. DNA is built from a set of twenty amino acids — the first ten of those can create simple prebiotic life, and now it seems that those ten are … destined to occur wherever they can.”

DNA, the building blocks of life on Earth might be the very fabric of all life everywhere in the known universe. Out of simplicity arises all kinds of biological complexity, in one fell swoop, sweeping aside the naive vagaries of Irreducible Complexity; an argument that proposes biological complexity is impossible via natural means and requires a creator being. Such bland and ignorant non-thinking isn’t tolerated here.

Comparisons abound in our own, man-made non-biological systems. Take a house, for example. Built as they are from basic constituent parts, such as bricks, mortar, glass, wood and metal. Once arrange, and in the correct proportions, shapes and lengths, these relatively simplistic elements give rise to a rather complex house, whose principle purpose is surprisingly complex, and in turn is plays host to even more incredible complexity — people, and other animals.

In a sense, a house is then analogous to an environ, into which a host of organisms survive and perhaps flourish. However, the key difference between a house and, say for instance, brain tissue, is that the former relies on the labours of men whereas in the case of the latter, neurological complexity can arise spontaneously:

“Apparently, the simulated neurons have begun spontaneously coordinating, and organizing themselves into a more complex pattern that resembles a wave. According to the scientists, this is the beginning of the self-organizing neurological patterns that eventually, in more complex mammal brains, become personality.”

My fascination with patterns continues. It would appear that the universe favours certain patterns over others. After all, what is the formation of a moon, a planet, a star or a galaxy if it is not a repeating, self-sustaining pattern? If it wasn’t, why do we see billions of other galaxies, populated as they are by stars, planets and moons?

And such is life, also. Albeit life is more complex, in that biological patterns have a purpose, that been refined and honed by the forces of evolution itself.

But if the universe is itself comprised of patterns, where do they reside? Is there an elemental equivalent of DNA, hidden in the deep recesses of the universe?

Patterns of life

Tim Palmer. A mathematical climatologist for the past twenty years, but a man within which beats the heart of a physicist. Not content with predicting complex weather systems, he also has aspirations of solving the greatest riddle in physics — unifying all physical theories of the universe into just the one.

And the basis of Palmer’s solution to the enigma of the universe? Fractals, such as the entrancing Mandelbrot set.

“’My hypothesis is motivated by two concepts that wouldn’t have been known to the founding fathers of quantum theory,’ he continues, talking about black holes and fractals. Palmer is referring to the arguments between Einstein and Niels Bohr, who had different views on physics, but who were actually looking at the same problem from two different points of view, the expert believes.”

Despite their visual complicity, fractals are relatively simplistic mathematical systems that generate repetitious successions of complex patterns. Such patterns are already present in nature, such as the fern leaf and the shell of a snail, which are, like the Madelbrot set, entirely predictable and endlessly repetitious shapes.

However, fractals can be of the non-repeating variety, in that as you look closer at the initial pattern, successively smaller and irregular patterns emerge, such as when you look at clouds, storms systems or coast lines.

Once you begin to appreciate the abundance of fractals, it doesn’t seem so unlikely that such patterns could exist at a much lower, fundamental level within the universe itself.

If we now accept that the universe itself and everything within is the out-pouring of fractals, then the hierarchy of the universe begins to make more sense, as we step down from galaxies, stars, planets, moons, asteroids, all the way down to life itself. After all, if life exists at all, like all those objects, a pattern must exist, which determines that life has to exist as a function of and not apart from the universe.

There are unerring symmetries across scales, rising from the infinitesimal to the largest of them all:

“Take for example the humble, kitchen or bathroom variety plug hole. Watch as water spirals inexorably down into the drain.

Then fix your gaze upon the spiral arms of a galaxy and how each point of light, a star in formation, all rotate around a common point, which is thought to be in every instance a super massive black hole.

Indeed, the proposed shape of the universe just happens to be the same shape as the Buckminsterfullerene, or the ‘Bucky Ball’ which is arguably one of the tiniest known objects in the universe.”

Imagine, if you will, my surprise today, as I discover the writings of a Carl Woese, professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois, whose thoughts on evolution have had a profound impact on our understanding of life.

Further to his theories, a student of his, Freeman Dyson, a man eminent in his own right, discusses his thoughts on the cyclical nature of evolution, and how what once was, will be again — a repeating, cyclical pattern, governing the emergence of life itself, right through to our strident attempts to control life.

To quote from the article, in a way that segues perfectly with my earlier thoughts, this one passage illustrates a new kind of understanding:

“The nonliving universe is as diverse and as dynamic as the living universe, and is also dominated by patterns of organization that are not yet understood. This picture of living creatures, as patterns of organization rather than collections of molecules, applies also to sand dunes and snowflakes, thunderstorms and hurricanes.”

As I’m sure Tim Palmer would agree, storm systems are exceptionally complex. And if you were to commit to paper, in academic fashion, the many aspects and processes that comprise such systems, one might be forgiven for thinking you were reading the detailed anatomical structure of a living organism.

If there’s life here on Earth, there is life elsewhere in universe, in abundance. Why? Because if life is but a pattern of the universe itself, then it is a repeatable pattern, and cannot exist in isolation.

Like a flower head, tilting towards the warm glow of the Sun, the Earth waits patiently for those spores of life which she has fostered within for so long, now have the means, the need and the ambition to rise from her surface, like seeds, and drift out into space, to spread across the cosmos, to form new patterns of life elsewhere in the unknown universe…

Recommended reading

• The reducible complexity of life
• A universal illusion
• The shape of the universe
• Serious Science: is there alien life in the universe?

It seems almost inconceivable that two of the biggest names in internet technology could both be blind to the potential of their own products / services. I was certain Google’s almost complete lack of social media smarts was a one off.

How wrong I was.

There I was, working towards writing a follow-up to my Facebook’s 5 missing features article when news emerged that Facebook had launched a Twitter application for Page owners:

“Now, with a new Twitter application created by Facebook, Facebook Page owners can automatically syndicate their posts to Twitter just by installing the app on their Facebook Page.”

My dream had finally come true! Now, I could post a Note on my Page on Facebook and have that article appear as a link on Twitter. Then, when someone clicks on the link, they see that article with the Facebook toolbar, allowing them to comment and / or like the article. All of which forming a strong outreach channel for my Page, helping build my fan number ever further, and building my brand.

For reasons that evade me, Facebook somehow managed to deftly avoid doing any of these things and instead released an almost totally useless Page application that simply burps stuff from your Page onto Twitter. Worse still, if you add a comment to a Note item, that comment is the title that people see on Twitter and not the title of the article itself.

It strikes me that Facebook are singularly clueless as to the power and potential of the very service they tend to. I am, quite frankly, astonished. I just simply cannot fathom how so many people with so many letters after their names managed to conspire between them to snatch mediocrity from the yawning jaws of social media success.

“No! Go back! Look…” I stab with an outstretched finger at the desk in front of me, littered with an assortment of sketches and notes. “Look, it’s there!”

But he doesn’t see me. Instead, he ambles over to the water cooler.

“Fuck the water cooler! Look mate, you have it right there!” I turn and stand in front of him as he sips quietly, jabbing my finger again and again. “There’s just NO WAY can you have NOT seen what I’ve seen!” I yell into his face, with back arched, neck taught and clenched fists to my chest.

Nothing. He does not hear me. He simply stares passively out across the grounds of the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

I march away towards the office door, with my hands clutched over my head in sheer frustration.

“This isn’t happening. It can’t be.” I mumble to myself, turning to face the desk once more as the guy walks back and agrees with his colleagues that their new Facebook application is fine and there’s no more to be done.

“This is some kind of hell, surely?”

OK, you could argue that I might just be over reacting a little. It is a Friday and after making Emily (who’s a client of mine) laugh with the above scenario which I acted out over the telephone, she suggested it might be worth writing the whole thing up.

However, there is a serious side; how can all those smart guys at Facebook miss something like this? These are the very basics of social media. Get the basics wrong and what hope is their for the bigger picture?

Another example of a missed opportunity is Facebook Connect not, well, connecting! Also, an astonishing oversight which simply wouldn’t happen on my watch.

Right now, Pages on Facebook are little more than island communities. The cynic in me thinks that Facebook are attempting to furthering their own financial agenda and would prefer we didn’t have the tools to easily share our Pages, forcing us to use their paid-for advertising instead.

If that is the case, then Facebook aren’t on the same page as their users and are selling us all short…

Depending on your take on social media, you’re either going to agree with a stern nod of your head, or angrily shake it, accompanied with much gnashing of teeth.

I know lots of people on the web, via StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook etc. I “know” people, but knowing isn’t the same as “liking”. I have friends. I like them. Why? Because I know them.

However, knowing and liking someone wouldn’t be enough to draw me into a brawl involving them and someone else. If they did wrong, I’d wade in and I pull them apart from the other guy. Later, when the dust settles and the blood is wiped from brow and split lip, I’d tell them what I thought, which they might not appreciate.

So what was the point of that short insight into my working class background? If you send me an article and expect me to just vote for it and then share it within my social network, then you’d be wrong.

I have rules for social media, the same way I have rules for almost everything else in life.

Back in early 2008, I had a need to commit to pixels my social media voting policy, which drew several very clear lines in the sand. Afterwards, some people who’d previously considered me to part of their reserved social network cut me loose. Why? Because I’d made it very clear I’d have no part to play in their without-even-thinking-votes-for-the-sake-of-it clique.

Also, I stopped sending my articles to certain people because I became aware that they weren’t even reading what I’d written. They just voted for and shared without a thought, which is meaningless. To do that trivializes my efforts and is arguably disrespectful. I wouldn’t and don’t do that, and I expect the same in return.

My totally uncompromising rules nearly always rub someone up the wrong way. But it’s a question of trust, and the value of that trust. It’s also about professionalism.

If you just vote up and share anything that comes your way, simply because you were asked to by someone you “know”, what value do you add, apart from nothing? But it gets worse — those articles you’re promoting into your own social network will show up as trusted sources of reading material by the people in that social network, be they friends, acquaintances, or just the people that you “know”.

In the coming months and years, this micro-blogging burping will most likely result in certain people being evicted from many a persons’ social network, because their noise is also your noise.

It’s happening right now. Back in late July, I wrote up my thoughts on this very subject, and within the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen some high profile people begin the process of trimming their friend / follower lists, right back to just those they know personally.

And as people look to refine the mean quality of their social networks even further, those that lower that quality will be the first out of the door.

All those people are doing is adding more network noise at the expense of the social media signal…

Recommended reading

• My 3 rules for Social Media voting
• A revelation in social relevance and people-powered “found” engines
• 3 steps for the social media beginner

When you think about a search engine, it’s essentially a referral-based system that collates content. The referrals are the links between one we page and another. It’s like word-of-mouth recommendation in many ways. Sure, there’s the low quality and the illegal stuff, but word-of-mouth isn’t just a way of making popular what’s good, it’s also a way of making people aware of what’s bad.

So the search engines are, if tangentially, people-powered — we make the links and the search engines follow them. Thing is, in recent times, the social web has started to undermine the search engines:

“To link is to like is to love. Or at least, that’s been my mantra for long enough. Problem is, Twitter and its ilk could be undermining the web itself. But if we link less, are we trusting less? No. We just need a better way to measure who and what we trust.”

In search of The Found Engine

I find interesting to see discussions on the future of search coming to the point where what we’re essentially talking about is user-curated data, or even people-powered search. It’s also interesting for another reason; in the coming years, search as an activity will most likely become rare and functionally meaningless.

I certainly wouldn’t go as far as saying semantics is meaningless, as the author of the ReadWriteWeb suggested, because that’s an excellent way of adding much needed specificity to a web page.

Nearly two years ago, I talked about what I called the Found Engine, which is where all of this is heading — we announce our needs, schedules, lists of friends and tasks to the various web applications we’re now wedded to and off they go, to find the resources we’re going to need to do all of those things, wherever those things may be lurking.

So we no longer search for things because those things we need are found for us and then surround us in a contextual cloud that’s further refined by having this cloud of data & information (two totally different things) spread across a time line, related to our activities, as they unfold.

It’s gratifying to see my ideas being played out, even if only conceptually.

Tags are already doing much of this, such as on StumbleUpon, or hash tags on Twitter. By declaring your interests in advance, those services sift through their vast silos of user-generated content for things that match your criteria.

The relevance of relationships

Recently, I’ve noticed several people talking about trimming their follower lists right down, in some cases, right back to just those people they’ve spoken with most often, or have met in person.

So as you can see, already, people are thinking about the manageability of their social networks, when originally, their only concern was to acquire as many followers as possible.

While I wouldn’t recommend doing that, it’s all about the individual and the needs of the individual. If you’re using the Twitter client HootSuite, for example, you can easily move followers into groups, to more easily manage the flow of knowledge and the create silos for distinct types of knowledge.

For my part, I saw this problem from the get go — the more people you follow, the more difficult it is to separate the links to interesting news stories from the inane messages concerning stubbed toes, broken promises and hateful bosses we all invariably Tweet about!

Finding the signal in the social network noise

Ultimately, those that rely on this way of surrounding themselves with relevant (maybe even mission critical) knowledge will find themselves continually going back to their various social networks and repeating the process of un-friending / un-following those people they think are diluting the quality of the shared knowledge they rely on so much…

Recommended reading

• The rise of the re-Tweet puts pressure on PageRank
• Rethinking Social Relevancy Rank: What’s Missing?
• Semantic Web as the “killer app”, Part 1

As our eyes turn upwards, towards the Moon, we celebrate the landings of 40 years ago. And like all arrivals, there was a journey, which is a story unto itself.

You might be forgiven for your envy. After all, like all emotions, it has survival value. Envy drives you to aspire to better things. Just be careful of who you envy. When we look at the lifestyles of movie stars, pop sensations and successful career criminals, we might envy what they have. But if you had to walk a mile in the shoes that got them where they are now, your envy might just subside.

Dr. Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun was an idealist. But he was also a man with a chequered and much disputed history. While few would contest his latter day stature as the father of modern space flight, his beginnings were far less glamourous, if no less profound.

The advent of the Second World War must have come as both a curse and a gift to von Braun, eager to pursue his love of rocket science. On the one hand, his specialist skills thrust him to the very top of the Nazi technical hierarchy, with access to resources he could have only imagined previous to the conflict.

However, Wernher von Braun was no longer building rocket ships to build bridges to the stars in space and beyond, he was devising rocket-propelled devices designed to deliver lethal, destructive payloads into the very heart of the enemy.

Meanwhile, in the wilds of the United States of America, equally imaginative minds conspired to build a new kind of bomb, one not owing its force to anything you’d expect to find in a chemistry laboratory.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was a man of conscience, but will also be remembered as the father of the atomic bomb, an epithet he would loathe.

After the Second World War, Oppenheimer became a chief advisor to the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission, where he made use of his position to lobby for international control of atomic energy, to help avert a nuclear arms race with the then Soviet Union.

On witnessing the “Trinity test”, the first artificial nuclear explosion on July 16th 1945, Oppenheimer famously recalled a verse from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita:

“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one…”

But many years later, he was to confess that yet another verse had entered his mind at the same time:

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, armaments manufacturer and the inventor of dynamite. Nobel stands apart from those mentioned both before and after. In a real sense, Nobel was a destroyer first and a dreamer second.

In life, Nobel’s fortune was amassed as a direct result of his invention of dynamite, and only later in life was he moved to make amends for his ignominious title, the “merchant of death”.

Enacted posthumously, the Nobel Prize would recognize people whose exploits were for the betterment of all mankind.

Leonardo da Vinci was a true visionary, whose interests were amazingly eclectic, spanning science, physiology, engineering and nature. While we will always remember da Vinci for his contributions to the art world, most notably for the Mona Lisa, he was also a war engineer, creator of such things as siege towers, designs for tanks and the first theoretical energy beam, in the form of concentrated solar power.

Amongst the almost innumerable contributions to science, medicine, chemistry, mathematics and even photography, astronomy and the invention of soap, coffee and chess — Islam contributed enormously to the modern world we live in.

The sheer number of inventions that have poured out of the Arab world is astounding, most of which having a direct and positive impact on the world, such as the advancements in surgery, personal hygiene, chemistry and engineering, in some cases, centuries before similar advancements or discoveries in Europe and the rest of the world.

However, through necessity, their collective inventiveness wasn’t always beneficial to humanity. Islam can also be credited with the introduction of the bomb. As we now know, the Chinese invented saltpetre, which they most famously employed as the principle ingredient in their magnificent fireworks. But it was the Arabs who made that leap of thought and realized that saltpetre could be adapted into an explosive:

“By the 15th century they had invented both a rocket, which they called a ’self-moving and combusting egg’, and a torpedo — a self-propelled pear-shaped bomb with a spear at the front which impaled itself in enemy ships and then blew up.”

Throughout the centuries, China has inspired and delighted people all across the world, with such colossal contributions as the invention of paper, printing, the aforementioned saltpetre and the compass:

“The Chinese invented technologies involving mechanics, hydraulics, and mathematics applied to horology, metallurgy, astronomy, agriculture, engineering, music theory, craftsmanship, nautics, and warfare.”

They say war is the mother of invention, and so it was that the sustained periods of internal conflict contributed most significantly to our understanding of metallurgy and the advancement of metal technologies, including the invention of the trigger-operated crossbow from the 2nd century BC.

But of all their collective genius, their most abiding contribution to the betterment of war is The Art of War, written by Sun Tzu in the 6th century BC. This treatise on war bestrode mere technologies and formalized the very process of war — transforming war itself into an art form.

Archimedes was at the vanguard of scientific discovery in antiquity. As one of the very first great innovators, such was his ingenuity, the very title of one of his inventions still carries his name — the Archimedes screw.

In addition to his constructive creations, he was also credited with the invention of siege engines, machines capable of lifting attacking ships clear out of the water, and arrays of aligned mirrors designed to focus the full force of the sun upon their hull and sail to set them alight, predating similar ideas by da Vinci by several centuries.

His genius is still to this day little rivaled. Some have even speculated that had he not died (by mistake, on the sword of an invading Roman solider in Syracuse), and his mathematical works been more wildly understood, we might have placed a man on the Moon as early as the 18th century.

Dreamers, aren’t we all…

Whatever your personal feelings are concerning war, great civilizations have risen on the back of conflict and unrest. Those dreamers, those men of imagination and ingenuity of thought, whose ideas have benefited us all so greatly are also the same men who have ended the lives of so many, in a multitude of horrifying and terrible ways…

Recommended reading

• Humans are not unique
• Just what is technology?
• Scientific advancements of the future
• Internet circa 2035…

This was a question British Prime Minister Gordon Brown reflected on recently:

“You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken.”

Chris Williams had his own ideas, regarding Gordon’s thoughts on Rwanda. Thing is, Chris makes one point by missing another all together:

“We’d like to see him try Twittering that to people in Sudan, or Northern Sri Lanka, or Somalia.”

The point he missed is that of communications technology and infrastructure, something Sudan and Sri Lanka and Somalia probably don’t have much of.

I suppose it’s easy to say that Gordon was just making a lazy attempt at political point scoring, but he does have more of a point than Chris does, out-doing myself on the cynicism front.

In an attempt to break into a large but largely very poor market, Nokia have been conducting research in Africa:

“The majority of Africans have extremely low income level and less than 10% of the population has access to the fixed electricity grid.”

As an aside, access to reliable and cheep energy in most parts of Africa need not be a problem, what with more cost effective solar panel technology coming along. That would help anyone with eyes on Africa, not least Nokia. However, such enabling technologies are subject (and likely to fall prey) to political will, or a lack thereof, than a lack of finance.

In the meantime, the lack of key infrastructures, like communications, in far off places like Rwanda, Sudan, Sri Lanka and Somalia mean that whatever horrors are taking place remain mostly hidden from the gaze of the world.

Yes, we occasionally see these tragedies on the news, but we are all cynical; more skin & bone black people starving to death. Why is this? I think I have an answer.

When cultures cut the technology ties that bind

When we see these starving, barely clothed and emaciated people, they are as far removed from our world as if we were to be looking at ancient man of some 50,000 years ago. For us to empathize with them, we have to first relate to their plight, and I don’t think that’s really happening.

But what happened in Iran made a connection with people all over Europe and the Us in the so-called developed first world countries. At once, we saw the plight of people with lives very much like our own, if still culturally different.

We saw their daily lives disrupted, people fleeing homes and cars, abandoned on streets that look very much like our own. And we also saw the ugly and punitive face of the law, dressed in dark uniforms armed with batons, shields and fire arms, much like we’ve all seen in now infamous video clips shown all over the web, from the Rodney King beating to the G8 protesters being attacked.

When see Sudan and Somalia, we see people living in homes made of sheet metal and dirt, with no running water, dirt tracks for roads and the more fortunate among them sat upon a horse, perhaps.

Enforcing the connection even more was that those people were talking to us by familiar means, such as Twitter and Facdebook, among others. This enabled the various stories to unfold rapidly, as one person shares quickly with others — those stories then spread virally through websites like Digg, driving the penetration of the story ever deeper and higher, often before the popular media picks up on events.

There’s a world of difference between metropolitan Iran and more rural Rwanda.

Zimbabwe brings such issues into stark focus. There is a country which had a communications infrastructure, but it has since collapsed. News emerging from there is now sparse. There in Africa, access to the internet is a luxury, rather than a utility and almost a basic human right, as it is here.

China recognize the power of social media only too well, suppressing its potential when the moment takes them, to compromise the potential of civil unrest or disobedience.

Clearly, communications technology is a fundamental and essential part of bringing broader attention to any situation. After all, how else would news be delivered to us at all?

But if we assume that places like Rwanda had access to similar technologies, would those same stories unfold as quickly, or would they unravel, given some crucial yet capricious social or cultural difference between us and them?

You could argue that Band Aid and the like raised awareness of the plight in Africa. But then you’d have to concede that they did that on behalf of the people, because they don’t have the means to do it themselves.

Also, another way of looking at this is, is our reaction to the problems in Iran more to do with the attack upon the people, or the attack upon democracy itself?

If I’m right (which I’d rather not be), our inability to connect both literally and metaphorically would severely hinder our sense of injustice and we might cynically look upon Rwanda as yet another massacre in yet another part of war-torn Africa…

Recommended reading

• Twitter would have stopped Rwandan genocide, claims Prime Minister
• When social media and censorship collide
• The tangled web of democracy we weave
• Internet access as a basic human right

When I first read the news of Google trotting out their own OS, my first thought was: “This is quite significant.”

But after thinking the matter through a little more, I don’t think it’s all that clear cut.

The following is a comment of mine on the official Google Chrome OS article, taken from my Page on Facebook:

“But after thinking about this, is this really significant? OK, so people get a choice of OS. But do people really care that much any more?

I don’t see Chrome OS doing too much harm to Microsoft and their Windows franchise because how do you compete with that kind of market penetration and market exposure?

Also, anyone who would want Chrome OS would need to know an appreciable amount more about such things, when compared to your average PC user, so they’re already in a minority.

For the the ultra-connected information worker, this is choice. For the average guy on the street, if it doesn’t play Call of Duty, or Word, it’s a no choice at all.”

So that accounts for the majority of people out there, right? Yes. But that only served to get me thinking again…

Let’s face, it’s unlikely that we’ll see major video games like Call of Duty running on the Chrome OS — unless there’s a web version. But that kind of black & white perspective is merely a misdirection. Google are hoping to achieve bigger things with their Chrome OS.

As a business man, I know only too well that if you aim a product or service at everyone, you get no one — you start with a well defined audience and then build outwards.

I don’t see anyone competing with Microsoft Windows. Instead, I see Windows being eroded by the likes of Chrome OS, niche distributions of Linux, Apple’s own Mac OS X — all of which will incrementally and inexorably eat into areas of Windows where Microsoft are negligent and / or weak.

Of course, Microsoft will fight and retaliate, but in the end, their great size will be their undoing as smaller players run rings around their slow, lumbering heels.

The rise of the mobile worker

So who are Google going for with Chrome OS? As I mentioned in my comment, it’s the information workers and their netbooks who’ll capitalize on the svelte, feature-lite aspects of Chrome OS.

I can see a time when people have as many as three computers:

1. a desktop in the home, for their family and their home entertainment.
2. a laptop for shuttling between home and office.
3. a netbook or PDA type computer for ad hoc information gathering, meetings et cetera.

Google are in a good position because they have Chrome OS and Android, both of which cover the netbook and PDA spaces respectively. However, for Google to pull this off, they need to clearly differentiate the two, or they will find themselves walking the same path as Microsoft, with their cluster of customer confusement inducing Windows variations.

Currently, there’s clearly overlap between Chrome OS and Android, but not in a good way:

“I also suspect that some at Google were not entirely happy with the the direction that its Android mobile OS project is taking. Numerous netbook makers have made plans to install Android on small laptops. But Android was designed for handsets and a move to bigger devices is problematic.”

If there’s frustration (or even confusion) at the manufacturer level, then we can only see this permeating upwards, through to the consumers.

On the plus side, the information worker is a rare breed, who are, on the whole, not easily put off or daunted by operating systems, software & hardware specifications or device-specific requirements.

In 5 years, such will be the interoperability of the web, just about all of the web applications we use will run like one huge Unix pipe routine — one application feeding into the next, and so on and so forth.

This cooperative, expansive and deeply social web opens up a world of amazing possibilities. Before all of this potential can be realized to its fullest, several major hurdles remain (such a portable social profiles, which I allude to in my 3-part discussion about how the semantic web could be the killer application).

From island nations of data to continental information super highways

Once we’re over the horizon, the web landscape is transformed from disparate, isolated island nations of data into a super-continent of interconnected services and applications.

We sign in once, we then declare our needs, desires, intentions and our goals, and then watch the myriad web applications whir into life as they sift, sort, collate, calibrate, refine and render data into neat collections of presentable information.

Google have the infrastructure and now the software to deliver a ‘net appliance to make all of this happen now, ahead of time.

So long as Google remain relevant and the quality of their many productivity applications stays high enough, Chrome OS could be the much fabled ‘net appliance oft talked about but never seen, until now perhaps…

Recommended reading

• Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS
• Chrome OS: What is Google’s goal?