Seb's Open Research

How to Deal With Your Weirdness

2009-11-12T08:22:00.004-05:00

I was invited to give a short talk at the Montreal IdentityCamp this week.

I basically started from the business-y idea that, these days, if you're standard, you are bound to get commodified. Then I moved into the identity realm with the good news is that each of us, to borrow Walt Whitman's words, "contains multitudes" - our personality has multiple facets.

When we move into any social space we have to choose which of our faces to show. At any given moment, a few of them are visible. The others are hidden, often because we think they are somehow "weird". What I tried to do was to pack up my current thinking about the advantages and drawbacks of showing lesser-known aspects of ourselves, and outline a few strategies to go about it.

I believe the influence of a few bright lights showed in the talk, notably Lilia Efimova, Alexandre Enkerli, Sylvain Carle, Karl Dubost, and danah boyd.

For the occasion, I decided to give presentation tool Prezi a spin. I was blown away. The interface totally rocks, and the end result is, in my opinion, much more entertaining than a pile of slides - without sacrificing understandability.

I think one of the strong points about Prezi is the intelligent use of motion. In the PowerPoint context, you can incorporate animation elements, but in my experience it usually distracts more than it helps. By contrast, I believe that motion in Prezi can really help tell a story. Now I'm a total noob, still really improvising with it. I'm pretty sure I'm not using it 100% correctly, but it certainly feels exciting to work with that tool.

Anyhow, here's the Prezi: (click More > Fullscreen to get the best experience)

And here are the live notes from Alexandre Enkerli:

@sebpaquet Montreal-style (English slides, French speech).

@sebpaquet Finding the specificity from own skills which are unique in aggregate.

@sebpaquet Contrary to high school, context allowing personal weirdness. Not pleasing everyone but finding like-minded peeps.

@sebpaquet thought-provokes through appropriate use of imagery and shared references. Adapted to crowd.

@sebpaquet primacy of personal context and move toward relative open-mindedness and rapport-induced weirdness-tolerance.

@sebpaquet Non-judgmental approach to diversity of strategies. Insight on potential issues including context-collapse.

@sebpaquet uses a large but manageable number of concrete examples in discussion of rather abstract points.

Federating identities through standardized tools.

pubwich on aggregating identities through feeds as php libraries. Power.com

@dianebourque on soup.io but Pubwich as Quebec-developed tool.

on intrapersonal process for stiff-intolerant/weird-tolerant interpersonal dynamic. Agency?

Black hole of open culture, forcing transparency.

Advantages of multiple-specialization in potentially faddish reality. Flexibility, learning how to learn, interdisciplinarity.

The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era

2009-10-22T00:37:00.012-04:00

Up until recently, learners have had little freedom of choice as far as teachers went. If you were stuck with a bad teacher, you pretty much had to suck it up. You simply didn't have access to alternatives.

I remember being taught thermodynamics by a completely incapable teacher. I'm convinced everyone who sat in that class still has mental scars from the experience.

Not even the best students understood what he was saying. Whenever someone asked him a question, he would just go back one page in his notes and repeat himself word-for-word.

We quickly learned not to bother inquiring.

But what could we do? It wasn't like there were a half-dozen other teachers laying around, standing ready to provide a perfectly comprehensible explanation of the law of entropy at the snap of a finger.

Fast-forward to today, and that dream scenario is exactly what we're getting incredibly close to. Look at Salman Khan. He's the real deal. For a few years, the guy has been delivering a steady stream of clear explanations on hundreds of topics relating to mathematics, physics, finance and a few other fields.

His YouTube channel has more than a thousand videos. Each is about 10 minutes in length, which translates to a pretty thick stack of DVDs. Do you need to learn about the ideal gas equation? Khan's got it. The law of cosines? No problem. Moving pulleys? Check. Collateralized debt obligations? Sure. You name the topic, chances are it's already available, or will be soon. For free.

At this very moment, students all over the planet have just discovered Khan's treasure trove, and they are dancing around in their rooms, feeling blessed to have found someone who explains the subject they have to study this year in a way that they can understand.

Think about it. Even assuming, conservatively, that Khan's calculus videos are only slightly above average, roughly half the students taking calculus this semester would save time and pain by watching his lessons instead of paying attention to the mediocre teaching happening in front of them.

And I'm not talking about students who don't have a teacher, or eager minds who are stuck in a class below their ability level. The latent demand for this kind of stuff is huge.

"But these are just videos, not a real flesh-and-blood person you can interact with!" True. But I maintain that a great video compares favorably with a live, but bad, teacher in a classroom setting. You can't interact productively with a bad teacher anyway.

The Snowball Effect

Now, one of the great things about clarity of explanation is that most people tend to recognize it pretty quickly when they see it. Students who stumble upon Khan's videos remember him. They will go back to him; they will recommend him to their friends.

It is important to note that, thanks to YouTube's bandwidth, Khan's teaching scales very well. He has nearly 25,000 subscribers as I write this.

At some point, he will be helping a quarter million people learn.

Expect a similar dynamic to play out in every blackboard-teachable field with a standardized curriculum.

How fast is this going to happen? Well, Khan is already becoming famous. Last year CNN gave him airtime to explain the financial crisis. Why him, and not an economics Ph.D. type, you ask? Because he is understandable, and because some genius at CNN figured out that at least some of their viewers were able and willing to learn a little bit in order to understand what is going on.

So, for a change, instead of viewers being fed stodgy, professional-sounding but indigestible prose from a self-important expert, for several minutes there was a guy on TV with a pink tie and amateurish-looking drawings finally giving a simplified, but clueful explanation of the financial crisis and possible ways to get out of it.

In a fast-changing world, people are beginning to recognize the value of explanation.

Teacher Fame Goes Global

Good teachers have always had some measure of fame at the local level. Let's not kid ourselves: within a school, the students know who is a good teacher and who is no more illuminating than a wet pack of matches.

The net takes that to a whole different level. Eventually everyone will know who the good teachers are, and will be able to tune into them. They will be rock stars.

But what will happen to the bad teachers then?

There's a quote by Warren Buffett that I like to bring up from time to time: "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked."

Well, the incompetent teachers have indeed been swimming naked, and in a world where learners are free to tune into many other, competent teachers, it will inevitably show. When you have something to compare to, bad becomes tangibly bad.

Very well then. There can't be so many bad teachers anyway, right? Well... It only takes one extremely talented biology 101 teacher to raise the bar for all biology 101 teachers. In effect, the top 5% of teachers stand to make the other 95% look bad, if they put themselves to it.

Some of the poor teachers will look so bad that their students will simply laugh and walk out if they can, or tune out if they can't. They will only show up in class to get evaluated.

Of course, this kind of behavior will bring some questions into sharp focus, among them: "What good is it to pay an incompetent teacher to come in and give lessons that nobody actually listens to?"

Education systems typically move very slowly, so I don't expect incompetence to be magically chased all of a sudden because of the sudden availability of zero-cost, high-quality explanation.

Thus, it will be interesting to see exactly in what way the pressure coming from students (and their paying parents) will collide with institutional inertia.

Who knows? It could be that quite a few bottom-of-the-barrel teachers will have to find a new line of work.

I won't miss them.

Digging into Google Autocomplete Data

2009-06-22T03:29:00.015-04:00

Following up to "What Google Really Thinks About Social Media", I put together a Yahoo pipe I called "Expose Google autocomplete data", which shows additional data about the Google autocomplete query of your choice.

The numbers below each result correspond to the value of num_queries provided by the Google Suggest API. I'm not sure exactly what they mean, but they are in all likelihood correlated with the frequency of the corresponding searches.

For some reason the Pipes widget doesn't let you pick a string, but the pipe itself does. Just click through to Yahoo Pipes if you'd like to try different queries.

Update: D'Arcy Norman: Google on Google. The snark bites back!

What Google Really Thinks about Social Media

2009-06-20T01:00:00.007-04:00

I'm not making this up! See by yourself. (You may have to turn Google Suggest on.)

Further reading: danah boyd: is Facebook for old people?

Stocks, Flows, and Upkeep in Social Media

2009-05-20T10:32:00.015-04:00

Last week a few folks including Michael Nielsen and I conducted a little experiment on Drawball. In case you don't know about Drawball, it is a kind of a "collaborative art" site where you are given a certain amout of "ink" which you can use to draw wherever you like on a gigantic, but shared, canvas. Your ink replenishes slowly, so you pretty much have to take breaks. Which is good if you have obsessive tendencies.

I find Drawball interesting because it provides a visualization of community dynamics. You see, some people go there and try to create nice things. Others are bent on destroying any and all nice things. People team up, so they can think big - and draw big. There are (good and evil) mobs. There are turf wars. There is drama.

The action on the ground is perhaps best described as ferocious pixel warfare. If you're wondering what the process looks like from 30,000 feet, watch this (there's a better quality video here):

I believe Drawball One is by now pretty much covered in protected areas that no one can overwrite, as a result of a preservation effort by the site's mastermind; On Drawball Two, however, it's the wild wild west.

Okay. On to our experiment. First we drew and colored in an "impossible triangle" of modest size. This didn't take too long and was not really difficult. Surprisingly, maybe owing to its small size, it stayed nice and clean for a few days.

Then we got started on something more ambitious: a fractal shape called a Sierpinski gasket. I picked this shape because it could grow without bounds from a small seed, and I figured its simplicity would make it relatively easy to repair, even for someone who didn't know exactly what it was. You can see the initial effort to the right.

Very quickly we had a budding replica of the seed, and one of the largest solid black areas on drawball. I think someone working alone would have taken a few days to do this, taking ink refill delays into account.

By the next day we had a pretty nice start. The shape had grown to a size that was noticeable on the whole-ball view (without magnification).

And that's when some vandals noticed us. They actually organized raids against our glorious gasket. Ink limitations mean raids are the only way to get any serious harm done quickly on Drawball. The bottom picture shows what the gasket looked like on day three. Nature abhors a vacuum, and those empty triangles obviously just looked too tempting.

Now, there is no revert button on Drawball like there is on Wikipedia; every vandalized pixel requires a pixel of repair. We didn't really try to fight the vandals. It was easy to redraw outlines, but filling in the shapes again is time- and ink-consuming.

The experiment is pretty much over by now. The only interesting thing that is left to do is to observe and measure decay. The structure is large and regular enough that I don't expect that it will vanish too soon, but it will definitely get dirtier every with every passing day. You can visit the region today and see if you recognize anything.

So, what have I learned? Well, the first tentative "Drawball law" that becomes apparent very quickly is this:

Drawball Law no. 1. Noticeability brings attention; attention brings participation.

A second law would be:

Drawball Law no. 2.
The effort required for upkeep grows in proportion to the surface area of your turf.

On Drawball strength lies in numbers, not finesse; consequently, if one person is able to maintain a drawing of area X, it will take two people to maintain an area 2X.

Beyond Drawball

How general are these laws? I suspect their applicability goes beyond Drawball. Here's an application of Law no. 2 to wikis and blogs.

To any social media site there is a visitor-editable, "living" part and a non-editable, "still" part. The living portion of a weblog is typically the very edge of the flow - the "now"; the rest of it is still life. For a wiki, the living portion is essentially the whole site (though at any moment some parts are typically more alive than others).

Now, the content of most blogs arguably feels more well-kept than most (open) wikis, even though wikis have a whole community around them and blogs typically have a single maintainer. Why is this?

I believe there are several underlying reasons, but I'm wondering if the chief one might not follow from Drawball Law no. 2. Wiki builders expand their turf with every paragraph added, each page created. If the community doesn't grow with the wiki, its turf becomes unmaintainable. By contrast, as a blog grows, its past content becomes museum material - it quickly fossilizes and requires very little upkeep.

To conclude using the terminology of stocks and flows, I would assert that as a general rule, participative flows (blog-like media) are easier to maintain than participative stocks (wiki-like media).

I leave design-for-community implications as an exercise for the reader. :)

What do you think?

More reading about drawball:
Drawball: from Chaos to Community - a nice essay positing that the social aspect is the reason artists bothered visiting and revisiting Drawball.

Wikipedia article on Drawball. Alas, Wikipedia doesn't consider Drawball notable.

Citizen Science at SciBarCamp II: Semantic Eco-Blogging!

2009-05-15T15:14:00.006-04:00

At the last SciBarCamp, Joel Sachs from the SPIRE team at university of Maryland presented a very inspiring project that opens environmental/bioscience in a way that enables regular people to get involved usefully.

First, a bit of background. Every living species has a certain geographic distribution that is known to evolve over time, especially in recent years due to global warming. This data is extremely useful for environment scientists. As you might expect, though, comprehensively cataloging which species live where is a monumental undertaking, especially if you have to repeat the effort every year!

Now, most people nowadays have digital cameras and internet access. Some gadget freaks actually have both, plus a global positioning system (GPS), all in a neat package, which makes it ultra-easy for them to go out in the woods and snap pictures of plants and animals around them. Special days called BioBlitzes have emerged recently where many people go out all at the same time but in different locations, to do just that. Then they report what they found on their respective blogs.

So where and how does it feed into science? Well, Sach's project provides Spotter, a Firefox extension, and a spreadsheet-to-RDF utility called RDF123, that together enable participants to easily do all of the following:

Snap a picture of a specimen;
Upload it to Flickr;
Provide geographic information on where the photo was taken;
Tag it with descriptive terms, as specifically as they can;
If needed, request further crowdsourced identification (volunteers can watch RSS streams corresponding to certain tags like "bird" or "butterfly").

Faithful readers of mine (who have good memory!) will recognize this as a neat incarnation of that old structured blogging idea. The result of each contribution is stored in the RDF representation on a central aggregating database managed by SPIRE. This enables semantic queries to be made, such as: "Show all observations of species that are classified as being of concern by the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service" or "What was the northernmost spotting of the Emerald Ash Borer last year?".

The overall result is obviously a global, collaborative database of samples from everywhere that gets richer with each participant's contribution. For participants, obvious motivations include:

an interest in natural observation (think about birdwatchers);
the satisfaction of contributing to a worthwhile scientific endeavor;
the pride of offering something quite unique (info sampled at your particular location).

I could totally picture 6th grade classes going out and having a blast doing this. (If you're an educator reading this, think about doing it!)

So far there are about 1200 observations in the system, but hopefully this number will grow as more people join the effort. I don't know too much about the viral properties of participation, but for starters, the fact that photos are posted into each people's Flickr stream exposes the project to their friends.

All in all, I think this is a very promising effort that exemplifies how amateurs and pros can complement each other given the right tools. There are obvious parallels to draw between this effort and other citizen science endeavors such as GalaxyZoo, which harnesses people's ability to classify galaxies better than computers, or the OpenStreetMap project, which aims to create free datasets of where streets are everywhere in the world.

SciBarCamp II, Toronto

2009-05-11T12:33:00.012-04:00

I'm writing this on the train back from SciBarCamp II in Toronto.

To briefly sum up the experience, I've just spent an intense 24 hours in the company of quite a few admirable thinkers.

As the name suggests to people who know about BarCamps, the event was set up as an unconference. Attendance was ~~on invitation and~~ limited to a hundred participants. The chosen theme was "Open Science".

It really felt like the organizers knew what they were doing. No time was wasted. Pretty much all of the participants (two thirds of whom actually weren't at the first SciBarCamp) slipped seamlessly into the unconference mold.

The participant makeup was quite diverse, with maybe half of the participants being scientists and others being businesspeople, technologists and artists with a strong interest in science. I was struck by the all-around open-mindedness and ability to speak in a jargon-free manner.

The event went as follows: At the Friday evening reception, we spent 30 minutes on personal introductions, then had a mix & mingle session where people basically talked to whoever they liked, and filled in session proposal sheets. Around 30 such sheets were filled in. Then, participants were invited to go around the sheets and were able to comment on them and indicate interest by filling in circles below the session descriptions.

The interest indicators enabled the organizers to build Saturday's schedule on the fly. Rooms were allocated to sessions, with the more popular sessions obviously being put into larger rooms. A few proposals were merged together. The final schedule had five one-hour time slots, with 5 parallel sessions underway at any one time.

You can have a look at the schedule here. Two sessions especially stood out for me. The first was Joel Sachs and Jesse Greener's session on citizen science. The second was Michael Nielsen's talk on open mass collaboration in mathematics. I will cover them in upcoming posts.

I especially appreciated the opportunity to meet again with WorldChangers Hassan Masum, Mark Tovey and Karl Schroeder, and I was stoked to shake hands with quantum-information-authority-turned-science-futurist Michael Nielsen for the first time. It was also a great pleasure to meet new people like physicist Rob Spekkens and Kaitlin "I am not a lawyer" Thaney from Science Commons.

Huge kudos to Eva Amsen, Christine Buske, Jen Dodd, Jamie McQuay, Mark Tovey and Sunny Tsang, who pulled this event off, well, flawlessly on a shoestring budget.

I think a Montreal SciBarCamp will obviously need to happen at some point. However, it feels like the requisite network has yet to gel together. (Either that, or I haven't connected to it for some reason.)

Update: Here is Glendon Mellow's report on SciBarCamp.

Quick Guide: Four Easy Ways to Protect your Gmail Account

2009-04-30T15:00:00.008-04:00

If you are using Gmail as your main email account, you'll readily admit that you'd be in a tough spot if you were to lose access to it. But these things do happen, be it because you forgot your password (most likely right after changing it!) or because your archenemy (or some random joker) has been able to hijack your account. Hey, if it happened to Kanye, it could happen to anyone :)

If you have registered for various services on the web using your Gmail account, things could get really messy. "I forgot my password" links would no longer be of any use, as they send help to an account you can no longer enter. Moreover, a hijacker could use your Gmail as a gateway to gain access to your accounts on those services.

The long and short of it, really, is that it would be best if you didn't lose your Gmail account.

I did a quick search today to see what precautions I could take to protect against this and found out que you and I can reduce risks in four easy ways. (The links below work for me today; your mileage may vary.)

Always use the secure https protocol (look at the bottom of the page) to communicate with Gmail.
Make sure you have chosen a secret question to get your password back.
Make sure you have entered a secondary address in your Gmail settings.
Pick a password that is not easy to guess.

In this guide you can find additional info, including a discussion of what your options are if you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having lost access to your account.

What Physics and Computer Science Taught Me About Thinking

2009-02-24T07:56:00.006-05:00

Back in the day, as a student, I had the opportunity to study two scientific disciplines. Beyond giving me a solid grounding in each field, these studies actually taught me a thing or two about thinking. These are actually the most valuable pieces of wisdom I got from nearly a decade of higher education.

First, physics taught me that, very often, the way you look at a problem determines how easy or hard it will be to think about it and solve it. When doing physics assignments, I would often spend about 3/4 of the time manipulating the problem statement to find a formulation that made its subsequent resolution straightforward. Very often the calculation ended up being trivial compared to what it would have been using a different representation. I challenged myself to make my weekly writeup fit comfortably on a single sheet of paper without cutting out detail, and I often succeeded.

I learned from physics that it is often best not to rush in to solve a problem. The time you invest in really understanding a problem is typically given to you back several-fold:

It simplifies the problem at hand;
It creates new learning in your mind, which will make subsequent similar problems easier to tackle.

Second, computer science taught me that there are many ways to skin a cat. Programming is essentially a communication challenge. It is about clarifying initially fuzzy concepts and relations and representing them in code. The way you do this determines how much or how little trouble you're setting yourself up for.

Again, the representation you choose matters, but not quite in the same way that it matters in weekly physics assignments. You're not trying to knock a particular ball out of the park. In a software project you're typically trying to design pieces that will interact together and that you will be using to build larger pieces still.

Of courses the pieces have to "work", but great design means that they have a special quality beyond just being correct: they're easy to understand and use. And they will still be easy to understand in use six months from now, when you return to that code after having been busy with something else. Or when someone else dives into your code.

An operating principle here is to make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. It usually takes work to get there, but it is amply rewarded in the long run.

To summarize: doing physics and computer science, I learned about the value of making the effort to make things simple. (as Mark Pilgrim said: "A lot of effort went into making this effortless")

Now, the great thing about it is that lessons learned about thinking are applicable wherever there is thinking involved, which is a pretty wide domain of applicability when you think about it. In a future post I want to explore how these principles influence the impact and diffusion of ideas, whether they be theories, methodologies, memes, or musical themes.

Canada's Top 10 Digital Thinkers?

2009-02-13T16:10:00.002-05:00

Hugh McGuire is wondering who might be "Canada's top 10 digital thinkers - the people who are writing, or doing, the most innovative digital stuff in the country?". Chime in with your suggestions over there.

9 Ways to Face the Perils of Cloud Computing

2009-02-06T17:12:00.026-05:00

The cloud *might* go up in smoke.
Are you sitting on it? Be smart.

I like to think I'm pretty cautious when it comes to safeguarding my stuff, but I admit I was taken by surprise when the spiffy, cluefully designed social bookmarking system ma.gnolia underwent a pretty catastrophic FAIL event a little more than a week ago.

Meaning: The service went down. And: the data (about half a terabyte of it) was lost. And: there was a backup, but it went down the drain, too.

What happen? Did somebody set us up the bomb? Actually, no. The file system got corrupted, which in turn corrupted the database backup. Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff has admitted his backup system wasn't robust enough.

Larry must have had a hell of a week. This event is of course bad enough for him and for ma.gnolia, but it is also a nightmare scenario for the heavy users who had thousands of links, annotations and ratings in there.

On a personal level, I had been collecting bookmarks there for a social software course that I'm developing. While I hadn't stored a zillion links in ma.gnolia, it's still a disappointment. But really, I should have known better than to assume that the services I rely on were properly backed up and just couldn't melt down or disappear. As Christopher Null writes, "you can't trust an online service any more than you can trust your hard drive not to crash. Sure, the vast majority of the time everything will be fine, but eventually all technology products fail, and even the best safeguards are often imperfect."

From a user standpoint, there are two things to think about regarding incidents like these. The first obvious one is how to recover from such a loss, and the second one is how to guard against eventual occurrences. Let's look at each one in turn.

A. The service died on me! What now!?

It turns out that there might be a couple ways to at least partially recover when your content vanishes.

Google and other search engines keep cached copies of publicly accessible web pages. If you're lucky, the googlebot will have crawled and saved a copy of pages with your content. Identify keywords that appeared on your pages or in URLs. Then do a search within the site and click the "Cached" links in the search results. (I found a few of my lost bookmarks that way.)
The Internet Archive crawls the Web and makes what it found available a few months later through its Wayback machine. You may find some of your older stuff there, though in my experience the archive is quite incomplete (for good cause, if you consider the size of the Web!).
Some of the aggregators out there might have picked up your content if it was available as a feed. Here's an example: The excellent Microcontent News weblog had a short life, but the site has been all but dead for several few years. However, Bloglines still has a copy of the feed, as it was left in 2003. (Unfortunately this one was a teaser feed, with only the first sentence of each post; had it been a full feed, the content would be there.) Over at HubLog, Alf Eaton has explained how to get at a feed's historical items using the Google Reader API.
Some sites republish feeds for fun and/or profit. Even if your original feed is no longer accessible, you may find traces of your content elsewhere. To find it, take a clue from Obi-Wan: Use the Search, Luke.

B. How do I protect against an eventual meltdown?

Here are five ways to minimize the impact of a service going down on the ground:

Use several services redundantly. For instance, social bookmarking service Diigo has a feature baked in that lets you post to multiple services. If one goes down you still have your links in other places.
Save local copies to your hard drive. For pictures and videos, you usually start from a drive, so this is a non-issue. But for blogs and social bookmarks, very often the "original" copy is stored with the service you're using. If it offers integral exports, use them. If not, local backup is less practical -- but have a look at #3.
Produce full feeds of your content and subscribe to them in local or Web aggregators. I'd have to do more research to see which ones keep items for the longest time, but I'm pretty sure that some local aggregators can be set to never throw anything away (If you know of some, please comment!)
Use an on-demand archiving service like (the amazing) Webcitation.org, which will keep a copy of any page on demand.
Make things public as much as you can. Public information naturally tends to get crawled and replicated. The public bookmarks on ma.gnolia have seen a better rate of recovery than the private ones.
(extra tip! thanks to Dave in the comments) With some services, you can email your updates to yourself. Just store those emails and you've got a safety copy.

Now, to be honest, this is the kind of advice that I read but rarely apply. Getting hit close to home will hopefully make me take one good look at all the services I'm using and to make sure I'm following at least some of my own advice, lest I burn myself again!

The Greatness and Perils of Following Suit

2009-01-28T15:12:00.011-05:00

Do quality and popularity always go together?

Very often, the first thing we do when we aren't quite sure what to do is to look at people around us to see what they are doing. Then, if we can't see anything obviously wrong with what others are doing, we'll typically follow suit.

One advantage of this way of doing things is that it saves us a lot of thinking. Let's face it, we don't have time to think through every single action we take. Another advantage of following suit is that it at least partially shields us from embarrassment: should our actions be found to be faulty or just plain dumb, we can always fall back on the excuse that everybody was doing it. (This is the basis for the classic maxim "Nobody ever got fired for buying from [insert well-established company name here].)"

Now, in a world with an abundance of choice, just taking the time to examine all of the options available to us is inconceivable. Take the case of music. Tens of thousands of music albums are released each year, which roughly amounts to a hundred a day. Say you wanted to choose this year's best song. Well, this is a needle-in-a-haystack problem. Even if you spend 24 hours a day listening to music for the next year you won't be able to give each album a complete listen. So you'll have to take a cue from what others have chosen to listen to and talk about, and actually completely ignore the majority of what is out there.

Does this mean that you have to give up any hope of picking the greatest song of the year? Perhaps not. Whether it be through the media or through your social network, you will almost certainly be exposed much more to certain songs or albums than to others. Some songs are more talked about and played: they are more popular. One line of reasoning goes like this: since better songs become more popular, if a song is any good, chances are that you'll learn about it. Conversely, if you never hear at all about a song it probably wasn't worth hearing in the first place. Therefore, the thinking goes, the best song is certainly among those you will hear this year, and chances are you'll hear it several times. Heck, everyone will hear it several times.

The same line of thinking could be applied to all kinds of things: books, scientific articles, shoes, even ideas (memes for those who like that term).

This approach, then, roughly consists of equating quality with popularity. One of its flaws is to assume that quality is absolute or objective, that is, that the quality of a thing is the same without taking into consideration the user (or reader, listener, etc.) of that thing. There are many contexts where this is not true. To pick an obvious example, the "best shoe ever" might be a woman's shoe, in which case it's not the best choice for me.

But even where we may assume that quality is absolute, there are pitfalls. In the next few posts I want to discuss some of them. Stay tuned.

(Heh, looks like I found a nice way to pressure myself to write at least another post :)

What I Did During My Vacation

2009-01-20T11:45:00.011-05:00

So I've been a little derelict in blogging lately.

Well... okay. To be accurate, it would appear that I didn't blog at all throughout 2007 and 2008!

Just to bring you, dear reader (purposely using the singular here - is anyone still tracking this feed, or did I manage to shake everybody off?), up to date, here are a few of the things I did during my vacation from blogging... in totally shuffled order:

Visited a few beautiful places in Quebec
Learned to play, reasonably well by my admittedly low standards, the 3rd movement (Presto Agitato) of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata
Finished a basement, and built a set of stairs to get there
Got a job as professor of computer science here in Montreal
Learned a bit about caring for the well-being of a family
Got befriended in Twitter and Facebook by about a zillion strangers.
Left my position at Socialtext
Started putting together a French-language online course on social software.
Did an experiment in homeschooling (something very rare in these parts).
Read a big pile of - wait for it - books! Yes, books!
Collaborated with Stephen Downes and Daniel Lemire in an investigation of diversity in social networks (more on that later)
Learned to play, reasonably well by my admittedly low standards, Jerry Lee Lewis' Great Balls of Fire and Ray Charles' What'd I Say
Learned more than I would have wished about petty academic infighting (thankfully from a relatively uninvolved standpoint)
Worked on building wikis that support multilingual communities
Almost got to meet my geek idol, Jon Udell
Started playing rock'n'roll with my bro again
Discovered the inspirational FAIL blog
Decided to start blogging again
Waited some more
Started blogging again!

Whew. The first post is the hardest, or so say about 2,000 other bloggers. Wish me success and speed in writing the next few hundred.

Addendum: This post would never have happened if it hadn't been for the persistent encouragements of my esteemed colleague Daniel Lemire.

The Freedom to Be Yourself In Public

2004-03-03T09:42:00.003-05:00

(NB: Post from 2004)

Cory Doctorow posts a couple observations that resonate with me in a comment to danah's post on homophily and blogging:

1. The Internet is full of weird people. Like science fiction, technology and RPGs, the Internet since its earliest days has attracted people who didn't fit in with the local norm, who sought community online -- the alt. heirarchy is like a roadmap of locally socially unacceptable hobbies, practices and beliefs that migrated to the net. This has its pluses and its minuses, but the net always framed itself as a place where you could come and woo your muse of the odd with other oddfellows, so no surprise, really, that it's full of people facing inwards, talking about their own heterodoxy.

2. The Internet makes you weird. The ability to browse all the possible kinks, find the ones that tickles your pink, and dive in, free from socially normative disapprobation, is a fast ticket to becoming One Of Us. No one is *really* a "mundane," but many people button themselves up and pass -- even to themselves. The net's seductive lure is to join the kink SIG that corresponds to your inner Imp of the Perverse and shut out everyone who would have you know that you're a perv for being *really* into, you know, rubber or chess or Klingons.

I recall conversing with Tom Munnecke on how one can view blogging as a personal "coming out" experience, going public with what was once private. And I think this process that many people are undergoing has the effect of speeding up the change and diversification of overt personal practices and social norms. While this might be scary to some, in my view it is a good thing, as it allows us to

be aware of how many others are different from, and similar to us;
be less afraid of behaving in ways that are closer to who we really are; and
make meaningful connections with strangers that we would otherwise have never found out about.

Coming to terms with who we are is crucial to well-being, and though it might not be necessary, I have no doubt that speaking out can be helpful - for more on that see "Using a blog for self-help?".

[Update: Just found this post by Andrew Chen which seems related. In it he states that "normal" people will probably never blog. Which makes me wonder if normality is the same as conformity...]

What if knowledge management actually is a technology problem?

2002-07-19T17:19:00.001-04:00

KM as a technology issue. Current thinking holds that knowledge management's problems come from too much focus on technology when the key problems are about organizational processes and practices. I've said as much myself on many occasions. But this formulation risks perpetuating the myth that problems are either organizational or technological. We know the real world isn't that simple, of course. We shouldn't contribute to the confusion by oversimplifying our discussion.

...To me K-Logs represent the most interesting recent effort to address this need with a simple solution available right now. They offer a starting point that a knowledge worker can understand and build from.
[from McGee's Musings]

I have to agree. Technology and organization go hand in hand. When it is adopted and subsequently (mis)used, technology tends to shape organizational practices. If it's introduced at the right time in the right way, you get a kind of symbiosis between the newly introduced technology and the innovative organizational practices that emerge from its use. But too often technology is designed with idealistic assumptions. The result is a gap that is too wide between current and wished-for practices. Most people are cautious. They won't try to jump long gaps, especially if they have yet to see anyone do it.

So proper design of technology is a problem because of this need take existing practices into account. Making the best possible tool is useless if users won't adopt it. The challenge is to make a tool that is simultaneously compatible with current and future practices, and bridges between the two. It's not easy.