The Killer Attitude

Moltbook - the first seven days

2026-02-11T07:12:00.000+01:00

Combine AI, agentic AI, social networks and network analysis, and you get a hyped mix plus this blog post.

TL;DR: To play with a visualization of the Moltbook social network, here is a Kumu graph from the data:

But what are you looking at?

Clawdbot Moltbot openClaw - the AI agent you install yourself and put to work - lead to the creation of Moltbook, a social network for AI agents. As with all other “social networks” (as well as less social networks) it should be an interesting case for making some social network graphs.

I dug into the social network on February 2nd, when it had been live for a week. This is what I found.

The numbers

Let’s start with some aggregated numbers from the front page of the site, from February 2nd:
Over 1.5 million AI agents have created a social network account, made close to 120 thousand posts across 14000 sub-groups which have received over 400k comments.

Now, time to grab the raw data which later will be the basis for the social network graphs, but the data can also be aggregated the “classic” way. Here we look at the aggregated numbers per day:

For the “posts numbers” I found 111k posts, which is fairly close to the 119k in the banner above. You see an exponential growth from the first day (27th) with only one post, up to the 31st, with 35k posts. Then the trend is more flat - the number of posts per day stays on the same level for the next few days. The total number of individual Moltbots that have contributed with posts are around 25k - a fairly low number compared to the total 1.5 million bots on the network.

For the “comments number” the situation is somewhat different. I did not manage (or bother) to get more than close to 170k comments (compared to the over 400k that the banner indicated). The number of posts per day increases during the whole week, but with a clear dip on Feb 1st - seems like the commenting capability was not available. The number of Moltbots that contributed with comments are notably lower than the number of bots posting. This is somewhat different from many other social networks observed. Seems like the bots are less “social” than us..? Or is it a bias the way the data was extracted? What do you make of that observation?

There are also other interactions on Moltbook, for which I did not capture detailed data. Posts and comments can be “upvoted” and “downvoted”, similar to “likes”. As I did not find a way to get the number of upvotes/downvotes per date there are no trends available as of now.

The Genesis

This is the birth of the network, the very first post, the very first day. From the table above, on January 27th there was one post, by one Moltbot, in one submolt.

This is also the introduction to how the social network is modelled in this post (there are many ways to turn the same data into different networks). We have two node types, Moltbots (red) and submolts (blue). Each edge (line) represents a post made by the Moltbot into a submolt. So here you are looking at the Moltbot ClawdClawderberg making a post in the submolt (group) named “general”. The title of the post was “Hello Moltbook! 🦞”.

Now let’s look at the network the next few days!

The growth and network

Day 2 this is the complete set of posts, aggregated from both January 27th (the genesis) and January 28th:

Still “early days”. Activity in 8 different submolts by 20 Moltbots. You can sense a center of gravity around the submolt named “general”, and some buzz around “introductions”.

Moving to January 29th, the third day:

It starts to get busy, and harder to see the details. Note the two blue submolts that are seemingly more posted in; “general” and “introductions”. This is a great opportunity to introduce a trick when exploring networks: the well-connected nodes are often cluttering the overall patterns - nodes that everyone, or “many”, are connected to does not add that much structural information, so it is often worth removing them and look at the remaining patterns. Like this:

At least “less cluttered”, and some now disjunct groups appear.

The next day (January 30th) it starts to get harder to find patterns:

And this is where you can move to the interactive version on Kumu. In the settings you can find filters to play around with. The start version you arrive at is exactly the selection as per above: Two major submolts removed, and only nodes that had activity up to January 30th. If you click on a node you can see the name of the Moltbot or submolt, and if you click on an edge you can see the topic of the post the edge represents.

What about the future of Moltbook? Well, I think the hype will fade. There have been articles in both major Swedish newspapers the same day I grabbed the data (DN.se, SvD.se). There’s has been news on the overall vulnerability of the network, and on that many interactions might have been human, rather than AI. There have also been posts on the network structure from David Holz and Tomasz Tunguz. The growth is still there, as in the latest banner stats of today (February 10th), so there’s more data to grab. What do you think? And what would you look for in the data?

A joint LinkedIn network graph

2024-12-08T20:16:00.005+01:00

It was quite some time since I last wrote about "social network graphs", but network graphs have been a core interest of mine ever since.

In this post I look at the "joint LinkedIn graph" for a group of nine individuals (of which one is me). I will show a number of network graphs, and explain what we are looking at. The full graph looks like this:

To explain how it is structured we will start with a much smaller and simpler graph:

These nine nodes are the individuals whose "joint LinkedIn network graph" we will look at. The numbers indicate the size of their own LinkedIn network, how many contacts they have. In total these nine individuals have close to 10 400 contacts on LinkedIn. But a number of the contacts are shared, so the complete network consists of almost 9 900 contacts.

The information was submitted over a period of time, with approx a month between the first and the last data set. (Data is from November 2024). The lines (edges) indicate which of the individuals are connected on LinkedIn.

Now we will place these nine nodes in a circle, and fix their positions:

You can see that this graph is fairly "connected", many of the possible edges between nodes are in place, which means that many of these nine individuals are connected on LinkedIn. Out of the 36 possible connections, 22 are made.

The next step is to bring in all of the other, close to 10 000, connections. Most of them are only related to one of the black nodes, and a few hundreds are connected to two or more of the black, seed, nodes, This is the version of the graph that we looked at first in the post:

There is a yellow "aura" around each black node; these are the contacts that are not shared with any other black node.

Then there are green, blue and red nodes - these are the shared contacts. Green nodes are contacts shared between two seed nodes, blue are shared by three and the few red ones are shared by four.

There are clear green clusters on the map, these clusters represent the set of contacts that are shared between two specific seed nodes. All the shared connections serves also as edges between the seed nodes.

If we release the fixed positions of the black nodes, and let all the nodes "self-arrange" (in this case using a force atlas algorithm), we get another version of the graph:

Here the positions also of the black nodes have a semantic meaning, you start to see clusters of the seed nodes based on the shared contacts. As a quick observation - the simplified network with just the seed nodes was quite dense, and did not suggest specific clusters. But using the shared network data the network interaction of the seed nodes starts to emerge.

The number of shared contacts, the number of green, blue and red nodes, is just above 400. And most of them, around 350 ("the green ones"), are only shared between 2 seed nodes. There are just above 50 nodes that are blue and red. One observation is that "most contacts are not shared", out of the almost 10 000 unique nodes most are yellow, unshared. Only a few hundred are shared.

How can these graphs be used? Are there any practical applications of the network view?

"Of course there is", is my simple answer. There are many ways to use this map to navigate. What opportunities do you see? What questions does these visualizations bring into your mind? Bring your thoughts forward in a comment here.

If you are interested in how a shared LinkedIn network look like in your specific context please reach out. If you have a team a shared network map can be created easily if you are most curious on the result. If you and your team would like to learn more about network graph modeling and visualization this type of data is a good starting point, especially since you can relate to the various aspects of your LinkedIn contact network. I am happy to host a workshop for your team!

Synthetic storytelling, the end of shared stories?

2023-06-01T11:56:00.005+02:00

This text leads into an observation about synthetic storytelling, how synthetic storytelling may be defined and what synthetic storytelling might lead to. To get to that point I put forward a storyline, a story told to prepare you and align our contexts, so please “keep reading”.

(And no, this text is not a synthetic story, according to the definition I bring forward further down in the text)

One of the records (as in 33 rpm vinyl LP) that I frequently listened to before the digital era (pre-internet..) contained these text lines in one of the songs:

"If you'd come today you could have reached the whole nation/Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication"

This phrase stuck in my mind, and I can still relate to it when I think of storytelling and communication.

Fast forward to the last decade. I read Sapiens by Yuval Harari. It is a great story about the evolution of humanity and society. (I use the word “story”...) To me the book outlines some possible ways the growth and evolution of the world we know can be explained. The big picture explanations are to some extent perhaps over-simplified, but also very useful as a way to frame the broad dynamics.

Harari ties together a number of emergent innovations (that sometimes can be attributed to a single individual, but often are made possible by the context, and not seldom the same “innovation” occurs in many places independently).

One of the broad stories centers on the emergence of cities. A number of innovations, emerging collective knowledge and behaviors, was needed for cities to spring into existence. Agriculture made production of food efficient enough to supply cities with food. However food is produced outside cities, and needs infrastructure and transportation. Hence roads, both on land and sea roads, are a needed condition for cities to be possible. For the same reason vehicles to transport the food are needed. Once cities emerged another problem needed a solution, humanity has evolved in a context where strangers can be a danger. Dunbar's number is an indication of how large a community we can have a relation across, and a city has more inhabitants than that number (150). In order to hack this limitation religion, more specific one-God religions, evolved. We are less suspicious to friends of friends than to a complete stranger, and as everyone within the same religion has a relationship with God we are all only two relationships away from each other. Religion is an innovation that enables trust between strangers. (Religion also enables other capabilities and behaviors, and not all are as positive as “trust”.) A religion is a joint story, a joint belief, that glues society together. A religion is an intersubjective reality.

Another storyline follows the role of language, and some evolutionary steps in how we use language, and related tooling. Language, or rather the storytelling language enables, has been an evolutionary advantage for humanity. It has propelled the advancement of society over time. Language is the enabler and engine for other major evolutions. Language enables joint stories. Language is an enabler for us to make sense out of reality, which applies to all types of realities including intersubjective realities.

One of the first evolutionary steps of language was the evolution of spoken language. Sometime way back in our history we started to evolve a spoken language. Spoken language was, and still is, a very effective way to evolve joint stories. Joint stories, told by older generations at the campfire, creates a joint context which bonds a tribe together, and the stories told also transfers knowledge between individuals and generations. Spoken language makes it easier for us to learn from others, and relieves us from some of the burden to learn from our own mistakes, compared to the pre-language era.

Spoken language next evolves into written language. This evolves the stories to reach longer, both in spread and in time. A written story remains after the storyteller is gone, and is told over and over again to the reader, without any new effort from the storyteller. The storage of stories and knowledge is no longer dependent on the memory inside our brains, we can hoard knowledge in collections of written stories. And of course the written word does not replace the spoken storytelling, the spoken word also evolves.

A next evolutionary step is the printed word, the innovation of the printing press. Over time this enabled mass-distribution of the printed word. More copies of every story written, more reach. More collections of knowledge (libraries). Shorter time to publish, and the emergence of newspapers with fresh stories at scale. And one important indirect impact was that “print” enabled a broader base of reading and writing ability.

We then see the emergence of broadcast media. Radio, movies, records, television. The possibility of storytelling at scale, with other media than the written/printed word. ("If you'd come today you could have reached the whole nation/Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication".)

The next era in storytelling evolution is the era of the Internet. Suddenly the spread of stories, both written and told using other media, is instant. The Internet era also brings two other components to the mix.

The distribution of stories starts to get influenced by other mechanisms than the earlier dominated “market forces”. Internet enables bespoke content streams, tailored to individuals and groups of individuals. Algorithms enter at scale, and machine learning (ML, sort of “AI”) begins to shape the algorithms.
Not only does the distribution of stories meet a significant lower marginal cost. Also the supply side of stories finds a lower barrier of entry, and a lower marginal cost. Internet has made it easier to contribute with stories to the storytelling arena. The emergence of user generated content and how it evolved into social media are effects of this. On one hand democratizing storytelling, which is not bad. On the other hand this abundance of stories has mixed with recommendation and filtering algorithms in a way that seems to create bubbles and polarization.

In the story on language I leave out the small scale, peer to peer, interaction. Individual interactions are coupled with the storytelling and knowledge exchange capabilities, but I want to put the spotlight on the collective characteristics of storytelling and knowledge collection.

I think the next major step in the storytelling story is what we see today. The past has evolved the way stories have been distributed, the story diffusion. The distribution channels for stories have become more and more efficient. The supply side of stories has all the time been an artisan work, each story needed to be told and developed by someone. Now this is about to change.

You have probably heard of, and even played with, chatGPT. Perhaps you have dug even deeper in the landscape of generative AI. As the term, “generative”, implies it can generate content. It can generate stories. Easily, at scale, with low marginal cost.

Let’s frame this as synthetic storytelling. Stories that are generated in a synthetic way.

Some might argue that “we control and direct the storytelling, with the prompts, the instructions we give the generative AI”. Look closer. In most cases the prompts a short, and the output the stories are long. Synthetically generated.

This change in dynamics has several likely implications on our storytelling evolution:

We will be able to generate personal stories. Stories that are tailored to individual readers, either by the sender, but also increasingly by the reader herself. Bespoke stories. The only one that will read the story is you. End of shared stories.
There will also be an abundance of stories. The floodgates of storytelling just opened. How will we be able to filter out the good stories, the useful stories?
The corollary to the “abundance of stories”-situation is likely that most stories will not be consumed by humans. The stories will be primarily read by another AI, which in “best case” makes a summary for a human. Most stories will perhaps not be read at all, not even by an AI.

The last two scenarios merge together into one, where an abundance of stories are produced and consumed, with no human interaction.

The first scenario is however the most worrying to me. Up to now stories have been a shared experience for humanity. Not only “a shared experience”, but “the shared experience”. Joint stories are an integral part of the history and evolution of humanity and society. Shared stories fuels innovation. Shared stories are the glue that keeps societies together. Within and across generations we have joint stories we can jointly relate to. Over history these stories have propagated around campfires, via oral storytelling, in written text and printed books.

Now we might enter the era of bespoke stories, An era without shared stories.

Every story you read is only read by you. Every book you read is only read by you. Every picture you see is only viewed by you. Every movie you see is only seen by you.

This is the reality of bespoke stories. A scenario generated by the availability of synthetic storytelling.

Of course this is not an “either-or” scenario, or rather - it does not need to be an either-or-scenario. Will synthetic stories blend with shared stories? I do believe that the attention-market dynamics will favor synthetic stories and push away shared stories. We need to actively find a balance, and find mechanisms that ensure a balance.

What is a good balance? In one way it is of course a personal preference, and it needs to be. But it is also a joint preference, as in “what type of society might have good enough chances to continue to thrive”.

But that’s another story. And let’s make that a shared story!

Continuous corporate course corrections

2022-01-16T18:54:00.003+01:00

You have seen The Epic Split, haven’t you?

As a marketing video it was a great success. It went viral. Countless parodies were made (including one from Höganäs kommun).

What captures your attention in the video? The split as such? The celebrity? The music? The sunset? Or the combination of it all? Watch it again.

Did you notice that the trucks are going backwards?

Everyone who has driven a car with a trailer, and tried to maneuver while reversing, will know the challenge. Which way should you turn the steering wheel to make the trailer move to the right? And why is it so hard to simply reverse in a straight line? When you drive a trailer forward you have a stable system. When you drive in reverse you have an unstable system. The approach is not as simple as “turning the steering wheel in the opposite direction compared to where you’d like the trailer to go”. You actually will find yourself doing constant small adjustments in both directions in order to balance the “unstable system”.

Still, when you read about the Epic Split video a majority of the writeup is about the “viral video”-aspect, not about the “driving backwards” aspect. However, the video is after all a commercial for “Volvo Dynamic Steering”, which supports the drivers in the steering. Although I have been told it is easier with a semi-trailer, it is still an achievement to drive the two vehicles in the video backwards, at 25 km/h, while the stunt is performed.

A vehicle with a trailer usually travels forward, as a stable system, and has one degree of freedom (left/right). When occasionally maneuvered backwards it is a challenge to manage this unstable system.

What about a vehicle that is designed to travel in the unstable direction, at high speeds (higher than highway speed), and with more than one degree of freedom to balance (besides left/right also up/down)? Sort of like driving your car with a trailer, backwards, on a highway - but even worse.

One such vehicle is the JAS39 Gripen aircraft. It is designed to have “negative inherent stability in the longitudinal axes for improved performance”.

Not an easy stunt to pull off. You might remember what happened during one of the early flights, or at a public air show..?

Now, what does a pair of trucks and a fighter jet have to do with companies and “continuous corporate course corrections”?

In all three cases they are systems where you cannot simply “decide where to go, and then point the steering wheel in that direction”. You need to do continuous course corrections. Small deviations from the optimal course at every moment tend to self-enforce and throw you further off-track. In order to do continuous course corrections you need continuous feedback data. Feedback data fed and processed with minimum delay. If you correct today's course based on feedback from yesterday you are probably doing the wrong course correction.

The three systems and not exactly the same system, perhaps not even the same category of systems, but they share this joint overall characteristic. In the JAS 39 case there is a processing system that uses the feedback data to aid the pilot. In the Epic Split case it is the drivers that process the feedback data (the dynamic steering system supports in a different way). You can find many articles on how to process feedback data to drive a truck backwards.

What about companies? One of the main methodology areas that are relevant in this context is the area of management systems. A management system is “the way in which an organization manages the interrelated parts of its business in order to achieve its objectives” (which is applicable also to the other two system types). However, a corporate management system is often less “continuous”, and feedback loops often have long delays between the actual event that is measured and the analysis and decision. I argue that a big, and often neglected, part of the popular activity of “digital transformation” is to design a management system that is more natively built upon feedback loops and continuous course corrections than the management system frameworks that are used in a majority of today's organizations.

There are of course exemptions, and some operational frameworks have characteristics of this kind. One such thing is the whole area of “agile”, which is centered around “continuous course corrections”. However, the agile frameworks are struggling to find a scalable approach that enables this across large organizations, without negative side effects.

Once we accept that an organization, and its operations and its business is a complex system we can start to build upon the insights from other similar systems when we evolve the principles of a management system.

What does a management system that natively has these properties look like? How can such a management system be constructed? What existing management system frameworks that fits this description exist? Any ideas? Drop a comment!

(Going back to the start of this post, the Epic Split video is part of a series of promotional videos called “Live Test”. While the Epic Split was the one that went truly viral and the one that made suitable intro to the reasoning in this blog post, I think this one, The Technician, is also worth a look. And perhaps a separate blog post.)

Greetings from 2030 - a time when the oxymoron of ‘sustainable growth’ is, finally, gone

2020-12-13T13:16:00.003+01:00

Dear 2020,

Reading this hopefully gives you hope and trust in the future. There is one! What it looks like we decide, every day. Sometimes it seems to need some magic, but remember that “magic is making the seemingly impossible possible”. There’s a big difference between “seemingly impossible” and “impossible”.

I remember that I watched the advent calendar on the Swedish television back in 2020. Something I hadn’t done for many years. I recall it was an effect of being mainly at home, every day, the full year. You can probably relate to that, even if it feels like a long time ago this shift happened.

The television advent calendar the year of 2020 was a story that included back holes, time travel and sending messages through time. Sending messages ahead in time, into the future. This is something that has been possible from the dawn of humanity.

Sending messages backwards in time is a bit trickier. When did we learn that? Well, “future will tell” :-)

Black holes was also the subject of the Nobel prize in physics back in 2020. (One of the laureates was Roger Penrose, who to me was more known for the Penrose tiling and other less galactic topics.)

2020 was the year when you could more clearly see that we were at the inflection point. A bit clearer than when I last wrote about it. The inflection point is rather an inflection period, a period of time when we shift from one era to another. A period of time during which our actions have a very high impact on the future.

Be aware of this. Also be aware that the inflection period is not over, it continues in 2021 and beyond. But proactive actions are best taken early in the inflection phase. Of course, the uncertainty is even higher in the early phases, so your actions must be guided on principles that embrace the unknown, and the actions must be designed to cater for the unknown.

Giving guidance on how to get to the future, from the future, is very tricky. One reason is that the past, present and future are different reference frames. It’s a bit like telling someone to “turn right”, and getting the opposite result (“they turn left”) because their left is your right. I will however offer you two beliefs of the future that might guide you:

First, “you will get there”, regardless of if you’d like it or not. It is not about “how to get there”, it is about what it looks like. And the future depends on the past, and hence you impact the future with every action you take, collectively.

Second,, a more specific hint: “Rethink growth”. I remember that “sustainable growth” used to be a very popular term, which drove humanity into the inflection period. “Growth” as it used to be defined was a very effective engine to power humanity ahead. All the way into the inflection period. But growth the way we used to think about it is simply not sustainable. All resources on a planet, both the renewable and the non-renewable, are limited. “Sustainable growth” is an oxymoron. Sooner or later a system of growth reaches the limits and the laws of growth starts to break down. This leads to a bifurcation point which decides the future state of the system. Our system, the system of earth and the ecosystem of earth, including humanity. Are we going to “level up” for yet another era, or are we going to be a victim of the great filter in the Fermi paradox (an unimaginable future!)? A key aspect to nudge our path into the wanted future is to redefine “growth” and find a growth metric that guides us into the next era.

A few complementary thoughts:

“Digital assets and digital value creation” are not disconnected from the physical world. In the 2020 era value created on the digital side of the equation still impacts the (unsustainable) utilization of physical resources.
“Technology” is important, but not the key ingredient of a sustainable future. We are leaving the industrial era, in which technology in the 2020 meaning was a central driver. Technology will still be a key part of our lives, just as grain and other agriculture products will be, and is, even after the agricultural era.

And in case you are looking beyond our planet. Yes, there are other planets within reach, and they are richer of resources than we might think. But all other planets within reach lack the most valuable and necessary resource! An ecosystem to be part of. To build up a complete, self-sustaining, ecosystem is a grand challenge that we still do not know if it is an “impossible” or just “seemingly impossible” quest for humanity. And before we know we only have one ecosystem, our planet.

We shape our joint future step by step, day by day and action by action. A learning from the 2020 advent calendar is in its title, Mirakel. Not in its literal meaning (miracle), but it is made up as a synthesis of the past and the present, of the present and the future. The protagonists in the Mirakel story are called Mira and Rakel, and Mirakel is a synthesis. Literally.

The protagonists in our narrative of the future are you, me and everyone else. “Act now”!

Herd Humanity (Flockhumanitet)

2020-05-31T21:52:00.000+02:00

“I read the news today, oh boy”. Flipping through the newspaper is an exploration journey, and weekend mornings are one of the good times for such excursions.

This weekend I found a nugget. Embedded in yesterday paper was an opinion piece, and in the opinion piece this nugget was present two times.

Herd humanity. Flockhumanitet in Swedish.

Let’s carefully detach this little nugget, and bring it into the light for a closer look.

Before we look at the term as such, let us briefly look at the context in which is was found. The opinion piece. The text brings forward the situation of the elderly in the corona context, how 70+ year old individuals in a higher-than-usual-rate are dying in caretaker homes. And are in no or little contact with relatives. A very urgent topic, with no simple solution. (and — this is also the topic for an article in today’s paper).

The opinion piece approached the topic from the role of the Church of Sweden. Also “relevant”, but perhaps not the most useful viewpoint for untangling the underlying wicked problem. (Or actually “system of interlinked wicked problems”, I think.)

Possibly with the exception of “herd humanity”.

I got the feeling that this simple term might open up for a new view on the “wicked problems” and help us find an “even better” approach. Almost like a “silver bullet”, but not in the Mencken way, but simple as in the “simple rulez” way.

Now, let’s have a closer look at “herd humanity” as a term.

It is obvious that “herd humanity” relates to “herd immunity”, which is an often used, and also (likely) an often misused, term in these times.

Incidentally, besides the term “herd humanity” yesterday’s paper also had a good example of “misuse of herd immunity”. In an article an individual states himself to be “herd immune” on his own (“Jag är redan flockimmun”).

I do believe that “herd immunity” is a collective state, not an individual state. Furthermore, it is not a “final state”, but a state you can enter and leave as a collective depending on a number of factors. If there’s any formal definition of herd immunity I think it starts from looking at the measured R of the disease. R is a metric that relates to the spread, not as in “spread speed”, but perhaps like in “spread width”. It can be partly understood as “the number of individuals each person that carries the virus transmits it to” and “R being sustainable below one” might be an approximation of a definition of “herd immunity”. Also part of the scope is that “R” can be different in different clusters.

This is a very rough starting point for the explanation and I will not even try that here… However, I do not think “herd immunity” is in any way an individual state. (Also, “herd immunity” is not a “strategy” in itself — but that’s a parallel potential post.)

This is the context the term herd humanity (flockimmunitet) should be explored. So, here, comes my take:

Herd humanity is a collective state of mind. A complex behavior of a network of humans.
Herd humanity is an emergent characteristic, and cannot be “decided” or “created”.
Herd humanity has not “one single definition”.
I frame herd humanity as a positive thing.
Herd humanity can be observed. Some metrics can likely also be defined and observed. The usable metrics are likely possible both on “herd humanity” as such, and potentially on activities that can increase “herd humanity”.

One such potential metric might be derived from the “pay it forward”-type of behavior. Like “if someone do you a favor, to who many do you pay it forward”. A measurement of reciprocity. The similarity to the R number is somewhat striking. However, in the “herd humanity” case you want an R above 1, while in the “herd immunity” case you want the R to be below 1.

Along this line of thought it might be that “herd humanity” is one potential outcome of the golden rule. And hence, the nugget discovered in the opinion piece might be a “golden nugget”.

Anyway, this is what I read into the term spontaneously. I am probably wrong, especially as in “not the only possible way of framing herd humanity”.

But the term struck a chord with me.

What about you? Any thoughts or ideas?

“See the worst thing about doing this

Doing something like this

Is I think that at first people sort of are a bit suspicious

‘You know, come on, what are you up to?’”

P.S.:

When doing some due diligence research on the term I found nothing except references to the opinion piece when searching for flockhumanitet. When searching for herd humanity there’s some reference to the work of Nietzsche, who seems to view the term as not so positive in his book “Human, All Too Human”. I also found a number of cases where herd humanity was apparently mistakenly used instead of herd immunity. Finally, I also realized that “herd” in “herd humanity” can also be a verb.

Urban legends on Neuralink, a must Musk read

2017-04-30T21:11:00.002+02:00

AI (Artificial Intelligence. But I assume you are aware of this meaning) is a big thing. A mega-big thing. A "we ain't seen nothing yet"-mega big thing. Something that is not easy to wrap your head around.

We have all seen and used AI and related things like ML (Machine Learning). Likely you have also seen and heard about possibilities just around the corner.

But perhaps "we ain't seen nothing yet". We might be at a stage of insight that compares to the future of "AI" the way the first pre-wheel, rolling log, make-it-easier-to-move-stuff, implementation compares to the worldwide systems of logistics of today.

The short version seems to be that AI will happen and will change everything, big time. Hopefully in a good way but the risks are not the usual ones. And if that is the case, what shall (and can) we do to increase the likleyhood that the outcome is "positive"?

A man, a plan, a canal - but not Panama

Enter Elon Musk, who is behind both Tesla and SpaceX. Elon Musk has raised concerns around the AI evolution, and also eg sponsored OpenAI.

The man has a plan. He also has a canal, or rather channel, for the initial announcement and outline of the new venture Neuralink. He chose a blog and a blogger.

Perhaps an unusal channel for an introduction (and, sure, I would not be surprised if more traditional channels was used as well - but I am not aware of any and most coverage refers to the WaitButWhy blog post).

And, make no mistake, this is not a usual blog, nor a usual blog post. It's long. It's good. It's a must read. And again long. It was posted just over a week ago, and it took me five days to get through it. (OK, it is not that long. I did other things as well during these days.)

If you have read earlier posts on WaitButWhy.com the choice by Elon Musk might not be all that surprising. Tim Urban (the blogger at WaitButWhy) already wrote a number of posts on Elon Musk and his earlier ventures, on a direct request from Elon Musk (start here), as well as a two piece blog post on AI which is another great read.

But if you only read one of the posts - read the WaitButWhy.com post on Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future. It will help you wrap your head around AI and one approach that might prevent a singularity type existential risk.

The Musk Business Canvas

During your reading journey you will come across this image, the Elon Musk Company Formula according to Tim Urban.

Image from WaitButWhy.com by Tim Urban. Used with permission.

You will find the canvas in the fourth chapter of the rad blog post, where this canvas is populated with both the Tesla and the SpaceX rationale.

If you have ever thought about the drivers of Elon Musk, or the concept of Massive Transformative Purposes, you will see how this canvas fits into the puzzle.

Don't get fooled by the lower left blue circle with the words "Starting Point". It is not the starting point. The canvas work starts in the upper right corner. The starting point for the canvas work in the Neuralink case is the "increased chance for a good future" in the context of AI.

In order to find the answers to the "how", "why" and other questions, go ahead and read. The reading will take you through the background and the population of the boxes in the canvas. You will read that "democracy is like escaping from a monster by hiding in a sewer", an you will learn things you didn't know. But take your time, you will need it.

And the ending is an interesting way of viewing AI: "in a future world made up of AI and everyone else, he [Elon Musk] thinks we have only one good option: To be AI."

(The short version of this blog post: Read the WaitButWhy.com post on Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future. Why? Read this blog post.)

Lost and found

2017-01-26T01:13:00.003+01:00

Most of us have spent time looking for something we needed to locate. Be it the car keys, that important paper or something else we urgently need.

Sooner or later that lost thing often turns up. With a bit of luck before the opportunity where the thing that is lost is needed.

In order to find the lost item fast enough most of us applies some kind of search, be it structured or more unstructured.

And everytime we search that lost thing is located in the last place we would search.

Naturally it is. Why would we look any further once we found what we are looking for? That wouldn't be rational.

We stop looking when we find the solution to the problem. That is the rational thing to do. But it is also a problem. Sometimes it is even "the problem". It might even be an irrational thing to do.

If you have a problem that needs a solution, it is very easy to stop looking when you find the solution. But likely you haven't found the solution, just a solution.

How do you know that there's a better solution, if you just keep looking? The problem is that you don't, so it wouldn't be rational to continue looking. But think again, compare with your experience from the past. How many times have you, sooner or later, identified a better solution after a while?

So how long should you then keep looking?

In the case of a simple problem like the car keys, the answer is obvious (or at least seems obvious). But there might be an other type of answer, and in order to identify that we return to the time before you found the car keys, or a solution to whatever type of problem you try to solve.

What thoughts went through your mind at that point in time? Perhaps thoughts like "where did I (mis)place the keys?", "when did I see them last?" or even "who took my keys!?".

Or did you search for the solution (sorry, the car keys) while at the same time looking for an alternative solution? "If I do not find the car keys I need to take the bus, and in that case I need to stop searching in 45 mins and instead walks to the bus station." Or "if I do not find the car keys I can call my friend and ask for a ride".

If you continiously look for altetrnative solutions some magic starts to happen.

You will likely find an alternative solution before you find the car keys.
When you have a backup, alternative solution, you are not as stressed for finding the expected solution (the car keys).
And, in the general case, you realize that the expected solution is just one alternative solution among others, some of which known now, some of which will emerge in the future.

This is a liberating experience. And mind-blowing. It's the solution to all problems ;-)

(Some might draw the parallel to "parallel computing", or even with phenomena like quantum physics and Schroedinger's cat - but that's up to you. Just be careful, it might lead into a parallel universe or a higher dimension!)

So, next time you found what you where looking for, keep looking. You should constantly look for things. And at the same time you always will have an alternative solution ready.

Now, where are those car keys..?

Cleese on Creativity

2016-04-20T21:12:00.004+02:00

Serendipity is a great thing. Tomorrow I will be in the audience when John Cleese is on stage, and when I mentioned that at the lunch table today I was recommended to look for an old video where John Cleese talked about creativity.

Which I did. And I found several.

Two of the videos caught my attention, One shorter (approx 10 mins) and a longer one (more than 30 mins). Both are highly recommended, and I suggest that you enjoy them in this order. (Both videos are embeded at the end of this post.)

Cleese elaborates around two modes; open and closed - and that creativity mood only can appear in the open mode.Suggestions on how to enter the open mode and unlock the creativity are given, and complemented with the note that actual creative insights sometimes (often) appears after the visit in the "tortois enclosure".

The shorter video is not dated, but might be from 2010. The longer video seems to be from 1991. It is fascinating to compare the overall messages and note how similar the stories are, but still performed differently - not only in the length of the talks.

There's a lot of take-aways from these talks, and I am sure you will both recognize some aspects, get ideas on how to move into the mood of creativity found in the open mode and - above all - enjoy the talks as such.

So - enjoy the videos, I did. And I will enjoy John Cleese live tomorrow, regardless if any lightbulb jokes are included. I am sure it will be a creative performance by a very creative comedian and public speaker.

Metrics; why Ratios are not always Rational

2015-12-04T16:54:00.000+01:00

Here are 16 minutes you definately do not want to miss.

Clayton Christensen takes you on a journey to explain why the interest rates on eg our homes are so low. And indicates why the reason for them to be low should make us worried.

It starts of with a classification of innovation into three classes. Then hops into metrics and how we mesure things. Finally ending in the connection to the interest rates, after a brief detour over to Japan.

There's a lot of take-aways in here. But the importance of metrics, and how we measure things, is central.

It is rare to find a very complex line of reasoning presented in a very understandable way. It is even rarer to find a few of the simple rules that guides the behaviour of a complex system neatly identified and presented, in a way that makes the connection almost obvious.

Exploiting externalities exponentially

2015-10-04T17:17:00.001+02:00

How can we ensure that exponential activities don't create and exploit new and old negative externalities?

A while back I finished reading the book ”Exponential Organizations”.

If you haven’t read Exponential Organizations the “slide version” is here, and slide 32 is the one-slider that summarizes the concept:

Exponential Organizations - Why new organizations are 10x better, faster and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) from Yuri van Geest

To me the most fundamental part of the concept is on the next slide:

This post is however not about Purpose-driven organizations, nor about how Purpose can drive a scale-free behaviour and experience.

Instead, this post is about a passage on the very first page of the book, in the foreword:

Salim has studied and interviewed CEOs and entrepreneurs whose companies are leveraging a newly available set of externalities and, as a result, scaling their organizations at many times the normal rate of typical companies.

The key phrase is "leveraging a newly available set of externalities".

Even though externalities can be both positive and negative, the most infamous set of externalities are the negative ones. Like getting rid of waste by dumping it somewhere.

A few days ago I read a post by "the undercover economist", Tim Harford. That post also touches upon the potential externalities that a multi-sided, peer-to-peer, market with exponential characteristics may cause and explore, on both of the market sides.

Tim Harford further more hints on a way to view such markets; as an arbitrage game where the price differences in a specific market (and thus an inefficient market) are exploited.

But he also indicates the positive values for a broader community that peer-to-peer markets creates; the activity adds fluidity (and thus a more efficient market is the result) and it creates a mechanism that can take care of peaks, eg on the demand side.

However, the question around externalities remains. A near zero-marginal cost society will create more exponential businesses. And a key component in exponential activities is to leverage externalities.

How can we ensure that exponential activities don't create and exploit new and old negative externalities?

Two cats, two antipodes and the Networked Society Gini

2015-08-16T12:28:00.003+02:00

Describing a future scenario is tricky. Time travel is even harder than time management. Any predictions you make seems affected by quantum mechanics in the large scale. Both Heisenberg and Schrödinger are hovering over the keyboard, along with your own thoughts.

But the quantum theories also come to your rescue. Just like the poor cat of Schrödinger, who is neither dead nor alive but both at the same time, the future is in a dual state until the future unfolds and we observe and take part of it. In order to map the future onto the cat we only need to identify the two states the future could have. What is the “dead or alive” equivalent of our future?

The Networked Society
In order to find these states we will look into the core of the Networked Society, of which we are “at the inflection point”.

What is the Networked Society? As it is part of the future that already has begun, we would like to understand what defines it.

It started out as a statement of “50 billion connected devices”, a great business outlook for companies like Ericsson.

As the Networked Society unfolded, marketing took over and told a large number of stories. Stories that showed that the Networked Society was unfolding in a fast pace, and provided benefits for individuals and the society. Access to an all communicating world becomes easier and cheaper, and the flow of data and media become both faster and more enriched.

In short, the marginal cost of communications went down.

At this stage the next level of insight of a networked society strikes.

A networked society is a near zero marginal cost society. And not only in the IT and ICT areas, but in every aspect of the networked humanity.

Read the last paragraph again.

A near zero marginal cost society.

Sounds innocent, but at this stage another cat appears. The Cheshire cat.

Entering a near zero marginal cost society scenario is like following Alice down the rabbit whole, or through the looking glass. You will recognize what you see, but the logic has changed. Completely changed.

In this strange world of a near zero marginal cost society, what is the “dead or alive” states of the future cat? What extreme endpoints will define a relevant dimension which will describe the potential state of the future?

For this I will not put a cat in a box, but a Gini in a bottle.

The Gini endpoints

Let’s use the endpoints of the Gini coefficient as the antipodes of our scale.

(Actually, I use the Gini term broader than the original one. I project the whole distribution and consumption of resources on the scale, and I also include other nodes than "individuals" in my mental compilation . I realize that this merrits a separate blog post. But that's for the future ;)

The Gini = 1 endpoint

As the transaction cost is included in the overall marginal cost, also the transaction cost will be close to zero. This will not only speed up the evolution, it will also strengthen the forces that powers the Pareto law.

This can lead to a well-known scenario in futuristic literature and movies; one or a few very large entities control everything. The entities could be a foundation, corporations or states.

This is a “Winner takes it all”-scenario. Imagine that as marginal costs gets close to zero, the market forces will bring down the prices. And as transaction costs for information also goes down the information will flow fast, and thus the only way to get a competitive advantage and be able to charge a premium is to establish a monopoly. And as the network effect goes across all industries the monopoly will not be in a niche market, but ultimately across the whole society.

The Gini = 0 endpoint

What about the other end of the scale? This is an "equal distribution" scenario. The same forces; close to zero marginal cost and close to zero transaction costs, could potentially power also this extreme end.

One way to view this is that “as marginal costs are almost zero the prices will be zero, and thus everyone can afford everything”. And the low transaction costs keeps that balance across the whole economic system, very much like the fact that the sea level is constant (well, almost…) across the ocean.

“Dead or alive”? For the cat “dead” is in most cases seen as the bad scenario, and “live” as a god outcome. On the Gini scale, which one of the extremes is the good, and which one is the bad endpoint? The answer for the Gini scale is not that obvious, and depends also on other parameters.

Also, in the case of Schrödinger’s cat the extremes are mutually exclusive. The cat ends up either dead or alive. The Gini scale is a continuous scale. Neither the “most likely outcomes” as nor the “most wanted outcomes” are found at the endpoints (I strongly believe). But where?

Well, we'll see

The future will tell. But we can shape the storyline and create our common future.

Given that the Networked Society is at the inflection point, that a networked society is a near zero marginal cost society and that it is all fuelled by transaction costs closing towards zero – a really interesting and challenging scenario - what shall we do?

As individuals and as part of a networked society we can, we must and we shall take an active part in shaping the future.

The future begins with us. Here and now.

Disclosure and disclaimer: I do work at Ericsson. However this post, and this blog as a whole, are my personal views and opinions, not those of my employer.

Facebook. The Feed, the Filter and the Firehose.The Flaw and the Fix.

2015-02-09T20:18:00.001+01:00

Sometimes you see something that is interesting and useful. Occasionally it also explains both how to fix the symptoms of an issue, as well as trigger you to understand why the issue causing the symptoms is there in the first place. Something that triggers a strong "Aha-moment". In very rare cases such an Aha moment makes you finally write a new post for your old blog.

A few weeks ago I watched a four minutes long video by Robert Scoble . Now I am writing this blog post.

Facebook
Facebook needs no further introduction. Not everyone has an account, true. But many have. Our feelings for Facebook could probably be categorized as a "love/hate paradox" to some extent.

Regardless - Facebook has a central role in many people's online activities. What we see or not see in our Facebook feed matter.

The Feed
Most of us the central functionality of Facebook is the endless feed filled with updates and shared content from our Facebook friends and from Facebook pages you "like". However, the feed does not show every update from your connections.

One reason for this is that not everything in your feed is interesting. Facebook wants to maximize your pleasure when you are facebooking, in order to enhance your urge to return and spend more time inside Facebook. One way to maximize your Facebook experience is to ensure that the mix of new updates you see contains as few uninteresting items as possible

The Filter
Therefore a filter learns what you enjoy the most. It identifies both which friends you are most likely to interact with, and what type of posts that are most likely to engage you. The filter then this learning to show you the items you are most likely to like.

Many users know about the setting to toggle between "Top Stories" and "Most Recent" for the News Feed.

However none of these will give you the firehose. Both of these options will give you a selection based on what the filter believes you want.

The Firehose
What is "the firehose"?

It is basically "all social updates from everyone". In most cases "something you don't want to drink from". Many social platforms only provide the firehose under certain conditions.

In the context of this blog post firehose refers to all updates from all your social connections on Facebook.

Even so, your personal Facebook firehose is very likely to contain a lot more than you usually see.

The Flaw
So, what is the flaw? Is there a flaw?

The risk is obviously that the filter filters out things you'd like to see.

And - as the filter gets more and more trained, it is likely to show you things it has learned that you like. From that position the continuous training of the filter will be based on things you see in your feed and interacts with. And thus things that the filter sorts out and doesn't include in your feed are less likely to get interacted with by you.

One scenario is that your feed content gets more and more monoculture-ish.

Now, the structure of the "filter" facebook uses (formerly known as Edgerank) is complex and for sure includes aspects to counteract the bias over time.

Nevertheless. The feed you see is only a subset fo what your social connections do on Facebook.

The Fix
In the case you want to enjoy your personal firehose there is a way to achieve this, as it seems. This is what's described in the video I mentioned in the beginning. If you haven't viewed it yet, now is the time:

Post by Robert Scoble.

Social graphs - scary and beautiful

2012-02-16T13:14:00.003+01:00

If you are on Facebook you might have seen pictures from your friends where they post their "social graph"? These are indeed beautiful illustrations of your friend's network, and below I point to a few of the available "click and view" apps that will do this for you.

From all of these you will be able to quickly get an overview of your social network, and often you will be able to identify groups among your friends. As a bonus you will also find a tool that displays your social graph on LinkedIn.

But these are not only nice visualizations. They also invite to a moment of thought on how much a simple list of your friends, and how your friends know each other, can reveal. After presenting three visualization tools for Facebook I'll discuss a bit more about this. But first the tools:

myFnetwork
This visualization is the simplest of the tools. No interactivity, but you can zoom and pan around in the picture. Individual nodes are colour-coded based on some centrality measurement - the more yellow/white, the more connected to the surrounding nodes.

All nodes are placed in a circular patten, and you can identify some of the major clusters among your friends.

You can try myFnetwork here (link).

Social graph

This tool provides some interactivity, and includes the image of each friend in the visualization. The clusters of friends are more easily explorable, and some of the more obvious clusters are highlighted with pink circles.

You can hoover over a node to see the name of that specific friend. A click on a node will bring you to the corresponding Facebook profile. By clicking and holding down the mouse button you can grab a node and move it around to see which other nodes/friends that are connected.

Try Social graph here (link).

TouchGraph

The last Facebook tool to visualize you social graph is also the most advanced.

It does a nice job in colour-coding different clusters in your network and gives the nodes different sizes (which seems to be related to the number of friends in your network (degree)).

The graph is interactive, and can be configured and explored in a number of ways. Note that by default it also includes yourself as a node, but that can be changed in the advanced settings.

TouchGraph can be found here (link).

Some theory...
All of the graphs above are sometimes referred to as egocentric, level 1.5, social graphs. This means that the start form an ego (you) - but as you are obviously connected to all your friends it doesn't add any information to include yourself (rather, including yourself will in many cases make the network structure less obvious). 1.5 means that the network includes all of your friends (level 1), and how your friends are connected to each other (level 1.5). A level 2 would mean including all of your friend's friends, also those that not are connected to you. This has some further value, but on the other hand the Facebook API does not provide access to this information, and the number of nodes would quickly be very large.

It is quite obvious that by only looking at your friends, and how they know each other, you find some interesting patterns. Especially the groups (clusters) usually match very well to real life social groups.

The clusters are most often visualized by a combination of a layout algorithm, where groups will form, and by specific algorithms designed to calculate clusters.

With other tools you can take the analysis to the next level - there is a number of metrics that can be applied to these kind of graphs - but that is probably a topic for a future blog post.

...and the scary part!
Well, isn't the scary part clear by now?

Simply by looking at your friends, and how they are connected to each other, a lot can be seen. The relationship and context of a specific friend can be deducted in many cases. If you know one node that is in your family, you are likely to find the other family members in the same cluster.

Probably obvious to you, but as your social graph information is more or less openly available (on Facebook, but also on LinkedIn, Twitter and other networks) it is not that hard for anyone to have a closer look. And of course the network operator have a very nice picture of you - not only from what you "post and like", but especially from your social graph.

The bonus - a LinkedIn tool
Oh - yes - I promised you to also include a tool to visualize your social graph on LinkedIn. You can find the tool here (link). It is very similar to the other tools above, but instead looks at your LinkedIn social graph.

The main difference, besides the nodes and network as such, is that this tool include yourself as a node.

It does a good job in identifying clusters in your more professional network. (Note, you need at least 50 connections on LinkedIn to be able to use it).

Now it's your turn
Go ahead and try one or more of the social graph visualization tools I mention here. I'd love to hear your viewpoints, just leave a comment!

Also, if you know any other nice tool to visualize various social graphs I'd be interested.

Lunch, anyone?

2011-11-29T13:56:00.007+01:00

It's not often I get excited enough over a new web site to jump into the editor and write a blog post immediately. This is however one such occasion.

In my feeds today I noticed several references to a new web site: YouGuysShouldLunch.com (or LunchaIhop.se in Swedish). Give it a try!

I haven't looked elsewhere, and there might very well be similar services around (if so, let me know in the comments).

However, there's several reasons that make me think this is simply brilliant, besides that the man behind (Jonas Larsson, @byBalsam) is from Sweden:

The way it brings your online network of contacts into real world, physical meetings.
You can't include yourself in a lunch proposal. You need to think seriously around who of your contacts you want to put together, and not simply propose a lunch with you and a friend.
The use of LinkedIn indicates that "it's serious business" and provides both easy access to the professional background of a proposed lunch date. You are also likely to have some kind of professional relationship to the people you put together for a lunch date.
It is a nice usage of the LinkedIn API. Mashups are great...
The site has both a Swedish and an English version, with different domains. Nice detail.
The logo indicates it can be a simple lunch, doesn't need to be at a fancy restaurant.
...and the list goes on with many small details.

However, the really neat thing is that this service is also one of the best and creative "I'm looking for a new job"-pitches I have seen. Ever.

As Jonas writes on his blog, he will leave his current assignment at the end of the year. One of the options when you pair together lunch dates is to invite one of your contacts to lunch with Jonas himself. He even provides a wish-list of people he would like to have lunch with.

No doubt he will have his calendar full of lunches the next months, and a bunch of interesting new job opportunities.

(Unless he builds a business around this initiative. Already valuable and interesting with several potential new things to add: How to find a good time for lunch (integrate with calendars), Where to lunch (find a good, close, spot by integrating with restaurant guides and maps).)

So - what are you waiting for? Which of your LinkedIn contacts do you think should have lunch together? (And who do you think I should have lunch with?)

The Pareto (80/20) rule and time management - the fallacy

2011-03-04T10:56:00.003+01:00

The Pareto rule (or Pareto principle), also known as the 80/20 rule, is often used when discussing time management. However I do believe there's some flaws when applying the Pareto principle to time management, and I'll try to sort them out here.

The argument within time management often goes (after introducing the 80/20 rule):

"Thus, since 80% of you achievements comes from 20% of your work, you shall strive to focus more on you time and effort on those (current) 20%."

Right? Not!
At least I don't think so.

Don't get me wrong - time management is useful. But we shouldn't apply the Pareto rule here. Instead it all boils down to "do the important stuff first", but you should also be serendipitous.

There's a few potential and actual flaws that can be identified, but first - let's have a closer look at the Pareto principle.

The Pareto principle and power laws
The Pareto principle was named after Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.

In a broader scope the Pareto principle is an effect of power law distributions, or more specifically - the 80/20 characteristics is a property of some classes of power law distributions.

Power laws are quite interesting, and well worth a deeper look (which I will spare you for the moment). For our purposes here we will note two things though:

Phenomena described by power law distributions are scale-free, ie shows scale invariance. This means that the phenomena will always show a power law distribution, regardless of how you "zoom in" when you look.
Power law distributions are an indication of a system in a critical state, or a system which shows self-organized criticality.

If you have looked into eg chaos theory, or read eg The Black Swan or Ubiquity, you will recognize that such systems are not predictable in the terms that we normally are used to with systems that shows a Gaussian random behavior. The changes are not distributed around an "average value". Instead the changes can be very large or very small, without any predictable size.

Now, let's have a look at the time management 80/20 fallacies...

False analogy (?)
The first objection - can you apply the knowledge from Italian land distribution to time management, or is this a false analogy?

To be honest; I'm not sure. I wouldn't be surprised if "how you spend your time" shows a power law distribution.

But I haven't seen any study proving this. Just because we "know that we spend a lot of time (80%?) on things that are not really productive (20%?)" it doesn't mean we have a Pareto distribution.

I would be happy if you can point me at studies that confirms that we do have a power law situation (or disproves...)!

But let's assume that we indeed have a Pareto distribution, and that the 80/20 rule do apply! What would this mean?

We will still have an 80/20 situation...
...even after we have done our "time management homework".

Remember that the Pareto distribution (and power laws in general) means that we have a scale-free behavior. Thus, after having cut of the "non-productive tail" of our efforts, the "productive head" (ie the 20% of our efforts that produces 80% of the value) will still have the 80/20 property!

What now? Should we iterate, and again cut of the tail (pony-tail?) of the head?

Also, how do we know that our initial 80/20 distribution isn't the result of a previous (unconscious) time management activity? Where should we start, and when should we end?

We don't know what will make up the "tail"
Another property of systems showing a Pareto/power law distribution is the unpredictability.

Yes, we should be able to analyze our past schedule, find the patterns and identify which part of our time was the unproductive tail.

However, if we do have a Pareto situation, it is not possible to foresee if any of the past "valuable time" eventually will be worthless, or if any of the potential "time wasters" will turn out to be the next big thing.

And it's all interconnected...
The last thing to note is that you activity that you'll trying to time manage consists of a number of smaller tasks. These tasks are not independent of each other, they all interrelate.

Going back to the theory, we can note that self-organized criticality is a property of some complex systems. "A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behavior among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts"

Thus it would be impossible in most cases to filter out the less productive activity and foresee how the non-execution of that activity would affect your overall productivity, especially how it would affect your more productive time.

This might sound too theoretical, but it is easy to see the connection to eg the value of collaboration and networking.

Perhaps those 15 unproductive minutes you spend with a colleague drinking coffee and chatting will result in that a piece of information you picked up in the chat saved you two hours of work later?
Perhaps those 10 minutes you invested in helping a colleague solving a task not relevant for your performance will result in getting help later from that colleague, again saving you hours of work? (Not mentioning that those 10 minutes of your expertise you invested probably saved an hour of your companies overall time that your colleague would have spent on their own trying to find a solution).

The summary, and the common sense of time management
So, I don't think the 80/20 reasoning shall be applied to time management, at least not the way it is most commonly done today.

First, please prove to me that we do indeed have a Pareto distribution here.

Second, if we do have a Pareto distribution, whats' the implications of that?

But as I said in the beginning - time management is important, of course. But to me it all boils down to:

Focus on the important things...
And define what you mean by important. Most valuable? Most fun? Best investment for the future? Most urgent? Also, define "for whom". For you? For your stakeholder? (And who are they?) For the society?
Tricky questions perhaps, but to me this are the important time management questions to have in mind.
...and be serendipitous
Be open for new things, you'll never know when and how they will come in handy.
Remember that it is often in the intersection of different fields or activities that the really valuable new thoughts and insights emerge.
And you'll never know what the impact and future value of an activity that seems less valuable today might be tomorrow.

Where do all good ideas come from..?

2010-10-07T12:25:00.003+02:00

...turns out that coffee *is* a good source, for two reasons...

I just discovered two videos with Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson) that are worth a few minutes. Also, he has recently published a book on the topic (Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation), which I have added to my "to-read"-list.

First, here's an animated version of the story:

Next, here's a talk at TED by Steven Johnson. In here you will find out the two reasons coffee might be good for creating ideas (one was revealed in the video above).

Also, don't miss the story of how the embryo of GPS sprung out of the Sputnik launch in the 50's. This story is told at the end of the TED talk.

Four million Facebook users in Sweden - some statistics

2010-09-02T10:44:00.011+02:00

Yesterday Facebook reached four million users in Sweden.As I have looked into the statistics and demographics at the one, two and three million mark I'm continuing the tradition with this post.

In Sweden 44% of the population are active on Facebook. It is especially interesting to note that more and more of the Facebook users are 40+ old.

In the age group 15-64 we see that 61% of the Swedes are active on Facebook. If you had any doubt, Facebooking has for sure become a mainstream activity.

The evolution over time
The graph below show the number of Swedish users on Facebook since the 25th of October 2007:The one-million mark was passed on October 31st, 2007. Almost 71 weeks later (March 8th, 2009) the two-million mark was reached. It took 41 more weeks to reach three million users (on Dec. 21st, 2009). The latest million of users, up to four million, took 36 weeks and was reached yesterday (Sep. 1st, 2010).

The gender distribution
Overall in Sweden 48.6% of the Swedish Facebook users are female, 45.1% are male and 6.3% have not defined their gender.

A further breakdown of the gender distribution per age group is in this graph:

The age distribution
The penetration per age is displayed in this chart:

The 100+ percent penetration between 14 and 23 years of age probably have a number of reasons, including:

You have to be 13 to sign up for Facebook. If you are younger you'll probably fake your age. And once you have set your birth year you can't change it (you can change the date and month though...).
It might also be that people maintain two or more Facebook accounts.

What do you think?

...and not only the youth on Facebook...
It's clear from the graph above that Facebook is used across the whole population. The penetration does not fall below 50% until the age of 42, and all the way up to the age of 60 the penetration is over 20%.

It is interesting to compare the penetration per age group today with previous occations. The chart below shows the penetration per age group at the stage where the number of Swedish Facebook users passed 1, 2, 3 and 4 million users:

Another way to view the data is to look at the accumulated penetration as we go from the younger to the elderly:

Initially (at one million users, the blue line) 80% of the users where younger than 30 years. Now (4 million users, green line) we find that we have to move to the 40-44 years segment to cover 80 percent of the users.

That's it for the 4 million report. Now let's see if (or when..?) Sweden reaches 5 million users on Facebook.

Any thoughts? Will the growth continue? Or will another site start to replace Facebook as "the place to hang out".

(Note 1: the number of users is measured through the Facebook advertising tool. Although it is not clearly stated what criteria is used to classify users, the best guess is that A) the tool measures active users, which probably means users that have logged in the last month and B) The nationality is to a large degree decided by looking at the IP-address range of the user.

Note 2: The data on the age structure of the Swedish population I used to calculate the penetration is from SCB. However, the latest data on the age structure of Sweden available as of today is the structure for 31st of December 2009. After some consideration I took the liberty to use that data, but to add 1 to all ages. Clearly this is only an approximation of the current age structure, but as eight month has passed since Dec. 31st I believe that is to some extent a better approximation.)

Gothenburg and Facebook - what's up?

2010-06-09T12:16:00.004+02:00

I just had a quick look at the regional/local statistics for Facebook in Sweden. To my surprise Gothenburg seems really underrepresented.And yes - I also used Gothenburg (and even Goteburg) as search terms - all gave a similar figure.

As a comparison - the same search for Stockholm returns more than 2.6 million people (far more than the official population in the region?) and for Malmö it returns 234 000 people.

The official population of Gothenburg is just above 500 000 individuals (Gothenburg is the 2nd largest city in Sweden).

How come? Any ideas? Could it be that:

People in Gothenburg doesn't use Facebook and social networking sites to a large extent?
Perhaps there's another social networking site which is large in Gothenburg?
People in Gothenburg would rather not state that they live in Gothenburg?
A slightly more technical possibility - Facebook uses, among other things, the user's IP address to decide the geographical location. Perhaps the Internet connections in Gothenburg are routed through Stockholm or some other place?

I'm stumped and surprised. What do you say? Do you have any Facebook friends from Gothenburg to ask..?

Copyleft or copy-theft?

2010-04-01T13:06:00.000+02:00

Creative Commons and Noncommercial use - what does it really mean? Can you help me understand this?

Please take the time to answer this poll (link) - I will post a summary when I get sufficient number of replies.

You might be familiar with Creative Commons and how they:

provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily
mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can
use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some
Rights Reserved."

Creative Commons works with four basic attributes, which are combined into a specific license:

Now, it's the "Noncommercial" I need your help with. (Again, here's the poll where I would love your feedback!)

How shall "Noncommercial" vs. "Commercial" purposes be interpreted? Is there a clear definition?

It is pretty clear that you can't sell somewith which is licensed as "Noncommercial". Ie, you can not make a postcard or a T-shirt of a non-commercial picture and sell it.
On the other hand I guess you can make a T-shirt and wear it yourself, or make a postcard and send to you friends?
Can you make a postcard or T-shirt and give it away? To your personal friends? On behalf of your employeer? If a corporation gives something away, even for free, it is in many cases a commercial reason for this.

It is quite common to apply a copyright model that let people reuse and embed content from the Internet (eg video files) given certain conditions. In many cases this includes a condition that the content "may only be used for non-commercial purposes".

At a first glance the interpretation of this sounds obvious. But beware, the definition of "Non Commercial" might not be as obvious as you thought. The interpretation is not crystal clear, and the formal meaning is in many cases more narrow than you might intend - both as a content creator, granting a "Non Commercial" license and as publisher/user, using "Non Commercial" content.

Let's have a look at the topic, starting with Creative Commons and then moving to some examples.

Creative Commons
Have a look at Creative Commons and the set of licenses they offer for creators and contributors that are looking for a crisp and clear way to apply a copyleft approach (rather than copyright) to their works and creations. In essence, this allows creators to apply a "some rights reserved" license to their works.

One of the attributes that can be part of a Creative Commons license attribution is the Non Commercial (NC) tag. Three out of the six available CC licenses includes this tag.

Now, what is meant by the NC tag? It turns out that this is not as obvious and straight forward as you would wish.

The license attribute
The short version of the Noncommercial attribute reads:

You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.

When you dig into the small print of the more legal version of a CC license including the NC attribute you find the text:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You [in Section 3 above] in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

What does this mean?

The key phrase is "primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation".

This phrase is not as clear as you would wish, and in many cases I believe the practical interpretation applied by individuals differs. Especially as many probably doesn't read the fine print, and instead relies on the even more open-ended phrasing "noncommercial purposes only" in the Noncommercial attribute.

The problematic word seems to boil down to "primarily".

Primarily or Secondarily?

How do you define what's primarily and what's secondarily..?

Consider a few examples:

Private use:

You have a blog where you post "funny things" just for the fun of it.
You have a blog where you post "funny things" just for the fun of it. Also, just for the fun of it, you included some ads on the blog.
You know that you'll probably not make any money from the ads (best case a few dollars a year). The reason you included ads are not to make money, but something else (like "I'd like cool ads on my blog" or "I'm trying to understand how ads work technically").
You have a blog where you post "funny things" just for the fun of it. The blog is hosted at a site that includes ads automatically (like eg. Facebook).
The reason the ads are there is to finance the (free) service that hosts your blog.
You have a blog where you post "funny and useful things". The aim is to make yourself more attractive to employ.

Corporate use:

You are posting to a corporate, external blog. The aim of the blog is to promote the "know-how" of the company and to attract new customers.
You are posting to a corporate, external blog. The aim of the blog is to build the perception and brand of the company. All sales goes through other channels.
You are posting to a blog on your company's intranet. The aim is to share knowledge, which in the end might make your company more efficient and competitive.
You are posting to a corporate, external blog. The company is a non-profit organization, but you still charge for your services in order to finance the activities you do to eg. support victims of various disasters. The aim of the blog is to promote the "know-how" of the company and to attract new customers.

In which of the above cases would it be OK to use content with the Non-commercial attribution? Have your say in this poll.

A study from Creative Commons
Creative Commons published a report September 2009 on this topic, looking into how the online community defines and perceives the term Noncommercial. Interesting and recommended reading - but no clear conclusion of the definition. Read the announcement here.

Conclusions?
So, what's your take on the definition of Noncommercial? A no-brainer or a can of worms?

How do you apply the definition, or don't you you see this as applicable to you?

Please drop a comment below, and contribute to the poll!

Source criticism criticism

2010-02-25T13:30:00.005+01:00

A few weeks ago the site Internetkunskap.se went live, with the aim to publish a number of videos to enhance the Internet knowledge and competence among school kids in Sweden.

A good initiative, which fills a need.

But, last week Internetkunskap.se published the second video about internet source evaluation (källkritik). Obviously an important topic in the context. However, the video has a major flaw.

"How to validate a search result..?"
About two minutes into the film a search is made to find out which city is the capital of Brazil. The first search result is from Wikipedia, and suggests that the capital is Brasilia. So far so good, but as the topic of the video is how to evaluate information found on Internet the film goes on. Next follows a discussion on that you can't trust a search result as such, but then..

"...click on the search result and read the page!"
About three minutes into the video we are ready to verify that Brasilia indeed is the capital city of Brazil. And the best way to do that is to click on the search result and read on the site that Brasilia is the capital. Right... (Not, of course...)

This small lapse hurts the overall impression in a number of ways.

It makes you look for other weaknesses in the video
And there are some to be found...
The most critical one is the lack of any discussion on the type of source (ie that Wikipedia is editable by anyone) or the need to identify the publisher and the intention of the publisher.
It makes you wonder about the overall project
Will the other films have similar flaws? What's the intention and target group? And who is really behind the site (source criticism...)?
Have a look at the first and third movie as well. And look for the upcoming ones.
It might be the takeaway for the target group
"I have done my "källkritik", I clicked in the search result and read it" (Not the sole message from the video, but an easy one to catch...)

The video discusses the need to provide references for information, and to get as close as the original source as possible. But it doesn't come anywhere near discussing "källkritik" as an academic/scientific method. (Or actually, the films shows this, but I feel the reference is misplaced in the overall context provided by the video).

I originally found it a bit humorous, and a nice touch, that the presenter of this specific topic is a PR consultant, who furthermore uses the alias "Doktor Spinn" (what is a spin doctor?). But with this major flaw it puts a (probably unintended) flavour to the overall video.

(Note: I have used the Swedish word "källkritik" in several places, instead of the term "source criticism", because I am not sure about the best translation.)

And here is the video:

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the coming videos. And tomorrow I plan to be at the Stockholm Social Media Lunch Club, where both @annika and @doktorspinn will attend. Let's see if they have read this by then...

But again, for the second video my suggestion is, as we say in Sweden - "Gör om, gör rätt".

(Minor update to the text 100305 - rewrote and moved the paragraph on spin doctors further down)

Facebook Ads goes social and useful (?)

2010-01-15T14:19:00.003+01:00

When I went into Facebook today I noticed this ad:

Two things struck me as interesting, which I hadn't noticed in Facebook ads before:

Govermental information related to society
The ad (for those who don't live in Sweden) tells you that you don't need a little sticker on your number plates from now on. (The sticker was a way to show that you had paid the taxes related to the vehicle).
This highlights the value of Facebook Ads for other messages than the pure commercial that have been the main part of the ads so far.
When you click on the ad you end up at the Swedish Transportstyrelsen.
Social recommendations
Notice the "like"-button, and that two of my friend have "liked" the ad.
I hadn't noticed this before, but apparently this was announced in August by Facebook.
(One reason I hadn't noticed might be because there wasn't any ads "liked" by my friend before?)
This is obviously a way to ensure that the ads as such become more personal relevant for you, in two ways: They are "filtered" by your friends, thus the content might be more likely to be relevant for you and they are "recommended" by your friend - you noticed your friends names and look twice.

That you start to see this type of "useful" information, rather than pure "spam ads", in Facebook leads me to some observations:

Facebook starts to be seen as a valuable platform for information spreading
As the Facebook penetration in Sweden continue to grow, now with more than three million users, it's becomming a mainstream channel that is useful not only for businesses.
A targetable information channel
With Facebook ads you can target the demographics of your receivers quite well, so local information, information for a specific gender and/or age group, information for specific interest groups etc can be effectively spread.
It adds further value to Facebook
I get more value out of this specific ad than most others than I have seen so far.
More natural placements than Google ads
My initial reaction was that this specific ad found a better placement through Facebook than it would have if included in the Google ad platform.

What do you think? Will we see more information spreading through Facebook ads, as opposed to commercial messages?

Three million Facebook users in Sweden - statistics and demographics

2009-12-21T12:02:00.003+01:00

The number of Facebook users in Sweden have now passed the three million mark.

This number have been close for a while, already in the end of October this blog mentioned the 3-million users in Sweden.
However, since October the number of Swedish Facebook users has oscillated around three million users and regulary gone back below the three million mark. But now it seems to be stable above.

Since I had a closer look at the statistics and demographics of Facebook users in Sweden when the number passed the one-million mark and the two-million mark I will once again drill down in the numbers. Enjoy.

The growth
The first million users in Sweden was reached in November 2007, the second million of users was reached in March 2009. Now, end of 2009, the third million users are reached in Sweden.

Based on the graph of the number of Facebook users in Sweden it doesn't look like the trend is flattening yet. Will the growth continue, or is the user base saturated?

When you look at the number of users per age you get the following distribution:

Most users are between 14 and 24 years old.

The genders
The Facebook users in Sweden is evenly distributed between male and female users: In all age groups there's a small surplus of female users (except for the 65+ group; perhaps male persons are more likely to fake their age?) The penetration
The current number of Facebook users in Sweden means that one third (33%) of the population are using Facebook. Out of the age group 15-64 years old nearly half of the population (47%) are on Facebook. In the group of people between 15 and 39 years old three out of four (73%) are on Facebook.

When you look at the penetration for each age you get this graph: Note that the 19-years-old have more than 100% penetration. Obviously there's some errors here (I discuss a few possible reasons in the end note).

It is also interesting to note that the reach is close to 10% even among the older part of the population. I'd say that there's plenty of room to grow towards four million users - as we have a notable part of all ages on Facebook it might continue to grow.

Compared with the one-million and two-million mark...
When you compare the age group penetration today with the previous distribution it is obvious that Facebook has got a foothold among the people above 35 years of age, and that this is where there has been a growth in the number of users. Note also that the highest penetration is in the age group of 15-19, which is a change from earlier this year. Facebook is no longer a place only for people in the early twenties, but a place where you'll find individuals of all ages.

Notes:
Are these numbers correct? What is meant by a Facebook user - someone with an account, or someone with an active account?

The numbers in this analysis is from the Facebook ad system and the Swedish demographics is from SCB.

There is definately some errors involved, but as an indication of the penetration and demographics these numbers might be used.

The age and gender is self-stated. Especially the age contains error sources. Eg. no doubt that the youngest Swedes, those below 13, also have found Facebook. (To a large degree this is probably driven by all the social games (eg Farmville) that can be played on Facebook.) But since the minimum age in order to register a Facebook account is 13 there is a number of kids who have stated an age of 13 or above. And the birth year can not be changed for an account, so this error might still be in place even when the user have passed the age of 13.

"Facebook Ads uses IP address and a user's profile information to determine a user's location." - it is not exactly clear how Facebook uses this combination to determine which users are Swedish. You might very well have individuals logging in through a Swedish IP, but who are not "part of the Swedish population".'

Further more, Facebook has the information of exact birth date, and the SCB numbers is an estimate of the age distribution for the year, not at the current date specifically. Thus the mapping of age information towards the Swedish demography from SCB have some errors.

Active users or not? - This is not clear, but my educated guess is that Facebook lists accounts which have been accessed in the last 30 days in the ads utility, thus the answer to this question is probably "Yes, active users".

CBO & CCO: Brands, Culture and a book

2009-11-26T16:08:00.003+01:00

CBOs and CCOs, interesting development!

Ericsson now has an appointed Chief Brand Officer. Read more at this blog, or have look at the Wikipedia article on the topic. Not the first one in the world, but a fairly new corporate title.

So, what's next? I just saw that there's a new book coming - "Chief Culture Officer"

With the subtitle "How to create a living, breathing, corporation" it looks interesting. Have a look at the table of contents, the pages available as preview and the reviews so far.

I will definately add this to my list of books to potentially get and read.

It is also interesting to notice that not only is it released on Kindle first, it is also more expensive to buy the Kindle version. Are we seeing willingness to pay a premium price for non-paper versions of books?

(D&D; Disclosure and Disclaimer: I work for Ericsson in my daily profession. However I do not blog on behalf of Ericsson; all opinions expressed here are my personal views)

Phone as PVR - learn from the kids

2009-04-02T15:06:00.003+02:00

The industry is pushing the TV experience out to the phones, and in general there is an interest in this use case. However, the next generation consumers are already defining how they will embrace TV and moving images on the phone.

I found my son watching the Simpsons, and at the same time recording it for later viewing. On his mobile phone.
As his phone usage budget is low, he and his friends doesn't use the mobile network that much. Yes - some phone calls and SMS's, but not connecting to the Internet. Mostly using the phone as a gaming platform, and also for various media consumption and creation.

In this case he uses the phone as a PVR, instead of a VCR or other more stationary solutions. By capturing the Simpsons episode the "analogue"way he solves the hazzle of later transfering the file to the phone. And he will be able to enjoy past episodes whenever and wherever he likes.

Oh yes, a bit cumbersome perhaps. But it definately solve the needs of my son. And with a 4 GB memory on he phone he can store a lot of shows...

The quality? Surprisingly good I'd say. And as long as he can keep his sieblings and parents quiet and out of the way the audio is acceptable also.

So - keep an eye on the kids, they define the future. Now.

What are your kids up to? Any stories to share?