Blogging is a productive, thought-provoking experience; but it is also a time consuming experience. To blog does not only mean to write. It also means interacting, reading and participating.

This blog came to life within my Master Thesis and I find it hard to continue writing now that my studies are finished.

This means, that the changemod blog will remain online, but will be updated seldom.

Stay tuned though, because changemod will reinvent itself behind a new facade.

The look and feel is not my work – I just did the coding. It is a simple site concentrating on content. See it in action at gamephilosophy.org

You can download the xhtml version here. Its features include:

• valid xhtml transitional

• valid CSS 2.1

• GNU GPL Licence

There is also a wordpress version here, if you’re interested.

It is not built for daily posts and typical blogging usage. Instead it uses the Content Management features of wordpress to easily update the body of the pages. It is basically meant for static pages, but with minor changes you can use it everywhere.

What I did to surpass this overload of information and work was to concentrate on specific services, blogs and aggregators. Sources, that I trust for the quality of information they provide.

Since social media have evolved in such a massive form of knowledge with no secure quality filter, information sources are mostly trusted individuals or niche social networks.

The return of the individual: FriendFeed & Toluu

One of the most popular services that puts the individual opinion at the center of attention is friendfeed.

A couple of days ago I joined a new invite-only service, which also concentrates on the power of the individual. Toluu lets you share your RSS feed with your friends. Instead of constantly reading the same blogs denying any diversity to your subscriptions (the RSS Curse) you can change once in a while by reading other feeds.

Although community plays an important role in Toluu, it is the role of the individual that gives the service meaning. You don’t need to have hundreds of friends, just some chosen few which you trust and share same interests.

In that sense, Toluu follows the basic principle behind FriendFeed.

For further information here are a couple of  interesting resources on Toluu:

• 10 Reasons why you are going to love Toluu

• An interview of the  Toluu founder

I still believe in the power of the collective intelligence. But correct aggregation of information is out of the question, when we are dealing with lack of diversity and biased opinions.

Lately it seems to me, that many social networks are in that position where information are chosen by the most connected and popular individuals.

Choosing your field of information: Get invited

As I noted above, I lately don’t have the time to scrouge through all these social networks, so I have decided to choose my battles.

I continue to be positively surprised by the quality of information in Twine. I’ve already given out more than 10 invitations, but magically the number of invitations at my hands increased.

So, if you’re interested in getting in Twine leave me a comment below and I’ll send you an invitation.

Toluu also provides to its members a limited number of invitations. I currently have only 3, so -again- if interested let me know.

And for those of you who scan the text and don’t actually read (which is fine by me) leave a comment if you want to:

• get invited in Twine (more than 10 invitations already given out)
• get invited in Toluu (3 invitations left)

1. The first one (how to attract more productive comments to your blog) has provoked an interesting discussion and suggestions. From surrealistic arguments on beer (!) by lago to a great tip from Nick about the intensedebate.com service.

2. On the second post about blogging, I argue about the negative effects of daily posts. It is a subject I currently experience first hand, since (as you might have noticed) I’m not posting that often lately.

Nonetheless the subscribers to my blog increase, although (naturally) the traffic has significantly fallen. In short I suggest, that daily posts may increase the traffic of the blog, but the subscribers will come once you don’t clutter their RSS Reader.

Which social media would you visit to check and submit latest news?

The problem of popular social media

I’m an active member of mixx and stumbleupon. I usually spend quite some time daily in these aggregators to read the latest news, socialize and submit worthy material. But April has been a busy month, so I don’t have time to concentrate on these social media.

I also noticed, that I really don’t have much reasons to spend much time in the popular social networks. Why?

• News usually iterate in other social media sites.
• Popular stories are not what I call news. Most of the time they are lists of firefox plugins, interesting pictures, comparisons of social media (mixx vs Digg) and so on. I enjoy that kind of news too, but in time shortage I prefer more “serious” news.
• They are a race of self-promotion. Either by self-submission, getting the right friends, commenting on the right article or promoting the popular-to-be post, self-promotion is sometimes in the back of our heads. Nothing wrong with that; but sometimes I want 100% objectivity.

How to surpass social media overload

So how can you surpass this problem? What do you do, when you are fed up with all these popular social media?

• Locate niche social aggregators. The popular social media sites are becoming complicated, full of all kinds of content and sometimes even unfriendly. I daily read Slashdot news. They are objective, interesting, serious and with great discussions.
• Build and constantly work on your feed. Having a steady RSS Feed is not enough. Delete once in a while some feeds and add new ones. Don’t have all the hubs (techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, etc.) in your Feed, their news usually overlap.
• Get FriendFeed. It’s individual based, so you can follow only the people you really trust. I follow only 4 persons – and it is more than enough.
• Jump on new, promising social media. I got in Twine some days ago and the service is great. Few people, communicating with personalized messages and submitting quality content. Did I mention it is semantic? I still have some invitations left, for those interested.

I’m starting to believe, that the next generation of social media will be individual based and not collectively powered. what do you think? Are you also getting this social media overload?

Couple of days ago I finally got my invitation to twine. Twine is one of the first semantic applications, which tries to

[...] organize, share and discover information about your interests, with networks of like-minded people.

Triplify (which I’m still trying to understand) and zemanta came along later.
At first sight twine looks like any other social network. You have your account, your connections (friends), your submissions, your groups and so on.
But actually twine is much more, something I noticed even during my short presence in the platform.
I’m not going to write an extensive review of twine, since most of you already know about the service.

I’ll just say, that the recommendations and tags used by twine are highly related with the user’s search and that the submissions are of very high quality and diversity.
If you don’t know about twine here are some extensive reviews:

The first Mainstream semantic app?

Twine launches a smarter way to organize your online life

Lately, there has been some criticism on twine also. I cannot say that I disagree with the points, but it seems to be a very promising and qualitative platform – at least in comparison to other social networks.

10 invitations

If you’re interested in subscribing to twine and giving it a try on your own, I have 10 invitations.

Contact me and I’ll invite you. Remember I only have 10 invitations, so the fastest ones will get invited.

Today, I semantified my blog with triplify.

With triplify your blog will have the possibility to create mashups, exploit semantic search engines and many more options not yet explored!

It all looks kind of new and I haven’t concentrated yet on how to use the triplify data, but here is my guide on triplifying your blog.

How to semantify your blog

• Download and unzip the triplify script.
• Make the cache directory writable: chmod a+w cache/
• Edit the config.inc.php file. If you are on wordpress, drupal, wackowiki, openConf or OpenJournalSystems there is a complete example to download at the documentation. I would suggest though, to read this documentation as well, since it explains all parameters very well.
• Upload the triplify folder to your root directory of your site and type at your web browser: http://YOURURI/triplify. This will register your new RDF data source.
• And you’re done!

Slight change in my Configuration

By default triplify uses this code to read your database:

$triplify['db']=new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=db','dbuser','dbpass');

This didn’t work for me, so I used:

$triplify['db']=mysql_connect('localhost','dbuser','dbpass');
mysql_select_db('db');

Upcoming and more information

I will return (hopefully) during the week with more information on triplify and its mashup possibilities with Yahoo!Pipes and other applications.

When I look at the Registry of triplify, I can see my blog but without any vocabulary or actual size. I suppose it just takes some time, until the data comes in.

I’m not sure though, so if anyone has any information on that one, it would be great.

Apart from the fact, that I have never seen any traffic coming from Technorati, I really don’t believe it is a service worth a blogger’s time.

I will not discuss its ugly design and slow interface but will concentrate on more actual reasons. Reasons, that deeply influence the user experience and also disregard fair blog ranking.

Usability issues

Anyone who has navigated in the Technorati page understands what I’m saying.

First of all the categories are not “synchronized”. As the image below shows, the entertainment roll-over category has subcategories such as “main”, “tv”, “Celebrity”, etc. while the entertainment category of the blogs has different subcategories.

Apart from that, administrating your account and blogs is a really hard issue. Lets say you want to ping your blog. The start page of technorati has a box of your blogs on the right giving the user the option to manage them and/or ping them.

But if the user is in his account, there is no ping or manage option – even when she clicks on the blog link itself. (see the above image and the two below) Shouldn’t these options be gathered in one place, or at least available in many?

I have my blog under a directory on my server. The main url (changemod.com) redirects to the directory of the blog (changemod.com/755). It’s something many bloggers do. Why can’t we just merge two domains?

Ranking issues

To be honest, I don’t find Technorati fair. It has a ranking system, based on authority (incoming links to a blog) and number of fans which does not take categories, topics or freshness into account. The authority ranking of Technorati:

• compares completely different blogs (e.g. gossip with technology). You cannot say, that icanhascheezburger is more popular than Smashing Magazine. They are completely different topics and it is like comparing apples with oranges.
• it promotes seniority and not freshness. Since authority and fans are the only ways to see popularity, it is logical that the most old blog will be the most popular. New blogs, do not get fairly promoted in Technorati, even if they increase in popularity faster than the major blogs.

Conclusion

I don’t say, that Technorati is absolutely worthless. It works great as a data source to monitor your reputation. But as a blog aggregator or a traffic-building tool is not our best bet.

This doesn’t mean, that Technorati collects bad information, it just doesn’t show them right. The relation between time investment required and information provided is not for the benefit of the user.

I really stay in awe, that this service remains so successful, without improving itself and I would really like to know why.

I’m really interested to know, what is your experience with Technorati. Do you get any traffic from it? Do you use it as an information aggregator among the other social networks?

While stumbling, I noticed that this feature has a much more important role than I first thought. In fact it seems, that the substitution of the avatar icons with a thumbnail of the site increases the diversity and objectivity of StumbleUpon submissions.

How we scan StumbleUpon

It is a well known fact, that when we visit a website we don’t really read it but mostly scan it.

I’m an active stumbler for quite some time and this minor change made me aware how I actually scan the StumbleUpon site.
My tendency when looking at my “What’s New” tab, was to check first the title of the submission and then the avatar of the submitter. Then I would unconsciously filter the submission according to those two parameters: if the title was intriguing, I would click on it. If the title wasn’t intriguing but I knew and really liked the submitter, I would still click on the link.
So what I was actually doing is putting each submission through a biased filter; sometimes it wasn’t the submission that drew my interest but the person who submitted it.

This is of course a very well observed tendency in social networks; our preferences and choices are highly influenced by the people we know, trust and follow.

The thumbnail feature of StumbleUpon

This thumbnail is exactly in the same position, where the avatar previously was. Since this has drawn my attention so intensively, it should mean that looking at the avatar was really a fundamental aspect of reading the StumbleUpon site.

I believe, that this simple size decrease of the avatar’s icon plays an important role in the way we judge, click and follow stumbles.

This is of course my personal observation on the subject. I really wonder, if you have also noticed the same behavior when stumbling. Did you also scan the stumbleUpon pages according to the submitter?

After installing the firefox plugin, zemanta runs next to your content editor. When you have written a post of at least 300 characters, zemanta provides a list of resources.

Although, the service is still in an early version and there are some slight problems, it is nonetheless a very promising application.

Andy Beard’s review of zemanta is very thorough, if you want more information about it.

While reading about the service, it made me wonder how semantic is actually Zemanta?

The delay of the Semantic Web

What takes so long for the further development of the semantic web? In his interview on the semantic web, Tim Berners Lee explained that the technologies are already there; what is missing the implementation of these technologies in the current systems. The way I understand the complex term “semantic web”, what is required for complete semantic functionality is:

• semantic applications
• implementation of semantic technologies in the current systems

This implementation is actually a fundamental aspect of the semantic web, since it will certify the correct interaction between machines, databases and humans.

How semantic is Zemanta?

Zemanta comes in the blogosphere as one of the first semantic applications, open for the wider public (twine is still in ‘invite Beta’ version). Zemanta uses a semantic algorithm, which – according to the ReadWriteWeb – compares

the words in a blog post to their pre-indexed database of other content in order to suggest related items which will display next to your blog post.

This is of course great news for the further development of the web. We are witnessing and participating in the first semantic application. But although zemanta, works on a semantic algorithm, it cannot take full advantage of it. The reason is, that the current systems haven’t

Image from Wikipedia

yet implemented semantic technologies.

For the take off of the semantic web, linked data and killer applications are required. With Zemanta, we have a killer application, which cannot show its potential.

Until this point of writing the current post, zemanta suggests 9 images:

• 2 of Tim Berners Lee
• 2 of the wordpress administration interface
• 1 screenshot of OpenOffice
• 1 screenshot of Chatzilla
• 1 Data set in the linking Open Data Project (image on the right)
• 2 screenshots of two blogs.

It seems to me, that these suggestions do not take full advantage of semantics, but rather function “web 2.0-style”, based on keywords.

Conclusion

I really like Zemanta. It integrates in the new wordpess 2.5 very well and it makes blogging significantly easier.

Unfortunately, it is quite far from being a semantic application; not because it doesn’t have the correct background, but because the rest of the web is not ready yet.

But my hope is, that if we use the application more it will help the development team to expand the service and the whole web experience.

Instead, I explain why self-promotion in StumbleUpon will not necessarily promote your work with great success. The reasons are:

• the StumbleUpon algorithm
• Clustering
• being social

If you’re interested read at the PandemicBlog why you shouldn’t stumble yourself.

So, who’s interested?

I actually wrote about the RSS Curse a while ago, explaining how we get used and accustomed to our Feed; how we are not welcoming change to our established subscriptions. My suggestion back then, was to delete all subscriptions and start looking for some new ones.

Barry Welford suggested checking the sites submitted by like-minded people in StumbleUpon and Justin Kirstner dropped the idea of implementing and using Yahoo Pipes with the RSS Feed. Great ideas both, but they are time-consuming efforts; that was also one of the problems of deleting the whole feed.

Apart from that, I agree with the opinion, that deleting all your feeds is a harsh measure – maybe necessary, but harsh. So, I started looking for new ways to expand my feed and discover new blogs.

Share your RSS subscriptions

I noticed, that most RSS aggregators have this great function called Export. All you have to do is press Export and the aggregator makes an *.opml list of all your subscriptions. This list can be read by any aggregator.

So, instead of searching new blogs and entries all by yourself, clicking submissions in SU and wondering through Mixx, you can just read the RSS Feed of your friends. This is certainly something missing from the social web; we can follow our friends in almost every social network, but it would be great to follow their subscriptions in their RSS Aggregator. (am I missing something, is there such a network?)

Until such a network comes along, I’m still interested in sharing my subscriptions. So you can download my *.opml list and simply import it in your feed.

I’ve thought about the best way to use this import/export trick:

• You export your own feed and save it in a Folder,
• In this Folder you don’t have only your feed, but also the ones of your friends
• with the import/export function you can change feeds, whenever you feel like it, without actually losing your own.

 How to share

I’ve been trying to find the simplest and fastest way for us to share our feeds.

1. One thought was to put an upload button under this post and everyone could simply upload the file. I don’t know how to do that, so if anyone has an idea, speak up!
2. You send me your *.opml file, I upload it and make a list of all the feeds, of course with a link back to your blog.
3. We start a meme, you write a post in your blog and share your *.opml file there. I then put a link at the bottom of this post, pointing at your article.

I think, that’s a great way of discovering new things; having a constantly growing list of the feeds of your friends, people you trust and have the same interests. Much easier than deleting all your subscriptions and of course much more fun.

It is also interesting to see, how many blogs overlap between these feeds. Are we all reading the same stuff?

Go Share

Go

• write a post in your blog posting your *.opml file or
• send me your *.opml file and I’ll upload it here with a link to your blog   or
• tell me how to put a damn upload button here!!

Let’s share our subscription lists, I’m really interested in reading new blogs. Aren’t you?

Download my feed list.

We are witnessing a boom in the field of social networks, which now expands to medical fields, where privacy is of utmost importance. My concern is not if these services actually protect their customers, but if customers really realize where they are getting into.

23andMe

The service is called 23andMe and is

a web-based service that helps you read and understand your DNA. After providing a saliva sample using an at-home kit, you can use our interactive tools to shed new light on your distant ancestors, your close family and most of all, yourself.

All they require from you is a sample of your spit and 999$. Then, they will gather all sorts of medical and genetical information and send you a thorough analysis. Purpose of this social network is not only to answer the question “where do I come from?” but also “how do I compare to other people?” Apart from that, as Technology Review notes

23andMe offers information about an individual’s disease risk. But it has also opted to emphasize more entertaining approaches to personal genomics, including using colorful visualization tools to look at a subject’s ancestry and compare it with that of celebrities from Jesse James to Benjamin Franklin and Bono. Now, to capitalize on the boom in social networking, the company will launch a genome-sharing tool that allows people to compare their genome with those of family members, friends, and even strangers who have offered up their DNA data.

It all sounds fun, but a person’s medical history is very thin ice and I wonder if potential users come to realize that.

23andMe’s Privacy Statement

The Privacy Statement of 23andMe is very clear and covers several issues to protect its users.

• they can choose if they want to share their information,
• the information collected are non-personal used for research and never released outside the company without the user’s consent
• users can delete their account anytime, which is also deleted from the company’s database.

It is obvious, that 23andMe takes privacy very seriously – and it should. Users are protected in multiple levels and given a variety of choices.

But one of the main reasons to join 23andMe is the community driven system. Users will likely want to compare information, they will want to see if they have the same genes as Gandhi; and that’s where the real privacy issues emerge.

Privacy in Social Networks; more important than ever

Until now, participators in most social networks were sharing information, of minimal importance: their favourite links, their hobbies, their bio or the number of their friends. Of course these are also subjects, that should be carefully shared, but no big harm can be done.

But with services like 23andMe, we are seeing a transformation in social networks and the privacy issues, that emerge.

Social networking is mostly fun and play, but when it comes to sharing information of your own DNA, things become much more serious. I’m not going to list the problems of publicly showing your medical history/future, these are obvious.

But users of social networks, should start thinking with extreme caution, which networks they should join. The fun and joy remains in social networking, but the hazards seem to increase.

Would you share information about your genealogical tree and your medical history with the wide public of the social web?

It’s a discussion, that started couple of weeks ago with an article of Alex Iskold and really got me thinking.

I really enjoy the merits of technology and always welcome new innovations; but also like going back to print and reading a good book.

So maybe, I would never set books aside to read from any other digital form; but this is just me.

But if we see the subject in a more global level, could digitalization really overpower print? I think not, due to the very nature of these two media.

Print Media

Marshall McLuhan once noted

All the words in the world cannot describe an object like a bucket, although it is possible to tell in a few words how to make a bucket.

Words are inadequate to convey visual information. They leave everything to the imagination, as one of the great laws of bibliography signifies:

The more there were, the fewer there are.

Print allows us to mentally react to and reconstruct information, but this is not the property that will allow it to survive digitalization.

The greatest asset for its survival is, that it requires our full attention and doesn’t allow any abstractions.

Imagine being completely isolated, with just one book in your pocket. If you decide to “interact” with the book, your only option is to concentrate on the book and read it.

Digital Media

Now imagine being completely isolated, with just your laptop. You can watch film, read text, listen to music, connect with people and many more. The possibilities provided by a digital medium are countless.

The coexistence of overlapping windows is now a fundamental principle of the modern GUI and in fact a very common practice among users. Lack of concentration is bound to happen, when several services run simultaneously.

This coexistence of information in a digital medium can be compared with the phenomenon of zapping.

Under that perspective, I find it very hard to substitute paper with any digital medium.

If we disregard the tiresome effect of reading from a screen or the difficulty of editing (running your pen over the text to underline and keep notes), digital reading is still not our best choice. In digital media, the distractions are many and reading would require much more time.

Conclusion

I disagree here with Mark Dykeman, since I don’t see paper dying, even if we had

1. better screens,
2. easier to edit text and
3. free internet access everywhere.

A monitor has multimedia possibilities, paper doesn’t. Whenever we are dealing with a lengthy read or an important document, paper is necessary to keep us concentrated.

For me the only option of digital replacing print is when E-Paper replaces tree-paper. Although, we are far from it realization, such a technology could bring revolutionary results, only because it utilizes the advantages of the digital by keeping simplicity of paper.

I’m really interested to see, how you see this potential of the extinction of paper.

How often do you print out documents you want to read? If you observe the younger generations and the popularity of newspapers, books and magazines, could you imagine the near future without massive use of paper?

I just joined Friendfeed. At first glance, it seems to be quite an interesting application. It supports 28 services about news (digg, reddit), social bookmarking (del.icio.us, su), music (last.fm), videos (yotube), etc.

Unlike other social sites, friendfeed is not about having a massive amount of friends. You just choose a few, which you know pretty well and you share the same interests.

It’s not about expanding your network, it’s about getting information you are really interested in.

Anyway, I think friendfeed is worth it. My profile is public, say hi anytime.

CSS Template

So here is the template with the current features:

• 2 column
• fixed width
• valid xhtml 1.0 transitional
• valid css 2.1
• under GNU GPL license, which means you can do pretty much everything with it. Of course a reference would be appreciated.

Download the CSS Template zip file.

Wordpress Theme

If you are interested in the wordpress theme of the blog, download the newest version. Improvements include:

• simpler header, where you can customize the text
• some SEO improvements I did over these months

Of course if you liked the old one best, you can still get it from the downloads section.

Download the wordpress Theme zip file.

Suggestions for improvement are of course welcome!

The reason I find this particular research so interesting is, that

• it has the potential of extending current scaling laws – and particularly Moore’s Law
• it takes advantage of the principles of collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds.

The theory of Probabilistic Chips

According to the article

Palem has developed a way for chips to use significantly less power in exchange for a small loss of precision. [...] chips could be designed to produce the correct answer sometimes, but only come close the rest of the time. Because the errors would be small, so would their effects: in essence, Palem believes that in computing, close enough is often good enough.

Current Scaling Laws

From the beginning of the twentieth century until today, a series of laws has emerged concerning the growth of computers and networks. They all negotiate the value of a network according to the technological leverage of the time.

• Sarnoff’s law, which was interested in the growth of radio and television networks (the value of the network is proportional to the number of actors)
• Metcalfe’s Law describing the value and the growth of small scale networks (the “value” or “power” of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of nodes on the network).
• Reed’s Law describing the value of Group Forming Networks (the value of networks, that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size).
• Moore’s law handling the evolution and expansion of computer microchips (the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years).

One can notice the evolution from Sarnoff’s Law to Reed’s Law.

While Sarnoff’s Law was suggesting, that the value of a broadcast station (television or radio) would increase proportionally to its audience it could not be applied to more complex networks, since the degree of interconnectivity was much higher.

So Metcalfe’s Law was an evolutionary step of Sarnoff’s Law, which better described the upcoming computer networks (ARPANET) in the 1960s. But Metcalfe’s Law could be easily be applied to small computer or telephone networks, but certainly not to huge networks like the Internet.

Reed’s Law emerged to describe the masive development of the web and more specifically of the social web.

Moore’s Law, on the other hand remains stable. Although it finds application on the expansion of computer microchip technology for more than 40 years, its validity is lately at stake. The reason is, that silicon transistors are becoming smaller and smaller and therefore less reliable.

But that’s where the probabilistic chips come in play, to keep the microprocessor technology rapidly evolving.

With probabilistic chips, tiny microprocessors may be designed in such way, that the individual parts might be imperfect, but collectively bring perfect results.

Collective Intelligence

The probabilistic chip technology actually takes advantage of the theory of collective intelligence.

As supported by the Condorcet Jury Theorem [pdf], the probability of a correct answer by a majority of the group increases toward 100% as the size of the group increases. The validity of the Theorem is based on the hypothesis, that the answers provided by each individual are not random – but instead there is a more than 50% probability to be correct.

The Condorcet Jury Theorem might be criticized when we are dealing with humans, but machines can be programmed to work in such a manner.

It seems to me, that this is how cultural revolutions emerge: combining disciplines, which at first seem irrelevant to bring forth innovative ideas and technologies.

Probabilistic chips, can change the scenery of energy consumption, mobile technologies and microprocessor development; and all that by applying an almost 200 old theory to a completely different research field.

This is the second, more detailed part of the readings, studies, lessons, articles and essays I have found online about the theory and analysis of the web. The first part was relatively small, I admit, but I hope this list will keep you reading for some time.

Copyright and the Commons

Free Culture [Lawrence Lessig] : A discussion on the current laws of copyright and their implication to innovation and exchange of ideas.

Free for All [Peter Wayner] : An introduction the cyberculture of linux and its results in free software development.

The Right to Read [Richard M. Stallman] : A political, ideological essay on SPA (Software Publisher’s Association).

Hacker Crackdown [Bruce Sterling] : The history of hacker subculture during the 1990s. Cory Doctorow made an audiobook of it, which I edited for better listening. You can download it here [torrent].

The wealth of Networks: How social production transforms market and Freedom [Yochai Benkler] : A look at the economical aspects of networks, property and the commons.

Communications Infrastructure Regulation and the Distribution of Control Over Content [Yochai Benkler] : With the argument, that current infrastructures of communication and distribution have a negative impact on individual autonomy and public, Benkler suggests a new model.

For more texts of Yochai Benkler, visit his homepage benkler.org.

Open University Seminars

Network security lesson : A Master’s level lesson on networks. How they function and therefore how can they be protected.

Information on the Web : An introductory lesson, teaching tactics to find what you are looking for online. As I said, introductory.

Sociological studies of virtual worlds

My tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World [Julian Dibbell] : A sort of ethnographic study on the social life of the LambdaMoo virtual world, which thrived in the early 1990s. If you have read Sherry Turkle’s “Life on the Screen“, you get the picture.

The Online World [Odd de Presno] : The structure of the online world and how to take advantage of your time and effort in it. Pretty basic.

Network Theory & Social Networks

Scale Free Networks [Albert Laszlo Barabasi] : A very good essay to understand the basics of scale free networks and how the internet is interconnected.

Taming Complexity [Albert Laszlo Barabasi] : Like “Scale Free Networks”, an introductory approach to the subject.

The physics of the Web [Albert Laszlo Barabasi] : The structure and dynamics of the Internet.

These three essays of Barabasi can give a very good overview of the way the web is connected, the role of hubs, the importance of linkage, etc. I really like his work and I definetely suggest his book “Linked” on the same thematology [not free to download].

That sneaky exponential [David Reed] : Why participation in social networks counts. The next step after Metcalfe’s Law is Reed’s Law. Very insightful and very good argumented.

The augmented social Network: building identity and trust into the next-generation internet [Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, Steven Forster] : The six degrees of seperation seem just too many. “This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks.”

Virtual Interactive Communication: A bicultural Surve [Dave Ambrose] : A theoretical study on Web 2.0 and social networks such as Facebook.

Attention economy of the Web

Propaganda [Edward Bernays] : To understand how attentiveness of the collective mind works, the strategies of propaganda are certainly the foundations.

The economy of attention [Georg Franck] : A very good essay on the attention economy, from an expert of the subject.

Attention and Participation in the social Web [Jiannis Sotiropoulos] : Narcissistically enough, this is my master thesis on the attention economy of the social web. Network theory, sociology, mass psychology and emergent behavior are used in this study. I always welcome your feedback. The thesis is also in wiki format.

Software vs. Hardware

There is no software [Friedrich Kittler] : A complex, but very interesting point of view, why there are no software but only hardware.

On the implementation of Knowledge – towards a theory of hardware [Friedrich Kittler] : Once again why the relationship between hardware and software remain a paradox.
More works of Friedrich Kittler. His writings are very theoretical and provocative, but always interesting to read. Some texts are in German.

A more wise, careful selection of your avatar can significantly boost your position in the networks in which you participate and, consequently, the popularity of your blog.

Apart from the reasons why, I also provide the right ways to choose the right avatar. Some examples of eye-catching avatars are given to prove my points.

So if you are interested in more indirect ways to increase your popularity in the blogosphere, check out the post. It can be a good way to start.

classified, censored or otherwise restricted [...] of political, diplomatic or ethical significance. Wikileaks does not accept rumor, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available.

The emergence of a censorship issue about the content of wikileaks, boosted the wiki’s popularity even more. To summarize the story:

The case in San Francisco was brought by a Cayman Islands bank, Julius Baer Bank and Trust. In court papers, the bank said that “a disgruntled ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign” provided stolen documents to Wikileaks in violation of a confidentiality agreement and banking laws.
According to Wikileaks, “the documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.” On Friday, Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco granted a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot, the site’s domain name registrar, to disable the Wikileaks.org domain name.

This case is not only interesting as one more censorship issue of the cyberspace but also as an example of the power and growth of the web. The indirect points that are raised are:

1. The decentralized nature of the web manages to overcome obstacles.
2. It seems that wikis are slowly evolving in authoritative resources.

Decentralization

The wikileaks domain was shut down, not allowing any users to visit the site. In any centralized network, shutting down the front door of a node would be enough to bring him down.
But the web’s decentralized nature, easily manages to overcome this issue. The wikileaks domain could be accessed

• by mirror sites across Europe [Wikileaks.be],
• the secure site of the wiki [http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Wikileaks]
• and even by the sites IP Adress [http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks].

This proves the difficulty of local, real life laws to be applied in cyberspace. Internet has always been a self-organized place and efforts to control it haven’t brought any results until now.

Authority in Wikis

If we go back to December, we will find several discussions about the trustworthiness of wikis. The reason was Google’s announcement of their “unwiki” platform Knol.

The fact alone, that this wiki received such attention speaks for the role of wikis in knowledge and information.
If wikis were really not trustworthy sources, which provide unproved data then why did this Bank step up against wikileaks?

It seems to me, that this case shows the strength of wikis, the power of the collective intelligence and the decreased role of authority and authorship.

The result

Latest news say that wikileaks got its domain back. Not because the Julius Baer Bank found the wiki less trustworthy and decided to drop the case, but because of the hard work and engagement of several lawyers and institutions (Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation).

It seemed to be a lost case anyway.

When you read the frontpage of reddit, you will notice mostly political and world news articles. Propeller too concentrates on political topics. Digg in its turn, is full of technology news. This is something, every blogger knows and the analysis at SocialMediaTrader proves. But why is that?

I mean there is nothing in the Terms of Use at these social networks, saying that only submissions of a specific genre are required. Everybody is free to submit anything and the wisdom of the crowd, will bring a post up or bury it. But still in a magical way, the posts reaching the front page are not diverse.

In this post I will analyze and visualize the network of the digg users, to show why technology is the favorite topic in Digg.

How relationships define the popularity of a topic

There are 3 requirements for a submission to reach the frontpage of any social network:

1. The quality of content.
2. Who submits the posts.
3. Who are the friends of the submitter.

These are points we are all aware of. When a top user submits a post, he gives it – in a sense – an additional popularity boost. His authoritative figure in the social network, says to the other users, that this particular post is worth their time.

But a point we are sometimes missing out, is that the friends of a top user does not only define the popularity of a post, but sometimes also the popularity of a genre.

Lets take a look at the top users of Digg.

The Digg Example

I decided to study Digg, since it is one of the least diverse social networks. In order to find the reason of this, I took a deep look at the network of the top digg users (according to Chris Finke’s data on digg).

• Step 1. I concentrated on the top 10 Digg users and saw if they were friends with each other.

• Step 2. I selected a random user from the list with a high popular ratio. The user I chose was sepultura, 28th top user with a submission/popularity ratio of 61.1%.

• Step 3. I visualized the data into a network, to see how highly these users were connected.

• Step 4. I collected the most dugg topics of each user the past 30 days.

Click to enlarge

I wanted to see if the top users are mutual friends and therefore view and promote each others submissions.

I also chose a random user with a high ratio, in order to see if he also was befriended with those top users. If so the popularity of his submissions could also rely on his friends.

If the top digg users were all befriended and interested in the same topics, it would actually be the reason for this monotony in subjects.

Visualizing Digg’s top users

The result of the visualization shows that the top 10 digg users are actually mutual friends and are in fact creating a very condence network.

Click to enlarge

• Mklopez (rank:10) is mutually befriended with all the others apart from p9s50W5k4GUD2c6 (!!) (rank 7).

• supernova17 (rank:4) is mutually befriended with 7 others, while msaleem (rank:2), mrbabyman (rank:1) and digitalgopher (rank:5) with 6.

• In fact, when these top users are befriended it is always mutual friendship, with the only exception of CLIFFosakaJAPAN (rank:6), who is a fan of Zaibatsu (rank:3).

• Only aaaz – the 8th top user – is mutually befriended with only 2 other top diggers.

• Sepultura, (rank:28) the random digger with high popularity ratio, was mutually befriended with 5 others: mrbabyman, msaleem, supernova17, zaibatsu and mklopez.

So it seems, that Digg’s top 10 users are mutually befriended and therefore are aware of each others submissions. Sepultura, might not be that popular but his popularity ratio is extremely high (61.1%). Is it a coincidence, that he is mutually befriended with the most connected top diggers?
The next step was to see, what are actually the interests of these users. Not surprisingly, apart from P9 and aaaz, all the other users (including sepultura) have as one of their main interests Technology News.

P9 and aaaz seem to have mostly political interests (second most popular topic of digg) and are actually the least connected of the group. P9 is mutually befriended with 4 top diggers (aaz among them), while aaaz is befriended with only p9 and mklopez (the most connected).

The Conclusion

The information collected show how the top diggers are actually in position of controlling the whole thematology of Digg. They have the same interests and are therefore friends with each other. It is only natural that they also like the same content. There is nothing wrong with that.

The power of the top diggers doesn’t rely on the fact, that they are popular but mostly on the fact that they have formed their own network.

But since their influence is so obvious and Digg isn’t specifically a technology network, I am not surprised that Digg enabled couple of months ago a more strict algorithm for a submission to reach the front page.

Image from SocialMediaTrader

I tried to do the same research with StumbleUpon, to see if the top stumblers are also that befriended as in Digg. It is certainly not the case. I suppose that’s why StumbleUpon has a much more diverse range of topics.

Creators have several good reasons to publish their work under a Creative Commons license, but there are some negative implications of Creative Commons, that we don’t observe at first sight.

From new technologies emerge new restrictions

When new technologies emerge, new ways of protecting our work come long.

Before Copyright.
Marshall McLuhan said about copyright laws that

the invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public – a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. (from the medium is the massage).

Copyright.
So, before the absolute expansion of the Web, there was copyright. For an artist to put his/her work out to the public wasn’t as easy as it is today. There were no computers to produce cheap, quality work; there was no Web with its wide public.
Artists needed someone who would finance the whole production process. And even when they did find someone and although “all rights reserved” applied the moment a work was created, sometimes artist didn’t really care. The purpose wasn’t to protect their intellectual property, the purpose was artistic expression. So copyright protected the ones caring and run obsolete in any other case.

Creative Commons.
The explosion of the Web changed the scene. Production and publication were very easy and very fast. So was copying and distributing. Awareness of self-expression rose. Every producer – regardless what he/she produced – wanted to protect his work. This needed to be done in an obvious (the web is huge) and fast (the works produced are numerous) way. So Creative Commons emerged.

According to wikipedia’s description

Creative commons is a non-profit organization, which provides several free licenses for the owners to use when releasing their work on the Web.

The value of Creative Commons

• Free flow of information; It is true, that the minute you create a work, it is immediately copyrighted with an “all rights reserved” license. This means, that you are the sole owner controlling who may copy, adapt, redistribute, publish etc.
  Since this perspective can be very restrictive to sharing and providing information, Creative Commons comes as a new parameter, promoting innovation and free flow of information.Creative Commons, under that perspective, combines a moral with a legal objective (although it has been argued, that the moral objective of Creative Commons is of lesser priority – at least in comparison to the Free Software Movement).

• Choice; Creative Commons provides a wide variety of licenses. There are 4 major licenses, which can be mixed, producing 16 possible combinations.

• Ease of use; Licensing your work in Creative Commons is easy. Very easy. In one step you choose your license and in the next your work has “some rights reserved”.

Criticism on Creative Commons

Over time, Creative Commons has been considerably criticized.

• It has been argued, that the legal code of the CC licenses has additional information, that people don’t read – they stick only to the Commons Deed.
• There are still several misconceptions about Creative Commons and licensing in general.
• It has even been argumented, that Creative Commons is completely pointless – although I would not go that far.

The public’s sense of ownership

For me the value of Creative Commons is undisputable. The public is too vast and the need for the protection of intellectual property is very important. Creative Commons gave developers the option to keep their work more open, than traditional, standard copyright laws do.

But the ease of use and the wide popularity of Creative Commons has also increased the awareness of the our sense of ownership. Suddenly, everything we produce – may it be a funny 5minute sketch, a blog post, a program or a whole book – is subjected to licensing.
Why do we put everything under a Creative Commons license?

• Maybe we believe, that our work might some day achieve a great financial value and we don’t want to miss the opportunity.
• Or we believe, that the web is full of malevolent individuals wanting to take advantage of our work and republish and their own identity.

I don’t want to argument why or why not one should put his/her work under a license, this is a personal decision. But just let me point out, that

• giving something for free does not necessarily mean not having any gain
• if the web were full of copyists and thieves, it probably wouldn’t be that successful.

I am not putting my work under any license, firstly because I don’t mind if someone copies my content. Secondly, I have a lot to gain from the online community and maybe that’s my way of giving something back.

After all if we only take and don’t give something back we will end up exhausting the free resources as Garrett Hardin’s theory of “the tragedy of the Commons” explains.

Do you have your work under a Creative Commons License? Why or why not? I’m really interested in your opinions.