Brandymore Castle

Veteran users of Digg are upset with changes to the site aimed at reducing their influence. They have begun gaming the "voting" system Angry Digg users flood home page with Reddit links What is interesting about this is: When I first encountered and thought about sites using voting systems to surface desirable information, I understood that all algorithms for voting can be gamed. That to deter gaming, very sophisticated and arcane algorithms were required. That these discourage contribution because contributors never know where their work will rank nor why it ranks low or high (this is similar to authors puzzling over Amazon's ranking system). I was surprised when sites based on user voting systems began to succeed by simplifying their voting to the thumbs up/down basic counts or other simple and easily gamed voting systems. I believe that when users are satisfied with outcome of their vote, which for Digg means, contributors get their links or comments surfaced and reade...

I'm not going to name the site that got me starting writing this post. Its a sentiment I've seen on many sites with a traditional publishing orientation. They follow the old tradition from the age of print, where all submitted works are required to be "not published elsewhere," requiring "first print" rights and demanding every "reprint" (copy) should cite the publisher as place of first publication (what is this, vanity?). These guidelines ignore the reality of the new age of immediacy, of information abundance, of venue abundance, the network. There is no scarcity in publication, there is no value in "first publication" or artificial scarcity on the network. The document is the conversation the conversation is the document. The old publishing world is gone, stop trying to hang on. The attitude simply does not fit with a universe of networked information being shared and reshared by millions of people, winding its way in bits and pieces ...

We are raised in a culture that teaches us to always look for answers or winners. We are taught to expect the purpose of a question is to find the answer. We expect the goal of a game is to win. In Zen practice, students are given questions to ponder in the form of stories, called koans. I was taken aback when I realized the purpose of the koan was not to find an answer to the question, but to measure the progress the student has made in understanding zen. It was a shock, for this rational and scientific minded person, to consider there might be some other purpose to a question than to find the correct answer. Although one can find cheat sheets with common answers to zen koans, there may be no correct answer to a koan. The answer, although interesting, is not the important point of practicing with a koan. A koan is a measure, just as for those who believe in 'fortuna' culture (a common belief among Virginia cavaliers was that each person was born with a certain amount of forunt...

According to CNN , the twitter outage left users feeling as if they had lost a limb or left home without their cell phone. It is suggested Twitter needs competition to provide alternatives when an outage occurs, as they inevitably will. There were (or are?) a couple of alternative social microblog services available (is jaiku still running?). Of course, this won't help if multiple sites get attacked at once. What would help is Google Wave. This outage is an incredible opportunity to demonstrate the potential for resiliency a "federated" or distributed social media system has. Content in the Google Wave universe is independent. Every user can have a copy of a bundle of posts, comments, content on their own device. Multiple copies can exist on different servers. It could be possible for a group to continue working, or at least work offline with their content, during an outage and then when connection is reestablished, the changes can be merged back into the conversation. Th...

I am reading On the Origin of Stories , a new book by Brian Boyd , which to make a long story short, draws conclusions from recent research into the mind and evolutionary psychology, that status is essentially attention (or at the very least attention is the currency of status). I can see how this applies to Twitter. The ability to 'favorite' another twitter's content is yet another way of bestowing attention. Twitter is an attention machine. When visiting a twitter's profile, being mentioned or retweeted in the stream of updates or being favorited are ways of gaining attention. A twitterer gains when a user with high attention favorites one of their tweets and more so, when they retweet.

ReadWriteWeb asks this question. Poetry is reflective. Journalism also should be reflective (if all journalism were like C-SPAN, we would be better off for it). I am sure we could and perhaps will find ways to mine activity feeds for patterns and other useful information. It may find uses in many fields and places in life, perhaps even in medicine. But the real reason why there is so little reflection on the web is simply because the structures and tools of the web encourage shallow interaction, quick posts, short content, quick reads, quick writes. This is an area I've given some thought to and posted to the blog about it. What is required is not some new gizmo for finding patterns in bits of trivial data, but tools that encourage people to slow down, to be reflective and create meaningful content. My idea presented here has been of a "quick-slow" system. This system would recognize the importance of brief, concise posts when things are happening (like you've just l...

I ran across an interesting answer in an interview about Twine : [Nova Spivack] I think the above solution would work for this too. Basically you are asking for a new view of the content – not “by twine” or “by time” but “by popularity” or “by relevance to me”. Notice the question being posed. What he is asking is, why don't you like the view our "intelligence" provided, why do you insist on these existing, simplistic views like by time or popularity? The last is odd. "Relevance to me" is the primary criteria for all information I want to receive. Even if I don't yet know it is relevant, such as when a person I follow in Twitter shares something I've never seen before and would never have found on my own. Do you understand? Even that is relevant to me . Everything I want is relevant to me. I understand what they mean though. They mean serendipity. Like overhearing a snatch of conversation in Twitter by seeing posts by friends of your followers, but who ...

Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable An excellent analysis of the situation newspaper based journalism is in. I like the idea of micro-payments for content, such as New York Times articles. The only problem I have with it and why I would be reluctant to use it, is simply that I have to pay for the article before I've read it. Even if I saw an excerpt, it might not be enough to determine whether it is worthwhile or not. A solution for this problem might be found in social networking. I usually read articles my friends share with me (by sending a link in email or chat). I would be much more willing to pay for an article they recommend. Keep the price low and integrate with a social sharing system and it might work as long as the payment is by an "easy button." The greater problem is content and authorship is changing radically with digital content available through the network, given the unlimited perfect copying and access without distribution. What we are seeing is a w...

It is worth noting the two guiding principles of illusion are "suppressing context" and "preventing reflective analysis" (according to Tufte, in Visual Explanations). The first applies also to the ubiquitous photographic image, nearly all of which appear without context. A situation that apparently few people find troubling. A good example of the phenomena is the iconic image from the Vietnam war of the Viet Cong operative being summarily executed by a village officer. The photographer who took the picture often wished he hadn't because of the damage the image did when used out of context (as was the usual case). Several iconic images from the Vietnam war were frequently presented without context. It was left up to the viewer to interpret and may very well be people at the time did not want to know the context, enabling them to press the image into service of their political aspirations or personal, psychological needs. Visual media is inherently weak at providi...

The issue of whether people should pay for forums or not came up on dpreview . With the current economy, I expect how to pay the bills will be a growing question for many web services. The problem is with forums there is perfect competition. Anyone can setup a forum and run it for next to nothing. If one forum decides to charge a fee, the users can flee to another forum. The only reason they might stay is because of the audience. For example, photographers pay for to host their photographs on Flickr primarily because it provides a rich audience of people who love to look at still photographs. Flickr is the Life and Look magazine of our time, it is the revival of the great picture magazines, not because of its technology (that helped orient the site in the right direction to succeed, just look at the abject failure of Picasa to be social---too little too late). Flickr just happened to be where most people who like to look at pictures gathered, mostly because of its blog-like streams of ...

Twitter is a 'starfish' enabler. It's what makes Twitter powerful and empowers those who use Twitter. It puts individuals at the center of the star. Twitter friends (followers) are more like information flows you choose, organizing the flow of information for yourself and others, curating, editing, creating than other social network friends, which are more passive, something you collect or at most create a space to explore. This is because friends/followers bring content to you automatically. It is the flows of information resulting from following that make Twitter different from other social networks. I didn't know much about Twitter when we started designing Farmfoody.org and thought it was something to do with short text messages on cell phones. I am currently integrating Twitter into farmfoody.org, after having considered a Facebook social feed model and finding it overly complex and confusing. We need as low a barrier to participation as possible. Farmers don'...

As the popularity of short, fragmentary messages grows, I have become concerned the public conversation may lose the capacity for thoughtfulness and reflection. At the same time, I would like to caution those who condemn Twitter or other systems based on micro content to not throw the baby out with the bath water. The long form newspaper article found in the New York Times or Washington Post contains a lot of material used to provide background for the reader, often at the end of the article. Not only is this text boring and redundant to the knowledgeable reader, it takes up previous space. The one thing the web is good at is connecting one piece of knowledge to a broader context of other pieces of knowledge. There is no sane reason to continue repeating background and further reading material in a long form newspaper article when on the web, a writer can simply link to the information. The brief, concise texts of micro content can be connected to many other sources of information, som...

It hadn't occurred to me until I saw it being done that social bookmarking and social microblogging are both popular in part because the create flows of information edited and curated by experts. One good reason to follow the bookmarks of a user belonging to a social bookmarking site is simply it is a source of good information. The bookmarks ought to be high quality and relevant in the expert's topic area. It makes sense to follow the tweets on the homepage of a user belonging to Twitter (or any microblog system), because they represent a selection, an inclusion, of edited and curated information for free, usually from an expert. A Twitter homepage combines the posts from a user's followers, which amounts to multiple levels of curation. Suppose a number of people practicing organic farming create Twitter accounts and post information they feel is important. Suppose then an expert in organic farming, perhaps an editor of an organic farming and gardening magazine becomes a T...

When I follow another Twitter user, their posts (Tweets) are included on my homepage, which is public. This amounts to creating a kind of "newspaper" news feed of content "curated" (selected and managed by me). The problem with this, is for example, that with our farmfoody.org Twitter account (established primarily for communicating announcements to users) is that it could become a kind of "mashup" of farm-food related news by following Twitter users posting on those subjects. However, that would result in clutter and chaos, since there is no way to organize the flow of content onto my homepage. What is needed, is a way to tag posts. It would be nice if posts could be tagged according to topic and each tag converted to a tab, which would separate the streams of information, so there could be a #farm and a #food tag (using the hashtags convention) and a Farm and Food tab would appear on my homepage, allowing readers to chose the topic they are interested in...

Should books be a calm refuge from the hubbub of the network or should they be part of the flow with constantly updated social activity right in the book? As ebooks become social that is an important question. Do people want to curl up with a good book to get away from it all, or will they want to constantly stay in touch with the author and other readers? I do not have the answer to that question, but it is clear the next step in electronic books is to make them truly dynamic, with more than just the ability to search full text or submit HTML forms. The next step in ebooks will be the integration of the social network, bringing community inside the ebook. As we begin to read books on devices ranging from the iPhone to Kindle, the possibility for connecting the text to its context of authors and fans, of creating a social context for the work in the same way Twitter creates a social context, grows. A thought occurred to me reading about Why is OpenOffice "profoundly sick"? h...

We need to enable people to curate collections. This means blogging the contents of an archive, which can be as simple as a blogger selecting certain items (by surrogate, typically a picture but also 3D rotatable image or video) and posting them to the blog along with any caption available through the collection's online database. They don't have to say anything original to be useful. The basic requirement is that archives places their collections online, giving access to potential curators outside the archive. Curating is anything a user does to create context for the cultural artifact, commenting, annotating, writing that contextualizes the artifact (like wiki pages). User curation of the archive helps people feel connected with the archive and its contents. Involving non-academics in the archives is important for the continued existence of an instituation and the collection, the value of which exists partly in the memories of people and in the objects themselves. I learned f...

A vital interest of mine is access to archives. I've been interested in the possibilities inherent in the web and network for increasing access to archives and enabling a greater number of non-academics to browse, organize and surface archive holdings. One of the most significant ways of exposing the holdings of an archives is blogging the contents. We really haven't got there yet, but I've noticed a small trend, which I hope signifies the beginning of exponential growth, of people blogging artifacts. I do not remember the first site I came across where a blogger was posting pictures of artifacts, usually photographs from an online catalog of a museum, but here are some recent finds. Illustration Art All Edges Gilt If we could just get every artifact in the world's museums and archives photographed or scanned and online, give the tools to blog the contents to millions of ordinary people interested in telling the stories of these cultural objects, think of how rich that ...

Tag clouds are dead. I don't want to mince words. I've been waiting for a long time for someone to say so, to let everyone see the elephant in the living room. What interests me is why tag clouds are dead. About ten years ago I was working on a prototype web application. It never saw the light of day. But it was called Strands and consisted of a wiki-like content management system that allowed anyone (it was based on SoftSecurity) to create pages, to post and edit content. Any author could include single keywords in the text. These would be automatically scooped up and entered into an index. You could display the posts associated with (containing) any keyword listed on a page like search results. The idea was that content could be navigated in any number of ways according to keywords added by users. It's wasn't social. It didn't know the user who contributed the keyword. The idea was to destroy hierarchy and create a user centered order to information, something clo...

I was prompted by something Andrew Shafer of Reductive Labs said (on the FooCampers list, so I won't reproduce it here, since it was forwarded to me) about the quality of communication among software developers. He was talking about how communicating the overall design and intentions of the project is vital, so the developers are not left guessing about how the application will be used and what its architects think it should do. What is important is the existence of a conversation between the leaders of a project and the developers writing the code. This hits very close to home, because our farmfoody.or g project is essentially there to improve the flow of information between producers and consumers of food, to enable a conversation . It occurred to me the solution is to throw away the flash cards and bulleted design specifications and just facilitate the conversation. Why not use social networking tools for developers to communicate? (You can get a sense of another approach from ...

It occurred to me that farm food is about more than finding fresh vegetables. We don't just visit a farmer's market or roadside stand because of the fresh vegetables. We go there to experience a sense of community. At the market we get to relate to real people. To meet people. To talk to vendors who know what they sell, care about what they sell, and can answer our questions. A supermarket produce section is like a warehouse peopled by stock movers who know little or nothing about the produce they sell. You may find a knowledgeable individual here and there, but the system is designed to move produce like boxes at a warehouse. The produce guy at the supermarket is not there for conversation. The relationship gets very personal when you have the same grocer for many years, when you visit the same roadside stand, when you buy vegetables or eggs from a neighbor with a microfarm. I always remember how refreshing it was as a child when my mother would take me to the grocery store to...