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...

When I went to Twitter today, it displayed a dialog We were hoping you could help us make it easier for people to discover their friends and colleagues on Twitter. Review your settings below to make sure the people you care about can easily find you. asking me to update my name, bio, location and email fields. This suggests that both Twitter and Facebook are insecure about each other, seeing strengths in the other and weaknesses in their own service. Twitter feels threatened by Facebook's focus on a true circle of friends and colleagues. Facebook feels threatened by Twitter's capacity for marketing and building followers in public. It suggests they may eventually become very similar in the features they offer, with Twitter integrating photos, video, circles of friends and Facebook making their content more public (which they are doing). Perhaps both sites will give users more control about who can see what content.

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 caught a discussion of Newscorp's new plan to get users to pay for online news content. It will be difficult to sell news online because there are so many fragmentary ways to get the news for free. If any scheme for getting online users to pay for news does work, it just has to be easy. No matter what news sources online do, they must make paying for the news easy and transparent like iTunes. As easy as putting a coin in a paper box at the corner bus stop. The pricing is not as important as convenience. Also, the customer must have a feel for the worth of the content before they buy or they must get a cheap bulk subscription so the content is cheap enough to take the irrelevant, incomplete, incompetent or useless with the relevant, complete, competent and useful content. I hate sites that put up a poorly written summary and a login or subscription screen. It breaks the rhythm of navigation on the web when a link leads to nothing. It stops you cold and punishes the user for follow...

I realize now the real problem I have been working on and off for ten years now is 'conversation' versus 'story', but particularly applicable to journalism. In a way, conversation and story are like oil and water, they do not like to mix. Yet, stories are filled with dialog, or conversations, so why is that journalistic stories cannot contain dialog? Well, when it is an interview, they do. So what we need is a network tool that seamlessly integrates conversation (interview, written dialog, transcript) with story (narrative, reportage, essay and analysis). It looks like Google Wave has the closest technology to achieving this flexible confluence of conversation and story, even the potential for our conversations and stories to be both mobile and distributed. If every smart phone adopted Google Wave, and given that it works similar to email, which mobile computing already provides and is a robust and well-known commodity service, it promises quick adoption avoiding any ce...

A quick observation about Google Wave. I wrote some time ago about the problem of social media losing its social context as it moves around the digital universe. I thought some mechanism should be created to enable the social context pertaining to a unit of social media to be portable, so it moves along with it. It appears that Google Wave associates the people who pertain to a document (the authors, editors, people with access to view or edit the content, etc.) with the content in a portable way, through its "wavelets" concept. It seems possible to share or transfer a piece of collaboratively authored content across the Wave system and into other systems with its social context intact. If so, this is a revolutionary step in the evolution of information technology. It gets my vote as the first technology I've seen that truly could be called Web 3.0, as far as I'm concerned. It would only be right, if you downloaded a image from such a Wave based system to your pc, tha...

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 ...

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 order and symmetry of biologically created structures, such as an egg or the human body, are expressions of how correctly those biological systems worked to construct the natural artifact. Biological organisms are collections of cells cooperating with each other. The order and correctness is an expression of the successfulness of the collaboration. An egg comes out more egg-like when the biological processed working to make it cooperate and collaborate more correctly in its construction. I believe this has implications for the collaborative processes operating in networked software development and information science. The biological process of construction is inherently different than the one humans have inherited from their tool making and industrial heritage. What will we make of it?

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...

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...

In discussions about farmfoody.org, the idea came up that recipes represent people in a way similar to the way avatars represent people, only much richer because they contain search engine friendly content. The recipe becomes a way for people to explore farms by navigating to the profile the recipes belongs to, then exploring the connections between users (producers and consumers who are friends). Content is the person. I think we will see more of this as social media continues to expand an evolve. This can be seen, again on Twitter, where the person is represented by the content. When you go to a person's Twitter page, you see mainly their content. The "profile" is in the background. This allows Twitter to prominently display information about the content stream, because they do not have to deal with ten different kinds of content under ten different categories. Tweet streams have following friends, followers and the number of updates counted. If there were ten types of ...

I've been thinking about why Twitter is successful. And why some other services that attempted to compete with Twitter by offering "improved" features, like Jaiku, were not. Twitter had the first mover advantage. In the last month or so the buzz about Twitter has spread to average people through use on cable television networks and by cases where people reported on news events through Twitter by cell phone. Those are well and good, but there are other reasons for Twitter's success. One is the simplicity of its presentation. The real estate devoted to profile and "friends" or user to user relationships is compact. The profile is brief and concise. The friends (following) and followers are represented by badge-like elements showing the number of following and follower users, with the numbers linked to listings. The followers are displayed as compactly as possible, represented by tiny icons arranged in rows and columns. The various kinds of posts are filtered b...

I may not be the first, but I have noticed something on social networks that hadn't occurred to me, although it should have, if we have link rot, why not rot in the relationships between friends? I've noticed on our farmfoody.org site there are some lapsed users, since their email addresses are bouncing. It occurred to me that they still have friends but no longer participate in the site. These are ghost relationships suffering from what could be called friendship rot. I suppose Facebook must have millions of people who no longer participate but have accounts and friends. It must have a terrible friendship rot problem. I suppose this form of relationship rot extends to LinkedIn and other sites that depend on navigating networks of relationships between people.

I've learned to avoid precategorizing anything in my bookmarks. I don't make a category unless it is necessary, unless I am using it. For example, I need to bookmark Amazon web services, so I create an Amazon Web Services folder, but I don't create a Web folder, with a Web Services folder inside, which I then put the AWS folder in. I don't have any other web services bookmarks yet in Google Chrome so I leave this for later. It just creates more folder depth to dig through before it's needed. I also try to avoid adding a bookmark just for reference. That just leads to clutter, where I can't find the bookmarks I use on a daily basis, because when you categorize information according to its classification or how it relates to other information, you lose how it relates to you, to useage. For example, if in browsing the web I find a half dozen interesting resources on manual focus lenses, but for cameras I don't use, the bookmarks will obscure the resources I use...

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 ...