Category: Four pillars

Sometimes I think we use terms like community and social network and collaborative filtering and mashing as if they were all going out of style; we pontificate about their pros and cons and pass judgment about all kinds of things. We’re in grave danger of believing our own propaganda, believing that all the value to be had is in our conversations.

Which is why we need to keep reminding ourselves of what’s really happening out there. People using the web to club together to buy a football club, Ebbsfleet United. People taking shares in emerging bands and helping them get to market, as in what Sellaband are doing. People changing the way you find emerging music, like what the sixty one are doing. People making it easier to share what you watch, like what vodpod are doing.  People coming together sharing comments on what music lyrics mean, as in what songmeaning are doing.

All these things have some key similarities, some characteristics that are worth understanding:

• Low barriers to entry, anyone can come in; where there is a price, the price is affordable
• Aggregation value: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, there is something being created that no person could create on his or her own
• Democracy:  Each person has the same voting rights
• High cohesion, loose coupling: The services offered are entire in themselves, yet can attach themselves to social networks quite easily; they aren’t trying to solve the world, just to do one thing well.
• A belief in community and in sharing.

I have been quietly compiling a list of these sites, covering a whole variety of topics, subjects and areas. Maybe it’s time I packaged them for sharing here, any interest?

I’m for data and information portability; you only need to read About This Blog to know I care for it, passionately, and have done so for a long while.

But.

Not all data is mine alone. Not all data is mine to share.

So. Before we get too hung up about what’s right and what’s wrong we need to understand more about communal data.  That’s something I’ve been trying to do for a while, and something I need to continue doing.

Liquidity with privacy and accountability is not that easy to achieve. We can get there. We will get there. But only if we work together and figure out how.

I’m a little strange. But then I guess you know that by now.
I believe that man did land on the moon for the first time in 1969; I believe that the images I saw of Apollo 11 on that July day were real, the images I saw as a 11-year old in a very crowded USIS in Calcutta (the name and the location may have changed by now, but I think it used to be on Chowringhee then). I believe that there were children like me all over the world, busy trying to memorise the names of the astronauts, the Command Modules and the Lunar Excursion Modules, for every Apollo mission since then, and a few before. I believe the pictures from Apollo 8 were real as well, and I believe I was really excited to see pictures of earth from the dark side of the moon. I believe that Apollo 13 did have a problem, and I believe I was really tense listening to the radio and wondering if they’d make it back safely.

So I don’t understand the conspiracy theorists who believe it was all made up.

And if you’re one of them, don’t despair. In years to come, you should be able to make up your own outer space conspiracy, and join up with like-minded people to act out your fantasy, thanks to NASA. They’ve issued an RFI for the “development of a NASA-based massively multiplayer online learning game“.

Incidentally, for those of you who wonder about the “waste” of space exploration. What I know is this: I cannot remember any other “scientific” event in 50 years that had children all over the world wondering, dreaming, listening, learning, yearning. What I know is this: when Neil Armstrong said “That’s one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind” (you can listen here) I wasn’t thinking, the US made it to the moon; my first thought was, Man had made it. Mankind had made it. What I know is this: even today, I hold what was done by NASA with awe and reverence.

Thank you very much for all your comments and queries. I realise from reading the comments that I haven’t been able to articulate the fundamental reason for my even beginning to look at this area.

And that is this:

The original Dunbar number was based on some understanding of the relationship between neocortical volume and group size for nonhuman primates.

Humans seemed to scale differently, and research suggested that from a group size viewpoint, the root cause for this difference was language.

The move from oral to written communication is also meant to have aided this process, as man learnt to store and retrieve observations and learnings about the group.

My contention is that anything that aids and improves group communications may also have the effect of raising the “theoretical” maximum for the size of group.

Maybe what I’m saying is that the Dunbar number is a constant, yes, but only in the context of a specific class of primates, a specific set of languages and linguistic abilities, and a specific set of communications processes and technologies.

Apologies to Phil Collins, and heartfelt thanks to LaughingSquid, someone I now read regularly.

We’re at the edge of the traditional mid-January reality-distortion field, traditional because it happens before every Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld. Not that Mr Jobs needs any help, but the distortion tends to be amplified by the rumour mill that precedes the event. This year, it’s been dominated by questions of what the “something in the air” could be.

Some of you may have felt that Fake Steve has the answer, with live blogging of his own speech. But, this time around, I think the prize goes to LaughingSquid for his predictions on the Flying Mac, and for the illustration below: