Category: Four pillars

I was at dinner yesterday with @gapingvoid, @stevecla, @jasonkorman, @dianamaria and @crossthebreeze. It was an enjoyable evening, topped off by late-night drinks at Harry’s Bar.

Over dinner, the conversation meandered across many subjects; at one stage we were talking about reboot, an inspiring conference that takes place annually in Copenhagen. I mentioned my interest in acquiring some of the chairs used during the breaks at reboot, which are available from strandstole.

Which reminded @crossthebreeze, Kris Hoet, to send me the links to a site he’d recommended to me when we last met in Berlin: Strandbeest. A creature of the beach.

Amazing stuff. A site well worth visiting, ideas that inspire, great execution. Go take a look.

My thanks to Kris.

I blame James Governor, Tim O’Reilly and Ross Mayfield for this post. James first got me thinking about the phenomenon of asymmetry in modern communications as a result of DMing me a few days ago with his Asymmetric Follow post, an absolute must-read. He then followed it up with another, looking at Dopplr rather than Twitter; in between, Tim O’Reilly then tweeted about it to Robert Scoble, connecting the phenomenon with Robert’s “DM hell”. And before I’d worked out where my head was at on all this, Ross Mayfield went and wrote this.

Enough name-dropping for you? Don’t worry, that’s not the intention. Some of you may wonder why anyone would bother with all this kerfuffle. Is this just a bunch of “social media experts” theorising about some obscure statistical phenomenon? Not really, there are some very important points being made here. Three in particular are worth emphasising:

• People in a Web 2.0 network are not uniformly connected; some have more connections than others
• Connections have directions; the number of inbound connections may far exceed the number of outbound connections, creating an asymmetric environment
• This is particularly true of “default-public” networks such as Twitter; Flickr is also likely to evince similar behaviour.

I think there’s more to it. Many years ago, I was honoured to receive a visit from Yossi Vardi; I arranged to have a colleague of mine, Stu Berwick, join me for part of the session. When we were discussing IM, Stu made an observation which really struck a chord with me. He said:

In IM, it’s polite to be silent

I knew something was rattling at the back of my mind when I read James’s post; it took me a while before I figured out it was Stu’s comment. I think the particular “politeness convention” that’s in place has a lot to do with the potential for asymmetry. In order for twitter to become asymmetrical, it must be OK for me not to reply to a tweet. If I am forced to reply then it doesn’t work. If I am expected to reply then it still doesn’t work. But if it’s OK for me to say nothing, then it works.

What is this thing that works? Asymmetric follow. Why? Because I am no longer expected to reply to everything that comes in. People who receive a lot of snail mail or e-mail don’t reply to everything that comes in either, so what’s the difference? The difference is in the perception of polite behaviour.

It’s rude not to answer a telephone call; it’s rude not to call back when a voicemail has been left; it’s rude not to reply to an e-mail; in fact it’s rude not to provide sympathetic sounds when listening to someone on the other end of a phone. [That last politeness convention has had an unintended consequence ever since the mobile phone was invented, the regular need to intersperse conversation with “are you there?”].

It’s not rude to ignore a SMS. It’s not rude to ignore an IM. It’s not rude to ignore a tweet. Even an @tweet. Even a DM.

The politeness issue alone is not enough either. This whole thing is exacerbated, beautifully exacerbated, by the 140 character limit of Twitter. Because we can now have “continuous partial asymmetry”. Someone who has 4000 followers can choose to reply to the @s of 400 of the followers, because of two critical things. One, the cost of replying to the @ is low. And two, you can vary the particular 400 you’re replying to. Yes you’re constrained, ostensibly by personal bandwidth, from replying to everyone all the time. But because you manage to reply to some of the people some of the time, nobody feels left out, the weak ties remain in place and everything works.

As a result of this continuous partial asymmetry, there is one more valuable, yet unintended, consequence. A-listing is less of an issue. The conversations that take place extend well beyond narrow echo chambers, there’s always an infusion of fresh voices into the conversation, yet barriers to entry remain low.

Just thinking. There’s something quite important here, and I’m going to have to gnaw away at it.

Andy Gibson of School Of Everything (disclosure: I’m an investor and board member) pinged me via this post. I was asked to list five things I do to keep myself mentally well (which I do below), to link to the Mindapples site (which I just did) and to invite, publicly,  five others to do the same (which I will do at the end of this post).

1. I go for a 30 min walk daily, varying my route as much as possible. Before I set off, I try and gauge how many steps I will need to reach my destination. This involves visualising the route, breaking it down into estimable chunks and then rounding it off. Then I try and keep count of the steps while thinking about other things. At the end of the walk I learn something about my estimation capacity, as also my ability to do foreground and background tasks in parallel.

2. Every night I will read for at least two hours, online and offline. Often it is more, but the minimum is two hours. At any given time I tend to be reading a number of books, sometimes as much as ten. Some I would I have just started, some would be nearing their finish. When I read at night, I try and switch between books a couple of times, just to learn about keeping switching costs low.

3. In the morning, on my way to work, I write down the things I want to get done regardless of other calls on my time. Then at the end of the day I look at the list, see how I’ve done and then throw it away. I never look at the list in between. The idea is to establish priorities very clearly in my head, priorities that will stand against the vagaries of the day. I have always been bemused by how people tell me about the importance of fixed and variable costs and keeping them in balance, and then they proceed to fill their day up weeks in advance. Don’t understand. So I keep a lot of white space in my day, the challenge is to make sure that I get the fixed things done while adapting to what comes in. And that’s all in the mind.

4. Before I go to sleep I spend a little time counting Fibonacci sheep. This is where the sheep go 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…… or a variant. The idea is to set a goal, to reach a term between 20 and 30. I like the way it stretches me, to remember something while throwing something out. To make sure I don’t land up memorising the answers, I change term 1 and make it 4 or 97 or something like that.

5. Throughout the day, intermittently, I give myself tasks of things to recall and then promptly change tack, move to something else. The idea is to get my brain to have some sort of offline agent, doing information retrieval work for me while I do something else. When I was young, I regularly experienced the weird feeling of trying to recall something, failing to recall it quickly, and then finding it came back to me much later, when I wasn’t trying. Now I try and train that facility, asking my brain to do something for later delivery.

Weird stuff? Told you I was confused. Let me know what you think. In the meantime, I’m going to tag Kevin Marks, Kathy Sierra, David Weinberger, Steven Johnson and Clay Shirky. And use Twitter to let them know I tagged them. How else would you do it?

BTW, if any of you want to get in touch with me, I tweet as @jobsworth.

For many people, the recent and tragic Mumbai terrorist attacks had one unintended consequence: the coming of age of Twitter. As the FT put it, Twitter Turns Serious With Messages of Life and Death.

There’s a lot of good coverage out there in the blogosphere: Dan Gillmor, who first got me interested in the concept of “citizen media” sometime in 2002, makes two critical points about the difference between social media and MSM in his post Wikipedia as Vital Breaking News Source: one, the significantly higher frequency of updates in social media and two, the incredible richness of context provided via the the technique of linking. I guess Dan is the doyen of citizen media, he now runs the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in the space where social media touches journalism, you could learn a lot just by visiting Dan’s Center For Citizen Media blog. His blogroll, headlined Citizen Media Types, is an excellent place to extend your knowledge; I read many of those people regularly.

One of them is Amy Gahran, who touches on a very important subject, responsible tweeting, in her blog Contentious.com. Rumours. You should read her piece “Tracking a Rumour: Indian Government, Twitter and Common Sense”. She also links to Mayank Dhingra’s Social Media: Handle With Care piece, also worth reading. What they have to say reinforces Journalism 101 tenets: the criticality of source verification; the importance of objectivity; avoidance of hatred-inducing subjects; the need for brevity.

Mindy McAdams, in her blog Teaching Online Journalism, covers some useful topics in Twitter, Mumbai and 10 facts about Journalism Now. Of particular importance is the role of the mobile phone, specifically the class of device that can cover both cellular as well as wireless. Her latest post, Breaking News Online: A short History and Timeline, is also worth reading, as is the Are These The Biggest Moments in Journalism-Blogging History post from the Online Journalism blog which she refers to.

Dina Mehta has been covering the events from an ethnographer’s perspective, combining her sociology and anthropology disciplines, and is well worth reading as well, both on Twitter as well as in the blogosphere. Whatever information I received first hand, I tended to filter it through the lens of reading Dina’s tweets. It helped.

We’ve also seen a bunch of tools get refined and improved during the Mumbai crisis: examples are:  Tweet Grid (which I found incredibly useful, the ability to receive topic-specific Twitter update feeds); Cover It Live also got some traction over the last few days. Even Blog Talk Radio, something I really like, got in on the act with SAJA HQ.

I’ve been through a few crises in my time, with different scales and personal impacts. What I’ve noticed is the following:

• Crises attract rubberneckers, people who come along to watch, people who want to know what’s going on. Crowds form.
• Because of this, crises attract extremists of various hues and styles. Politicians are the most common, nationalists and fundamentalists are not far behind. Sometimes all three merge into one person, a truly ugly phenomenon.
• Rumour dominates. There’s a lot of Chinese Whispering going on, as the crowds grow and the extremists exploit.
• All this comes in the way of three groups of people desperately trying to do their jobs: the security services, the emergency services and the media.

And in the midst of all this we have the people really involved, the victims of the crisis. Fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Human beings.

The stories are about them. Not about politics or nationalism or fundamentalism. Not about tools and techniques.

And that’s why the use of social media in crisis management intrigues me, excites me. We’re able to join hands and actually do things for the people involved, leaving aside the three-ring circus going on.

What kind of things? Here’s a list of some of the things I witnessed in Twitter these past days:

• People used Twitter to find other people, loved ones, relatives, friends, acquaintances. They provided status updates to others who needed that information. Person to person communications. Hospital lists. Sadly, even lists of those that perished. A classic crowdsource-able activity, reducing the workload on emergency services personnel. Most of the time, the tool used was a mobile phone with a camera.
• People used Twitter to raise awareness of the need for resources. Blood. Food. Money. Shelter.
• Twitter became a go-to-place for important telephone numbers, particularly for overseas contact numbers.
• Twitter also performed one other critical function: the democratic nature of the beast meant that the voices of extremists and rumour-mongerers was drowned out.

The two-way participative nature of social media, coupled with the always-on affordable ubiquity of the tools used, changes the game. This is not about news and journalism. It’s about participation. Someone in Buenos Aires or Budapest or Birmingham or Butte can actually help someone in Mumbai, by carrying out searches, quashing rumours, pointing to information sources, helping put people in touch with each other.

Sometimes I think about all this as a giant virtual switchboard manned by volunteers, willing and able to help. We should be thinking about how we can improve all this. How we can set up this virtual switchboard effectively. How we can help quash rumours. How we can take the load off the security and emergency services people.

How we can best help the people most affected. Using a variety of tools at our disposal. Including my favourite one: prayer.

incidentally, if you’re interested in following my tweets, I’m known there as @jobsworth or

http://twitter.com/jobsworth