I loved this video: Melvar and Lien building a physical scale model of their web site.

And I think there’s a very important lesson in this. For too long, too many of us have assumed that people who excel in virtual worlds are useless in physical worlds. Get a life before you get a Second Life, that sort of thing.You know what I mean. But we’re wrong, very wrong.

I remember reading a Pew Report which indicated that the super-communicators in the emergent generations actually spent more time face to face with their friends than the rest of the population.

We have to keep remembering this. When Generation M, the mobile multitasking multimedia millenials, spend time online, they’re not sacrificing face time with their friends and family.

They’re sacrificing TV time. And advertisement time. And everything else that goes with it. Particularly when you compare them to earlier post-TV generations.

So they’re going to do what we never managed to do enough of. They’re going to choose what they do in their leisure time. Choose whose recommendations they trust. Choose whom they spend time with. Choose who they share their intentions with. Choose.

[It should come as no surprise that I found out about this site and project via Scott Beale, who knows a thing or two about virtual and physical worlds. Thank you Scott.

Stu Berwick told me about this via Twitter: Stimulus Watch. What Stimulus Watch does is to take the list of “Ready-To-Go” projects published by the US Conference of Mayors, convert them into a wiki and thereby empower readers to comment on the projects, enrich the data, “vote” on the projects.

There’s lots to like about the initiative. The UI is simple and intuitive, at least for me. The projects are actually listed before decisions are made. Descriptions are intelligible in the main, and contain useful information beyond budgets, such as job-creation. In each case the question posed is simple: is the project critical? Here’s an example:

I touched on some of this in my Clay Shirky at the ICA post. One of the key issues that came up that day was the issue of identity, how to make sure that the right person voted, how to make sure that the person voted once and once only. This is not resolved here either. But it can be.

There are a million people out there who will criticise this thing to bits. Let me not be one of them. I like the transparency. I like the fact that someone has invested time and effort to take public domain information and make it more shareable, more enrichable, and as a result perhaps a little more comprehensible. I like the simplicity of the UI, a search-based front and a consumable wiki. I appreciate the existence of an excel file with all the source info, available for download.

For democratised action to have any meaning, citizens need to be informed. The more informed they are, the more likely it is that their action will have value.

The availability of tools like Stimulus.org is a good sign. [One of the first things I am going to do is to mutate the tool in order to make it useful for enterprises to prioritise their projects!]. The very existence of the data in a downloadable form allows for mashups to be created with relative ease, particularly those with geographical overlays, as in this example taken from epolitics:

There’s a long way to go, many problems to solve. But there are encouraging signs. Views?

PS it is worth going to stimulus.org just to read Jerry Brito’s paper on Hack, Mash and Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency. You can find it in the About Us section.

When I look at the digital implementations of social networks of today, they appear to have a core made up of five things:

• a directory or address book
• the ability to group people in the directory
• support for different modes of communication between people
• the ability to schedule meetings between the people
• a way of notifying changes to the four things listed above

Membership of groups and subgroups; multimodal communication; meeting and event scheduling; notification of changes; all these have existed for centuries. We can probably draw a line from jungle drums and smoke signals through the invention of the telephone all the way to e-mail and IM and communities like Bloomberg chat. None of them created the kind of noise and buzz generated by the social networks of today. The question is why.

I think there are three reasons:

• Standardisation
• Persistence
• Exposure

Standardisation. Historically, social networks did not scale. They didn’t grow easily; their geographical coverage was limited. In the digital realm, some of these problems are done away with, there is greater standardisation. In the past, all we could do was to interconnect islands of community. But the communities remained communities, distinct and separate. What is happening now is that we are moving beyond the interconnect paradigm; new, virtual, communities transcend the physical and cultural and linguistic separations of the past. It’s no longer about being interconnected. It’s about being connected.

Persistence, as in persistent communications. It’s been around for centuries as well, from the time man learnt how to draw. Again, you could think of persistent communications as having been around for a very long time, but as distinct and separate islands. Disconnected from each other. Today’s social networks seem to be powered on today’s esperanto, primarily English-based, but evolving as a mishmash of influences of multiple languages. Evolving, alive, as any language should be. When I look at my twitter feed, it is multilingual. By choice. After all, I choose to follow the people I follow. Again, in language, it looks like we used to be interconnected, now we are connected.

There’s something else happening with persistence. We’ve had persistent communication for a long while, but not searchable retrievable communication. In the digital world, our communications are Tivoised; archived and replayable at will, free-text searchable in many cases. This too moves us from interconnected to connected, it helps us all understand more about other languages and dialects and usages.

And finally we have exposure, openness. APIs and their equivalent. What do I mean? It’s what is represented by facebook as a developer platform, what android represents as well from a slightly different perspective. A way of building things for a community to use, without having to belong to that community in the first place; without having deep knowledge of that community. Most importantly, an ability to build things for a community, things that lower the friction of communication and scheduling and sharing and belonging. Moving us from interconnected to connected.

Sounds like semantic argumentative tosh, doesn’t it, my harping on about interconnected and connected? Perhaps it is. But there’s something in my head that won’t let go of this notion, that things are different now, that these differences are caused by the drivers of standardisation, searchable persistence and exposure. That the effect of these drivers is to allow people to be connected in ways that were not possible before, on a global, multilingual, multicultural basis, with tools that allow asynchronous and multimedia communication. That the catalyst to move all this forward at breakneck speed is the concept of the open multisided platform.

Instead of standardisation, persistence and openness I could have just said one word: the internet. Instead of describing the distinctions between interconnect and connect I could have said just one word: the internet.

It’s all about the internet. And the new possibilities afforded to us.

The possibilities are tremendous, possibilities for doing harm as well as good. So what we’re doing now is learning. About those possibilities for  good and harm. How to handle privacy and confidentiality, both personal as well as corporate. How to keep this new area safe for children, and for parents. How to deal with the avoidance of lock-in. How to empower humans “at the edge”. How to take the friction out of current social practices, practices we see at work and at home. How to make sure we don’t disenfranchise people by accident or design. How to derive value from all this for education, for health, for welfare, for government. How to use all this to become better stewards of this earth.

That’s what all the buzz is about.

Learning how to do good with these new tools, and how to avoid evil.

And on the way there, finding out how to make all this available to everyone in an affordable, sustainable manner.

Just musing. Comments? Views?

I spent a little time reading this Pew Internet survey on Twitter and Status Updating.

It feels strange to be close to the edge of this classification:

Twitter and similar services have been most avidly embraced by young adults. Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter. The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.

I think the key trends are that Twitter users are racially and ethnically more diverse than the population at large, and that they are more likely to be using wireless devices and smartphones. Of course, as the report suggests, this may be due predominantly as a result of the relative youth of the Twitter user. But I think it’s more than that.

I think we need to recognise that Twitter lowers barriers to entry, reduces the cost of participation. Which means more people get enfranchised, are able to take part. Twitter is not necessarily about high speed internet connections and industrial strength desktops. I think there is a class of person who is attracted to Twitter just because of that. Nothing to do with age.