Category: Social Networking

Urban Dictionary

I just came across this Urban Dictionary where people provide definitions for new urban words and then vote the definitions up or down (with commentary). The social site allows people to upload images that capture the word; for example, the first definition of “scene” has 332 images. These are not images of the word but images evocative of the word. What is interesting is that further down on each page is an embedded visual Google ad (as in a small image rather than text ad.) The ad is pulled based on the word so you get a different type of image of the word. For “scene” there was this linked animated GIF for a dating service where you can “Find out who is waiting for you at the Goth Scene”:

Image of Ad

Of course the book is being mined by the editor for a Urban Dictionary book compiled by Aaron Peckham. When you read the Terms of Service you will find the following:

When you post Content on the Website, you agree to grant the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, fully sublicenseable, non-exclusive license to copy, distribute, sell, publicly display, publicly perform and make derivative works of your Content on the Website, on services affiliated with the Website and elsewhere (including but not limited to print, video, audio or computer media), regardless of the form of media used or of whether such media or services now exist or are developed in the future. By posting Content to the Website, you hereby represent and warrant that you have the right to post that Content and to grant the foregoing rights to the Company.

ThoughtMesh: Tag your writing. Join the conversation.

Screen shot of ThoughtMeshMatt sent around a link to ThoughtMesh, an original idea about how tag-rich online publishing might work. You can get an account and upload an essay (it encourages you to divide into chunks) or self-publish so your essay is meshed. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but it gives you contextual tag clouds to use to see related stuff.
Here is what Jon Ippolito says in his essay, ThoughtMesh Author’s Statement,

When Craig Dietrich and I set out to build ThoughtMesh, we asked ourselves how an ideal publishing tool for scholars would behave. We decided that we wanted a system that was distributed–not siloed away in a single database, but able to be published on any Web site anywhere. We also wanted all the essays to be connected to each other, by something less random than search returns, but more serendipitous than intentional hyperlinks.

Adonomics: Facebook Analytics

Adonomics offers statistics for Facebook plugins so you can see which developers have the most installs. They give you emebedable code so you can track, for example, daily active users of an individual plugin like FunWall:

Adonomics also provides a valuation for plugins and a space for developers to try to sell plugins. To developers they offer services like:

Adonomics helps Facebook developers and owners take their applications through the three key phases of Growth, Engagement, and Monetization (GEM). Whether you’re interested in

1. Growing your app by designing it to spread virally
2. Engaging your app’s user base activating key users
3. Monetizing your app by running third-party ads, signing up sponsors, or selling it outright

Adonomics is your best source for information on what works (and what doesn’t). We’re dedicated to sharing the best practices and helping you get the most out of the Facebook platform.

Thanks to Shawn for this.

Spectator: Mass e-vites can prompt gatecrashing

Well, I’m in the news today. I was interviewed for a story in the Spectator, Mass e-vites can prompt gatecrashing which is about how word of parties circulates quickly on the web leading sometimes to uninvited (and violent) guests. Or it is about how Facebook is dangerous. I have blogged before about Facing Facebook (and privacy), but what strikes me now about Facebook is how it offers an alternative to e-mail. The argument goes like this:

  • Email was developed when the internet (Arpanet actually) was a trusted circle. The net was flat and only people like you and answerable to you were on it.
  • Email doesn’t work on an internet that is broad, global, and open. Spam is just one symptom of the problem of scale.
  • What we need is a messaging system that lets us control who can write us; a system that priviledges the local (in the sense that people in my university have easier access); and a system that lets me use different types of messaging for different purposes (from short announcements to photos to private messages.)

Sounds like Facebook, doesn’t it? Which is why my children seem to use Facebook for communication and email for file transfer (as in moving a copy of a paper to print out to the lab at school.) Unfortunately I can’t move off email the way Donald Knuth did – it is now woven into the work practices of the university. I’m also not comfortable with a commercial organization like Facebook or Google having all my messaging. But I can start moving to private social networks for certain purposes. To that end I set up a private network for my extended family on Ning where we can keep track of birthdays, family photos, and information.

How about an open source project to develop a distributed social network messaging environment that could interface with email, that could be run by individual units, and that could offer control over types and sources of messages?

Cybersyn: Before the Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism

Image of Cybersyn Opsroom

In New York for my last f2f meeting of the MLA Committee on Information Technology I got a New York Times with an intriguing article about a Chilean management system, Cybersyn, titled Before the Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism.

Cybersyn was born in July 1971 when Fernando Flores, then a 28-year-old government technocrat, sent a letter to Mr. Beer seeking his help in organizing Mr. Allende’s economy by applying cybernetic concepts. Mr. Beer was excited by the prospect of being able to test his ideas.

He wanted to use the telex communications system – a network of teletypewriters – to gather data from factories on variables like daily output, energy use and labor “in real time,” and then use a computer to filter out the important pieces of economic information the government needed to make decisions.

Cybersyn was apparently semi-functional before the coup that overthrew Allende’s government and it was used to help manage around the small-business and truckers strike in 1972. I don’t think the Opsroom pictured above was ever fully operational, but visualization screens were important even if at the time they were hand-drawn slides that were projected rather than computer generated visualizations (see http://varnelis.net/blog/kazys/project_cybersyn on the chairs of the Opsroom.) Beer and the Chileans wanted Cybersyn to help them implement an alternative socialist economy that was managed in real time rather than “free” and chaotic or planned in the heavy handed way of most socialist economies of the time.

Rooting around, I found a good article about Cybersyn and the English visionary designer Stafford Beer from 2003 in the Guardian by Andy Beckett, Santiago Dreaming. It turns out that Beer gave the Massey Lectures in 1971 and they have been reprinted by Anansi as Designing Freedom. He also moved part-time to Toronto in the 80s where his last partner, Dr. Allenna Leonard of Metaphorum still resides. He died in 2002.

Another interesting thread is Fernando Flores who was the political lead of Cybersyn and the person that recruited Beer for the project. After the coup, Flores went to the US and got a Ph.D. in Computer Science collaborating with Terry Winograd, and being influenced by Maturana, also Chilean. That’s right – the Flores of Understanding Computers and Cognition. He is now back in Chile as a senator and supports various projects there.

The common thread is that Beer, Flores and Maturana all seem interested in viable systems in different spheres. They were applying cybernetics.

Obama and the Long Tail fo Politics

I went to a talk by David Theo Goldberg who also heads up the UCHRI (University of California Humanities Research Institute). His talk wasn’t about networked politics, but he repeatedly mentioned flash mobs as a new political phenomenon and then he went on to praise the long blog entry Barack Obama and The Long Tail of Politics by Isaac Garcia of Central Desktop, the company whose wiki-like collaboration software was used by Obama to organize California. The blog entry is one of the best explanations of the Obama phenomenon I’ve come across.