Spam and Greeting Cards

Will spam kill the net as we know it?

In a previous entry (Overcome with Spam) I commented on spam/sporn is changing what we can do. Here is a scary dissection of a spam greeting card e-mail: Ecard-hijack spam.

It stuck me back in December that e-cards were dead when I began to get spam claiming to be e-cards. Now I wonder if this is not sweeping net culture. Any bright idea or service that depends on people trying out (and trusting) unknown others becomes a trojan horse for viruses. At what point do we basically stop doing anything except with trusted entities? When that happens the Internet as a democratizing (in the sense of connecting people laterally outside of exising hierarchies) force dies. At that point we lose the global “inter”net and move to forms of intra/extra nets that are limited gated communities.
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Clumps of Communities

Can we find patterns in large networked groups?

Roland Piquepaille has a column in his Technology Trends blog on Detecting Patterns in Complex Social Networks which talks about new ways of “uncovering patterns in complicated networks”. (Note: blog now discontinued.)

Anytime I have done significant visualizations it becomes clear that we need types of MVA to help simplify. The simweb project John Bradley and I did used Correspondance Analysis to reduce the n dimensional space to dimensions that captured most of the variation and which therefore could be graphed and understood. Hmmm… I wonder what statistical techniques (and I assume that it is forms of MVA) are used?
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Blogshares

Can we track culture on the web?

With Skip Poehlman in Computing and Software here at Mac we did a project on culture tracking on the net. The idea was to track keywords by checking search engines every night. The data was recorded so you could graph the ups and downs of keywords.

The idea came from a conversation with a friend about whether it was possible to create a cultural stock market so people could bet on items like “Madonna”, “XML” or “James Bond”. Since then I have found sites doing things like that. Here is a site that explicitly lets you play a stock market game on blogs. BlogShares – Fantasy Blog Share Market.
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textz: the anti gnutenberg

How can we share texts?

textz.com is a refreshing ascii simple project for sharing texts. They seem to be against everything including encoded texts and copyright. textz is the antidote to complex and expensive e-books and xml texts. See textz.com – we are the & in copy & paste. Authors like Douglas Adams, Neil Stephenson, and Slavoj Zizek have works posted.

Their interface is interesting, but doesn’t seem to work reliably. There is an annoying scrolling news feed at the bottom (while a cute hack, it doesn’t seem to add to the site unless one considers the feed more textz.)

Could we hook this into TAPoR to give analysis features? Probably.
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Blogs and Power Laws

Will blogs go the way of all media? Will a few dominate?

Well, it has already happened. So called “power laws” seem to apply to blogs where a small number blogs get lots of attention and most very little. See Clay Shirky’s (soon to be a LOTR character) Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, a short paper on the subject. He suggests that the very success of a few may change things – they may be percieved eventually as mainstream and cease to be considered blogs.

CBC radio today also had a thing on DNTO (Definitely Not The Opera – one of Peigi’s favorite shows so I hear it too) on blogs. They pointed out how marketers are creating blogs to promote products. The death of blogs! (Mind you, calling the death is getting to me – is anything left alive?)
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Open Source Knowledge

Could knowledge be open?

Wired has a good story in the Nov. 2003 issue about Wired 11.11: Open Source Everywhere. It charts some of the open projects other than source code projects like the Wikipedia and Stallman’s Project Gutenberg. These are mostly open publishing projects, but what would it mean to open the development of knowledge the way code developers do? Could we turn a project like TAPoR inside out so that all could see the workings of the project and participate?
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Anger and Polarization

Are Americans getting angry and is that anger driving a polarization of the electorate?

The Angry American by Paul Starobin suggests that we are getting angry (conservative anger towards Clinton, anger towards Bush) but that this is good and shows we aren’t cynical. A cute point, but he doesn’t deal with the problems of anger politics – the willingness to contemplate any means to achieve an unexamined end. The partisan politics and willingness to spend too much on politics.

Whitaker’s Autopoiesis

How can Maturana’s theory of “autopoiesis” be applied to understanding computing?

Randall Whitaker has an extensive site on Autropoiesis that provides a background and discusses in depth many of the concepts. See Self-Organization, Autopoiesis, and Enterprises. Whitaker is interested in how autorpoietic theory can be applied to enterprise computing – groupwork, human factors, and information systesms.
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Is Humanism Dead?

What does it mean to say Humanism is dea?

Such a statement could be historical, in the sense that the Italian Renaissance movement called Humanism is over. See Humanism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy].

More radically it could mean that the values of humanism are no longer shared. What would these values be?

– The return and admiration of the classics and classicism.
– A focus on human achievements and expression, especially those in a self-conscious tradition that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
– Preference for practicies of dialogue and academic organizations over practices of science and professional organizations.
– Preference for interdisciplinarity or antidisciplinarity over specialization and professionalization.

Are these values no longer shared? Have we moved on?

If we have, it would call into question the relevance of Humanities Computing as that application of computing to humanistic disciplines. Could HC be an interested extension of a dead tradition?
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Maturana and Languaging

Are there alternatives to the piping model of communication?

Maturana and Varela’s Autopoiesis and Cognition has been suggested to me as an original work that crosses biology, cognitive science, and information theory (not to mention applications to philosophy and literary theory.) In a paper by Maturana called Biology of Language:The Epistemology of Reality he looks at “languaging” or the relationship of saying and observing.

They to understanding dialogue as more than just the piping of messages from one system to another is that we observe our own sayings (and writings) as we create them. There is a folding back of the message to the sender that recursively changes the sender and what is being sent as it is sent. In other words we listen to ourselves speak as we speak while simultaneously watching the reception in the other in order to manipulate the saying in real time.
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