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Wednesday, March 19, 2003 |
Leaderless Resistance. I was reading this quote from an article called Leaderless Resistance Today:
"The new communications technologies make it possible for a movement to exist solely as an ideology, with no membership lists, no financial records, no direct communication between the operatives and no "off" switch. There is no way to negotiate with such an ideology, no way to compromise....Because there is no formal "group" with assets, interpersonal relationships, or other stabilizing factors, individuals who moderate simply leave the milieu; their writings and actions remain behind, recruiting new members."
..and I was thinking "Yeah, that's fabulous, that's the kind of stuff we need!!", when I actually looked at the article and realized it was about terrorist groups and dangerous elements in society, and how movements might continue, simply based on an ideology, a book, a website, an event, even without any organizing network, without an organization, without any leaders. And the article talks about how that is a very bad thing, and how we might stop that. But I'm looking for how we might start that. Oh, not focused on hate and violence as the article is talking about. Focused on truth, freedom, beauty, love, the common good. Imagine that there were nothing any frantic monopoly could do to stop people from spontaneous making things work better and being more fun, and from exposing the truth at every turn. No organizational leadership to buy off, no accounts to bankrupt, nobody to put in jail, no communication channels to cut. Just millions of people who freely and voluntarily operated as cells of a bigger body, without even having to talk about it. Heheh. [Ming the Mechanic]
There is something very powerful here. Does the Internet need some pruning and cleanup? Is that even possible?
6:58:00 AM 
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Tuesday, March 18, 2003 |
Airport luggage inspectors policing thoughtcrime.  A traveller flying to San Diego from Seattle found his luggage had been opened by the Federal Transport Security Authority, who had left behind a note telling him so, on which was scrawled "DONT APPRECIATE YOUR ANTI-AMERICAN ATTITUDE" -- a reference to the "No Iraq War" signs he'd picked up in a shop in Seattle.
So, the Feds are not only inspecting our bags -- and invading our privacy -- to ensure that they are bomb-free; they're now taking it upon themselves to chastise us for our political beliefs? What the hell does keeping bombs off airplanes have to do with winkling out protest signs?
Nothing like a little thoughtcrime policing to undermine the entire mission and credibility of the TSA. Of course, the TSA is maintaining that this wasn't the work of an inspector -- rather, someone at the airport cut the security-seal left behind by the inspector, defaced the "You have been inspected" card, and replaced the seal, all without being caught by the TSA itself (wow, that gives me a lot of confidence in the TSA's ability to secure the nation's airports!).
Nico Melendez, western regional spokesman for the TSA, said the note in Goldberg's luggage will be investigated, but he said there's no proof that a TSA employee wrote it. "It's a leap to say it was a TSA screener," Melendez said.
But Goldberg said, "It seems a little far-fetched to think people are running around the airport writing messages on TSA literature and slipping them into people's bags." Link Discuss (via Interesting People)
[Boing Boing Blog]
7:01:52 AM
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Seb does it again. Towards Structured Blogging.
Lately I've been thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily.
Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on. Now, say I've written a review of the latest Radiohead album into my blog. I'd like others who are interested in Radiohead, or in music reviews in general, and who may not know me, to be able to pick out my review from the common pool in a simple way. Interesting people may come my way because of this.
What we're talking about is getting people to put more metadata on their content. Now allowing it is one thing, and fostering it is another. And I'd say the latter is the bigger challenge.
The importance of feedback
I believe a critical element to get a sustainable system is for people to get reasonably quick feedback in return for the extra effort expended in creating metadata. The Internet Topic Exchange, in which Phillip Pearson implemented the ridiculously easy group-forming design, seems to work because it has a short feedback loop, and might provide a template for where we'd like to go. Here's an illustration of how the Internet Topic Exchange works:
People (on the left) associate select posts with particular topics by specifying a Ping URL; TrackBack carries information about their posts into the Exchange (the fat square), and from there they make it into open topic-specific blogs (on the right). (I don't need to talk about the per-topic Wiki pages here.) Creating a new topic is as easy as inventing a name - anyone is allowed (and encouraged) to do it.
Now, people interested in particular topics will watch them, and this is where the fun comes from. Look at the figure above. Say John (the yellow guy) doesn't know Elaine (the purple girl). But he watches Topic 1 dutifully. Now Elaine happens to come across the channel for Topic 1 and posts to it because she's also interested in Topic 1. Soon John gets her post in his aggregator, checks out her blog, and voilà, he's found a like mind.
In this case the metadata that we have managed to get John, Elaine and others interested in consists of a simple topic identification. This simple scheme has helped such groups as spanish bloggers, emergent democrats, and Austin bloggers coalesce.
Beyond topics
How might we work our way from this model to a different form of metadata, say a music review? Here's a possibility. We retain the basic architecture of the Exchange, but add a new type of blog post called "music review". A drop-down box might enable me to select between "plain-vanilla blog post" and "Music Review". The interface for entering a "Music Review" post might look like this:
(Here I'm assuming there is some sort of standard for music reviews composed of a title, an identification code for the piece of work being reviewed, a rating, and some text. If you know of a similar existing standard please let me know.)
In an ideal world, the "Find" button would pop up an assistant that lets you dig into a music metadatabase (say, MusicBrainz) and quickly home in on an unambiguous ID code for whatever it is you're reviewing (possibly asking you to contribute to the metadatabase if it doesn't know about this piece of work), and puts it in the box.
You fill in the other boxes, click "Post", and your part is pretty much done. Next the system does three things. First, it stores the review in a non-lossy format somewhere on your site. Second, it converts your input into a regular blog post to put in your blog and RSS feed. Third, it notifies one (or more) central indexing service(s), analogous to the Topic Exchange, that knows about music reviews, of the availability of your new review and of its location. This central service also serves a variety of RSS feeds. There could be song-based feeds, album-based feeds, artist-based feeds, genre-based feeds, etc. that you can subscribe to. You could subscribe to the "Radiohead songs and albums" feed and get all reviews of Radiohead songs and albums as soon as they come out. Or maybe you just want to be notified whenever someone reviews a certain song you especially like.
As in the case of the Topic Exchange, these RSS feeds are where the feedback (and the addictive quality) comes from and how new interpersonal links form and people cluster.
Putting it all together
Now to generalize. I talked about music reviews, but the scheme should also work with other kinds of content. Music video reviews, movie reviews (using IMDB?), ad reviews, TV show reviews, game reviews, radio station reviews, weblog reviews, restaurant reviews (perhaps using GPS data), scholarly article reviews... other kinds of content that are not reviews also, such as song lyrics, TV show transcripts, quotes, self-identification data.
Each of these would have (one or more) standard format(s). The basic idea is to let the blogging system support "alternate post type" plug-ins. Anyone should be able to develop such a plug-in (and a corresponding indexing service) for a new kind of post that they want.
If something like this were to become successful it would compete with a host of commercially led user-contributed databases such as Amazon's review database. One advantage would be to put control more firmly in the hands of contributors.
Will people care enough about having their writings under their own control and collected in one place to move away from such databases? I think they might. I know I do.
Other people are thinking along similar lines: Danny Ayers, Alf Eaton, Marc Canter, Sam Ruby, Ben Trott, Karl Dubost, to name a few. It would be nice to make something like this happen in 2003.
[Seb's Open Research]
Seb is so right on. First he does the Personal Knowledge Publishing rap, then he wrote about the collective mind "web-enabled group minds at work" - and he's been tracking the TopicExchange for a while. he's also been the ONLY person so far, besides me - who has contributed to the Topic Exchange channel I created - 'theMatrix'. [Marc's Voice]
6:24:24 AM
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Monday, March 17, 2003 |
More Social-Network Mapping Tools.
I wrote yesterday a column named "New Social-Network Mapping Tools Are Emerging."
Slashdot mentioned it, and their readers sent me many comments and e-mails about other visualization tools.
First, I need to make some corrections about Valdis Krebs, the developer of InFlow, a software tool I talked about in this previous column. He wrote me to tell he never worked at IBM. On the contrary, IBM was his first big customer. And, while this Discover article stated that "Krebs has spent most of the last 15 years honing his mapping software," he told me "the first working version [w/o visuals] was written in 2 weekends... on a 512K Macintosh... using Prolog." Finally, InFlow is designed to analyze not an individual e-mail box, but groups of them.
And now, let's browse through the excellent suggestions in no particular order. [Please note that I intentionally removed all e-mail addresses.]
- Raffi Krikorian urged me to take a look at a quick hack he put together a year ago called email constellations. "This project aims to be a free, flexible, and easily modifiable visualization tool that allows a user to intuitively understand their online social group structure."
- Stefano Mazzocchi sent me a pointer to his Apache Agora visualizing social networks. There, you can see a data cloud "generated by processing three months of e-mail traffic on three Apache development mail lists."
- Jonathon N. Cummings alerted me about the NetVis Module which allows a dynamic visualization of social networks. "The NetVis Module is a free open source web-based tool designed to simulate, analyze, and visualize social networks using data from csv files, online surveys, and geographically dispersed work teams."
- Rev. wRy mentioned EtherApe, a graphical network monitor for Unix.
- J. Maxwell Legg wrote about his freeware inGridX tool. "inGridX started life as a repertory grid creative free software offer to Kellian decision support consultants who make inferences about meanings by looking at the spin derived from a grid of elements and constructs. inGridX uses Principle Component Analysis as the basis to materially implicate a grid's digital effects.
- The NameBase people pointed me to their Proximity Search tool which "generates social network diagrams of the ruling class."
- Steve Wolff asked me to check his Surf3D Pro tool. This is a freeware program which promises to reduce "search time by over 80% in comparison to what it normally takes you to click through and evaluate search engine results." It has specific agents for Google Usenet groups, eBay auctions, Yahoo! Boards and others.
- Arthur Embleton and Gustavo Muslera both recommended KartOO visual meta search engine. It is similar to the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, but it doesn't require Java and uses FlashPlayer to draw interactive maps. Dazzling!
- Finally, a reader named xynopsis talked about another kind of tools, the Visual Thesaurus. This web tool is not about social mapping, but it shows graphical connections between words. In this previous column, "The Visual Thesaurus: What Does it Show About Thanksgiving?," I already explored this very funny tool.
As I already said, if you know about other similar new tools, please tell me and I'll gather your comments in a future story.
Sources: Roland Piquepaille, with Slashdot readers' help, March 16, 2003 [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]
7:09:50 AM
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New Social Network Mapping Tools. New Social Network Mapping tools from SmartMobs..
And now, let's browse through the excellent suggestions in no particular order. [Please note that I intentionally removed all e-mail addresses.]
- Raffi Krikorian urged me to take a look at a quick hack he put together a year ago called email constellations. "This project aims to be a free, flexible, and easily modifiable visualization tool that allows a user to intuitively understand their online social group structure."
- Stefano Mazzocchi sent me a pointer to his Apache Agora visualizing social networks. There, you can see a data cloud "generated by processing three months of e-mail traffic on three Apache development mail lists." [A bit of caution: you might have to stop and restart your browser after using it.]
- Jonathon N. Cummings alerted me about the NetVis Module which allows a dynamic visualization of social networks. "The NetVis Module is a free open source web-based tool designed to simulate, analyze, and visualize social networks using data from csv files, online surveys, and geographically dispersed work teams."
- Rev. wRy mentioned EtherApe, a graphical network monitor for Unix.
- J. Maxwell Legg wrote about his freeware inGridX tool. "inGridX started life as a repertory grid creative free software offer to Kellian decision support consultants who make inferences about meanings by looking at the spin derived from a grid of elements and constructs. inGridX uses Principle Component Analysis as the basis to materially implicate a grid's digital effects.
- The NameBase people pointed me to their Proximity Search tool which "generates social network diagrams of the ruling class."
- Steve Wolff asked me to check his Surf3D Pro tool. This is a freeware program which promises to reduce "search time by over 80% in comparison to what it normally takes you to click through and evaluate search engine results." It has specific agents for Google Usenet groups, eBay auctions, Yahoo! Boards and others.
- Arthur Embleton and Gustavo Muslera both recommended KartOO visual meta search engine. It is similar to the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, but it doesn't require Java and uses FlashPlayer to draw interactive maps. Dazzling!
- Finally, a reader named xynopsis talked about another kind of tools, the Visual Thesaurus. This web tool is not about social mapping, but it shows graphical connections between words. In this previous column, "The Visual Thesaurus: What Does it Show About Thanksgiving?," I already explored this very funny tool.
[Smart Mobs] [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
6:58:24 AM
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Friday, March 14, 2003 |
Who Loves ya ,Baby?.
DISCOVER Vol. 24 No. 4 (April 2003)
Table of Contents
article in full...
Pass your e-mail through some new software and the answer will become obvious
By Steven Johnson
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In his classic novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable links, that actually gets stuff done— as Vonnegut describes it, "a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing." A granfalloon, on the other hand, is a "false karass," a bureaucratic structure that looks like a team but is "meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done."
No doubt you've experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it's an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID.
For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software called social-network mapping promises to change all that. Instead of polishing up the org chart, the new social maps are designed to locate karasses wherever they emerge. Mapping social networks turns out to be one of those computational problems— like factoring pi out to a hundred decimal points or rendering complex light patterns on a 3-D shape— that computers can do effortlessly if you give them the right data.
Until software designer Valdis Krebs came along, however, there wasn't an easy way to translate social interactions into a machine-readable language— short of following people around, anthropologist-style, noting whom they called or whom they chatted with at the watercooler, and then typing it all into a PC. "In the late '80s," Krebs says, "I was taking two graduate classes at UCLA— a class in organization design and a class in artificial intelligence. I was real busy at my day job, and I had a lot going on in my personal life, and I started thinking, 'Boy, it would be great if I could figure out a way to do one project to hand in for both classes.' " It seemed like an unlikely combination, until a friend showed Krebs an article about an early rendition of social-network-mapping software. "I looked at the article and had that 'aha!' moment: 'Here's the project for both my classes.' "
Krebs has spent most of the last 15 years honing his mapping software, which he called InFlow. He quit his day job in 1995, after IBM agreed to license the technology, and now he makes social maps full-time. Krebs is half sociologist and half digital cartographer: Many of his organizational maps are based on surveys taken of employees answering questions about whom they collaborate with, what their work patterns are. That data is then fed into InFlow, which paints striking visual portraits of social structures in organizations. They look almost like images from a chemistry textbook— dozens of molecules strung together in an intricate shape, each one representing an employee. The links between each person are a way of visualizing the flow of information through a company. "The maps show how ideas happen, how decision making happens, who the real experts are that everybody goes to," Krebs says. They show the karass buried inside the granfalloon.
Of course, modern corporations no longer need surveys to make sense of their employees' social interactions. With the rise of e-mail, chat rooms, bulletin boards, and Web personals— the watering holes of the digital realm— our social interactions now leave behind an increasingly long trail of data. And that makes them easy to map.
"If we're going to spend more of our social life online," Judith Donath says, sitting in her office at the MIT Media Lab, "how can we improve what that experience feels like? How can you convey the sense of being in a crowd or the movements of a crowd?" Stylish, and aided by a subdued, affable vocal style, Donath runs the Media Lab's Sociable Media Group, exploring what we can do with all the digital data we're implicitly collecting about ourselves.
"You have this enormous archive of your social interactions, but you need tools for visualizing that history, for feeling like you're actually inhabiting it," Donath says. Turning her sleek, black flat-panel display toward me, she loads up Social Network Fragments, created by Danah Boyd, a grad student, and Jeff Potter, a programmer. The program is visually stunning, if somewhat overwhelming: a floating mass of colored proper names projected over a black background and clustered into five or six loosely defined groups. It looks more like a work of information sculpture than a supplement to e-mail software.
The program was featured as a work of art in a gallery show in New York City in the summer of 2002. But the data it represents are culled from mundane sources: the addresses of e-mail messages sent or received. By looking at the names of people whom you send messages to or receive them from, and who gets cc'd or bcc'd on those messages, the software builds a portrait of your social networks. If you often send messages to your entire family, the software will draw links between the names of all the people you've included in those messages; if you cc a few colleagues on a message to an important client, it will connect those names as well.
Assuming you have a significant amount of e-mail traffic, the software will create a remarkably sophisticated assessment of your various social groups, showing you not only their relative size but also the interactions between different groups. If your college buddies have grown close to members of your family, you'll see those two groups overlap on the screen, like two crowds huddled next to each other.
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Intelligence analysts once assumed that terrorists organize in isolated cells. But social-network maps revealed that the 9/11 hijackers' cells morphed into a hub-and-spoke pattern with an obvious leader: Mohammed Atta. The active structure resembled that of an IBM project team. |
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If these visualizations are interesting for individuals, they're even more interesting for large organizations, where social networks can play a key role in the success or failure of the operation without any individual really knowing where all the networks are. Every large organization has its granfalloons and its karasses. You have your executive vice president for sales, and the 10 deputies who report to her— that's a granfalloon. The karass is the group of 10 people from 10 different divisions who come together to make sure the new product ships on time. Granfalloons are what you see in the annual report and the business plan; the karass is what actually happens on the ground, when things are going well. It's that implicit social structure that both Donath and Krebs are after, in their different ways.
Social mapping is not just for corporate sociologists. Krebs has used his software to analyze the social networks visible in book-buying patterns on Amazon.com, by tracking the "people who bought this book bought these other books" feature. The software starts with one book and follows the links out to five books connected by an Amazon customer's purchasing habits; then the software moves on to 25 books connected to the five. (If he's attempting a particularly broad study, he'll do another sweep.) Then the InFlow software creates a map showing clusters of books that are often purchased together— and by association, clusters of book buyers with shared interests. These are implicit social networks, not explicit ones; you don't necessarily know the people in your cluster, but you have a lot in common nonetheless.
Not surprisingly, social-network software is ripe for political analysis. "A few weeks ago," Krebs says, "I got into a discussion online about the state of the country politically, and some people were arguing that the country was really divided, that we were back to where we were after the 2000 election. One side can't stand the other side. And I started thinking, I wonder if you could see evidence for this in the book-reading networks." Krebs used InFlow to analyze the network of book purchases surrounding two best-selling titles, one from the left (Michael Moore's Stupid White Men) and one from the right (Ann Coulter's Slander).
"What I got were two cliques that were about as distinct as they could be. I kept looking for paths that crossed between them. Every time I tried to follow one of these paths, I'd go out three or four steps, and then boom, I'm right back in the clique." Most strikingly, the two networks intersected only on a single title: Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong. Otherwise, the two groups were engrossed in entirely different reading lists, with no common ground.
Those two cliques make it clear that tools designed to detect social networks are just as good at detecting antisocial behavior as well— for sniffing out the karasses that don't ever speak to each other or those linked by one solitary thread. For corporate managers and sociologists alike, this may prove to be the software's most useful function. It shows us the gaps in the network, the borders that no one dares cross.
RELATED WEB SITES:
Learn more about InFlow and the work of Valdis Krebs: www.orgnet.com.
Read about Danah Boyd and Jeff Potter's Social Network Fragments project at smg.media.mit.edu/ projects/SocialNetworkFragments. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
7:13:50 AM
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Towards Structured Blogging. Sbastien Paquet has a great article with thoughts about how we can move towards structured blogging. You know, where the meaning of what we post is captured more systematically than just being a bunch of words one can link to.
"Lately I've been thinking about how we could evolve blogging tools to allow people to author more structured (dare I say semantic?) content, so that other people could find their stuff that they find of interest more easily.Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on. Now, say I've written a review of the latest Radiohead album into my blog. I'd like others who are interested in Radiohead, or in music reviews in general, and who may not know me, to be able to pick out my review from the common pool in a simple way. Interesting people may come my way because of this.What we're talking about is getting people to put more metadata on their content. Now allowing it is one thing, and fostering it is another. And I'd say the latter is the bigger challenge. Here are some ideas....continued in Towards Structured Blogging" Good stuff. Seb suggests some ways of choosing what types of thing you're posting in your weblog entry. Like, is it a 'Music Review' for example. That would allow services a step beyond Internet Topic Exchange aggregating postings more intelligently. I think we need something a couple of steps beyond that, but I can't quite articulate what exactly that is, so this would be an easy place to start. [Ming the Mechanic]
7:08:58 AM
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Thursday, March 13, 2003 |
Azeem digs up an essay by Paul Saffo on information overload and new organisationional structures, written 14 years ago, to make a case for generalists.
We are in a pickle today because we are trying to manage 21st century information overload with 19th century intellectual skills. For example, we still prize the ability to recall specific information over the skill of making connections among seemingly unrelated information. We have become a society of specialists, each knowing more and more about less and less.
One of the important antecedents was the introduction of the printing press. Prior to the Gutenberg, memory--the ability to recall tomes--was the over-riding metric for scholarship. When printed books meant recall was less valuable, literacy being a more potent skill.
Saffo postulates a similar shift with the now familiar consequences in organisational structures, work behaviour and machine-to-machine conversations.
Azeem goes on to postulate that organizations do not value generalists for three reasons: specialization of processes, an educational system that creates them and the threat they pose to specialist managers.
Overcoming the organizational inertia that reinforces specialization may well be the largest barrier to advancing our capacity to process information. Institutions are powerful things. But so is the flow of information.
Take education for example, which is on a path of convergence of diversity. Convergence of disciplines is where real innovation and discovery occurs. Never before has the barrier to sharing and accessing information across disciplines been so low, and as a consequence, fields like social network analysis have become reinvigorated. The falling cost of information processing has also increased the amount of quantified analysis in every field. Most social sciences are rapidly converging with economics and even hard sciences. Educational programs stem from research and the definition of fields of study, offering more inter-disciplinary educational paths.
Innovation springs from intermingling diversity. Commercial organizations will continue to value specialists to assure competence and deep discovery in given lines of research. But like the trend in education -- stove pipes and protectionism will fall. The costs are minimal and the risk of exchanging information is minimal compared to the rewards.
The design challenge is systems that support both generalists and specialists without creating information overload to empower their collaborative discovery and gradually dissolve their distinctions. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
7:27:33 AM
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Sunday, February 23, 2003 |
Content Conundrum. A friendly conversation about Reusable Learning Objects, courtesy of David Davies.
[...] Q: So, where has this little discussion got us? I can create my own RLOs, although I was anyway only I called them learning resources. I can't use any fancy RLO content creation tools yet because there aren't any good ones although there may be soon. I can search RLO repositories just as I can search Google though I accept I may get a better chance of finding what I want searching an RLO repository given the fact that it's a resource dedicated to a particular topic as opposed to Google's come one, come all approach. Metadata may help me to find RLOs but nobody's yet been able to demonstrate that in any compelling way. And finally, although we didn't talk about it, even if I did find someone else's RLO I may not be able to use it because I may not be able to modify it for my own purpose. Not so good, eh? A: Actually, I'd say quite the opposite. Because we've been able to identify these as some of the central issues surrounding the use of RLOs, that people are taking these issues seriously and that there care some high-level group attempting to address by consultation with all stake-holders then I'd say there are likely to be some important breakthroughs in the use of RLOs in the future, or at least some clarity over what we really mean by RLOs. [...] [David Davies' Weblog] [b.cognosco]
5:53:35 PM
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Thursday, February 20, 2003 |
Microsoft's Kid Mobs.
Thanks to a bundle of bizdev chutzpah with a great name, Tammy Savage, Microsoft is developing something that may actually seem cool to 16-year-olds of all ages. Steven Levy describes the evolution of Threedegrees, a p2p smartmobbish application brewed by Microsoft's NetGen Lab, which is really a bunch of college just-graduates living in a big house, Real World style, helping Microsoft figure out how people who've grown up in a networked world want to take communication to the next level. Threedegrees, the result of this jam session, allows users to from mobs - er, ad hoc posses - of up to ten persons, with the theoretical possibility that they will "perform shared tasks," as the Jupiter analyst quoted in CNet's story says. Right, tasks... play tunes, chug virtual beer, that sort of thing. As Levy describes it, this is Microsoft's first anti-production tool... when a beta was added to servers within Microsoft, "productivity took a nose dive." Cory Doctorow says "...the project sounds kind of neat, until you realize that it's got an assload of DRM built into it and, in the end, does less than Napster did." (Thanks, Phred!) [Smart Mobs]
5:25:43 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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