Seb's Open Research
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Saturday, April 05, 2003
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Write for you
 This is just too good to miss. Elizabeth Hall Associates looks to be one of those promising startups that boldly tap into the steadily growing market of sleep-deprived, ambitious students.
"We provide a totally secure and confidential customised writing service, copywriting and personal effectiveness skills building.
CUSTOMIZED ACADEMIC WORK CANNOT BE DETECTED BY NATIONAL PLAGIARISM DETECTION TOOLS.
THIS IS RISK FREE. THIS IS UNDETECTABLE CHEATING."
 4:11:24 PM
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Musician weblogs
In Online Communities and the Future of Culture I claimed that all kinds of culture-makers were getting online because it rewarded them with more meaningful contacts with people who can appreciate their work. Here are a few blogs by musicians that I happened across lately.
- Phil Jones' BeatBlog - "what would happen if a culture did try to blog music, to create little fragments of rhythm and melody, to hyperlink through them?" Reusable Music Objects. I like.
- Brad Sucks - "I write, record and produce songs in a small home studio and put them on www.bradsucks.net for people to download without copyright and hopefully enjoy. I'm also releasing the audio source files for all of my tracks in case people want to mess around with them or collaborate with me."
- Violinist blogs
- InTune diaries - A Scoop site.
- SongTrellis - seems to be a Manila site for a community of musicians
If you know of any others, please leave a comment! Hopefully Google will index this and help other musicians find one another.
[Update] Gary chimes in with Shirtlifter - "His website features lyrics with the MP3 right next to them, some personal stories, gig and release notes and just for fun also creates an alternate universe ... with himself at the centre, of course :)"
1:01:54 PM
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The epistemology of social software
Matt Webb: "We're exploring, but not deriving the facts -- even if it's "this works, this doesn't"; we don't because with social software it comes for free: the ones that work are the ones that are successful. Successful and social should probably be decoupled so we can more easily examine them."
10:40:48 AM
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The unbounded playground
Andy Phelps has (once again) a fascinating post on the many links and potential bridges to be drawn between what's happening in multiplayer games and in social software. A passage especially resonated with me:
I yearn for the day that blogs are incorporated into virtual worlds (and thinking of building some stuff). I don't just want a 'blog site' I want a 'personal world'. I could hang out there and leave messages for other travellers. I could trackback through other peoples worlds and signs, artifacts they have left there. The dream of personal ownership of a piece of cyberspace that is *mine*, whose purpose is not predestined along the design of some set of game rules (although already players are subverting the very goals of game worlds to their own, creating a status structure and society based not only on norms that the designers envisioned, but several others as well).
Reading this reminded me of a piece I wrote for a "Technology in the Future" contest a while back. The challenge read, "Tell us your wildest dreams and ideas and how people will use it to make their lives better and more fun. In 250 words." My entry was titled The unbounded playground.
In the future, massive virtual environments are created and enjoy very wide availability. Technology enables people use to enter these worlds and interact with one another in ways that were initially unforeseen by its creators. Most importantly, the environments are open-ended : they let participants invent and create new things in these worlds, and put them up for display. These can be works of art, games, puzzles, anything you can imagine and communicate. In virtual worlds there is no scarcity ; there are no constraints other than those that users individually or collectively choose. The only limit there is the imagination.
These new universes expand rapidly because they tap into the urge that we have to express ourselves and to discover new things.
Individual and collective creations emerge. Participants are driven to share their inventions : their electronic nature makes sharing virtually costless. As a result of these efforts to reach out, people with similar interests eventually cluster. They build on each other’s contributions ; collective creations emerge and whole new communities sprout out. The new medium offers a social flexibility that is unheard of in the « real » world. For instance, it is easy to participate in many communities at the same time, find or create new ones or leave any one of them as one sees fit. The overall result is an explosion of individual and collective freedom, creativity and two-way sharing, an experience that is totally unlike earlier forms of entertainment such as television or movies.
(And in case you were wondering: no, I didn't win.)
12:45:31 AM
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Mapping my creative network
Inspired by Liz's brilliant initiative, I thought I'd try and map out part of my creative network for the benefit of my readers and the other people who come across this blog.
The task wasn't all easy, and I found myself wishing for more dimensions to work in - hence the "Missing from the picture" section. But here's the result. Now please don't come and tell me to change my map because you'd rather appear somewhere else; this reflects my current, very personal mental model of my immediate neighborhood.
Words in blue indicate themes. Sorry I haven't had time to embed links into the map, but hopefully this will be helpful anyway - though, come to think of it, it might actually tell more about me than about the people in the map!.
Drawing this made me realize how people and topics or themes were two very fundamental building blocks in my current worldview - and I believe my left sidebar reflects this. Does everybody think in the same manner? (I doubt it.)
I put the above map in the public domain, in case anyone should want to do something with it.
12:23:25 AM
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Friday, April 04, 2003
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The evolution of weblogs
I just found two pretty interesting posts speculating on the evolution of blogs while mining Gary Lawrence Murphy's blog:
- Where the Mushrooms Bloom, on the proper way to the Semantic Web:
"What we need is not structured XHTML web pages or more dublin core meta-tags in HTML; what we need is a browser that expands on the "add a description" textbox on the bookmarks form, and gently induce the operator to incrementally fill out just a bit more information about that fave link (by rewarding them somehow) and then trading that information transparently via P2P RDF! Instead of Google being some massive keyword database rating pages by word and link counts, it is a miner for the hearts of gold among all these drifting resource descriptions.
The whole point and purpose of it all is that the arcane format of these RDFs remains invisible to the annotators, and the annotations are invisible to the webpages authors (both living and dead) who's once upon a time works the bookmarkers are semanticalizing. Enter more bottom-feeder blo.gs and other robots to sift, coallate and refine this dualspace of crosslinked metadata, and the visible strata of ill-formed websites starts to take on real structure."
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Blog Fad, on how the popularity of information found in the blogosphere must be distinguished from its reliability - the blogosphere exposes "sociological truth" rather than truth itself; and on the central importance of the ever-developing tools that graft onto blogs such as RSS, Daypop, PageRank, Blogrolls, Technorati, Blogdex, blo.gs, Trackback, et al., making the circulation of knowledge much more efficient than before.
2:03:59 PM
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Thursday, April 03, 2003
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Slices of the ongoing conversation on social software
Matt Webb: "Learn about human nature - the kind of human nature which is important here, emotional response curves maybe - groups dynamics and so on. Model, break down. Put in the implicit design laws into the requirements document, things that aren't usually thought about" Yes!
12:52:32 AM
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Leading by example
Stefan Smalla points to a video stream of nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huan's presentation at Stanford on innovation and success in business. I have to agree with Stefan - this is one very impressive guy. I found especially interesting how he explained that he found that a leader's ways of doing things very often naturally rubs onto the rest of his team, so that through his own actions he can nurture a successful culture within the organization.
12:32:27 AM
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Wednesday, April 02, 2003
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Tuesday, April 01, 2003
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Beautiful mechanics
First off, no I'm not talking about car repairmen :o)
Physics was my first muse, intellectually speaking, so I hope non math-inclined readers will forgive this brief incursion into greek letter territory. I just couldn't resist this - in Pity the Freshmen Jacques Distler finds beauty in Freshman Mechanics. While he seems slightly surprised, I'm not. Mechanics is a treasure trove - plus, everyone's got first-hand experiences so many of the concepts feel natural if you've been paying attention to the physical world.
Consider a pencil (a uniform rod) balanced on its tip. As the rod begins to fall, the tip is held in place by the force of static friction exerted by the table.
- No matter how large the coefficient of static friction, mu, the rod will reach a critical angle, theta, at which it will begin to slide.
- For small mu, the tip will slide the opposite direction from the direction of fall. For large mu, the tip will slide in the same direction as the direction of fall.
[Hmm. Turns out my blogging software changes the greek letters into accented characters. Oh well.]
5:44:24 PM
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Learning in community
Though sketchy, the following presentation summary is very interesting, as with most of what comes from John Seely Brown. Brown says that "learning in the digital age really takes place through practice like in the opensource community, not through old methods of lecture and receive." And I'd add that it's much more fun that way.
Mixing, Tinkering and Reusing in the Digital Age Short, point-form post of a John Seely Brown presentation. [elearnspace blog]
5:18:52 PM
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Thoughtful pieces on emergent democracy
Via the emergent democracy channel, two excellent recent items:
- A UK civil servant's thoughts on how to influence politics through collectively developing coherent, articulate positions that have popular support.
- New Harvard blogger Jim Moore's wonderful paper The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head. Here's a choice quote on the newfound power of the individual within a global social movement:
"The shared, collective mind of the second superpower is made up of many individual human minds—your mind and my mind—together we create the movement. In traditional democracy our minds don’t matter much—what matters are the minds of those with power of position, and the minds of those that staff and lobby them. In the emergent democracy of the second superpower, each of our minds matters a lot. For example, any one of us can launch an idea. Any one of us can write a blog, send out an email, create a list. Not every idea will take hold in the big mind of the second superpower—but the one that eventually catches fire is started by an individual. And in the peer-oriented world of the second superpower, many more of us have the opportunity to craft submissions, and take a shot." (emphasis mine)
In a complex world it makes sense to use the intelligence of many more people to reach decisions - if only we can craft a process that effectively allows all of us to think together. I don't think we're there yet, but things are moving fast in many directions at the same time.
Matt Scofield offers an interesting counterpoint to Moore's essay on Joi's blog. "Certainly our democracy is not perfect, but America is not yet an oligarchy -- delibaration in the "second superpower" is what makes the "first superpower" so effective." Indeed, improving deliberation might make the first superpower's decisions better aligned with the second superpower's interests.
4:54:07 PM
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Below the radar
David Gurteen's latest knowledge letter points to Peter Fryer's nice little site called trojanmice.com. Fryer explains what he means by the term 'trojan mouse' thus:
Much change is of the ‘Trojan horse’ variety. At the top of the organisation a decision is taken to introduce a strategic change programme and consultants or an internal team are commissioned to plan it down to the very last detail. The planned changes are then presented at a grand event (the Trojan Horse) amid much loud music, bright lights and dry ice. More often than not, however, a few weeks later the organisation will have settled back into its usual ways and rejected much of the change. This is usually because the change was too great to be properly understood and owned by the workforce.
trojanmice, on the other hand, are small, well focused changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way. They are small enough to be understood and owned by all concerned but their effects can be far-reaching. Collectively a few trojanmice will change more than one Trojan horse ever could.
There is an art to spotting a Trojan mouse - you need to develop a critically trained eye. Seeing things differently, and seeing different things, is a powerful experience. And once you do, you can set your trojanmice free to create the results your business needs.
I think that some of the really powerful memes that end up driving change are indeed rather subtle in their ways - no loud music, no smoke, just a simple shift in how to do certain things that propagates over social networks from one person to the next. And what's interesting is that pretty much anyone can craft and disseminate them. If you've been listening to the loud music playing elsewhere, you might not notice the change until it's way too late to prevent it from taking over.
Here's an earlier blog post about Dave Winer, Douglas Engelbart, and outliners as positive Trojan horses.
3:58:15 PM
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Monday, March 31, 2003
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Graduating in social software
social software graduate studies. Liz: "is there a need for a graduate degree program focusing on the development and implementation of social software? [...] if there is a need (and/or interest) in such a program, what should it include? What would a graduate of such a program need to look like in order to be valuable in today’s development world?"
4:37:49 PM
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We like novel, trivial technology
I don't think I've linked to Britt Blaser before, but everything by him that I've read to date felt quite insightful. Britt is building momentum right now, trying to put together a system called Xpertweb that could (as I understand it so far -- which is only slightly) reorganize the way economic relationships are set up between everyone and anyone. Doc, Mitch, Flemming, and Stuart among others are wrapping their brains around this and taking it rather seriously, so I'm eager to see what will come out of the effort.
The icing on the cake is that apparently, the design is fairly trivial to implement from a technological standpoint. Which sounds very good to me. I too like novel, trivial tech.
3:56:58 PM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:12:35 PM.
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