Social Networking

The inspiration for my post Burning Down the TV came from Jen Simmons presentation at Wordcamp New York last Sunday. The other speakers that day included Matt Mullenweg, co-developer of Wordpress and a partner in Automatic, bloggers Aaron Brazell and Shay David, Jeremy Clarke on running a blog network, and Jen on Wordpress and video.

If you’re curious about where Wordpress is going in the next release (due out in November) and what else you can do with this CMS besides writing text-blogs you’re in luck: videos of Wordcamp NY are now online. Here’s the beginning of Matt Mullenweg’s introduction and below it, a link to videos of all of the presenters.

Click here to see the rest of Matt’s talk and the other presenters sharing the Wordcamp New York stage, with thanks to Jonathan Dingman for posting these videos and to Sun Microsystems for the generous use of their conference facility.

I’m not really turning Japanese as this post’s title* suggests, but as a blogger and a Blogfather I was fascinated to learn that according to reports last year in Technorati and The Washington Post, Japanese has become the dominant language of the blogosphere.

Why Japanese? With a vast middle-class nearly everyone can afford an internet connection, and with daily commutes that can be hours long people have time to blog from their phones and assorted digital hand-held devices. Thought the subjects of personal blogs tend to be quite different in Japan than in the West, could this this video report from The Washington Post be a glimpse into our future?

Note: although these percentages date from 2006 and were quoted by the Post in late 2007, they’re still striking and the cultural spin in the video intrieguing, prompting this post. For the most current data see Technorati’s 2008 Report from the Blogosphere.

* Props to Max Praver for the translation.

I trust you all tuned in last Friday night to see if McCain was going to show up?

After such a tough week for the old maverick — suspending his campaign, parachuting into Washington, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative,  and keeping everyone guessing if we’d be watching Barack debate himself — it made for quite the drama and a weird preview of a McCain presidency. As Gail Collins wrote in her Times op-ed piece yesterday:

Imagine what would happen if a new beetle infested the Iowa corn crop during the first year of a McCain administration. On Monday, we spray. On Tuesday, we firebomb. On Wednesday, the president marches barefoot through the prairie in a show of support for Iowa farmers. On Thursday, the White House reveals that Wiley Flum, a postal worker from Willimantic, Conn., has been named the new beetle eradication czar. McCain says that Flum had shown “the instincts of a maverick reformer” in personally buying a box of roach motels and scattering them around the post office locker room. “I can’t wait to introduce Wiley to those beetles in Iowa,” the president adds. [And] on Friday, McCain announces he’s canceling the weekend until Congress makes the beetles go away.

But I digress – this began as a post about Twitter mashups. Maybe you’ve been at a conference recently where the presenter invited the audience send text feedback, projected on a screen above. What if that happened on a national level?

We saw that in the pre-convention debate sponsored by CNN (who’ve been out front on weaving Twitter into news broadcasts). Now Current TV, the independent cable television network founded by vice president Al Gore, has broken new ground by incorporating audiences’ 140-character commentaries from the microblogging service Twitter into their broadcasts.

How cool is that? For the whole story go to Wired for their post Current TV Hacks The Debates and visit Current TV’s Hack the Debate for more episodes. I can’t wait to watch this during the VP debate on October 2nd.

I began playing World of Warcraft when I was a suit for Pearson. Though I worked my way up to a L20-something Paladin, the daily 4 hours as a commuter and on the phone, and 10 hours at the computer and on the phone killed my interest in grinding higher. Still, WoW was compelling and deep, and I acknowledge was my gateway drug to playing and working with the new - and next - generation of MMORPGs and virtual worlds.

From the beginning I saw beyond games’ entertainment value to their high potential to be used as teaching and learning simulations. That led me to the first several Serious Game Summits that were held in Crystal City, MD just across from the Pentagon. From the spook-to-wonk ratio of attendees there, it was clear the military-industrial complex was on to the potential of games to train, too. In a Presidential season with both sides all puffed up about their ability to defend the country, the constitution and the borders, Wired reports today that:

American military and intelligence communities are increasingly worried that would-be bin Ladens might gather in a virtual world, to plan a real-life attack. But the spies haven’t given many details, about how it might be done. Now, a Pentagon researcher has laid out how such a terror plot might unfold. The planning ground is World of Warcraft. The main target of this possibly nuclear strike: the White House.

There’s been no public proof to date of terrorists hatching plots in virtual worlds. But online spaces like World of Warcraft are making some spooks, generals and Congressmen extremely nervous. They imagine terrorists rehearsing attacks in these worlds, just like the U.S. military trains with commercial shoot-em-up games. They worry that the massively multiplayer games make it incredibly easy to gather plotters from around the world. But, mostly, virtual worlds are nerve-wracking to spies because they’re so hard to monitor. The accounts are pseudonymous. The access is global. The jargon is thick. And most of the spy agencies’ employees aren’t exactly level-70 shamans. Continues here >>>

At first I rolled my eyes thinking here’s more fodder for the haters to bash all video games. But all that palaver about terrorists training in WoW got me to wondering: which Presidential or VP candidate can see WoW’s nefarious underworld better from their home state: Obama-Biden or McBush-Impalin?

More importantly does saying you can see something — Russia, polar bears thriving in the melt, or World of Warcraft — mean you understand its subtleties and nuance, or is that only maya, the dangerous illusion?

Click image to stop on one picture, mouse up or down to pan, click again to continue.

Here’s a whole new take on the global market and media mashups. This kaleidoscopic stream displays 35 images I shot at public markets in London, Seattle, New York City, in Ariquipa and Urubamba, Peru, and in Seine Bight, Belize. 

It’s made with a cool new service from Viewvox.com that allows you to mix, create and blend personal media - video, photos and music - and share them as live streams on your own channel, in email or embedded as it is here. Look for more here soon and comment with links to ones you make - let’s discover everything Viewvox can do.

Several weeks ago in Hooked on Twitter I pondered whether microblogging had spawned a new literary form. Evidently it has, as Matt Richtel writes in the New York Times last weekend:

You might remember the novel in its earlier form; it had a cover, and many pages, forethought of plot, editors and agents weighing in, and, oh yes, it generally had sentences and punctuation. And, finally, some poor suckers had to take the time out of their busy days to actually read it.

Who has time for all those niceties? They’re so first half of 2008.

Introducing the Twiller. Recently, a handful of creators (present company included) have scrapped pen and paper for mobile phone and keypad, and started texting their novels — in real time, just a few characters at a time. Our medium is Twitter, a service that lets you broadcast bursts of 140 characters at a time to be read by people who subscribe to get your updates.

Really, so first half of 2008. For more, visit Matt’s site and go pick up a copy of Hooked from Amazon. See you in the tweet-stream.

Though summer reading does not summer blogging make, now Labor Day has past it’s time to catch up. One of the more intriguing ideas to hit my radar in August is Scott Traylor’s post on the size of online social networks:

How is it that some members of online social networks have so many connections? Connections that number in the high hundreds, and sometimes even thousands? Do these users really know that many people?

Observing how some users of LinkedIn and Facebook have hundreds of “friends” or more, and wondering how that was possible, Scott’s research led to a theory called Dunbar’s Number, the “the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person. Although no precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, a commonly cited approximate figure is 150.”

Not content with theory alone, Scott took the time to look at different levels of connectedness he has with others, and plotted those relationships to see if Dunbar’s number holds up. Does it? Read more here to find out.

Earlier this year Automattic founder and WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg suggested on his blog that the future of Wordpress MU (multi user) is social media. TechCrunch covered the story too. As a user of Wordpress and advocate of the new convergence I think it’s great news. From the BuddyPress site:

The idea of BuddyPress is to take a standard vanilla installation of WordPress MU and turn it into something that represents more of a community building tool, or niche social network.

BuddyPress is essentially a set of WordPress MU specific plugins. Each plugin adds a distinct feature (or component) to BuddyPress and only handles functionality for that specific component (for example, private messaging). BuddyPress also has a core plugin that all other plugins require, it contains shared functions and performs the basic modifications to the WordPress MU interface.

When using the default theme, BuddyPress will move the main focus of WordPress MU away from blogs, and onto the actual member profile. However, members can still blog and use all the blogging features they would normally expect from WordPress. When someone uses BuddyPress, they will be going there to build or enhance their profile first, and write something on their blog second. The blog is turned into another component of BuddyPress.

Everyone is asking me about Twitter lately: “What is it?” Microblogging. “Does it serve any purpose?” Lets you follow and communicate — 140 characters at a time — with friends, colleagues or (from the Twitter home page once you’re logged in) everyone who tweets. But invariably it comes down to the last question, “Why would I want to?”

The first two questions are easy but I admit to being pretty dodgy about answering the last one. I know of a professional librarian who uses it to query her colleagues around the world, and of at least one remarkably large company with a staff tweeter who monitors the bit-stream for customer insights and respond to any complaints that bubble up from the chatter. But what about smaller companies, professional practices, consultants, creatives, writers… you?

In my short life as a tweeter I’ve found a few business uses — it’s gotten me back in touch with a colleague for a possible collaboration, for one — but really I’ve gotten hooked on Twitter to follow the “story” that some tweet-streama reveal. For example take Ingen Bio Group, “the leading private human pharmaceutical development company in the world” and Dr. Leonard J. Kendall who tweets as IngenBio and has said:

05:38 PM July 30, 2008 from web
Thorne log> I wasn’t able to stop him. Kendall was killed in the explosion. 03:46 PM

July 30, 2008 from web
Thorne, Sgt. Garrett - INTRAGEN EXPOSURE >QUARANTINE HOLDING 4.30.95 >Ingen Bio - Security Command >ITC CLEARANCE LEVEL - RE … … 03:17 PM

July 30, 2008 from web
. …- . .-.. -.– -.

02:47 AM July 29, 2008 from web
http://tinyurl.com/6qom2q

09:12 PM July 28, 2008 from web
The Salt Lake Times - Warehouse Explosion Kills Cancer Scientist April 16, 1995 - 10:13 a.m. CT

08:48 PM July 28, 2008 from web
KENDALL LOG//DELETE - FILE RECOVERY INCOMPLETE / UNABLE TO RESTORE

12:38 AM July 28, 2008 from web
1:08:00:00 FIGHT.SURVIVE.INFECT.

Wait… back up… “Fight. Survive. Infect?!

Then I played the video Dr. K linked to this morning… and have to conclude this is either one of the best viral marketing campaigns or social media art works I’ve seen. Very cool. Though the excitement of discovery has passed the intrigues of Dr. Leonard J. Kendall and the Imogen Bio Group continue amaze and entertain. And I still don’t know if they’re a corporate security breach, a marketing promo for a movie or video game, or an emerging literary form.

What do you think?

Update – I just ran across a January post called 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers by Darren Rowse on ProBlogger that expands considerably on my post. What caught my eye was this chart of Darren’s traffic since he started “taking Twitter seriously.”

Suffice to say that if you found my post of interest and you’re a blogger you want to check this out.

If you’ve noticed the right hand column of my site recently you know that sometime around the 4th of July I began tweeting on Twitter. Though I long eschewed it and still find it can be a time-sink, I’m beginning to see a place for microblogging: keeping up with friends; asking questions-to-the-universe that (sometimes) beget worthy answers; and it’s downright entertaining (the mad scientist — or micro novelist? — IngenBio comes to mind).

But now that I’m gettiing my tweet on, MIT Tech Review reports that Identi.ca has written an open source microblogging code base called Laconica that anyone can use. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.

Is this too much of a good thing? Will my peops migrate there, forcing me to follow if I want to keep up? Should I be running an instance of Laconica on my server, the way I do Wordpress, to foment my own microblogging network? These were my immediate questions but I realize the bigger meme is that everything on the Internet is mutable, no matter how original, no matter how well done. If you build it they may come, but you can count on someone else building it too. Maybe better. And they’ll try to eat your lunch. How’s an entrepreneur-developer-businessperson to cope?

Just as with bricks-and-morter businesses and tangible products — you know, the old fashioned kind you could touch or hold in your hands — the differentiator has to be design. One obvious example is Apple (a few stumbles notwithstanding) who have built design into the company’s DNA. Arguably Google, paragon of the lean interface, has too. Need some inspiration to get your design on? There are lots of places to turn for inspiration, but the thumb-worn copy of Tom Peter’s modest booklet Design (as modest as anything associated with Tom Peters can be, that is) that’s a fixture on my desk is one of my favorite places to start.