Vacuum

What to do with Flickr?

Once upon a time, Flickr was just an experimental part of Game Neverending. Then it was a full blown society, full of interesting people who happened to express their interestingness through photography. Digital photography was new then, and special, and there was some first flush of enthusiasm for having a system that "got it".

Time and space happened, and Flickr became part of Yahoo. A piece of the fun drained out, and the Internet got bigger. Digital photography got more ordinary, and the camera I carry around everywhere felt more and more like a crappy camera and not like something I could capture the essence of the world with.

I'm at a point where I could easily take a photograph every day and send it somewhere. Should Flickr be that place? Will the time come not too soon when I will want to be a refugee from it, downloading my photos in the hopes that I can re-upload them somewhere else, tags and annotations intact and some fragment of society reconstructed around them?

I loved Flickr once, in the way that I'm sure that people once loved Compuserve. There is still a Game Neverending to play with photographs, but I don't know yet where to play that game.

note to self, twitter edition

as noted on a late friday night; selected, slightly edited, not credited.

"pick up absentee ballot"
"leave the laptop closed if you don't want kittens posting on the Internets"
"700 kids + headache - advil = bad"
"go to sleep!"
"always write for me,always write for me.I am not a great writer, I am just passionate"
"must expand mixed drink repertoire"
"stick to decaf after 5"
"remember wallet next time you go gift shopping"
"Bring notepad or book"
"Breathe"
"Turn off Blue-tooth headset when putting in Pocket"
"dont wear flip flops to a playground with a mulch ground.  Its annoying when the sticks go between your toes"
"start running again"
"if ever in a presidential debate, don't stick tongue out"

Note to self: if you want to write a twitter to yourself as a private message, you have to have two twitter accounts; it doesn't let you send a note to yourself (complains that you aren't following yourself, and you can't follow yourself).

Gustav: social media lessons being learned

While it's still fresh, here are some lessons being learned in the middle of watching (and being a small part of) the net's response to Hurricane Gustav.  I'm not putting a lot of links in this post.

--

Decision to evacuate: It was clear while following Twitter - both directly from the handful of NOLA folks I follow and generally from looking at the net - that people went through a huge amount of decision-making about when and whether to leave.   Twitter looked like an actual help here for the folks I knew, both to help let others know where they were going (or whether they were staying) and to help make the evacuation process somewhat less isolating.   

Evacuation path: Those who left relatively early had relatively easier driving; by the time evacuation was underway in earnest the traffic jams were huge, some gas stations were temporarily out of gas, and the contraflow caused a lot of congestion when it ended.  Twitter again seemed to be useful to help people figure out which non-Interstate highways looked like reasonable exit paths, or at least if it wasn't useful at that moment it was something to file away for next time.

Lodging and companionship when you arrive: Here the contrasts associated with poverty and access to resources are the starkest.  Those with means to leave early and drive far arrived to empty shelters, and people eager to help; those who went somewhat off the beaten path, and knew where they were going, found their choice of hotel rooms; those who evacuated late and didn't go very far found themselves in crowded shelters right in the hurricane's path.  There were stories of Labor Day reunions with family that had left during Katrina for another city and never came back, and more than one account of people who evacuated to their previous Katrina evac destination.

Keeping track of things back home: New Orleans was out of the worst of the storm, and a cadre of well connected people stayed behind, and as a result there's been detailed reporting on status down to which bars are open and who has power (even though the Entergy site is only reporting aggregate numbers at the parish level).  Other places had it much worse, with Baton Rouge the biggest loser, getting a substantial storm hit and a lot of NOLA refugees in shelters and really bad power and telephone recovery.  I don't (personally) have as connected a Baton Rouge network as I do a New Orleans network, so it feels second hand and isolated.

Decision to return:  This is a complicated set of decisions as of yet not completely played out, and really the next question.  If I return home, will there be flooding on the way?  Will the power be on?  Will I have phone service, will the toilets work, will there be good drinking water, will I get stopped on my way home and then stuck?  If I don't go home, can I afford the hotel stay? 

--

The other question you have to ask, of course, is whether the Internet has been helpful for 2 million people, or just for 200 who are super well connected.

The OnStar service announced how much health and welfare traffic it took during Gustav, and how helpful it was to have trained professional staff on the other end of the phone line to help people during an evacuation - to find hotel rooms, to give driving directions, to be calm. 

Various "social media projects" sprung up to coordinate information, but the real winner in the wild appears to be radio (in particular Mississippi Public Radio), which can reach people right close by even if their phone is out of battery or out of service.

CNN was broadcasting live (!1!1!) using Twitter to get real time feedback from people - how much of that is just the nature of broadcast news to seize on new technology, and how much is it some fundamental change in how reporting is done in the middle of a disaster.

The test, I'm sure, happens not this week or next but months or years from now as Houma, LA is rebuilt or when Pineville, LA and Alexandria, LA once again have clean running water.  There's some disappointment in that the reaction has been "it missed New Orleans, no problems", when that's so clearly not the case.

--

Some reactions:

Andrew Turner shares a lesson: iterate. He points to this Etech 2008 Disaster Tech preso from Jesse Robins and Mikel Maron.

Come, Follow Follow Follow Me (trad. arr.)

a round in three parts:

Part I:
Come, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, follow me.

Part II:
Whither shall I follow, follow, follow,
Whither shall I follow, follow thee.

Part III:
To the greenwood, to the greenwood,
To the greenwood, greenwood tree.

sources:

KiDiddles song lyrics; includes a sound file, but not the same tune I'm used to.

transcribed by Cathy Russell; replaces "greenwood" with "redwood".

Wendy James w/religious lyrics.

World War II recruiting chant for the Girls Training Corps, UK.

Come, Follow from the "Songs of Cesium". "For non cesiophiles, cesium is the most electropositive and sublime element known, and as such merits praise, worship, its own newsgroup (alt.cesium), etc. etc."

plus this opaque JSTOR reference to The Restoration Catch.

(reflecting on the variations of the "follow" command on various services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Plurk, Plaxo, LinkedIn, etc etc etc etc etc)

Discovering national elites via punched cards; on the value of LinkedIn and structured data for propaganda efforts

via archivist Jeff Ubois, this account of using needle sorting cards for human intelligence gathering:

Alfred De Grazia, with Floyd Hunter and Paul Deutschmann, wrote a training manual in 1954 for the State Dept., "DISCOVERING NATIONAL ELITES A Manual of Methods for Discovering the Leadership of a Society and Its Vulnerabilities to Propaganda" that includes an approach to social network analysis for "propaganda-target analysis" based on punch cards. It's now been declassified:

• http://www.grazian-archive.com/governing/Elite/F_34.html
• http://www.grazian-archive.com/governing/Elite/Table%20of%20Contents.html

The rest of De Grazia's site is out there (though one might have said the same thing in 1954 if presented with a scheme for punch card analysis of social networks.)

If you look closely at this personnel record, it's eerily reminscent of the data structure of a LinkedIn record. Note that LinkedIn just sold off a 5% slice for $53 million, giving them a nominal valuation of $1 billion; with 23 million membership records, that's about $40 per punchcard.

Kevin Kelly (re)discovered these cards recently and has a nice set with photos in his piece One Dead Media, noticing that nothing of this description was anything he could find anywhere:

But prescient as it was, and as cool as these cards were, I searched the Net today for any sign of InDecks and was surprised to find no sellers on eBay, no fan sites, no collector sites, no historical web pages, and no evidence that anyone is still using them. They are gone. Blasted out by the first computers. Bruce Sterling lists them in his Dead Media file, a catalog of defunct media devices and platforms. They seem to be verifiably extinct.

Believing that nothing really goes extinct, I challenge you to reinvent these in some useful, usable way.

Novelty and collective attention / Huberman and Wu

If you wait long enough, it won't be novel, and thus it won't be worthwhile to pay attention to. Thus by incorporating a delay loop into your news consumption you'll miss a bunch of transient spikes of things that are no longer newsworthy.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/45/17599

Novelty and collective attention

Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman*

Information Dynamics Laboratory, HewlettPackard Laboratories, Palo
Alto, CA 94304

Edited by Harry L. Swinney, University of Texas, Austin, TX, and
approved September 14, 2007 (received for review May 25, 2007)

The subject of collective attention is central to an information age
where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus
of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and
eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the
dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an
interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news
stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model
characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate
that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law,
suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention
fades.

(via dragomir radev)

Technorati Tags: attention, novelty, digg

social media metrics / quality without a number

“To seek the timeless way we first must know the quality without a number. There is a central quality which is the rooted criterion of life and the spirit of man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be numbered.”

Brian Kerr channeling Chris Alexander for a new century and an old industry.

Technorati Tags: qwan

Wiki Wednesday / Ann Arbor / Nov 2007 notes

Last night was Wiki Wednesday in Ann Arbor. We met at Rendezvous on South U.

In attendance: @matth @homelessdave @edwardvielmetti griff
Regrets: @bkerr @vaguery @samrose @tedernst

The main topic was Arborwiki, it's continuing care and feeding.

I gave some results of initial local search log analysis from the new features in Google Analytics, as a way to systematically surface pages that people are looking for that aren't there or that need love.

We talked about ways to source more photos for Arborwiki, with a call to the local Flickr community. Many pages don't have pictures on them that could. The Ann Arbor District Library has an image archive, but copyrights are murky and thus most of the photos are unusable. Most Flickr people are happy to grant rights to their photos for Arborwiki use if asked.

Griff talked about ideas for putting together a local community newspaper out of Ann Arbor Alive. We worked through some of the mechanics and logistics of this including trying to figure out a hosting platform - consensus was that Arborwiki has some of the data, but that this might be an ideal student Drupal design project.

There was some brainstorming about bicycle-mounted, bicycle-powered low power FM. Dave has bike power and a trailer suitable for towing a mobile station. FCC regs (unclear on exactly which) allow some amount of low power broadcasts as long as they are non-interfering; with an Internet head-end and a network of neighborhood retransmitters you could reasonably build community radio on the cheap.

Dave suggested an area of focus around expanding the number of biographies on the site. It would be reasonable, for instance, to have a bio page for every elected official, for every person that a street was named after, and for other people with some notability or notoriety. Less clear was the relationship between people's "user" pages and people's "bio" pages for folks who are contributors.

Matt talked about maps and mapping and plugins that manage that, which appear to be evolving well. Some ideal future neogeowiki world has an infrastructure that generates KML as a byproduct of user behavior for mapping and search.

NEEDS LINKS - DO THAT NEXT - POST NOW

Google acquires Jaiku, film at 11

Google has acquired Jaiku. The Finnish service (what do you call it? a microaggregator?) pulls in feeds from your various web presences and turns it into a lifestream. My Jaiku profile hauls in a bunch of news from the various dispersed places I put thing.

I have about 30 friends I'm following on Jaiku, which is tiny compared to the rest of my use of these sorts of things. My use of it in the past has been some part backup relief valve for when Twitter is down, and part keeping in touch with a more European crowd.

The analysis of the Jaiku acquistion is happening in real time to the right hand side of my screen on Twitter. Ross Mayfield expects that Jaiku competes with Facebook's Social News Feed, and notes that integration with Google Talk adn Orkut is perfectly reasonable. Steve Rubel predicts that Twitter is the next to go and suggests that Yahoo will snap them up inside 45 days. There's the usual undercurrent of groaning about yet another chance for a cool service to be swallowed in the maws of a huge company, with the memory of Dodgeball fresh in mind.

Jaiku did some work to integrate with Nokia's Series 60 phones, and they have a mobile version for ordinary mobile phones. My early take on it compares it head on with Twitter's mobile version, which is much more awesome for me in part because it has my motley assortment of Ann Arborites, librarians, web geeks and fellow bus riders to help me get through the day in real time. I don't have that collection of people on Jaiku, and thus for me it does not have the same real time feel.

The other point of comparison is Jaiku vs. Facebook's tools for aggregating information about yourself. I don't know any other tool out there that quite so neatly pulls in abbreviated versions of the things you're up to and consolidates them quite so well as a personal chronology and record. This "lifestream" approach is nicely done, compact, and useful, and they figured out search optimization enough so that every so often I get Jaiku as a referrer for something I've written and have it show up high in search results. Facebook feels like it needs constant tending, but Jaiku can run in the background and passively gather the stuff you're doing on the open network and pull back 1% of it to keep a record.

With the current froth around Facebook and thus by extension all close substitutes for it I'm not surprised by this acquisition. Jaiku is much more a tool that belongs on and lives in the open Internet than Facebook. If you were to roll back the clock and make a comparison, it would be between AOL or Compuserve back in the day in the Facebook seat, and Usenet, home pages, email lists and What's New pages in the rest-of-the-world seat. Last time, AOL lost and the net won, but it won only by mostly destroying itself and remaking itself in the process. This time who knows.

Technorati Tags: jaiku, google, facebook, goog, acquisition, hosting

scrabulous: online scrabble game needs Facebook developers w/experience in load balancing

from the error page at the scrabulous facebook site:

Need another day.

What we did last night did not work, we need another day to get this running.

There's no point in letting everyone try to play and face errors, so we're closing it for some more time. Please check back in tomorrow.

Any programmers with experience in load balancing please email fb.scrabulous@gmail.com . We can do with some support in that area.

Sorry folks ... trying our best to give you the best.

always interesting when facebook apps go down because of heavy loads (and I do miss my scrabble games).

Technorati Tags: scrabble, scrabulous, facebook, load-balancing, scaling, architecture, games