Finally, The Internet As Intended.

For any of you out there that are still stumbling across this blog - pleae re-direct yourself to kurtvoelker.com, where I’ve now taken up residence.

See you there!

Kurt 

Yahoo! has launched their new social network called mash. Looks like a 360 replacement from what I’ve read. The service is invite only right now - anyone have any an extra invite?

OMB has released an API to the FedSpending.org database of contract and federal assistance awards. Another great example of data transparency. It will be great to keep an eye out for interesting an effective use of the data.

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A system ordered largely by unbalanced positive feedback will continually amplify that feedback. I learned this in 7th grade with my mock fender and gorilla 12 watt amp. So why does Duncan Watts piece in the NYTimes today describing a study proving that popularity affects web site user’s decisions, have many in the blogosphere trumpeting the ironic death of Web2.0, collective intelligence, transparency, and the network effect?

Watt’s article describes his study that was published last year in Science, where more than 14,000 participants registered at their Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants.

The results indicated that songs that jumped to an early lead in number of downloads tended to stay at the top on the web site that provided download numbers; and these popular songs were very different from the ones choosen by users that were not provided that “social” information. Thus, there is a “cummulative advantage” provided to the early downloaded songs - and these early leaders are effectively random, they are simply the preferences of the first users.

So what should we take away from this? Many are using the simple experiment to knock the very core principles of transparency, wisdom of crowds, collective intelligence, and the network effect that are at the core of the leading approach to succesful web sites and systems. Scott Karp - whose sanity amid the Web2.0 hype I always appreciate has really dropped the hammer:

All of a sudden it’s crystal clear what Web 2.0 really is — the greatest platform ever for harnessing randomly imitative social behavior. Before Web 2.0, achieving utterly arbitrary results took time and effort. Now, with platforms like Digg, we can get nowhere in a fraction of the time it used to take.

While on one hand, it’s nice to see something we know intuitively - that things already declared popular receive more attention than items without that distinction - proved to be true. On the other, the experiment as performed dramatically over-simplifies the situation for one very big reason: positive feedback loops.

The most successful emergent systems, those where valuable order arises by individuals acting autonomously, are successful through a balance of positive and negative feedback. Everything from thermostats to a human’s sense of balance to ants’ decisions on the best place to store their waste. Can you tell I just read Stevn Johnson’s Emergence?

How dramatically would the results change if you simply gave users the ability to vote songs both up and down? Hard to say, but I would have to guess it would make a difference.

Creating a system that produces quality from simple rules is amazingly complex - netflix is offering a cool $1M for one that improves their movie recommendations. I wouldn’t dismiss the crowd’s wisdom from an experiment that doesn’t allow the wisdom to emerge.

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Community Wifi for lower-income communities just got a much needed enabler. For just $79 Netequality, an Oregon-based 501c(3) nonprofit is now offering a modified “wall plug” version of Meraki’s Mini PCB wireless mesh network router hardware.

They have already deployed networks in six communities, where one (or more) broadband internet connection is plugged into a NetEquality router and one wall-plug repeater is needed every 4 houses or so.

What a great partner for other nonprofits that need their information and services to reach communities that typically have poor internet penetration. I could envision some very interesting programs that couple the planning and installation of a mesh network with specific information services for residents.

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Ross Mayfield says it’s tipped, Stowe Boyd agrees, and John Edward’s every move is public. It appears that Twitter has blown up. The tool seems amazingly frivolous at first glance. I setup an account 7 months, posted one message, and stopped. Then this morning I saw this - http://sxsw.twitter.com - and you start to get it. How do we set one of these up for NTEN in DC?

 

 

 

The USAToday.com today launched a redesigned site flush with participatory features. Kinsey Wilson and John Hillkirk, the executive editors, have a great message about the paper’s mission and how embracing these new social features will help enhance the way it creates and delivers the news.

Our website has a new look. But the real change is in the approach, not the appearance.

…In many ways, it is an extension of the mission we set for ourselves nearly 25 years ago when the newspaper first launched: to present the news of the day in a concise, accessible, even entertaining fashion that was, above all, respectful of the reader.

But it is a mission recast for an era in which readers are inundated with information, have little allegiance to a single news source, struggle to assess the credibility of what they read and have the capacity to share their own insights with a wide audience.

Wow. Quite a message. Kudos to USA Today for seeing the writing on the wall and making a decisive statement on the future of news.

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The Washington Post is reporting this morning that the US Patent Office will soon launch a pilot project to tap into the collective intelligence of the web to help them vet patent applications. I love seeing adoption of these web2.0 techniques applied in appropriate places with a real potential for postive impact - and this is one of those. It will be interesting to watch things develop. From the Post:

The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency’s examiners.

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To start a social network today you need only flip the switch. Ning, KickApps, Pligg, GoingOn, are all players in the ever growing space of social network providers. The rapid commodification will have two major impacts on the nature of social software in the near future:

1. Social Networks are Features

Om Malik got it right when he said social networks are features, not properties. Friends lists, collaborative ranking, private messaging, public commenting, widgetable profile pages - this collection features strengthens any site.
2. Unified Identity Becomes Essential

The proliferation of social networks as a site feature means a proliferation of personal profiles, which makes identity management more and more of an issue for Joe User. He wants to participate in the social network features of the sites he visits, but managing multiple identities is a pain.

So, if you’re considering the addition of social networking features to your site (and you should be), you should be also be looking at the new identity standards and tools - and the one with the most momentum right now is OpenID.

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