There is more to the game than a comprehensive tutorial, there’s also a sharp story, and perhaps more significantly, a robust content delivery and data-mining platform that Valve uses to update and monitor the usage of their products. Valve’s content distribution platform, Steam, allows the company to apply bug-fixes and updates to games, as well as learn about how users go about playing through the games, including but not limited to the furthest level of completion, and whereabouts in the game players are most likely to meet their end.

While the ability to glean insights about how their customers use their products must be invaluable as feedback data for making better and more engaging games, it is the ability to update content seamlessly on users’ computers that was a move to watch this past week.

To prepare for the upcoming release of Portal 2, Valve quietly and unceremoniously released an update to 2007’s portal that changed the end of the game. The practice, known as retconning, or enforcing “retroactive continuity” is usually met with nerd-rage, but seems to have been well-received by the gaming community in this case. Thanks to their content distribution and monitoring platform, Valve has been able to take a product already in the hands of consumers, and modify it so that when their forthcoming product hits the shelves, the continuity between the first and second installments of the game’s story is cohesive and correct. Not something that could be done with the game of Life or Clue.

Steam isn’t the only content distribution platform that has the ability to update and change the user experience after the sale is made, Amazon’s kindle had an unfortunate time with what is more or less the same story, and I’m sure that there is plenty of legal language and technical infrastructure in the iPod/Phone/Pad terms of service that allows Steve Jobs to legally annex users’ first born children.

As an increasing amount of products are imbued with connectivity and access to a platform, the way that companies think about the experience they deliver to users will need to change in kind. Companies will need to find ways to cleverly leverage these platforms to make their brand experience really resonate with customers–all the while avoiding pitfalls where they may alienate users and lose their trust.

While the site shows where people are now, not where their homes are, clever criminals could scan for location-updating users and filter their results by context. “Drinking wine by the fireplace” is likely something said at home, as is “at my home office doing some work.” With a base-collection of tweets like those tied to geotagged locations, a criminal could easily create a database that maps who is away from home right now, how far away they are, and in the case of fervent tweeters, what speed and direction they’re traveling in. By putting all of this information on a map, and filtering to see only people who are on vacation, enterprising burglars could plot an optimized route through a neighborhood going after only the houses that are currently empty. Pretty great risk-mitigation strategy for criminals!

At the footer of each page on the PleaseRobMe site is the friendly explanation that “[its] intention is not, and never has been, to have people burglarized.” I believe them completely, but their point is well made. Technologies like geolocation and status updates might appear simple, but they’re part of a complex and elaborately tracked ecosystem of technology, one that’s not easily understood or teased apart into core pieces. Hopefully PleaseRobMe catches some attention and brings to light that showing whether or not you’re a candidate for burglary or not is a possible consequence of not carefully using modern social technology. I wish the PleaseRobMe team luck, as the lesson is much better learned here and now than later when even more sensitive information is accidentally or carelessly shared, and the stakes rise further.

Some time ago internet memes were confined mostly to the periphery of the Internet, but some made it into the mainstream–think LOLCats and RickRolling. These two and their fore-bearers originally spread on message boards, forums, and irc channels; parts of the internet that weren’t especially welcoming to casual users. But the face of the internet has changed: it’s now easier to use and more people are on it. And it’s more social. Lots has been written about how it’s easier for messages to go viral on social networking sites like facebook because people have a built-in friends list, and their peers are likely to be more receptive to a message that comes from a friend.

Lately on facebook these mainstream internet memes really seem to be taking off. A few weeks ago women everywhere were posting status updates that were only one word long: a color that corresponded to that of their bra. This was allegedly to raise awareness about breast cancer, though it’s equally plausible that the idea was simply to “confuse boys.” Shortly thereafter, “doppelganger week” began, and people started changing their facebook pictures to photos of celebrities that they vaguely (or wishfully) resembled. Next was the “post the urbandictionary definition of your name. Finally, and most recently, has been a political meme going around seeing if an onion ring can amass more facebook fans than Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper (and boy can it ever).

These four memes have taken over my facebook newsfeed, and likely those of just about everyone else who shares more than a few friends with me. Viral marketers would love to get this kind of reach, but doing so largely remains a dream. So why not change the rules of the game a bit?

Urbandictionary is clearly benefiting a great deal from being the center of attention in this way, but what’s to stop other companies from joining-in on the trend and showing that they “get it”? Various breast cancer societies could have easily hopped on the bra-color bandwagon. New York Fries or Pizza Pizza (the only places I can think of off the top of my head that serve onion rings) could roll out a “Prime Minister Onion Meal,” and any number of celebrity gossip magazines could use the doppelganger meme to great effect.

After all, if these trends simply “happen,” then there’s no intellectual property concerns to worry about, the message already exists and is popular (making it a proven commodity), and it shows people who already feel like they’re a part of something that the marketer/company is also in the know. Macy’s tried this by hiring Rick Astley to sing “Never gonna give you up” in 2008’s Macy’s day parade, but I think the best has yet to come in terms of marketers latching on to, and reflecting back, the spontaneous culture of the internet.

Christopher White, a University of Alberta graduate student, responded to the prorogation by forming a facebook group, Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament (CAPP). People joined in droves. To date, the group is almost 220,000 users strong, and there was hardly a single time I logged into facebook for a period of 2-3 weeks when I didn’t see that at least 4-5 more of my friends had joined the group. I thought then, as I did before, that this was just armchair democracy, and no one really cared about the issue with more energy than it would take to click a link, and people on both sides of the issue agreed that that was a very likely assessment. When facebook invites started going out asking Canadians to rally in their prospective cities on January 23rd to protest, I was skeptical that turnout would exceed more than a few hundred in any one place.

Boy was I wrong.

On Saturday I went downtown to take a look at the protest, and snuck onto a nearby patio to get a view of the turnout.

(Click for full)

By my estimate, there were some 3200 people in Toronto’s Dundas square, not all of them were there to learn about the Gumwich. Whether or not the protests will make a difference in the long run remains to be seen, as we’re still pretty far from an election, and it’s entirely possible that only a few of the attendees voted for our current ruling party. But this clearly puts to rest the idea that civic engagement online begins and ends with clicking a button to join a link.

I’m glad I was wrong, and I’m glad that I was around to witness this social media-organized peaceful assembly for political action.

Well you sure watched that quickly! For those who are busy and those who skimmed, Suarez’s argument breaks down roughly like this:

Our world is full of robots. They’re not machine assembly line robots, nor are they wheeling around shouting “Danger Will Robinson.” Instead, they’re small bits of software that each do one thing, and do it very well. The history of computing has taught us that thinking machines are good at doing things quickly and doing them over and over, and that’s generally what these bots (short for robots) do; they perform their tasks relentlessly and single-mindedly.

At first, these bots were used to augment the abilities of humans and allow them to have greater responsibility and reach, but increasingly they are replacing people themselves, often in positions that typically made decisions that affect other people. An example that Suarez uses is bots that review credit history data to decide whether or not a given person is approved for a loan: some time ago some person made the decision that people fitting x criteria would be approved, while people meeting y criteria would not. The bot then implements this decision across all records that are sent its way, and in many cases, the repercussions of its decision  has livelihood-impacting results on the lives of the credit applicant.

Bots thrive on the Internet, as they’re not penalized for not having physical, motile bodies online. As more and more of our society has machines embedded in it, there will be more and more information generated for these bots to scour and analyze. In 2010 here at nGenera Insight, two of our main research topics–Pervasive Personal Identity and the Digital Identity Revolution, and Managing in the Age of Unbounded data–are issues that can exist only because of the efforts of software robots. It’s a big issue in our minds, but for Suarez it’s even bigger, and we need to have a serious discussion about the role that these automated, unflinching, and increasingly empowered pieces of software have in our lives and society.

It’s been a couple of days now since I first watched the video, and I’ve been rolling the argument back and forth a bit looking for problems with it: I haven’t come up with much at all. There’s great potential for good to be done with the information collected by these bots, and from the analysis and distillations they perform, but as it stands, the design of the world’s information infrastructure (that is, the internet and the devices that are constantly added to it) give end users/consumers/citizens very little control over their own information and the information collected about them. Suarez is right that we need to have an open and frank discussion about these elements, but I think first we need to really define the space and make sure we’re all on the same page.

Farmville exists with a very different business model than most video games: you don’t pay by the month to play it, you don’t even shell out a one-time payment to play: you play for free, and then the game tries to sell you in-game perks and a chance to skip the grind to unlock all of the game’s content by spending money rather than time.

Farmville locks you out of some content unless you have enough friends playing Farmville with you, and having friends in your network playing Farmville is a reliable source of coins, experience, and gifts, the main resources of the game.

The game is also more than happy to bribe players for participating in its viral spread: cute lonely animals will show up on your farm periodically and as a player you face a dilemma in sentencing them to virtual abandonment and death unless you post on your Facebook wall that you need one of your friends to start playing Farmville and “adopt” the adorable little self-promoter.

The genius in how Farmville has succeed in getting so many people addicted comes down to how it handles commitments on a player’s time: every time you play Farmville and plant a crop, you’re making a commitment to come back during a 12 hour window or so to harvest your crop, or else you forfeit your investment.

There’s some more surprising and clever stuff that has been baked into the social design of the game, but even the points above would seem to make for an addictive (and viral) experience.

nGenera just hosted a conference in Memphis (kudos to FedEx for graciously hosting it at their World Technology Center) where I gave a presentation on gamers as employees and customers. I argue that gamers are more than a bit self-interested, and are focused on generating smart, efficient solutions to problems that let them sail through the rest of the game with relative ease and speed. Gamers also want to feel engaged with their virtual worlds, and in certain cases have emotional connections with in-game characters and the game itself.

Farmville seems to have taken these constructs to a new level, allowing gamers to pay (real money) for tools that speed them towards completion and give them competitive advantage, and putting gamers in situations where their emotional involvement with the game is leveraged to encourage friends to start playing (and spending their own money for in-game advantages).

While writing this post I’ve had the facebook connect installation screen sitting in a background tab in my browser, I think I have to go try the game out for the sake of research. Are there any Wikinomics readers who play the game? What do you think of it? What should I expect?

Hopefully I won’t get completely swallowed up, and will post again soon!

Viral marketing is about making people curious, and getting them to talk amongst themselves. If done properly, an idea or campaign can be seeded very cheaply; word of mouth then does all the heavy lifting, getting the message to a large group of people at no (or very little) additional cost. It also has the benefit of turning people into advertisers; you’re more likely to pay attention when a friend tells you about a product or service than when a commercial tells you about the same product or service (by the way, kudos to McDonalds on their coffee, which they’re giving away for free this week).

This approach is not without problems. Anyone who has graduated grade school (and therefore played many a game of broken telephone) knows, it’s really easy for a message to get degraded as it makes its way through a crowd. When you’re relying on crowds (or individuals) to relay your message on your behalf, it’s essential to pick one that doesn’t degrade easily. It’s also crucial to pick a message that explains it’s own context. Continuing with my McDonalds example, it’s pretty hard to misinterpret “free coffee at McDonald’s,” whereas “‘the world is ending in 2012′ is the premise for a new movie and you should go see it” lends itself readily to all sorts of breakdowns and losses of context — which in turn make a shorter message that is itself easier to communicate.

The trade off for cheap viral marketing is that as soon as the message or idea is released into a crowd, its originator loses all control. It’s still very bad that people unquestioningly accepted the suggestion that the world was going to end, but that was the message at the core of the viral marketing campaign. Was the campaign irresponsible? Poorly run? Very effective? Are the consumers who believed it to blame for their own ignorance?

Just as airline travel made it possible for infectious diseases to spread to new populations at scary new speeds, our densely connected information networks allow ideas and messages to turn viral and spread very quickly — have we got a responsibility to critically analyze information before we pass it on to our peers, or is that their responsibility?

Churchill said that “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” today it can get around the world at least a dozen times in the same amount of time.

The expertise threshold to publish content was considerably higher on GeoCities than it is today, requiring at least bare-bones understanding of HTML, and very little WYSIWYG (if any) editing. Templates were added later, but by and large most things were done by hand. Today, it’s very easy for anyone to have a professional looking, CMS-powered blog that never breaks and scarcely if ever uses Comic Sans MS, but most of these lack the personality that dripped from nearly each and every tweaked template. User generated content lived, in large measure in one GeoCities section or another, so the problem of trying to distinguish “professional” from “amateur” content at least seemed easier.

The precursor to GeoCities was probably (and correct me if I’m wrong) Usenet. But instead of fading away as GeoCities seems to be doing, Usenet is still around and kicking, and is mostly used for piracy and debates about which Star Trek captain could best Darth Vader. However, the bulk of the pre-piracy history of Usenet is now indexed (if poorly) by Google. Knowing the right combination of dates and usernames, my grandchildren follow through my online argumentative career circa the late 90s. The argument has been made the internet should learn how to forget — so why not begin doing so with digital mausoleums like GeoCities and Usenet archives? On the other hand, for the first time we’ve got greater retention and documentation from the exciting time when everyone started to connect to everyone else.

But I digress. I’ve been looking around for any old GeoCities sites I may have made way back in the day, and, finding none, have little more to say than goodbye to one of the first content publishing platforms I ever used. Thanks again, GeoCities, for the public service you provided, it was a big and essential step for the internet.

The reality, I think, is pretty far from the mark: people don’t want high quality, (and in the case of media, accurate) content; they just want to be entertained. What’s more, the threshold for entertainment is frighteningly low. Even before the YouTube revolution, “Reality TV” was gaining ground and prime-time space with each new season, and Fox News/CNN were reporting on trivialities (on good days) — exactly the problem that crowdsourced media was supposed to remedy.

Unfortunately, look at the content that does really well online: stoned children, rude celebrities, general failure, and of course, cats — none of which requires any editorial effort, and generally reflects poorly on our collective taste. If we have network neutrality, and this is the content that really thrives, where then is the drive for media companies (or individuals) to make high-quality content when they can just as easily monetize the equivalent of the Springfield film festival winner? Instead, media becomes a race to the bottom with media companies competing with Joe-Sixpack to see who can first discover the one true lowest common denominator.

This mirrors the old saying about democracy: “it’s the form of government where the people get what they deserve” — we’ve now got democratic media, and people are going to get what they deserve there too. It seems to me that if we’re going to collectively demand network neutrality, and the power and responsibility that comes with it, we’re going to have to raise the bar in terms of what we expect and demand in terms of quality content — and “Twitter journalism” (and the like) shouldn’t make the cut.

Even if there isn’t a collective intellectual awakening, there will always be people online who want premium, high quality content. However, under this new model, in order to make the delivery of that content sustainable (let alone profitable), we’re going to have to pay for it, and it certainly won’t be cheap.

As always, please leave a comment if you hit any snags or have any suggestions.

While the global battlefield showcased the fight between ideas like Communism, Fascism, and Western Liberalism, other ideas are pit against one another on smaller scales all the time. Take for instance the showdown between alternating current and direct current (AC and DC). Both are ideas about how to transfer electricity. DC ultimately lost because it wouldn’t work on a large scale; it wasn’t viable in the long term. Had Edison’s pro-DC publicity campaign been successful and DC became the dominant electricity model, it’s likely that we would have quickly hit the upper limit of usefulness and been abandoned in favor of AC anyway (or another, better technology).

This happens everywhere: Phrenology lost to Psychology; more trivially the curtsey lost to the handshake. Betamax was superior to VHS but lost the format war of the 70s. Either format would have been beaten handily by DVD but only VHS lived to see its own demise. Inconsistent (or suboptimal) approaches lose out over and over again.

For now Western Liberalism married with Capitalism seems to be the mode of choice for maximizing individual freedom in the broader context of society. This means having a democratic society with—in varying degrees—free markets. This has been supplemented by finance, a global network that connects all countries and peoples of the world and communicates information about supply and demand via indicators (market prices) that drive human behaviors.

The hierarchy of things should be that governments set the rules for economic behavior, and within those confines companies and individuals act in their own self interest. Unfortunately in practice money is seductive and politicians are (often) bribed. Further still, government is inherently local while finance is global. In essence, by its nature finance struggles to be the highest principle at play—the one at the heart society. After all, there’s more money to be made when everything—government included—is subsumed into the profit-seeking construct. This isn’t to say that finance is bad, just single-minded.

The recent financial meltdown seems to hint that Capitalism may have at its core some inconsistencies that undermine its long term viability. These objections aren’t new; take for example shopping at Wal-Mart: short term benefit (in the form of low prices) is contrasted with the long term cost of driving down wages and moving business overseas. Similar arguments can be made socially and environmentally.

In the past few years we have seen the rise of another global network that connects all peoples in all countries and efficiently communicates information about supply and demand: the Internet. While the relationship between finance and technology has usually been mutually beneficial, with the advent of the Internet it seems possible for technology to offer an alternative to finance as the central pillar for global society—one for which finance is a tool rather than a master.

Already large companies are trying to bend the internet into a new corporate-controlled distribution channel for their products and services, but could this go the other way? Could the internet replace finance as the central pillar that networks the world together? Are the two necessarily in competition? What would the world look like if this shift ever took place? Do we want it to?

I’m curious to know.

When Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown came out, the best analogy for a movie like this was to a Hip Hop track — a piece of music that remixes together samples from all sorts of sources into something new. While that analogy holds, so too does one about Hip Hop and Open Source software. French trip-hop producer Wax Tailor explains this quite well in a suitably-remixed/sampled track of his own, Once Upon a Past. For those not keen to listen to music at the office, the song argues that a society that allows its members to borrow from and build upon the achievements and accomplishments of others is culturally richer than one that does not. This is an argument also made at length by Larry Lessig in reference to sharealike licensing and copyright law reform. Given the ‘Transitive Principle of Analogous Creation’ (a term that I just invented), we can look at Tarantino’s work through the lens of lax copyright law and open source philosophy. Under this reading, his work is neither homage nor theft, but is instead a synthesis of and reflection on the work that came before his.

Unfortunately, what works for Tarantino is a luxury that most of us do not share. As I wrote about a bit ago, when amateur content creators try to remix existing cultural artifacts together into something new, they get takedown notices, sued, or see their work make money for someone else. There’s clearly a divide: a Hollywood movie exists to make money, buying sound samples or paying licensing fees is a cost of doing business. Unfortunately, small-time directors who are looking to make a movie, not piles of money, and host it for free on YouTube or Vimeo aren’t able to leverage the same library. Even if they release their creation under a free license they’re still on the hook for any and all IP that they added into their mix.

So where does this leave us? As user generated content seems further into our collective popular culture, it will increasingly become fodder for Tarantino and anyone else who wants to paint a comprehensive picture of the world as they see it using parts of the world itself. I think that we need to have a discussion around what we want the roles of IP protection and the public domain to be. This doesn’t seem to be a discussion many people are having — and it doesn’t seem to be a discussion that many people realize needs to be had at all. So, if you are sitting around with your friends after watching Inglorious Basterds and run out of things to say about the movie, use it as a talking point to segue into the debate surrounding copyright law and the rights of content creators and producers. Your friends might flash you a strange look, but it’s a conversation well worth having.

I’m no fan, but the mainstream appeal is clear: the video has almost 13,000,000 views. I’ll allow Wired.com to explain what happened next:

On YouTube’s business blog, technical account manager Chris LaRosa and music partner manager Ali Sandler describe how Chris Brown and Sony Music managed to capitalize on the 12 million-plus times people have watched the “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” video, which shows Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding party boogieing down to the Chris Brown song “Forever.”

“The rights holders for ‘Forever’ used [YouTube's content management tools] to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes,” they wrote. Not only did the song rise to No. 4 in the iTunes music store and No. 3 on Amazon, partly as a result of YouTube’s links, but Sony and Chris Brown also collect a share of revenue from Google’s text ads on the page itself.

The wedding video is inspiring people to click through from YouTube to Amazon and iTunes at twice the normal rate, according to LaRosa and Sandler. And the effect appears to be spreading to YouTube’s official music video page for the song, where they say the click-thru rate has increased 250 percent over the past week.

And the kicker:

Unfortunately the newlyweds depicted in the video aren’t making any money from the video’s millions of views, which would have surely helped defray their wedding and honeymoon costs. YouTube spokeswoman Jennifer Neilsen confirmed that Sony is the one monetizing the video, and that the people depicted in the video are not part of the revenue equation.

This is very frustrating. Worse still is YouTube’s prideful gloating about finally monetizing a video.

Sony’s implicit logic is that because that they own the rights to the music they could have the video removed. Since it remains online by their good graces alone, they are entitled to all click-through revenue that the video generates.

This makes sense legally (it shouldn’t) and is exactly the kind of arrogance I expect from Sony. It’s also a terrible way to engender consumer loyalty. The increased Chris Brown sales would not exist were it not for the video. Taking advantage of content creators and then leaving them out in the cold is not a viable long-term strategy. If users feel that their work is going to be leveraged by others to great effect, they’ll stop sharing it.

An even more egregious example of the one-way flow of content control was South Park’s Internet Meme episode. Viacom felt entirely within its rights to take the likeness of iconic Internet/YouTube celebrities and use them in the episode to generate ad revenue. If those same Internet celebrities uploaded clips of the episodes that featured their claims to fame to their own YouTube channels they would receive takedown notices. This is completely unfair.

Both of these are examples of a larger issue at play which is tightly knit with copyright law. The use and compensation surrounding content between individuals and media companies is not bidirectional. YouTube is not only complacent, but jubilant at the prospect of allowing its users to be exploited. And worst of all, I had to listen to a Chris Brown song to write this post.

Something has to change.

Wikinomics is the second site to test drive this technology, the first being The Huffington Post, which is using the feature for an “interactive investigation” of Obama’s proposed health care bill.

The quick instructions for use are as follows:

What Insight is and how to use it:

Insight is a tool that allows readers ask questions or leave comments in-line, or simply give quick feedback, on the specific parts of content that they find interesting.

To get started, readers just:

Step One: Highlight text with their mouse that is interesting to them.

Step Two: Leave feedback, ask a question, or add an in-line “Insight” (cite your facts when possible).

Step Three: Register for Insight when prompted (users can leave a comment or rating 10 times, as a “temporary user”, before we require them to regsiter).

There is a screencast available if you click the “Learn more” or “What is this?” link on the application.

I’m not sure, but I think the answer is contigent on whether facebook profiles are public or private spaces — the problem is that there seem to be a lot of ways to define if it is. Facebook is public if you don’t know how to set your privacy settings (or if you don’t care to). It’s also public in that everything said is part of a record over which you don’t have much control (people can easily screenshot, quote, save or remember anything said or done).

At the same time, privacy settings do exist for a reason, so maybe calling a profile “public” is too strong in some regards — these settings exist so that only friends (or at least people you never talked to in highschool) can see what you’re up to and interact with you. At best, facebook is a semi-public (does that equate with semi-private?) space, so how do we decide how we behave in this new space?

In real life (or meatspace, as the kids today call it), the division between public and private space is pretty well defined, something is public if you’re broadcasting it outwardly in a public space. Canadian free speech/hate speech laws are a good example, you can say any number of distateful and hateful things to your friends sitting around a table in a bar, but if you stand up on the table and say those same things a little more loudly, you’re no longer in your own private world, and there very well could be some consequences for “sharing your views.”

How does this situation play out on facebook (or other social networks)? Where’s the line between public and private with regards to what constitutes a public statement? It seems that just to be safe, you have to regard everything as public. But how does this apply to etiquette?

If someone posts something, is it considered fair game for debate or disagreement? Or are the rules the same as at a nice dinner party, where you bite your tongue in favor of social graces? If the space is shared, have you got an obligation to make your dissenting opinion known when someone says something objectionable? What are some possible best practices if you decide to do so?

What do you think?

The title, Snow Crash, comes from a 1999 essay that Stephenson wrote about the history of Operating Systems. The lengthy essay, titled In the Beginning… Was the Command Line (avaible for free download here), is one part history lesson, one part cultural critique, and one part personal narrative; Stephenson intertwines the fight between Microsoft and Apple with the development of the modern operating system and his own personal narrative in which he migrates from Apple to Linux.

Stephenson starts with the hacker (in the non-pejorative sense) view that since the operating system really nothing but information, the idea of paying for an operating system is a bit absurd, it’s just pieces of data processing other pieces of data; Bill Gates’ master move was convincing the world that they should pay for something that by its very nature should be free. Further to this, being a shrewd businessman, Gates only made Windows as good as it needed to be to sell; aesthetics just weren’t important. Apple, being a hardware company focused on providing seamless user experiences, took the time to make their OS shine — much to their own detriment.Superficial attractiveness and functionality aside, operating systems are all what Stephenson calls mediated experiences. The way that computers handle information is not readily useful for most users, so a layer of abstraction is inserted between the user and the machine, this layer is the operating system. In replacing the command line interface with the graphical interface, operating systems made computers more accessible, but sufficiently less powerful, as the designer of the OS got to decide what tools should be readily usable to users, and which ones are not. Open source operating systems give users the freedom to determine exactly what their level of abstraction (the GUI) allows them to do. Given that the body of open source technology was at the time exceeding the capabilities of commercial operating systems, it’s mostly just marketing that keeps people buying Windows and OSX.

I’ve gotten into this debate with friends before: should computers be made easy to use, so that anyone may use them? Should computers be “hard” to use, that is, should OS designers refuse to sacrifice power for friendliness? Or, is this a false dichotomy, and open source allowed users to customize their experiences to whatever degree they like (and are capable)? Where should the burden of computing lie, with the user, or with the computer?

I’ve glossed over a lot of the ground that Stephenson covers, if you find yourself so motivated and with some free time, I encourage you to check it out, I’d like to know what people think of this 10-year old view. (It’s worth noting that Stephenson has since abandoned Debian Linux in favour of OSX, does this damage his argument?)

The move from people to pigeons as carriers was important in that all the sudden there was a task performed over a distance that could now be automated. Nowadays, instantly sending a message to someone on the other side of the world is trivial — but that doesn’t mean that modern technology has yet been exhaustively used to solve older problems.

There’s plenty of old technology that still works — works well enough in fact that no one has bothered to replace it with a better, more efficient alternative. Here are a small list of examples:

• The Steam Engine. A.K.A. nuclear power. It’s pretty much the same principle, just instead of burning coal or wood to boil water and use the steam to move turbines, it’s nuclear fission. We’ve supplemented an old technology with new components, but the base principle hasn’t changed in 300 years.
• Physics. More accurately, Newtonian Physics. It’s easy to forget that just as things like steam engines and the internet are tools, so are ideas like laws of Physics. The set of tools for modeling the Physical world that Newton and his contemporaries invented were, and are, extremely useful and accurate. They’re also inaccurate and have been superceded by ones that take into account a larger picture of the universe.
• Government. The oldest governments of today were built for a different world, structured to address different issues, for people with different priorities. The election of representatives worked well for people whose lives were spent largely on farms and in factories, unable to travel the distances required to participate in the democratic process. The stability that has made governments reliable in the long run also makes them resistant to change, after all, you go with what you know. Governments are, to their credit, now adapting to involve citizens in the process of running their country, but it’s necessarily a slow-going process as this new technology is tested and accepted.

In the business space, the drive of competition should drive the constant reevaluation of all technological assumptions in favor of more efficient alternatives. But the same might not be true in other areas of society.

In the three examples above, all work well in their native context, especially Newtonian Physics. If you’re calculating how long it takes to fly between Toronto and New York, you don’t need to take into account relativity, so there’s an argument that, in that context, the older tool is just fine. This leads us to the question: should we be aggressively looking for ways to apply new technology to everything in our world, constantly re-evaluating old problems with modern eyes and modern problem solving skills? Or were some problems solved well-enough the first time, and we should focus our attention on other areas?

Similarly, when you look at your day to day life, how many of the tools and technologies that you use everyday seem like little more than sleeker versions of Historic designs — what items are missing from my list?

Wikipedia goes to great lengths on it’s NPOV (Neutral Point of View) policy page to explain how and when an article can be considered “neutral:”

The neutral point of view is a means of dealing with conflicting verifiable perspectives on a topic as evidenced by reliable sources. The policy requires that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly. None of the views should be given undue weight or asserted as being judged as “the truth”, in order that the various significant published viewpoints are made accessible to the reader, not just the most popular one.

This sounds great, but I’m concerned that the Wiki system as a whole might have considerable bias built-in. First, consider what Wikipedia is. It’s the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” but not anyone does — instead, most prefer just to read (it’s the 7th most visited site online). Just as visiting the site is an opt-in process, so is editing it; the community that creates and polices content is very much self-selecting. This is where I think the problem arises.Something is only neutral within the context of its community. That is, an issue is neutral (in my mind at least) when it exists perfectly balanced between the centres of gravity of two or more conflicting views. Given that the population of people who edit Wikipedia is necessarily drawn from the people who read Wikipedia — but also have the inclination, be it technological or ideological, to edit the site — there is the concern that the editing community has a different makeup with regards to their opinions on issues than the reader community, and the world at large.

Wikipedia attempts to address this by saying that in order for something to be cited as a reference, it needs to refer to a reliable source — one that has a reputation for fact checking and integrity. There are two problems with this:

1. “Reliable sources” have bias built in too. Al Jazeera is reliable to one subset of people, FOX News is reliable to another. Fans of either source would be offended to hear that the other is placed on the same level as their own.
2. The community gets to decide what sources are reliable (because who else is there to, Wikipedia is a community based effort).

The first problem doesn’t have any easy solutions; individual bloggers may be telling the truth with every word they write, but until they have a sufficient following and track record, there’s not really any reliable metric to decide if what they’re saying is admissible. Wikipedians could do research to bolster one-off claims found on blogs, but this practice would be awfully close to original research, something the site strives to avoid.

The second problem is simultaneously easy and hard to solve. The more people edit Wikipedia, the more accurate the alignment of “neutral” to the Wikipedians and “neutral” to everyone else becomes (unless of course people with a specific agenda flood into the site en-masse to try and shake things up). But this is counterbalanced with the issue of getting people involved. Not everyone wants to edit Wikipedia, and not everyone who wants to knows how.

Interestingly, I read this result as meaning that Wikipedia is consistent from first to last. In principle, the more people edit Wikipedia, the better it gets; similarly, the more people edit Wikipedia, the more its version of neutrality becomes one that reflects the world at large. It’s a fantastic resource, and if we want it to continue to improve, at some point, we’re all going to have to get involved.

(A special thank you to my friends Danielle, Eve, and Josh, with whom I had the conversation that resulted in this post. Also of note is that XKCD, did, in some measure, address this long before we did.)

On this platform, everyone contributes to a library of content that can be used by anyone to do anything, the payoff for sharing your content is that everyone else has access to yours. I think Larry Lessig would agree.

Unfortunately, the interface for accomplishing such a level of collaboration doesn’t yet exist, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t already started happening. Introducing thru-you.com — a site run by YouTuber ‘Kutiman’ that remixes unrelated existing user-submitted YouTube musical content into new pieces; making songs played by ‘bands’ whose members have never met one another. The result is pretty cool to behold:

Under the editorial control of Kutiman, a massive pool of unrelated source material has been crafted together into an original piece. Conceptually, this is reminiscent of the sampling done in hip-hop, but from a much larger, more diverse pool.

Generating these movies required downloading each of the YouTube videos, converting them to an editor-friendly format, stitching them together and then uploading them again — something that is likely beyond most casual YouTubers’ technical abilities. It won’t always be this way, and soon I believe new technologies will emerge that allow all YouTube users to better leverage the content that their entire community has generated. Once this happens, the remix-culture will really be in full swing.

Part and parcel with viewing YouTube as a platform with open content that can be used and displayed however a content remixer likes is a new way to view YouTube videos: YooouuuTuuube.com. YooouuuTuuube.com takes a normal YouTube video and spits out the frames on a grid before your eyes. The result is pretty different from the normal experience of watching a YouTube video, but it shows the new kind of media that can be created when existing media is open (or at least taken) for use by others. To see it in action, check out this YooouuuTuuube’d version of ‘Junior Kickstart’ by The Go! Team — Enjoy!

This reality looks to soon be a thing of the past. In a couple of days, Wolfram (the people behind the MathWorld resource site) will be launching Wolfram|Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” that can answer factual questions — essentially deriving new conclusions and results from existing web pages and documents (read the engine’s introduction here).  ReadWriteWeb recently got a chance to play with Alpha, and they seemed very impressed:

In today’s demo, for example, Stephen Wolfram searched for “internet users in europe,” or “weather oakland” – two queries that most users would also use in Google or any other search engine.

Where Alpha exceeds, is in the presentation of its “search” results. When asked for how many internet users there are in Europe, for example, Alpha returned not just the total number, but also various plots and data for every country (apparently Vatican City only has 93 Internet users).

Another query with a very sophisticated result was “uncle’s uncle’s brother’s son.” Now if you type that into Google, the result will be a useless list of sites that don’t even answer this specific question, but Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the ‘blood relationship fraction,’ for example (3.125% in this case).

Similarly, I.B.M. has developed a system that is also able to compute knowledge. In an amusing move, they’ll be introducing the technology to the world by having it compete on Jeopardy!:

In a demonstration match here at the I.B.M. laboratory against two researchers recently, Watson (the system) appeared to be both aggressive and competent, but also made the occasional puzzling blunder.

For example, given the statement, “Bordered by Syria and Israel, this small country is only 135 miles long and 35 miles wide,” Watson beat its human competitors by quickly answering, “What is Lebanon?”

Moments later, however, the program stumbled when it decided it had high confidence that a “sheet” was a fruit.

Missteps aside, these are exciting developments, and represent the introduction of computing to a higher level of information. Initially systems could only compute numeric data presented in very strict formats; this remained the paradigm for a very long time. Only recently has the development of extracting in-text relationships from so-called “unstructured data” made forays into mainstream technology — but such data still required human interpretation and understanding. These parallel developments from Wolfram and I.B.M. take the interactions between machines and information that next step further — which, despite being considerably more technically complicated, is likely to greatly simplify human interaction with computers.

Early this morning I was updating the Wikinomics backend and saw that I decided that it would be a good time to finally bring to life the redesign that I was working on. So here it is! If you’re not a fan, you can switch the previous skin by clicking here. Otherwise please leave feedback in a comment on this post if you’d like to see any changes!

Every so often in my adventures on the Internet, I come across something pretty far out there, and I do what I can to spread it around. This is one such discovery. A small disclaimer, this relates to TV from the ’80s, so if I missed the boat and this is old news, my apologies.

Earlier today a friend was telling me about a TV show from the mid-’80s, St. Elsewhere. In the final episode of St. Elsewhere, it is revealed that the entire show took place in the imagination of a minor character, Tommy Westphall, a young boy with autism. Here’s where it gets good: with the TV crossovers.

Some of the characters from St. Elsewhere once visited the Cheers bar, that means that the Cheers bar was also just a figment of Tommy’s imagination. Since Frasier was a spin-off of cheers, everything that happened on Fraiser was also imaginary. On Fraiser, Niles and Daphne read the comic strip from Caroline in the City, so Caroline & company are also imaginary, and on and on and on. This is just one avenue, and it continues and branches and expands beyond all reason:

In a 2003 article published on BBC News Online, St. Elsewhere creator Tom Fontana was quoted as saying, “Someone did the math once… and something like 90 percent of all television took place in Tommy Westphall’s mind. God love him.”

The Internet, true to form, has an index of all such cross-overs, and has mapped out the entirety of the universe that exists inside of Tommy’s mind:

Click for the full sized PDF

The final count is 282 shows that exist in this imaginary universe, all tied together in some sort of bizzaro social-network. If you’re a real trivia buff, you can read the index of how all the shows are related. Hit ctrl+f and search that page for the name of your favorite show — it’s probably in there. They even tied Firefly (and therefore Battlestar Galactica) via the Weyland-Yutani corporation! In it’s own way, this is the kind of peculiar, off the wall thing that you really could only find on the Internet, I don’t think this would have seen a wide publication in print.

If there’s anyone who’s hanging in to see if there’s a Wikinomics angle to this after all, how’s this: what is described above is a great example of how links in a bunch of seemingly seperate entities can, when examined from a suitable distance, tell us something (debatably profound) about the much larger collection.

While connections in tv shows are as trivial as you can get, as more and more devices become intelligent Internet enabled, and more information about how we go about our lives becomes aggregated, and links between data of every type are discovered and catalogued, what sorts of emergent observations will we then be able to make, again of course, from a suitable distance?

The richest of the bunch is a piece of software called Skyrails:

Check out the other six technologies here.