Today’s riff is inspired by the mixed feedback from the avc community on cross posting with a single comment thread everywhere.

Attention Jiu-Jitsu

The concept of leveraging the web as a medium for attention harvesting is nothing new. Businesses have competed to capture user attention:

• with walled gardens (MSN, AOL)
• with discovery portals (Yahoo, Google)
• crowd sourced media sharing sites (Digg, HackerNews, Reddit)
• and social networks: publishing and browsing (Myspace, LiveJournal, Facebook)

But none of these large attention gravity wells have come up with a formula for the most valued product of the net, community. It’s hard to simulate the bonds of living and working together without actually living and working together.

Social Grav Here and Victus Media

On several occasions I’ve discussed social gravity as a focus of high value web networks. Our first take on implementing social gravity is part of the user interface to the intelligent media manager. Shared topics are revealed on the browser portal by listing fellow users who are also discussing the same topic in the same timeframe (relevancy). This simple system may collapse under heavily trafficked topics, but could easily be scaled by showing the top N people from one’s friends, follow or other lists, a random subset, or sorted by a quality filter (influence).

We value social interaction differently as individuals, as communities, and as large populations

Individual P2P messages

For personal messages or live communication there are rhythms of speaking, listening, questioning and understanding. Each of us has a certain communication style we prefer, which can vary by topic. When I’m talking with colleagues over work, business, or technical details I prefer terseness and rapid back and forth exchanges to converge on vital tasks, and high value attention areas. While chatting with friends the conversations are far more relaxed unless we’re both excited about a topic.

Community

For me, a community begins with three or more people. Communication and actionable decisions can be made without all parties present. There is enough trust in each other’s decision making ability to move forward without a strict hierarchy. Top down networks, are not communities. While individual influence may fluctuate within a community, there is no clear leader for all topics of discussion. The value of the community comes from sharing diverse perspectives, and collectively moving in the direction of greatest opportunity. New members will join as a community evolves, and older members will fade as the community makes collective decisions that fail to resonate with their individual choices. This is a natural feature of dynamic communities and cultures. The advantage of communities that sprout from social networks is that members can belong to many different groups. The old cultural punishment of isolation due to dissent has lost it’s teeth.

Population Broadcasts

Unlike communities, large populations function on a level that is removed from individual social interaction. Driven by efficiency and logistics populations have ironically constructed complex bureaucracies and representatives (which are inefficient) to handle social decisions. And yet we are still subject to the emotional whims of leadership who are unwilling to work through broad philosophical divides between cultures. Careful analysis of motivations and focusing on the root of pain points is a better option than reflexive violence that leave all parties bewildered and damaged.

Blog Posts: A story is spun and left open

For bloggers the message may be reporting, analysis, or opinionated hypotheses followed by supporting evidence. The topics are intentionally left open in hopes of elucidating expert and amateur interpretation. The comments enrich a raw topic and help guide future post topics with unanswered questions. Personal blogs by people with interesting day jobs* have an anchor of realism attached to their tales. The blog isn’t just a soapbox or marketing tool, it’s an extension of the author’s beliefs and thoughts. Blog’s are an invitation for intelligent discourse, the origin of asynchronous conversations.

Popular and Relevant aren’t cut from the same cloth

Popular news sites aggregate authors and begin by trying to cover as much of a narrow topic as resources allow. Over time with site growth the conversations in comments are replaced by a “scan and move on” approach by most readers. As much as I enjoy a good post by Mike Arrington, MG Siegel, or Marshall Kirkpatrick I don’t expect them to regularly engage with readership much. We have to understand these folks are sometimes writing many posts a day, or busy doing vital business development. This means not much time if any time is left open for conversing with potentially hundreds of commenters under their deluge of posts. Modern blog aggregators have moved away from a social model towards the broadcast news model with a smattering of comments from regulars in hopes of initiating something resembling a conversation or debate.

Even popular solo bloggers like Robert Scoble and Fred Wilson have growing comment streams that surpass their time to respond to. Commenters are left to talk among themselves, which is scalable. Blogs can evolve into topical social web platforms where content comes from an enthusiastic audience as long as shared value is embedded into the DNA of the model.

Notes:
*= I’m sowing the seeds for a fascinating day job, where my heart and head are “all in”. Building a startup and business who’s culture is fueled by our teams sense of value is the prize.

References:
This post was induced by Jason Kolb’s Beyond Blogging brought to my attention via Louis Gray’s share.

The hypothesis is that our world is accelerating it’s evolution, perhaps not physically but culturally*.

We are in the very midst of major social and cultural revolutions. How we process information, how we share our discoveries, and how we determine what’s most valuable are all undergoing rapid shifts and sweeping changes with varied merits of fitness. Societies which tend towards rigorous control and forced social replication are fracturing in the wake of frictionless information spread. In comparison, social alternatives with greater personal freedom and choice grow with improved communication.

How I process and share information

What looks like a simple blog post to you, has drastically changed the way I think about challenging issues, and I’m not alone. Now instead of speaking briefly to one or a handful of close friends or family about subject matter they may or may not be interested in, I can reach out to many minds at different times and in different places to critically review important issues. So much has changed since the commercialization of the web, but we take most of it for granted. Just fifteen years ago the ability to share ideas with large audiences was limited to a select group of people:

• popular writers
• news editors
• talk show hosts
• political and religious leaders
• rockstars

More importantly there wasn’t an efficient way to get feedback from audiences to refine concepts. Broadcasters merely “read the crowd” to determine if what they were sharing was resonating.

Time: How we determine value

Time is the ultimate measure of our personal value. It’s not how much we are paid for our time, but how we choose to spend it that determines value. We dedicate time to what we believe is most important. Whether it’s impressing our company by putting in long work days, or maintaining closeness with family by arranging regular gatherings, or by spending time with our dearest life partners in lieu of other attention stealing activities.

Notes, References, Background Materials (admit I only scanned them briefly this morning, but they helped me frame social evolution):

• Whiten’s paper on cultural evolution
• Social Darwinism Science and Myth
• The Theory of Demographic Cycles and Social Evolution of Ancient and Medieval Oriental Societies

We need more power kiptin

For the second time in two months my iPhone 3Gs battery failed to take a charge. The guys at the store were helpful but I’m not a big fan of having no phone (mobile net access) for a day and waiting around the store to talk to an “Apple Genius”. I’ve been planning on picking up an Android phone for a long time now and the recent power failures prompted me to action.

All Hail the HTC EVO, or Not

After reading about the power slurping EVO, I was concerned with making a bad situation worse but since the battery is replaceable and extra batteries go for $45 bucks, I figured it was worth considering. I didn’t want any strings attached to my mobile computing platform so I told the Sprint Cellular sales guy that I would pay full cover price ($449) for the device. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a substantial amount of money, considering my bank account is recouperating from a wedding/honeymoon. But not having any weasel contracts and peace of mind is worth a couple of hundred bucks. It turns out even at full price to begin a Sprint plan I have to agree to a 2 year debt. No thanks. Enough with the phone contracts, hidden costs, surchages, and bogus fees.

Fuck Wireless Phone Plans

Pardon my emotional outburst but I’m pretty sick of the cost per bit cellular companies are charging. Between shoddy AT&T coverage and recent rate hikes (price per bit is going up to all new data users), and uncalled for lock in by contracts (all of the providers – except Tmobile thanks Denny), the entire wireless industry is full of shit. My electricity and gas bills are equivalent. Does it really cost $100-120 per month to provide wireless information routing and transfer?

One alterantive I’m strongly considering is any smart phone/or hand held pc without a phone plan and buying the cheapest tethering node for a flat monthly fee ($60). I can use Skype and Google voice for my phone service or just give up on a phone number entirely. Why isn’t there a Skype device taking advantage of these lower costs to consumers?

After checking in to one of my favorite daily reads, I learned about how a friend and networking guru Fred Wilson handles a deluge of email. Controlling our information input streams is highly relevant to the evolving social web. Effective tools that empower users to better control their personal information streams will be sought after.

Email is the biggest and oldest open social media. While you can converse with many folks at once by lists, it is highly effective as a one to one asyncronous messaging system. The sender and reciever can both communicate when it is best for them. This flexibility allows a single person to interact with hundreds or thousands of people and to have automatic documentation of those conversations.

Popular social media services and sites are dominated by asyncronous formats. Some also recognize the need for instant message or voice channels, and include that functionality as an option. Facebook, Google Chat, And Skype all have syncronous options, while Twitter can approach syncronous communication through a RESTful interface.

Syncronous Communication is best for Emergencies

In the situation that you must communicate immediately asyncronous messaging is relegated to a backup role.

When you’re primary server is down, an email message is a good practice, but an instant message to a portable device may be preferred.

When your wife gives birth and you want to let all your close family and friends know you typically call them to ensure they are “in the loop”.

When you have just struck value gold and want to share your elation with your colleagues a direct message goes great with a wider band asyncronous message.

Project & Startup Communication Channels

I generally go through about 4-5 Twitter messages, a dozen or two emails, and many project tracking updates with my colleague Tyler each day. Some days are more active than others but we have only lightly overlapping schedules. He lives in Maui (4-5 hours behind eastern time where I live), and I am an early riser/sleeper. We can really only sync up (share a computer screen) about once per week.

Earlier on in the project Vladimir Vukicevic and myself experimented with a p2 wordpress blog to track project updates. I selected this based on Matt Mullenweg’s success and praise. In addition we added a friendfeed shared room to track status. These tools not only help to keep the current project team up to date, but help new members rapidly catch up to where a project is at.

Learning about what channels a person prefers is important to optimizing your communication efficacy. I cycle through many independent com channels every few days. Some I visit much less often, depending on my schedule. As I use each channel I see common functionality and various extra features. One of my favorite asyncronous formats is blogging. I can communicate one to many, and many to many (comments) with a very small time demand (my writing/editing time cost).

Current wireless Internet providers use a single service provider or access point to the full Internet backbone. Whether you’re on AT&Ts network through your iPhone, or Verizon’s network for your soon to be released Droid, you send and receive information first through a local wireless connection. But there is a problem with this restricted network design, not all available paths for local wireless connectivity are equally burdened, and enforcing structure on information flow at the beginning and end of wireless access only serves to slow it down.

I made an off the cuff comment about mobile networks on Fred Wilson’s post on mobile tech this morning. What we really need is all the wireless providers to come to an agreement, and work out a solution that allows for access to ANY of their networks as a local solution. The least burdened/most capable network provider (judged by a third unbiased party/business) would always win out. The even distribution of wireless data will provide value to all users/customers and profit to the providers themselves.

How the Internet Works

Here are quick introductions to how the Internet works in regards to data routing (routing for dumbies). Real time packet navigation/routing is non-trivial because the entire network knowledge isn’t known at any point in the journey.

• How Does the Internet Work? by Rus Shuler
• The Journey of Internet Packets by Garret Wilson
• Packet Switching
• And of course The Internet as background info

As to why I believe the Internet has become so important, I refer you to another comment on Fred’s blog (I spend a lot of time commenting there) in response to a friend Shana Carp’s comment.

I was just having an old man’s mid afternoon siesta (was up till 1am playing with Google Wave, then got up at 5am with Michelle) and dreaming about network link strength (a cool visualization chart that I don’t know how to code-> much like my current foray into building a google wave robot with scala).

Google’s breakthrough information mapping was counting links, real time information quality doesn’t have time to develop links, so we require other measures. Every time I follow a link, some part of me feels like I’m strengthening a neural connection of some super smart but as of yet non-existent entity. Our usage of the Internet “teaches it” by making direct connections between abstract concepts. Loosely we train the neural network of the web. Crowd sourcing sites do this with votes, social sites do with likes, and twitter does it with retweets.

The further strides we make in building the Internet’s depth, by making it a richer experience, the greater we are rewarded. It’s a feedback loop. The more I improve Internet usage efficiency, by adding useful services, the richer I become. The intelligence of the Internet isn’t an isolated entity either, it’s composed of a billion or so people actively using it, generating and connecting content. Our attention, and shared time and thoughts here are changing the structure of the web in a real way.

Look at what became of traditional advertising, Google’s 20billion dollar plus revenue stream didn’t come from no where, it came directly out of the pockets of traditional advertising, which was a lot bigger market than 20 billion dollars. So Google shrunk the industry, and captured the revenue – classic disruption.

Information Theory

Shannon’s Information Theory provides us with a measure of information transmission capability for a channel, and it’s direct relation to the Entropy of the information distribution. The more the underlying probability distribution tends toward higher entropy (less predictable system), the greater the amount of information that can be transmitted over a channel.

This applies to dynamic network paths as well theoretical channels (this is a hypothetical leap for me, it’s a gut feeling). Restrict portions of the path, and limit the overall information transmission capability through the network. This is one of the reasons why the Internet works so well for information sharing, it minimizes network path restriction. When telecommunication providers restrict the beginning and end of a wireless packets journey (they’re own service), they are in fact reducing the choices for the network path, and ultimately the information transmission rate through the network.

As an interesting aside, in regards to text transmission (blogs, text messages, email), this excerpt describes the entropy of human language in trials (our text data can be encoded in many different binary formats though):

A long string of repeating characters has an entropy rate of 0, since every character is predictable. The entropy rate of English text is between 1.0 and 1.5 bits per letter,^[1] or as low as 0.6 to 1.3 bits per letter, according to estimates by Shannon based on human experiments

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I’d like to kick off this idea by capturing my definition for open social media:

My definition for Open social media:
1) I can share documents by posting them to select friends (email), or everyone (my website)
2) my personal connected social graph is portable so no business “owns” my network
3) the pipes are transparent to me, I should be able to contact people through many different subsystems with a simple status message
4) the hubs of communication are decentralized/federated (search can be propagated like status messages, I wrote a little about this on my blog)

Right now businesses like facebook are providing a turnpike (with tolls) to help me get from point a to point b. But they shouldn’t own all the destinations, on ramps and off ramps. They should work on making it a beautiful ride that I choose to take.

When it comes to connecting with other people with social media, we have to be able to define our own set of rules. The value in network design is easing connectivity between nodes, in the case of social media, people are the nodes. While we should agree on a protocol for connecting us in real time (maybe XMPP), the style in which we instantiate connections should be of our own devising. The community ties we build should be able to move with us from social network to network. Why should I have to reconnect with all my friends every time a new social media channel springs to life? In the case of networks which are purchased or are closed down, why as a user, should I be punished and lose contact with many great friends I meet up with?

One of the most beneficial features of true Open software is that the lack of restrictions, and bottlenecks allows for maximum dynamic change within the network. If there aren’t any Dominant Nodes (like Facebook is now), the routing of information, and the rate of change of the entire system is optimal for the entire network. To illustrate this concept consider how link sharing occurs now through the Internet.

1. Search
2. Social sharing
3. a combination of social search, personalized to each user (node)

The last mixed solution will allow us to find relevant information from our social network, and topically within areas of our greatest interest. The benefits of this type of search is that we don’t have to actively filter our information streams. Our friends and chief influencers act as curators of information, as they share what is most relevant to them. Our interests reveal themselves naturally or emerge from day to day usage habits and readings. Our behavior can be “learned” by personal search assistants, that we should be in full control of. If an outside entity or corporation owns this information, we are locked into their dominant node. Once this lock in occurs, our future choices are restricted by whatever decisions the external provider determines is best for it’s “average user”. The intricacies and diversity of individual styles will be dumbed down to a least common denominator, because what’s good enough for the biggest community in a limited domain, will rule the way in which subgroups or minorities participate.

Here’s an earlier post I put together capture some ideas: Open Social Media, of the People, by the People, for the People.

I’ve also asked someone I consider a social media super user, Reg Saddler to give this discussion a quick scan, as he is active on twitter and Facebook. He’s also the super receptive to discussion on random topics and social shares, thanks for looking this over Reg.

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Don’t Believe the Hype

There is so much hype regarding existent and novel social channels that I wonder if many of us are missing the point when it comes to communicating. The quality and character of the message you are trying to transmit is of much greater importance than the specific implementation chosen to broadcast it. Yes, I’m excited about new social tools like Google Wave. But my reasons are somewhat selfish: the technology can be distributed, and wouldn’t necessarily vanish even if businesses liquidated (open source). 

• Facebook enabled me to catch up and chat with good friends from my university days
• twitter introduced me to new friends, but to my chagrin, an even greater number of Multi-Level Marketing and Social Media experts. My signal to noise has been steadily dropping so in lieu of auto following back, I’m manually pruning my follow list to correct this
• friendfeed connected me with people that like talking about the same topics I did. Posts of interest, spawned comment threads that brought life to isolated links. I was able to converse and connect with many different folks. Friendfeed has probably been the strongest tool in helping me connect to folks, but it’s future is unclear as it’s been picked up by Facebook
• Js-kit Echo, and the new Disqus 3.0 enable real time commenting. This should boost comment interaction between readers substantially

Don’t Like What’s Offered, Build Your Own

The future of social media will host many different interfaces personalized by each user, but they’ll share common protocols to distribute information around the world instantly.

• A great example of this is the RSSCloud by instigated primarily by Dave Winer (a classic trek fan when it comes to engineering).
• Zee from theNextWeb has put together a pretty awesome status stream using only a few tools. The best part, we can all implement something similar .
• And of course Brian Hendrickson’s open implementation of a status sharing social media.

There are a great many and growing number of social media infrastructure tools. Social media support products like Drupal, or sites like Ning want you to choose their solution for connecting people or forming a web community.

For my take on open social media, please check out this popular post from late July.

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How Many People Actually Listen?

Out of a couple thousand twitter followers I wondered how many actually care about what I post on a regular basis, and my estimate  is probably only a couple dozen. If they follow like myself, they only have time to observe their undirected input streams a couple of times a day. What does it mean to have followers or subscribers for modern Internet browsing habits? Is it simply a token of approval? These questions are in some part supposed to be answered by analytics and statistics. We can see how many folks visit our sites or download files. We see how long they decide to stay on the site, how many other pages they visit, and determine if our content is valuable to them. But I hypothesize that this data is largely irrelevant to our goals.

If you’re passionate about sharing something, you hope that the right people get your message. This group is a small fraction of the overall visitors of your content. Perhaps only 1 in a 100 are authentic audience members that will return to your site, and truly support your community. These are the folks you should concentrate your energies on. They are the ones you should provide fantastic value to and in turn they will help you build an effective community, founded on your collective message and vision.

What is Your Information Overload Point?

This week we witnessed Robert Scoble make the decision to clean house and wipe his follower list in twitter. Initially I thought this was an interesting move, in hindsight I realized that he may have chosen the simpler but less effective solution. My comments to his post, You are so unfollowed!

Bold move. How and when you choose to follow someone is a groovy option we have in social media. I’ve learned some of the basics from watching you in action Robert and have enjoyed many of your videos (looks fun interviewing startups).

I’m on the fence with twitter, I realize I get more utility out of friendfeed because of lists I’ve made but I’m not ready to wipe the slate clean with twitter just yet. I enjoy pruning one follower at a time and manually following back folks with interesting feeds (takes time).

A little later after walking I revisted the post with this comment:

Robert, I’ve been doing some more thinking about your mass unfollowing. And I believe you made a classic mistake, you chose the simpler solution, but not the better one. First off I’m positive you chucked out the baby with the bathwater to find a few pearls. You also lost some very important information, WHO NOT TO FOLLOW! 

I humbly submit that you should have demanded better social aggregation filters from twitter. As long as they are going to be the sacred real time pipeline holders they had better damn well give access to a business like Zemanta to help cluster every status ever submitted. It would be in their best interest as a value provider of information, and in the users best interest to find relevant and valuable unknown info.

You just chopped sweet Serendipity off at the kneecaps. 

By the way I’m working on a solution to your rationale for spring cleaning.

I never would have suspected that Robert would simple nuke his follower list. The shift of direction was forced by a lack of effective information filters on twitters end. Louis Gray suggested Robert made the wrong move, and at least myself and Mark Krynsky agree with his perspective.

My Ideal Follow Method

My ideal “follow” habits would be the global stream of all web information, selecting specific topics of interest as they wisk by my perception. I’d also have groups of friends, associates, developers, and other people that share content in my areas of interest. But since folks are multidimensional and rarely create media on only one topic, I’d have these groups sorted under topics I really care about.

Related Articles:

• To Jump on the Massive Unfollowing Trend Would Be a Mistake
• You’ve got a tone of Followers but are they Listening?

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After writing up the following in a brief message to fellow blogger Randall (recently discovered both of us perceive a similar near future). I thought it best to share the direction I’ll be taking the blog over the next few months with VS community members (aka readers/commenters, you).

Just a heads up for the topics I like to study/concentrate on/write about:

• business efficiency, productivity philosophies
  • #1 matching our work with what we love to do, but generally how I’ll run my company… TBD
• communication (social media, one to many, many to many)
• social collaborative design (tools, areas of interest)

I’d like to see what Google wave can do for the last 2 (communication/collaborative design) or better yet what I can do with Google wave.

Some things I’d like to learn and write more about:

• emergence software concepts
  • huge systems of simple tools from which incredibly complex applications emerge
• semantic tools
  • language analysis tools
  • optimality of communication
• prime factorization
  • prediction
  • numerical features
  • information compression possibilites
• open software initiatives:  can we pattern a similar structure that somehow rewards developers based on contributions (credit, money)?  The challenges include:
  • fair attribution for work done
  • project management/focus
  • laying out virtual landing pages/hooks for developers to discover and sink their teeth into