Do you hear the irresistible call to spark self sustaining systems? On serene mornings like this I can discern little else. The enticing summons affects equally those who wish to initiate or nurture a novel pattern into an enduring legacy.
Tag: social design
Emergent Design by a Super Organism
It’s easy to forget that man doesn’t have a monopoly on massive construction projects. Colonies of ants have evolved to construct extraordinary shelters for defense and reproduction. On scale, these construction projects mimic our own cities with functioning highways, fungus gardens, rubbish pits, and proper ventilation.
Coding web apps is the new literacy
The World Wide Web isn’t an Open Platform
The Motivation for Contributing to User Generated Content Sites
Why post to Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News or Reddit? Why blog on Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr or Posterous? Why answer questions on Quora? All of these activities can be traced back to social motivation. The desire to share something cool with other folks is a big part of what drives the commercial internet today.
How Money Shapes the future of the Web
The most elaborate game
Society is an elaborate game we all partake in rewriting*. The more social and interdependent our lives become, the more essential gameplay becomes to each citizen. Tit for tat, greedy algorithms and generosity are situationally dependent strategies. Framing social and fiscal success in the form a game doesn’t discount the value of hard work. I’ll begin by reviewing the forces that lead to higher social connectivity.
Connected Canvas, Adaptive Web Portals to Unlimited Information
Not long back I wrote about malleable web surfaces and the browser plugin Stylish for customizing stylesheets. The example I shared was a retro modification of the twitter web UI with a larger content area and narrower sidebar. Since that time I couldn’t put the idea of personal HTML data views down. Web data that is openly shared suffers a restriction on how it’s composed that is easily remedied with adaptive web portals.
How Complex Systems Adapt
Societies’ Hackers
Many take pride in finding and exploiting loopholes in rules systems. Whether lawyers, cyber security experts, or hobbyists, it’s a challenge to discover and expose systematic errors. I like to think of these folks as Hackers, many of which have benign purpose. The larger and more complex the system, the more difficult it is to make sweeping changes that affect all of its members. (more…)
Matricide, SocNets Plan to Strangle the Web which gave them Life
This post was instigated by MG Siegler’s Tech Crunch coverage of the Kleiner Perkins $250 million dollar Social Fund (sFund). What fired me up is a quote from Mark Pincus that discloses the direction of web born yet anti-web properties: (more…)