randomosity

The consistently thought-provoking Chris Brogan explores how current digital tools provide for greater freedom in employment and life in general. Chris makes some prescient referrals to technologies and ponders why one should focus on being more mobile or consider being more nomadic. His post explores the equation from the perspective of the nomad. I wonder what the perspective is from the other side - from those that would consider the nomad’s services. He raises the critical question about data security and I wonder if this doesn’t extend to a larger question of trust. I have only rarely been on the nomad employing side of the equation, but even by appreciating the nomadic perspective, I am challenged to feel comfortable with the nomad. It’s not really about the results - or about my level of trust. I agree with Chris and with Mark Harrison who affirmed that the nomad should be paid for delivering results. What concerns me is the breadth of digital relationships.
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I have a few friends on Facebook. Last week at the Social Network/ing Conference, I was reminded that the Many Eyes application has a Facebook application that quickly grabs your social network and allows you to paste it into Many Eyes to get a quick visualization of your social network. I finally got around to trying mine.

What a treat! I had had the honour of meeting and spending the last two days chatting with Fernanda Viégas from the Visual Communications Lab. Her work has been and continues to be inspirational for me personally and to the information visualisation community more substantially. She presented a tantalizing talk at the Social Network/ing conference at OISE/UofT. ‘Visualizing and Analyzing Social Networks’ quickly demonstrated a small facet of Many Eyes to a new audience and gave us a sneak preview of a new tool soon to be available through ManyEyes called PivotGraph. The logic of the PivotGraph is one of those ah-ha moments - it makes all the sense in the world, but leave it to Fernanda and Martin Wattenberg to visualize the problem, and come up with a brilliant way to solve it. Consider that social networks have traditionally been visualized in two ways: the node-link map and the matrix. The common to node-link method is very intuitive, but also becomes quickly cluttered and loses visualization value as the scale of the network being mapped grows. The second is the representative matrix, which scales very well, but sacrifices intuition for clarity. Realizing that there had to be a way of combining the strengths and minimizing the weaknesses, the PivotGraph hybridize these two forms using a collapsible node-link metaphor that, interactively aggregates like nodes and allows for focus on individual vectors. It’s nothing short of amazing to see in action!
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Avi Goldfarb presented a fast, concise and effective discussion of what conclusions could be drawn about multi-institutional collaboration between US universities during the era of BitNET adoption, 1981 - 1990. A bit of internet history, my ears perked up immediately. His more general framing question: How do changes in collabouration cost change how we produce knowledge.
His study examined 270 institutions as they connected to the BiTNET during this period and cross-indexed this with the number of coauthored journal articles subsequently produced. Goldfarb’s paper ‘Restructuring Research: Communication Costs and the Democratization of University Innovation’ concludes that collaboration was enhanced, but that the gain to institutions was not uniformly realized and physical distance between collabourators remained a factor.
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Despite technical difficulties (presenter’s worst nightmare - LCD projector bulb burnout), Steve Easterbrook demonstrated the usefulness of comparing software structures to social networks of developers to measure operational effectiveness. His well argued and logical presentation ‘Increasing Shared Understanding in Software Teams through Informal Knowledge Transfer Networks’ extended Conway’s Law to social network analysis. This technique of measuring socio-technical congruence is especially valuable in larger scale development projects, where it is probably less obvious about whether a development process is functioning effectivelly. By mining the data rich environment of communication and revision logs, it is possible to generate a social network map of developer interaction that can be connected to a software development schematic to determine Socio-Technical congruence.
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Social Network/ing Week at the University of Toronto kicked off tonight with a fascinating keynote by Cornell’s Jon Kleinberg. ‘The Geography of Social and Information Networks,’ was one of the most fascinating applied mathematical lectures I can say to having ever attended (and before I go too far I will stress that the math was made very, very approachable for a layperson such as myself). His introducer indicated that he invented algorithmic sociology and although this sounded rather presumptuous (an Al Gore and the Internet sort of thing?), I can’t help but be quite willing to give this some credence after listening to this presentation.
Kleinberg opened with a quote from Jim Gray, that “the emergence of cyberspace and the world wide web was like the discovery of a new continent.” Kleinberg was quite deliberate in this juxtaposition of the geographic with the technological and he then teased this into a further merge with the social. But he questioned whether maps are actually an appropriate metaphor for something as aphysical as social networks - but chose to let this stand on the need to have some common vocabulary with which to be able to relate.
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One of the more intriguing social networking applications that I have been enjoying over the last year has been Plazes.com. I blogged about my initial experiences with this spatial addition to the social sphere. Plazes uses your cyberspace IP to place you in physical space. If you are at a previously defined Plaze, then you are pinpointed. If you have discovered a new place, you supply some info about the place, refine the location and it is stored for future reference. You can discover if there are other plazers in your nearby space or plazes that have been recommended and you can also get a Traze (a spatial and temporal indication of where you have been over time). You can also use your mobile phone to plaze yourself or to find nearby plazes. The system works, is a hoot to use and you can even provide a little map to your blog readers showing where you are in real time –-> see my own sidebar.
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My attention was drawn to a new Fortune Magazine initiative called the Corporate Org Chart Wiki. It bills itself as in early beta and clearly experimental. It claims to seek to ‘tap the collective knowledge’ of the community and to collect and share enterprise organizational charts. Its collaborativity certainly marks it as a wiki. Unfortunately it seems overly open to the abuse that has been associated with many of the public wikis existent today. There’s no authentication, nor any sort of transparent versioning that I can find. Its a nice little flash app and it functions efficiently. It allows a user to draw relationships and add nodes visually and relatively intuitively. It allows an observer to gain a quick appreciation of the organizational structure.
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I observed my first SmackShopping live internet game show today. Building on the last minute bidding fun of eBay, and the social networking/buying power of a large group of committed purchasers, JellyFish offers an intriguing experience.

As a semi-standard demand consolidator, JellyFish has agreements with a wide range of normal retailers who contract to provide X amount of discount for bulk orders facilitated by JellyFish. Purchases earn the discount with is split 50/50 with the JellyFish buyer. So there is a buying incentive through JellyFish. But what makes this fun???

Well, for periods throughout the day, there is a real time games how. ‘Players’ (any JellyFish user) vote on particular products that they’d really like to buy. When the show starts, the product discount increases until the fixed number of units are sold. The game involves trying to be the last buyer in and therefore get the highest discount before the deal is done. The top players are then ranked and points are awarded based on the top ten finishers. In addition, observers can guess at what the final discout will be and get a chance to spin a virtual roulette wheel to win an additional prize.

In the game that I observed, buyers were after a PlayStation 2 game which in the end went at about a 45% discount. The closest guesser then spun the wheel and it landed on SmackShop’s choice. They gave him $50, but possible prizes ranged from a Wii, to various other electronic doodads in the $250-500 range.

Its pretty easy to see how this game can become addictive for those who crave a good deal. It also has a lot to say about the future of shopping. The idea of consolidating demand and getting retailers to bid for your business has been explored using the net by a variety of startups over the past few years. The interesting thing about Smack Shopping is that is that it puts the game right up front, and pinpoints that which makes the eBay experience exciting and fun. The other aggregators made their intention to deliver shopping value clear, but perhaps failed to note that the thrill of the deal is the sweet spot and if you can play it up, you can make a killing yourself.

Lucky for me, Canadians can only wtch Smack Show for now. They promise to open it up to Canucks soon, but right now as many merchants will not ship to Canada they have a made a blanket rule. Canadians can use normal Jelly Fish shopping, and determine whether individual merchants will ship to Canada.

I have spent the last decade naturally evolving towards a work day that largely takes place in coffee shops. Having written my MA largely at the Second Cup in Guelph and turned to the Starbucks before that to do business planning, I currently spend the bulk of my time at the Second Cup in Westdale. During this time, I have evolved from relying on pen and paper to hopelessly attached to my laptop. That same appendage has gone from tethering to an electrical outlet to craving attachment through wireless connectivity. The way in which I work away from the office or home has evolved, technically and socially.

The pen and paper days also involved a good book and allowed for reading during the day. As data connectivity has progressed, direct social connectivity has decreased.
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