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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