“I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses”
~ Apologies to Billy Bragg.

As a response to the Digital Fundraising Democracy Teach-In at EtCon, and in particular the ludicrous 45 minutes in granted to “Emerging Democracy Worldwide”; Tom Steinberg is staging a UK-flavoured Digital Democracy session at ConConUK:

“Tom mySociety Steinberg is organising a UK digital democracy teach-in (think My Society, iCan, Fax Your MP, Vox Politics and Up My Street).”

Hopefully, Rod/the YourParty folk and some of those blogging MPs might also show up…?

I wish that someone from Estonia had been invited to the fun in San Diego.

“President Meri — who answers his own e-mail and can be reached at www.president.ee — has even grander plans for Estonia.com. In 1997, he helped establish the Tiger Leap Foundation, an organization that united the Ministry of Education with Estonia’s computer sector in an effort to have one computer in place for every 20 pupils in Estonian schools. That goal was reached this year, and now Meri wants to create ‘a virtual government’ that would greatly downsize the state apparatus, replacing bureaucrats with online government services.”

Perhaps if there had been more than 45 minutes for the rest of the world.

Moreover – where was Dr. Gøtze, or the UK’s own professor of digital democracy, Stephen Coleman, from The Oxford Internet Institute??!??!? They are joint-authors, of Bowlingtogether.net, a spin on Puttnam’s “Bowling Alone” cited famously as an influence by the founder of Meetup.com.

At a time where wars are being fought in the cause of “installing democracy” worldwide, one might think digital democracy – somewhat advanced in places other than just the USA – might be afforded a worldwide examination by O’Reilly.

Ah well… Thank goodness for ConConUK.

It’s like Billy says:

“If no one seems to understand
Start your own revolution and cut out the middlemaaan

Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

In a perfect world we’d all sing in tune
But this is reality so give me some roooom

Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards

So join the struggle while you may
The Revolution is just a T-shirt awaaaay

Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards“

The man himself posts in the comments:

“This was too easy! You should have tried a Mongolian goatherd or a Republican Senator instead of me. We’re probably in too-similar worlds.

Steven Johnson mentioned your site to me – so that’s only two degrees of separation.

My suggestion is that you keep quiet about the fact that I’ve made contact and see if anyone else comes up with a more circuitous and interesting route.”

Heh.

Half-baked thought: the goal of all the ‘Sters is to collapse our social web to a surveyable size, bringing our friends and connections close enough to see beyond them to new people. A little like glancing over the shoulder of someone you’re talking to at a party in order to see who’s coming through the door.

The picturesque and playful exploring of our social connections is sacrificed. The mathematics of coincidence are intruding on the delusions we enjoyed every time we exclaimed to a new acquaintance the reassuring cliche “what a small world!”.

Where’s the business model in social networks? The same as email and other generators of information overload: the new luxury of meaning. I will pay to sustain the space, the silence and the signal. Give me privacy and anonymity, but also possibility. Extend my connections, but don’t collapse them. Jason Kottke’s satirical job advert for such social network concierge services could be answered one day, as he suggests, by an arms-race of web apps or software agents at a price.

The republican senator and the mongolian goatherd that Eno mentions have the same luxurious, unobtainable high-ground at the lip of the connectivity well, for very different reasons.

The money and the privilege give the benefits of access without the overload. Those down in the connectivity well will pay for a short trip up into the weightless, noiseless luxury world of the goatherd/billionaire like we do expensive spa weekends or wilderness trips.

Or when we bore of our “too similar worlds” we’ll swap identities and networks for a while – for picturesque experience of other uncollapsed networks, connections and the possibilities they bring. A student at the RCA based his “identity tourism” project on the statistic that 70% (I think) of us lie about what we do when a stranger on an airplane asks us. Playing dress-up is pretty profitable in the real-world as it is.

But I digress.

The final goal of sitting down for a nice milk stout with the man has yet to be accomplished, but EnoQuest is done; with a nice three-act structure at ridiculous internetweb social-singularity-speed.

Big thanks to Steven Johnson, and everyone who joined in.

And I have five leads:

1. Some access to previously privileged knowledge: the name and phone number of his agent from someone who read this blog and has a big red book for agents of the rich and famous.
2. A two-degrees connection from someone I work with, perhaps
3. A possible two-degree connection from noted flaneur and esotericist Dan Hill.
4. A tenuous four-degree connection from Kim P.´
5. A tantalising IM me” from Euan.

Some promising stuff, and a lot of background material from others in comments – thanks!

For some reason phoning his agent seems like cheating, and certainly not the stuff that social network visionquests are made of. Plenty of room still for your suggestions…

I want to talk to Brian Eno.

Do you know him? Do you know someone who knows him? Do you know someone who knows someone who knows him? In theory, it’s very likely.

I want to sit down and talk to him within the next 2 months.

If I’m successful all of these social software theories will have had some real pay off for me finally – and hey, maybe I can sell the story to Dave Gorman.

I will let you know how it goes.

Which is probably the title of an ‘R’-rated Finnish film.

Anyway – Chris has the best review of Orkut I’ve seen (especially on the lack of nuance and innovation) and David Galbraith also has some good insights as you’d expect.

I’m going to try and find how to remove myself from it now.

So, the conversation went a little like this:

[Foe]: “I think Amazon would come up with a better social network service than Google would”

[Me]: “Haven’t they done that already?”

[Foe]: “What do you mean?”

[Me]: “Well, they’ve got straight to the part where the social interactions of thousands of people get them more cash, without having to deal with all that troublesome dating business”

[Foe]: “Heh… Yeah, I suppose… but what I mean is something where you see what your friends are buying and reading and wishing for, and that activity is what prompts connections and conversations”

Which got me thinking. Amazon already have incredible features for harnesses our connections and social behaviours, but they are all fairly anonmous, unlike the wave of social network services. Could Amazon benefit from some of the UI features of those sites?
Read More »

Like many others I had a few emails inviting me to join Orkut this morning. I had first heard mention of it yesterday afternoon when some colleagues found it, and started snickering about it’s mission statement to make people ‘come together’.

It turns out that Orkut is finnish slang for orgasm.

Other than that what to say? It’s YASNS, it looks terrible (pastel colours and wierd faux deco drop-caps? urgh!) but actually has some pretty nice interaction design going on. I think it’s actually the most usable out of the SNS so far, and I suppose this will have to be a trend – new social-network-services aiming lowering barrier to particpation and transfer of networks as you weren’t the first.

It flows pretty intuitively, but with some funny quirks like only giving you access to some rating/karma features when it decides to. It’s affiliated to Google so I guess that’s worth thinking about.

» MIT: Power Laws: Hype or Revelation? : Media Arts and Sciences | IAP 2004 | MAS 965

Via Abstract Dynamics, some lovely social network visualisations, both historic and contemporary in Visualizing Social Networks by Linton C. Freeman University of California, Irvine

I’ve been plink’d.

Not really sure what to make of it. Being a thick designer, and despite numerous patient explanations by Foe; I’ve never really understood the “why” of FOAF. What it’s use or ornament actually is. What the point might be, beyond the usual quilt-making, that is.

I visit Plink after reading a couple of things about it this weekend, and by chance saw the name of someone I knew: Muttley, who also looked like he’d been dobbed-in* by others. In what sounds like a likely new-age tagline for the service – I found myself in a few clicks.

I felt unease, and a certain lack of control.

I was there not by my own choosing, but by dint of featuring in the FOAF of others. Good folk and good friends to be sure (Betteridj, Hammo, Phil… thanks I think!), but I still felt a bit funny about it. There didn’t seem on a quick inspection to be any information which would lead to immediate trouble, like email, but there was a picture of me (looking younger and skinnier, so that’s okay) so I guess it’s mostly harmless.

I still feel uneasy about it though – aside from getting onboard and embellishing my page or ignoring the thing, it seemed like I had few options. I know that some other social-quiltmakers offer little control ultimately; but I was invited to join them by my friends.

Which is the root of my unease I think. It felt like my friends 0wn3d my name.

Which I guess might be the point.

—-
* ‘dobbed-in’ erm… I dunno: squealed on I guess. Ask a brit.