Thursday, March 22, 2007

Much now do we all know

Fired U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias: Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.

Don't be mysterious

Mark Pilgrim: There are two basic visions of the future of the web, and one of them is wrong. I’m going to work on the right one for a while. At Google. Starting today.

That was three days ago.

Blasering trails

Britt Blaser: The People Law trumps the Power Law. A good and highly thoughtful piece that explores several laws that make more sense of What We're Doing Here than the power law ever could by itself. A few nuggets:

In the age of Big Media, It was the only thing we could count, but those times are months behind us. In social networks, everyone is a potential participant, but if your 10,000 readers leave 100 comments but don’t take your ideas and run with them, so what? Leaving a comment is a lot like leaving, because Embrace is not the same as Extend.

A network's value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe) (but) Network nodes are significant only when they’re verbose.

If your network has mechanisms for encouraging outreach and constant chatter among nodes, it will grow. News and juicy tidbits flow down the nervous system and questions and energy flow back. That sound you hear is the twittering of the network's nervous system. Every political campaign is learning the same lesson in this transformative election cycle: The movement's not about the candidate, but about the conversation. or,

It’s not about the Twit, it's about the Twitter

Only interactions count, and the richest count most

...to We The People out here, the arcane and convoluted ramblings of the pundits fall on deaf ears. What we care about is learning something we don't know from someone a little closer to the action, and pushing our unique point of view back in toward the center of the movement.

So let’s put that silly Power Law to rest at last: it's a monument to outmoded metrics. The People Law is the one we’ve been conforming to all our lives: Where there’s folk, there’s fire.

Homage was also paid to Metcalfe's law in The Cluetrain Manifesto:

What’s more, networked markets get smart fast. Metcalfe’s Law*, a famous axiom of the computer industry, states that the value of a network increases as the square of the number of users connected to it — connections multiply value exponentially. This is also true for conversations on networked markets. In fact, as the network gets larger it also gets smarter. The Cluetrain Corollary: the level of knowledge on a network increases as the square of the number of users times the volume of conversation. So, in market conversations, it is far easier to learn the truth about the products being pumped, about the promises being made, and about the people making those promises. Networked markets are not only smart markets, but they’re also equipped to get much smarter, much faster, than business-as-usual.

— in large measure because business-as-usual is still looking at customers as an "audience" and measuring power in terms of consumption alone. That might be good for TV shows, but not for ideas that change the world.

Bonus Links from Ming the Mechanic: Cymatics and group formation and Free Thought the Simplicity of Life.

Identity sprouts in Brussels

There are conferences, and there are things like conferences, except you go there to get stuff done — to move a whole topic forward in tectonic ways. The best of these have been unconference workshops such as the BloggerCons and the Internet Identity Workshops.

In every case I've been amazed and gratified at how much whole fields move forward at these things.

In the case of the IIWs (Internet Identity Workshops), the progress has verged on the miraculous. Lions not only lay down with lambs, but all species of partipants get down to work toward the common and converging goal of equipping individuals with the means to control their own digital identities — and to put identity tech to fresh and practical uses.

The next two of these are Identity Open Space (IOS) in Brussels (April 26-27) and IIW 2007 in Mountain View (May 14-16).

I'm especially excited about the Brussels workshop, because it will provide European participants in the Identity Gang and its members' many projects with a venue for getting together and moving both their projects and user-centric identity forward.

I'll be there. Hope to see you there too.

For more info, here's the wiki.