Friday, February 14, 2003

Matt discovers Castelo Miramare. I want to buy a castle. I never did before, but now I do. I've found my dream castle. [Curiouser and curiouser!] This castle on the Adriatic Sea, in Triese, Italy was built between 1856 and 1860 according to the wishes of Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg (later to become Emperor of Mexico.) I also visited the Cathdral in Queretaro, Mexico which is where Maximilian hid out - before he was excecuted in 1864. He never got to live in his castle. The castle is right at the entrance to Trieste, and welcomes everyone to this quaint, off the beaten track seaside cosmopolitan city.  James Joyce lived there for 20 years, and me for 9 months.  We were attempting to build a digital city there - until politics and dot com greed sunk the project. But as they say in Friuli Venezia-Guilia - "ah Trieste, mia bella!" [Marc's Voice] 5:12:39 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Bubble Blog Emergence. Ross Mayfield did an excellent post on Distribution of Choice and another one on Ecosystem of Networks. I was sitting looking at his neat chart, wondering why I didn't really like it very much. Well, it is a good chart, and it shows what kind of audience weblogs might have in their different roles. I guess what I don't like is that it is not how I'd *like* things to work. Which is a bit hypocritical to talk about if we're talking about emergence at the same time, and this happens to be how things emerge. But it sort of indicates that what emerges from blogs is in the bigger picture the winner-take-it-all phenomenon of power-law distributions. The people who are first or who are popular will just get more popular. Which sounds like a U.S. election to me, but it doesn't really sound like what I think emerges from blogs.So, I decided to make my own chart, coming from a totally different place. Maybe it looks crazy to anybody but me, but, hey, I gotta try. So, here the point is that it starts with ME and the choices I make and what happens to them. So, if we're talking about blogs, there is first whatever I have the thought of writing about. I make some choices about what to write about. Let's say we consider each of those thoughts or choices a little bubble, and that those little bubbles naturally rise up in the information ocean.I might have a small group of people I'm already working with, and we might use blogspace as a place to work on things. We share a project, and we either put our pieces together between our blogs, or we write about what we do from each our different angles. Blogging allows us to work more openly and refer to each other's work, while also sharing it with a bigger audience.My blogging bubbles float up and get spread wider. People I don't know read my blog, and read various people's blogs, and we get attracted to each other. Connections form. It might just be that we read each other's stuff, or we link to each other, or we start talking in other ways. That becomes a good basis for forming new groups that can act together.All of our bubbles, mine and those from other blogs, with the added value of our collective linking choices, will float up and into the cloud of the web. Specifically they will end up in an assortment of directories and search engines, most notably in Google.And that is in part where there are interesting and new things going on. Not just that few people get most of the attention, but also that the choices of many relatively ordinary folks become more visible than ever before. And they form emergent patterns that become very visible.For myself and my weblog of relatively modest popularity, I notice that many of the bubbles I set up rise to considerable size and power, because they're supported by others who choose to link to them. What interests me there is not so much how great I am at showing up in search engines, but how easily the collective opinion of (a group of) bloggers will show up prominently. A rather random example is that I wrote a couple of little blog entries about Nestle doing some not very nice things. Now, if you do a web search on CNN or on Google on "Nestle sues Ethiopia", I'm number one. If you just want to know about "Nestle Corporation", I'm number four, before several of Nestle's own sites. Nestle last year made 5.5 billion dollars in profits, but yet you and I, by linking a bit to each other's posts, can compete very well with their web presence and influence public opinion. Not me, but us. It wasn't even my own info I posted.The point is not at all whether I have unfairly more or less readers than some other weblog. The emerging democracy in blogs is in that we together leverage our choices in a way that normally isn't possible unless you run a big corporation or you're run by one. We're a swarm of thought bubbles. [Ming the Mechanic] 4:36:37 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Neuroethics: The Battle For Your Mind. In Ronald Bailey's The Battle for Your Brain he reviews eight current objections to neurological enhancement, ultimately argueing that none of them are really convincing. The claims are that neurological enhancements: permanently change the brain are anti-egalitarian are self-defeating are difficult to re-fuse undermine good character undermine personal responsibility enforce dubious norms make us inauthentic "In the 1960s many states outlawed the birth control pill, on the grounds that it would be too disruptive to society. Yet Americans, eager to take control of their reproductive lives, managed to roll back those laws, and no one believes that the pill could be re-outlawed today."  Our future cognitive liberty will ultimately be up to us to decide, but it is important to remember that in today's global society lands of experimentation and geographies of early adoption will emerge to take advantage of these new tools. [Neurotechnology and Society] 4:34:15 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

What Fun!  What Fun!               I have never been a big Survivor fan.  I’ve watched them from time to time, but have always been too annoyed by the people and situations to get into it.  Last night Amazon Survivor premiered.  For the first time the tribes are broken down by men and women.  What fun!             Of course, the moment the men saw this, they pulled on their ego packs and started forward.  “We’ll never go to tribal council!”  The cocky displays of testosterone were of no surprise to me.  Annoying, but not unexpected.             The men certainly did a better job getting a shelter built.  I was beginning to wonder about the women because they couldn’t seem to get things going in that way.  Still that didn’t prevent the men from letting their egos out and claim to have caught fish before the immunity challenge.  Can’t be shown up by the girls!             The women managed to win the immunity challenge – much to my overwhelming joy.  And what is the topic of conversation at tribal council?  Which woman is the hottest and who wants to hook up with who!!  They also had the same discussion back at camp among themselves.  Again, must be that testosterone thing or something because I don’t recall any similar conversations in the women’s camp.             Overall, I really enjoyed last night’s Survivor.  I will admit, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much if the women would have lost the challenge.  Bringing those eight men down several pegs was well worth that time watching! [Sexy Mothers Do Exist] 3:02:31 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Blogging Bubbles. Flemming Funch adapts my Ecosystem of Networks to highlight the creative role of the individual, how individuals are empowered when they are connected and how memes percolate from one to many: So, here the point is that it starts with ME and the choices I make and what happens to them. So, if we're talking about blogs, there is first whatever I have the thought of writing about. I make some choices about what to write about. Let's say we consider each of those thoughts or choices a little bubble, and that those little bubbles naturally rise up in the information ocean. Public opinion maps to the political network, networking and group-forming maps to the social network, teamwork & acting together maps to the creative network -- and me being creative is participating in all three.  The arrows flow in all directions, not just up.  Just as thoughts feed results feed connections feed patterns -- patterns feed connections feed results feed thoughts.   [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] 11:49:39 AM    trackback []     Articulate []