Over the past century but accelerating over the past couple of decades, we have seen the emergence of a kind of global data field. The planet itself – natural systems, human systems, physical objects – have always generated an enormous amount of data, but we didnt used to be able to hear it, to see it, to capture it. Now we can because all of this stuff is now instrumented. And its all interconnected, so now we can actually have access to it. So, in effect, the planet has grown a central nervous system. Look at that complex set of relationships among all of these complex systems. If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. Thats where societies become more efficient, thats where more innovation is sparked.
When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So you could look at the planet as an information, creation and transmission system, and the universe was hearing its information but we werent. But increasingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actually begin to hear the planet talking to us.
Galaxy Zoo, where you can help astronomers explore the Universe:
The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies — and our own — formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes — a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer.
More than 150,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo so far, producing a wealth of valuable data and sending telescopes on Earth and in space chasing after their discoveries. Zoo 2 focuses on the nearest, brightest and most beautiful galaxies, so to begin exploring the Universe, click the ‘How To Take Part’ link above, or read ‘The Story So Far’ to find out what Galaxy Zoo has achieved to date.
Liz Gannes on GigaGom writes about companies such as Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp which work on Freemium model – that is, offering a free service with the option to upgrade.
Don’t spend money on marketing, do offer flexibility and data exporting to eliminate buyers’ regret, make sure to capitalize on and value goodwill, and only charge for things that are hard to do. That’s what some startups say is the key to success in the freemium business. But the biggest reason the five presenters this morning at the Freemium Summit in San Francisco — Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic (see disclosure at the bottom) and MailChimp — are doing well is because they have great products that people want. They’ve been able to get those products to a broad audience by using the freemium model — that is, offering a free service with the option to upgrade. It’s an increasingly important business model, but one that’s hard to navigate, so their anecdotes, open sharing of data, and lessons learned were really valuable.
As wikipedia explains – " Freemium is a business model that works by offering basic Web services, or a basic downloadable digital product, for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features. The word "freemium" is a portmanteau created by combining the two aspects of the business model: "free" and "premium". The business model has gained popularity with Web 2.0 companies."
On Eurozine, Geert Lovink examines the colonization of real-time; comment culture and the rise of extreme opinions; and the emergence of "national webs".
Web 2.0 has three distinguishing features: it is easy to use; it facilitates the social element; and users can upload their own content in whatever form, be it pictures, videos or text. It is all about providing users with free publishing and production platforms. The focus on how to make a profit from free user-generated content came in response to the dotcom crash. At the height of dotcom mania all attention was focused on e-commerce. Users were first and foremost potential customers. They had to be convinced to buy goods and services online. This is what was supposed to be the New Economy. In 1998 the cool cyberworld of geeks, artists, designers and small entrepreneurs got bulldozed overnight by "the suits": managers and accountants who were after the Big Money provided by banks, pension funds and venture capital. With the sudden influx of business types, hip cyberculture suffered a fatal blow and lost its avant-garde position for good. In a surprising turn of events, the hyped-up dotcom entrepreneurs left the scene equally fast when, two years later, the New Economy bubble burst. Web 2.0 cannot be understood outside of this context: as the IT sector takes over the media industry, the cult of "free" and "open" is nothing but ironic revenge on the e-commerce madness. more…
On Eurozine about the Cyberwars: "While the role of technology in the political struggle in Iran and elsewhere should not be overstated, it should not be underestimated either. The "next generation" controls with which authorities aim to manage the Internet mark a shift from heavy-handed filtering to sophisticated multi-pronged methods. Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski on the attempt to normalise the exercise of power in cyberspace."
Mark Rolston , Chief Creative Officer of Frog Design gave this talk at TEDx Austin where he explored the fascinating intersection of technology with our perceived reality, drawing on examples from our own lives to illustrate how close we are to integrating the two. Mark shares his views on the human interface potential of content and how virtual may become the “new” real with technological advancements people are already working on to enhance human experiences. Our first and second life are all getting entangled for sure:
The study “Chronic Diseases & The Internet” conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project studies the relationship and importance of Internet in the lives of critically ill. According to the study people with chronic health condition are less likely to use the internet but those who do are surely benefitted by the availability of health information, self-help groups and online communities. The usage gap is not the factor of interest, it’s the problem of access. Because logically a critically person is more likely to access health related information on the net compared to a healthier one. Download the full pdf version of this report from this page
When other demographic factors are held constant, having a chronic disease significantly increases an internet user’s likelihood to say they work on a blog or contribute to an online discussion, a listserv, or other online group forum that helps people with personal issues or health problems.
Living with chronic disease is also associated, once someone is online, with a greater likelihood to access user-generated health content such as blog posts, hospital reviews, doctor reviews, and podcasts. These resources allow an internet user to dive deeply into a health topic, using the internet as a communications tool, not simply an information vending machine.
Claire Cain Miller on NYTimes citing this report writes a great piece "Social Networks a Lifeline for the Chronically Ill". In this article Claire talks about various social networks available for such patients and some self-initiated online activities of people with chronic conditions. One such example is of Amy Tenderich, who has diabetes, writes a blog and manages the social network Diabetic Connect from home in Millbrae, Calif.
Kazys Varnelis on Eurozine writes an excellent piece on the meanining of network culture. In the era of postmodernism we were left in a free floating fabric of emotional intensities but in contemporary culture the self is affirmed through the network and he discusses here what this means for the democratic public sphere. He touches various topics and it’s association with the network culture: economics, art, digital culture, gaming, social networking, privacy, and many more…
On network culture:
Network culture extends the information age of digital computing.[1] But it is also markedly unlike the PC-centred time that culminated in the 1990s. Indeed, in many ways we are more distant from the era of PC-centred computing than it was from the time of centralized, mainframe-based computation. To understand this shift, we can usefully employ Charlie Gere’s insightful discussion of computation in Digital Culture. In Gere’s analysis, the digital is a socioeconomic phenomenon as much as a technology. Digital culture, he observes, is fundamentally based on a process of abstraction that reduces complex wholes into more elementary units. Tracing this process of abstraction to the invention of the typewriter, Gere identifies digitization as a key process of capitalism. By separating the physical nature of commodities from their representations, digitization enables capital to circulate more freely and rapidly. In this ability to turn everything into quantifiable, interchangeable data, digital culture is universalizing. Gere cites the universal Turing machine – a hypothetical computer first described by Alan Turing in 1936, capable of being configured to do any task – as the model for not only the digital computer but also for that universalizing aspect of digital culture.[2]
Kazys Varnelis is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
ESA’s Technology Observatory has come up with a study that highlights online games as key future technology. The study, Online Game Technology for Space Education and System Analysis, looks at potential applications of different online game-playing technologies from the simplest content-oriented games through to Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) virtual worlds. The study suggests that immersive environments based on these technologies could enhance collaborative working of project scientists and engineers. It also recognized that exciting online games could prove an excellent tool for promoting space and supporting the teaching of science, technology, engineering and maths.
The connections and the links in social media carry multiple meanings – from intimate relationship to casual chit chat or just common interests. These connections allow flow of information and indicate a user’s influence on one another. The report “Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy” (pdf), a collaborative research paper by Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabrıcio Benevenuto, Krishna P. Gummadi presents an analysis of twitter data and comparison of influence: indegree followers), retweets and mentions. The investigation highlights the dynamics of user influence across topics and time and comes up with interesting observations:
1. Popular users who have high indegree are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions.
2. Most influential users can hold significant influence over a variety of topics.
3. Influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort such as limiting tweets to a single topic.
More details on dataset and data sharing plan can be found on the project site http://twitter.mpi-sws.org/. The project used a dataset of 2 billion follow links among 54 million users who produced a total of 1.7 billion tweets
Adi Avnit- @dotmad had suggested something similar last year through his blog post- The Million Followers Fallacy. He practices what he preaches and not got into “follow and be followed” game on twitter, in last 8-9 months he has just followed 100 or so more additional people. In the blog post he describes how “The Reach” (follower count) can be manipulated and how it doesn’t mean that people are actually engaged with you, listening and passing along the message.
But why is this influence thingy such a matter of great research and study. ? Well our Marketer friends believe that certain messages have a great chance of spreading if they are sampled and passed along through key influencers in the society. And the challenge is that, this is really very difficult to identify or attribute in the offline world, whereas online connected ecosystems like Twitter now allow you to do that.
The traditional view assumes that a minority of members in a society possess qualities that make them exceptionally persuasive in spreading ideas to others. These exceptional individuals drive trends on behalf of the majority of ordinary people. They are loosely described as being informed, respected, and well-connected; they are called the opinion leaders in the two-step flow theory (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955), innovators in the diffusion of innovations theory (Rogers 1962), and hubs, connectors, or mavens inother work (Gladwell 2002). The theory of influentials is intuitive and compelling. By identifying and convincing a small number of influential individuals, a viral campaign can reach a wide audience at a small cost. The theory spread well beyond academia and has been adopted in many marketing businesses, e.g., RoperASW and Tremor (Gladwell 2002; Berry and Keller 2003).
In contrast, a more modern view of information flow emphasizes the importance of prevailing culture more than the role of influentials. Some researchers have reasoned that people in the new information age make choices based on the opinions of their peers and friends, rather than by influentials (Domingos and Richardson 2001). These researchers argued that direct marketing through influentials would not be as profitable as using “network”-based advertising such as collaborative filtering.
In yet another study Henry Jenkins talks about Media Viruses and Memes. Though it talks about the spreadability of media or content, it can be applied to brands and marketing as well. In the connected world i.e. on the social networks brands themselves are acting as influencer through evangelism and whatever that they are doing there if that content, media or message if that itself is not spreadable, it won’t be passed along no matter what their follower count it. Thus looking at both these studies will help a better understanding of who is the influencer, what is influence and how to influence. Here’s the video if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead’
Like the gene, the meme is driven to self-create, and is possessed of three important characteristics: 1. Fidelity — memes have the ability to retain their informational content as they pass from mind to mind; 2. Fecundity — memes possess the power to induce copies of themselves; 3. Longevity — memes that survive longer have a better chance of being copied.
Galaxy Zoo
