Trouble in dead trees and inky fingers land

Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable

An excellent analysis of the situation newspaper based journalism is in.

I like the idea of micro-payments for content, such as New York Times articles. The only problem I have with it and why I would be reluctant to use it, is simply that I have to pay for the article before I've read it. Even if I saw an excerpt, it might not be enough to determine whether it is worthwhile or not. A solution for this problem might be found in social networking. I usually read articles my friends share with me (by sending a link in email or chat). I would be much more willing to pay for an article they recommend. Keep the price low and integrate with a social sharing system and it might work as long as the payment is by an "easy button."

The greater problem is content and authorship is changing radically with digital content available through the network, given the unlimited perfect copying and access without distribution. What we are seeing is a working out of the many pieces loosely joined paradigm described a decade ago. The newspaper started as a handwritten piece of paper passed around coffee shops in Enlightened London. I see nothing sacred about its continued existence.

The problem of journalism online is of course that Twitter is the new journalism but the content is too brief, chaotic and frequently idiotic. Micro-blog formats do encourage conciseness and sharp thinking, but they also promote a hyperactive and fragmentary view of subjects. As I wrote in my blog, there needs to be a "slow thought" or "slow news" or such movement (like the Slow Food movement), which you might say is what blogs already give, but not really.

Biological Construction and Networked Content Creation

The order and symmetry of biologically created structures, such as an egg or the human body, are expressions of how correctly those biological systems worked to construct the natural artifact. Biological organisms are collections of cells cooperating with each other. The order and correctness is an expression of the successfulness of the collaboration.

An egg comes out more egg-like when the biological processed working to make it cooperate and collaborate more correctly in its construction. I believe this has implications for the collaborative processes operating in networked software development and information science. The biological process of construction is inherently different than the one humans have inherited from their tool making and industrial heritage. What will we make of it?

Farm Foody: A Social Network Connecting Independent Farms to People

Over the last year, I have been working with Tom Davenport, and Matthew Davenport, of Hollin Farms, a small, independent but very internet-savvy family farm to start a social networking service Farm Foody (farmfoody.org), which uses the Internet to connect local farmers like you to their customers. I would like to summarize why we believe social networking is so important to the survival of the independent family farm, by posting a revised version of our flyer.

A social network is a group of people who become connected to each other through their activities and interests within an online community.

We believe a social network increases the economic leverage for the independent farm. A catalog of farms or an individual farm homepage does not change the economic leverage of a farm. A social network gives the small farm leverage in a big agriculture economy in two principle ways: by helping farmers manage their relationships with customers more efficiently and generating a more effective marketing presence through the social networking experience.

The independent farmer must create a close relationship with the customer, similar to the relationship an artisan baker or butcher has with their customers. This involves effort, which our website seeks to reduce to a manageable level and leverage for marketing effect. We hope by providing a means to relate directly with consumers as a “personal farmer” your farm can compete in a small farm economy becoming dominated by high end, specialty products.

We like to think of the social network as restoring the balance that once existed in small town America between the farmer and the customer.

A social network provides benefits to both farmer and consumer. When people are members of a social network, they automatically generate a marketing presence for you through normal activities they find beneficial. This presence is much larger than any standalone website, catalog or advertisement could provide, since it includes all of the people who are friends of your farm and their friends, and so on. These indirect effects are difficult to enumerate, just as the fertility of the soil is hard to explain, but the effects are there for all to see. We all recognize fertile soil when we see it by the vibrancy of the plants growing in it. The social network is like the soil a plant grows in.

People are encouraged by the social network to discover new farms by exploring the relationships between network members.

When people visit a social networking site, they will ordinarily explore the site through following relationships with “friends.” In a social network, anyone can be a friend of another member. In this manner, they often find other members to become friends with who they might never have found through searching. This process is similar to “word of mouth” in the real world, where people ask their friends where they bought their produce. This phenomena drives new customers to your farm without the farmer being required to do anything.

Think of how musical groups create elaborate websites to market their music, yet nearly all successful music groups today maintain a presence on a social networking website. They receive much more activity and feedback, much greater awareness among young people who buy their music, through the social network than the traditional website.

Unlike a catalog of farms, even with a locality search, the social network draws people in and keeps them there with an activity, it gives them a stake in the farm and in their own presence on the site, which benefits them and the farms they affiliate with. Your “profile” (presence) on the site becomes a place for customers to return to for the latest information on your farm. A customer's profile becomes a way to share their own interests (along with your farm) with others. When you post a bulletin (like a classified ad), it automatically flows out to friends of your farm. Non-farm members can even use the network to promote themselves.

Think of a chef joining the network, becoming a friend of several farms they purchase produce from promoting his own abilities through his network of friends and bulletins, leading new customers to your farm.

The social network involves people with the life of the farm. Interest in agriculture has never been greater. The farm is an exotic location for agricultural tourism. Organic food is an established product. Eating local has never been more attractive to the consumer. With books like Omnivore's Dilemma, and the recent anxiety and uncertainly about imported foods, people are more likely than ever to wonder where their food comes from. Farm Foody leverages this social change for you.

A site designed by farmers for farmers.

Our experience at Hollin Farms helped us to design an online service mindful of the needs of farmers. We understand the farmer does not have time to sit at the computer figuring out how to update their information. Our goal was to make using our site as simple and immediate as possible in order to reduce the time and effort you spend answering customer's questions, keeping your customers up to date on availability of produce, and the like. We believe the Internet can play a vital role in helping the independent farmer survive and prosper in the 21st century.

farmfoody.org

A website by Tom Davenport, Hollin Farms (hollinfarms.com) and Steve Knoblock (brandymorecastle.org)

Random Blather on Andy Warhol and Social Networks

Andy Warhol could have expressed himself in any medium. He chose painting (or at least a medium that appeared on its surface to be painting), perhaps by accident or by design, but whether he chose painting for this reason or was merely successful because he chose correctly, we may not know, but at the time he worked painting was the one medium where an artist would be taken seriously, what they had to say about society would be taken seriously in the medium of painting. He could have expressed his prescient views on celebrity and mass media by carving little dolls or collages, but he chose painting, I believe because that is the medium society would take seriously and pay attention to. If he didn't understand that, he was ignorant of the art world and society from the mid-twentieth century to the end of the twentieth-century. Only now with the information age are new art forms emerging that make painting, novels, movies obsolete.

A great artist does not care what medium they work in. They only care, as Warhol understood, that the job of the artist is to achieve a unity with their times and produce works that are completely in tune with what is happening in society, only slightly before society begins to realize what is happening. Celebrity was coalescing into a powerful social force in Warhol's time and he recognized it before anyone and found a means of expression for his recognition.

If you want to be a great artist today, you will not want to paint with oils like Picasso, abuse industrial sign printing technology like Warhol, or take photographs, you will want to discern the unique changes taking place in society in your time and create works that show people that. I don't know what they are or what medium it will be, but I can take some guesses. Social networking seems to have the force and weight that celebrity once had in 20th century society. It is emerging as a phenomena with the potential to completely reorganize authorship, art and life in the next century. I know it seems small and like a fad, but it there are profound changes taking place when you start to a) make authorship easy for everyone and b) make it easy to mix content from more than one person. When it becomes commonplace and ubiquitous for people to have other people's works of authorship displayed mixed in on their "social network profile page" (an ugly phrase, but what do you call it other than "my page?"), it changes the nature of authorship. It used to be clear who authored a work. Now it is not so clear or at least confusing to someone who grew up with books signed by an author, news stories bylined by the reporter. But the times are changing. It seems normal to young people to have other people's content show up mixed in their own, to see pages with content contributed by many people all jumbled together. I forsee a shift in the way people gain status, not just through works of authorship, which the networked world breaks down (devalues), but through becoming essentially editors of their own personal magazine...the profile page. It is a logical extension of your friends appearing on your social network home page, a simple step from that to your friends works of authorship appearing on your home page. This is like a "digg/slashdot/kuro5hin" site in miniature, where you get to approve or disapprove the content (stories, photos, etc.) appearing on your page. Users on flickr, gain status not just through authorship, but through association. The user with the most authors in their "stable" or contacts list or whose content appears on their page, wins. We already see the editors of these pages begging authors to "join their group" or become friends so that the best shared content will appear on their page.

I experimented with this in the late 1990s but it never went anywhere since I didn't push the project to completion. I was held back by fears, which I attributed to worries over vandalism (it was wiki-style), but which I believe were existential fears about authorship, the breaking down of authorship that might occur when one could easily refer to or include other people's content in your own through tagging (which was how it was to work).

Out of many, one: The acceptance of many views.

I've talked before about the need to accept the inconvenient existence of multiple of truths that exists in genealogy. Incomplete knowledge about the past is unavoidable. The past is gone and we are not getting back to put under a microscope. Even the present is difficult to pin down. We only know what we experience or someone tells us, which is pretty much what we know about the past, only through source material and what someone tells us. We are left frequently with only sketchy knowledge about family history. This leads to different families claiming the same individual, each with their own basket of evidence and story. I've learned to accept this as a reality and moreover, I've learned to accept this as being a Good Thing (or at least the best thing we can expect given the nature of reality).

The net it turns out is very good at handling incomplete information as it rapidly emerges and changes from multiple authorities. The applications emerging ont he web are gradually all taking on a similar shape. They all in one way or another incorporate the acceptance of many views. The wiki synthesizes a single view out of the many views of its authors. Social bookmarking (and other social networking) sites allow multiple "truths" to exist within the same space. The social network creates an ecology where authority can develop implicitly, without saying. Most of the social networks incorporate the many views or truths into some kind of aggregate view that is useful, a kind of single view out of many. This represents a democratizing of knowledge, but I hesitate to call it democracy since that is just one particular method for synthesizing a single truth out of many views. Democracy works in a very crude way by voting and we know that voting systems are subject to gaming by malicious people and other flaws. The kinds of systems, wikis, social networks, voting systems used by various collaborative news sites all represent vastly more sophisticated methods of synthesizing a single view out of many than democracy, which is relatively weak and produces a "tyranny of the majority" when not mediated by some system of individual rights.

I was explaining how social networking works to Tom Davenport today in regard to a farm website we are developing. I explained to him how if he had an account on a social bookmarking site, he would for his own benefit maintain and organize his bookmarks online. He would bookmark sites on pork and beef as he does now in Firefox. To do this he would create tags for Pork and Beef, organizing sites about pork and beef under those headings. Because the bookmarks are shared publicly and the tags exposed to to browse and search, a person can click on the Beef tag and discover his bookmarks (among others sharing their bookmarks). That person might click on his user profile to look to see what links he has on Beef. They might find his bookmarks are highly reliable and useful. Therefore, the user would be likely to turn to Tom's bookmarks when looking for accurate information on beef and cattle raising. They would not necessarily even know that Tom is a farmer, but they would discover him as an authority simply by observing the quality of his bookmarks on the topic. Tom Davenport implicitly becomes an authority. He implicitly shares his expertise with others. All without declaring himself a farmer or an expert on anything. Of course, he might mention in his profile he is a farmer; he might link to his farm site and you might have more reason to trust his bookmarks.

I tell this story because it illustrates the acceptance of many truths that lies behind the way the web works today. There may be ten thousand people on a social bookmarking site who think they know something about beef. Each may have a different idea of how to raise beef. Their bookmarks will implicitly reflect their knowledge, experiences and differences of opinion with others. The gestalt of the social network will reflect this diversity. The more accurate providers of bookmarks will become popular, the ones with less accurate bookmarks, reflecting radical, not very useful or very different views will remain less popular. One might object that this creates a kind of stagnation on popularity, but in reality it relates directly to the idea of the "Long Tail" where more people may be accessing the less popular bookmarks more than the popular. So the social network embodies two kinds of authority simultaneously. The authority of popularity and the authority derived from the long tail...the authority of individualism, of the disruptive idea, gives freedom to both kinds of authority and the freedom to move back and forth between the two kinds of authority...for the disruptive idea to start as a seed and grow to an oak, to move from being "indie" knowledge to "popular" knowledge all within the same framework.

It is fascinating that the web reflects this reality by its nature. That a concept coming from an obscure activity like genealogy is moving to the center of intellectual pursuits. That it can create a framework where out of many views a single truth can emerge without denying all the other views. It reminds me of the vast jumble of "junk genes" that we carry along in our DNA from our distant past, which are there because they might just come in handy some day. It reminds me of how organic the web is and utterly incomprehensible within the old framework of bell, book and schoolhouse knowledge it is becoming.

Only something organic can be becoming. And the web is always becoming. Always becoming something. A book is never becoming, it only was or is. Scholarship is locked into this model since the Enlightenment (oops, the E. slipped in there...was hoping not to mention it), what it means to posses knowledge, to share knowledge, to build knowledge and discover the truth is all changing now that we are connected to knowledge on the network. So strangely different than books. I've rambled enough for now and must retreat to the high tower of Brandymore again for the night.