I am fascinated by the emerging ways that social media and internet-fuelled innovations can be leveraged 'for the good'; that is, to solve profound problems in the world.
So Social Innovation Camp, which I couldn't attend, has been rocking my world, from afar.
I find the energy in this little film about the Camp absolutely inspirational and deeply exciting. Hope you enjoy too.
Credit: pen3ya
I was just reading about Permaculture on Wikipedia (as you do) and thought about how fitting the 'Holmgren's 12 design principles' are to operating online, particularly with online communities and this social media malarkey:
David Holmgren has developed 12 design principles for permaculture:
I haven't got a clue what some of these really mean in a permaculture context yet they seem to map so well to the web:
Lovely stuff.
Can you see what I mean or does it sound like I've been drinking meths again?
Credit: robsv
It's easy to denigrate various forms of internet media as having bad 'signal vs. noise'.
I'm wondering if that's one, actually a bit of a cop out, and two, whether that it will become a saying of the quaint old times.
The non-technical definition from Wikipedia is: "signal-to-noise ratio compares the level of a desired signal (such as music) to the level of background noise. The higher the ratio, the less obtrusive the background noise is."
And there's no doubt that online media have a much poorer signal-to-noise ratio than traditional media for a variety of reasons, particularly:
I agree that, untreated, online media has typically worse signal to noise than traditional media, and I agree that various forms of online media have comparatively better or worse ratios (for example podcasts seem to have better signal than blog posts, and some might argue that both have better signal than lifestreaming or twittering).
So my issue isn't so much with the complaint as with the complainant.
Online media is by its very nature abundant and disintermediated.
This is why we love online media and social media so much, for the untrammelled blossoming of a million meadows, and for the free and easy access to wade through each field, to discover the rare and delicate orchid amongst the swaying sea of sunflower (OK, I know I'm stretching the metaphor now).
Credit: pictoscribe
We love that abundance and disintermediation - we celebrate the permissiveness of an ability to self-publish without an editor's approval or a cheque to a media owner, and to find the long-tail needle in a haystack, that compilation or article or technical fix to the exact itch we needed to scratch. The miracle of the web, no?
To then turn around and complain about signal vs noise, well, at the risk of sounding like my mother, it's just a bit much.
This is the web tradeoff. The exchange. The quid pro quo. We need noise to get signal.
Since the content is infinite and our time finite we must be our own filters.
Filters used to be at the production end, the editor, the radio DJ, civil servant taking the committee meeting minutes, the powerful few.
Disintermediation puts the onus on us, the audience, as well as on those who wish to re-intermediate: new form aggregators, memetrackers, ideamarkets, social news sites.
If you feel a particular online medium suffers from particularly bad signal-to-noise ratio then you're staring a business opportunity in the face.
And you're probably not effectively filtering your own web finding-and-consuming, with a couple of options you can take:
Finally, we should ask ourselves, will the volume and ratio of noise get better or worse? My personal belief is that the web tradeoff will continue to boom and that signal vs noise will become a dated notion.
In fact, we are already in this position (see: Peak Attention; Continuous Partial Attention), we just haven't caught up and admitted it yet. Everyone is drowning in a sea of available data and information and media and messages. In the near future we will not dismay or scorn at this inevitability - we will turn to our pattern recognisers, our data analysts that see outlines and stories where we see only numbers, our personal and corporate filters, tools and sieves, and scoop out our generous handfuls of web content, knowing full well that for all the noise, we will find the golden dust we seek. Whinge, we will not.
Twitter is like the person you once cared for deeply and still think of fondly, but who couldn't change, and was never quite right inside. Something, somewhere, was broken. And despite huge efforts and 'changes', nothing changed.
Credit: confusedvision
Poor Twitter, my love, you're broken inside.
I wonder if you'll ever fix. (We hope so and are all here for you).
Credit: mtchm
The web is quick and dirty.
Please don't stop and wait and ponder and over-plan.
Planning is important.
Strategy, more.
Purpose, the most.
But execution, execution, execution.
Learning through iterations.
That's where the magic happens.
The web is quick and dirty.
Do it today.
...and this is what you get - Tarantinoesque Haiku:
Woke up in the lobby wearing nothing but five strategically placed cupcakes. Eyes feel like olives stabbed with little cocktail swords.
and:
I saw a little kid trip over a pug and cry, and I didn't have that dream about my mother. So far, best birthday ever.
and:
Killed a man in Reno just to watch him die of exsanguination, hypoxia, and heart failure. That and crocheting are kind of my hobbies..?
Fucking genius! Fireland on Twitter.
Fanks to Jennybee for the recommendation earlier this week.
Listening to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson on their For Immediate Review podcast this evening (whilst doing the washing up - continuous partial attention done well methinks) a quirk struck me right at the centrepoint my furrowed monobrow, not once but twice.
In their interesting conversation:
1. murmur-murmur-murmur, The Guardian, the UK newspaper, murmur-murmr
2. blum-blum-blum, The Telegraph, from the UK, boom-diggy-dlum-dlum
Which got me wondering: how long will the Guardian be instantly identified and indeed highlighted as 'the UK newspaper' and not just The Guardian?
Is that kind of rigid unshakeable relationship changing, falling away, eroding?
I have noticed my reading of The New York Times has gone from zero to an article a week, all via links on the blogosphere rather than via direct subscription. Parts of the NYT, which I really enjoy actually, are directly relevant to me, regardless of the bounds of this physical world (obviously).
And at the PR and New Media conference in 2007 the Guardian Online head of editorial development Neil McIntosh outlined the Guardian's vision at 'to be the leading liberal voice online'. No geographies here, ya grimey bounded hick. No territories, patches. Global bay-beeee...
My antennae suggest that the Guardian is achieving this too with the West Coast digerati - I can't provide direct references, I'm just ambiently aware that more and more bloggers seem to be citing The Guardian.
And and the smart, funny Anne Spackman, editor of Timesonline (the online Times of London, as it was), and some old skool geezer from The Telegraph both talked that day of the bump in traffic as the two American coasts woke up and consumed their daily news.
Finally, Loïc Le Meur, the French CEO of Seesmic, currently based in California, twittered: I maintain every bit of it. Countries are just a thing of the past. We need a World government and vote for a World President.
I think Loïc was chattering about the American elections and giving his global player view on the future but sharing politics with 95% of the rest of the world is a WHOLE different kettle of fish for me, in fact the very thought makes me nauseas and panicky in a way few things do, but looking back I think his suggestion stems from this same vibe.
Of course, it might be easier in the media world than in some others - content travels through networks relatively neatly.
I wonder how long it'll be before nationality is a quirky dated consideration in the work world? Yeah, the world is flat, or flatter, but is it really? And who for? Is it possible that we really will recruit from a global pool and then enable their working efforts through technology, through remote systems and services? 'You know what - you stay there in Naples/Mumbai/Wyoming, that's right where we want you'.
How long will it be before nationality is a throwback on the web, a jilt back into a bygone era, like being asked for your fax number or crowding around the wireless to hear some precious piece of available-once-and-then-gone-forever news?
These are my 'predictions' - inverted commas indicate that they're hardly radical - for 2008, thought up in about 10 minutes and delivered in a very badly lit room last night using some ridiculous toddlers toys to illustrate the points.
These follow on from Stephen Waddington.
Whaddayareckon?
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