test

ignore this

Not Value, Values!

In The Myth of Excellence, Crawford and Mathews analyze the purchase decision form a values ratification standpoint. According to Crawford and Mathews, the fundamental driver is the unconscious need for personal values to be ratified, our desire to be validated as individuals. This need has become stronger with the failure of the traditional social institution to provide such validation. Instead, the need gets fulfilled by businesses. The authors are actually of the opinion “Today, differentiation is found in the manner in which the product or service is rendered, viewed through the lens of human values.” Tom’s of Maine, Southwest Airlines, and Johnson & Johnson are cited as companies that excel at values-based marketing.

Consider social software in the context of the Crawford and Mathews values theory. While the connections identified and/or formed by social software techniques are not necessarily about values, I would contend certain statistical commonality of values is quite likely, particularly in spontaneously formed communities. If you accept this premise, the monetization of social software networks becomes a matter of catering to the common values of those who coalesce around a social software entity, e.g. a blog.

Viewed from a broader perspective, I am left with the following question: is social software a form of response to the failure of our institutes to satisfy what Carwaford and Mathews call the Perpetual Scavenger Hunt for Values?!

Democratization of news dissemination

The power of social software as a news dissemination source hit me this morning. How did I find out about the capture of Saddam? It wasn't the television, which my wife and oldest son were watching all morning. It wasn't the radio, which was on the entire time I was driving to get the family breakfast. It wasn't the newspaper, which I briefly scanned the headlines for while waiting for my mocha at Starbucks. It was Blogdex, when I got home and settled in to browse my RSS feeds. The future will be interesting.


Erik

Social Software in War

Military thinking, paricularly in the US, has put a lot of
emphasis on the application of technology in pursuit of
a new paradigm for conducting battle/war. The recent
use of "smart army" in Iraq is characteristic. Instead of
massing troops, e.g. the 6 million soldiers deployed
between Germany and Russia on the eve of the June 22,
1941 strike, a much smaller number of troops is equipped
and organized in a much more lethal manner. Was, according
to this paradigm, is conducted by an extremely small number
of highly professional troops.

I am actually of a somewhat contrarian opinion on the
subject. While the striking power of an average GI in 2003
is undoubtedly far superior to that of his/her ancestor during
World War II, mob technologies can again make war the business
of the whole nation. Fundamentally, armies are differentiated from
mobs by their organizational abilities. Armies can concentrate
superior number of troops in the right point at the right time,
something that mobs used to have a very hard time with.

Consider, for example the Roman legions. I very much doubt that each and
every lergionary was individually superior to the savage he was facing.
The legion, however, was a superior tactical, operational and logistical
construct to what primitive tribes could pitch against it. When facing
sophisticated enemy, e.g. one organized by phalanx, the legion was
not necessarily superior.

Consider as well the Israeli army. The regular army is fairly small. When the
need arises, it is reinforced by a much larger number of reservists. While the
reservist might not be as physically fit as a regular soldier, his/her motivation is typically
high, military skills are definitely decent, and experience in battle often exceeeds
that of the regular soldier. The whole thing depends how quickly you organize
the civilians who left their fields/offices/businesses in platoons, companies, battelions, etc.
As dmonstrated in numerous wars, once organized Israeli reserve army units can be
and often are formidable.

I would think the ad hoc organization enabled by social software could easily turn
a "dumb mob" into "lethal mob". While you might not want to run a nuclear submarine
in this fashion, other contexts could lend themselves very well to "lethal mob" techniques.
Inner city fighting and guerilla warfare come to mind as a particularly "suitable" contexts.

I do not really know how pervasive information technology is in Iraq. However, beyond
a certain threshold level of pervasiveness we might find ourselves fighting "lethal mob".
Obviously, certain segments of the population are not happy about US troops on their
land; arms, apparently, are plenty; and, disbanded Iraqi soldiers have a certain level of
"proficiency". All our opponets need is the ability to put together these elements. Even
ad-hoc organization ould be quite lethal.

Scary.

Many-to-Many: Semantic social software

I've tried very hard to stay out of the discussion on semantic web vs. social software started by Clay. However, reactions like this are wearing on me. Social software quite possibly is the SAVIOUR of the semantic web (lowercase intentional), not a competing or orthogonal paradigm. While a full discourse on my opinion here will be forthcoming later (or can be inferred from my previous posts), I will provide a couple simple examples of the union for others to extrapolate the value.

First, remember the discussion around syndicating reviews of which Marc was at the center? The volume of chatter about a specific product in an OpenReviews aggregator would make a spectacular "buzz marketing barometer" for what's hot and interesting. By tracking trackbacks and references to specific people, by product category, one can quickly discern trend setters and target those individuals. You could do the same with just a semantic web, but your accuracy would be far reduced. The added social dimension makes it truly meaningful and provides a layer of accuracy and depth that would be unachievable without it.

Second, look at blogdex. It's basically a social semantic/collaborative filter for "interesting" material on the web. The fact that an individual has interest in a piece of data is, in itself semantically meaningful. I personally use blogdex to make sure nothing "big" gets by me. In a more sophisticated semantic web, the blogdex context could be extended to provide content filters. For example, One could envision scanning the blogs of all notable physicists. When an item on the web reaches a certain threshold in terms of cumulative references (valuable content to the field) or number of references in a time period (temporally notable content (e.g. breakthroughs)), it would notify you.

Contact Network Pricing

This article is the first I've seen that outlines pricing of an enterprise social network management tool. 4-20K...not bad....

XML.com: Working with Bayesian Categorizers [Nov. 19, 2003]

This is a great concept. I'd love for it to be applied in the context of:

1) local information as a categorizer of interests and expertise of an individual
2) relevence and importance of information as a function of social interaction
3) syndication of 1 and 2 via social networks on a topical basis