connecting*the*dots

What the fuck is going on in Sydney? From the AP via Aljazeera:

[…]

On Sunday a mob of 5,000 white men, many of them drunk, attacked men they believed were of Middle Eastern descent in retaliation for the assault a week earlier of two volunteer lifeguards.

Youths of Lebanese descent were alleged to be behind that assault, but police say there was no apparent racial motive. (Full story)

Police arrested 16 rioters and said 31 people were injured, including a man stabbed in the back by an assailant officers said was a man of Arab appearance.

Prime Minister John Howard called the violence “sickening” but denied it was underpinned by a vein of racism running through Australian society.

“I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country,” he said.

[…]

The rampage will compound shock expressed Monday at Sunday’s rioting, which police said was organized by mobile phone text messages and fanned by Neo Nazi groups.

“What we have seen yesterday is something I thought I would never see in Australia and perhaps we have not seen in Australia in any of our lifetimes. And that is a mass call to violence based on race," Community Relations Commission chairman Stepan Kerkyasharian told Sky News.

[…]

I’ve a few readers down under; Jack are you feeling the vibe down there? How organized are these hate groups?

As social tagging begins to catch on beyond the early adopters, content and commerce domains are opening up their information architectures to empower their consumers to tag, creating exponentially greater degrees of faceted, semantic relationships between their information objects.

Amazon is already in the lead to extend this open paradigm into the commerce space with object tagging and Mechanical Turk (a program which could seriously disrupt peasant-class wage pay around the world). Amazon’s past innovation isn’t a guarantee for future success, but their recent moves prove to be a good sign.

How Social Tagging Works

Folksonomies change the dynamics of generating useful index pages by centralizing human perspectives expressed through single or compound descriptive terms into navigable indexes. It’s the equivalent of a dynamic, open-ended thesaurus, eliminating the need to manage the static creation of valued relationships, as co-occurance stitches together threads of information like newly created and evolving synapses in the brain.

The usefulness of these visible, semantic relationships to the person searching for specific content or products is quite possibly the most sticky form of extended discovery not generated through database algorithms.

I mean, forget dropping out of my mental model to browse topical navigation or stopping to search for an explicit term or phrase; when I engage with a domain such as flickr or del.icio.us, my desire to stay within the domain is increased simply because the language I use to define my world through tagging simultaneously allows me to peer into the world of like-minded folk (ergo: folksonomies).

Tagging creates community through the overlap of perspective.

While this extends conversation, it can also impact the sales potential of commerce sites by adding another layer to collaborative filtering, which Amazon has already acknowledged through their advancements in tagging. Now, extend this concept further into the realm of consumer contributions with industry and one can envision the incentive for business to slightly open their gated approach of mass manufacturing in this age of personalization, allowing customers to participate in defining what a company produces by simply tagging their existing objects.

• Tagging builds community
• Tagging increases the findability
• Tagging can give customers a transparent stake in the process of creating services/products/content

Back To The Interface

Try thinking about tagging interfaces on a few distinct levels:

• Interfaces which display common tags from across a particular domain need to be designed to maximize their semantic relationships.
• Object-level interfaces need to be re-crafted to both accommodate the display of previously applied personal tags and tags applied by the community.
• Management screens, which can give ownership of personally applied tags to the people that spend their time generating them, need to be compiled from contributing domains across the web for individuals to manage and, potentially, collect residual dividends related to sales generated from exposed tags.

I recently stumbled across an interesting site that leverages the API of del.icio.us tags. Kevan Davis created extisp.icio.us to scrape user tags and visually represent them using only words or images:

My good friend, DeWitt Clinton, created Delancy, which leverages the open nature of del.icio.us, providing an enhancement with the ability to manage tagged objects by personal click-through popularity:

Kevan’s enhancement focuses on re-presenting information in a way that presents our constantly evolving association with the world outside, while DeWitt’s enhancement focuses on adding feature value, assisting us to quickly find our most used bookmarks.

This type of innovative, open source development reflects the same type of creative energy that non-developers posses — people that are becoming hooked on tagging, hooked on participation.

Sharing Interfaces, Creating A Usable Web 2.0

Now that Silicon Valley is reaping the rewards of innovative open source development—observing hundreds of prototypes across numerous types of applications—how long will it be until these companies begin to act in a similar fashion? Yes, I’m talking about open collaboration.

TypePad enables me to tag my posts by assigning categories, but the management screen is a simple list, one that doesn’t allow me to easily create more manageable sub-categories (I’d probably group my tags by proper names, places, titles, descriptors, etc.). Mena, it’s becoming painful for me to manage my 200+ tags; how about TypePad teaming up with del.icio.us to use their management screen?

del.icio.us does many thing well, including their flexible interface for managing tags by give user created groups of tags nicknames. So simple, but so powerful. Why aren’t domains like TypePad, flickr, Flock, etc. bartering with del.icio.us to leverage this successful interface—one that thousands of early adopters are already using and loving — while providing their own best practice proprietary interfaces or code in return?

This level of collaboration amongst businesses is an example of what would allow companies to focus on developing more focused innovation, enhancing development cycles, reducing resource allocation and most importantly, providing best practice consistency across applications where possible. Toyota recently leased the technology of its Hybrid engines to Ford and other automakers.

How much quicker would a usable and useful Web 2.0 network be created if companies operated in such a manner?

The collective intelligence of humanity seems to be amped to contribute. Are we ready for them?

Everything is everything… for real.

Go see it today and then do something positive.

Blogging is a strange beast.

I was on ScriptingNews yesterday, reading Dave Winer’s spot-on post about Google web clips. Frankly, it surprised me that it was a new feature to him, as I’ve had it displayed above my Gmail client for what seems months now. Maybe Google is releasing features in chunks of user groups? I digress…

Just as I began to create a post about the differences in my mental model when I’m searching for information and performing specific tasks to accomplish a specific goal within an application (with the former being the proper place for RSS advertisements [which is what they are] and the latter a place that should be free of such junk), I happened upon his post which used an out of context quote from Tara Hunt’s post as a lead into a somewhat self-aggrandizing post. Well, that shifted my posting focus.

Within 10 minutes I had moved from one blog to another, uncovering the gist of what her quote actually referenced. In the end, I found myself watching a 3 minute-long clip of Mena Trott and Ben Metcalfe going at it at Les Blogs conference in Paris. This somewhat common interaction in the midst of a conference (speaker and attendee getting worked up in debate) was different because it came into being due to the backchannel IRC conversation being presented behind Mena, which led her to call Ben out of the audience to back up his off-comment.

So instead of dropping a UX post, I found myself clued into who Ben Metcalfe is and this practice of presenting IRC conversations "to add texture" to a conference presentation—a practice which, I feel, is completely fucked up. Don’t agree? Feel free to create more noise for the sphere to devour. Monitoring the sheer amount of conversations that posted following the Mena-Ben exchange has been almost humorous. Yes, this post is my second referencing the “event.”

Look, blogging is empowering; it connects us individual human beings, allowing us to have a voice within the mass markets of consumerism. To Dave’s point, it’s also a hell of a lot more than that, as human behavior is impossible to predict or map out. The great thing about the blogoshere is that there is little to no organization or editorial control across blogs, but a snapshot of the conversation across the blogosphere might tell a different story.

We’ve already moved beyond the purist definition of a blog (or a web-log) into a sphere peppered with collaborative blogs, some laced with specific editorial agendas, others serving as a virtual world for friends in the real to pool their perspectives of the world. This evolution begs a bunch of questions to be asked:

• What happens to these voices in this ecosystem as the blogosphere continues to evolve?
• Is there a tipping point for these new blogs to leave the support system of the blogosphere and enter the capitalistic fray of the mainstream media?
• What signifies that initial shift; a weekly email between contributors agreeing upon editorial direction and goals, possibly?
• How about an advertsing or revenue model that only subtly effects the subject matter of posts?
• A blog isn’t a blog simply because of it’s posting and interactive features… or is it?

Are we moving towards creating more brand in the ether or is it the first step to creating grass roots, organized, activism with a catchy name to evoke information scent within the greased-palm structure of the mainstream media?

Oh, and about social tagging…

Dave Winer, who I read often and agree with a good chunk of the time, is acting pretty shady with his latest post, "Hmm, not so sure about that."

In order to write a post about the ill-conceived notion of people "defining" what the blogosphere is "all about" (I happen to agree with him, it’s all in the eye of the beholder), he quotes a provocative one-liner from Tara at HorsePigCow saying:

"The blogosphere is all about subverting those power structures."

Dave then goes on to frame his position in any debate regarding the topic of blogging:

"It’s weird when someone who’s been blogging for months says what the blogosphere is all about and it doesn’t match up with what I, who have been blogging for years, thinks.

It’s one of those things where she can think what she wants and I can think what I want and the world goes on.

But anyone who thinks they know what the blogosphere is about is as right as someone who thinks they know the meaning of life, and potentially as dangerous (in a not-nice way) because maybe they’ll try to force you to see it their way."

Well, that’s a surgically chosen bait quote there, Dave. How about grabbing a quote which included a bit more context to her entire post, something akin to:

"For me, though, it comes down to power. I’m all for empowering the individual. (dot)Ben, being merely a conference participant, was able to voice his own dissension to the subject matter, but was called out by the speaker, who, had the power in that room. The blogosphere is all about subverting those power structures. The ‘me’conomy is rising, folks."

I read her post and followed her good links to find out that, apparently, tension at Les Blogs conference erupted as a speaker (Mena Trott) was criticized (with a "bullshit") by a member of the audience (Ben Metcalfe) via the (publicly displayed) conference backchannel discussion. Subsequently, Mena decided to ask the mystery handler to stand up and back his/her comments and the hilarity ensued.

Tara’s post was primarily gleaned analysis via Technorati’s "Top Searches This Hour" feature, commenting that it was a signifier of the blogosphere’s affinity to the little guy (Ben, the audience member) not the empowered (Mena, the speaker).

After doing my own hyperlink chasing through Tara and Ben’s posts, I stumbled across the fact that Dave was apparently present for watched the event on vidcast afterwards and left his comments on Ben’s squash-attempting post about "the incident." So if Dave was at the event, and participated by having discourse with Ben on his post about the incident, why the fuck didn’t he attribute a more contextual quote to Tara?

Instead, following the out-of-context quote he framed within his own rhetoric, he pushes his own false-positive agenda to the forefront (emphasis mine):

"I did an interview earlier this week, talking about the relationship between blogging and professional journalism, and I reiterated my old line, that I don’t want to do away with the pros, I grew up reading them, and I think they serve a purpose. But they have to lose the arrogance and get creative if they want to have a chance in the new century.

Now I imagine from Tara’s point of view I look like as much of an obstacle to her getting what she wants as the pros may have looked to a blogger who started when I did. I heard this in North Carolina at a session where I was used as an example of what blogging was rising against, the middle-aged white male. I was horrified, because I gave up a lot, personally, so that these people would have a chance to blog. Now I’m being projected on, it’s the Chinese Cultural Revolution all over again. Grandfather is a bourgeois counter-revolutionary, even if he marched with Chairman Mao."

So is this an example of less arrogance and more creativity? Ugh.

The net effect on the majority of Dave’s readers with less time on their hands than me, is that they are now led to believe that Tara is a whiner, craving more reach, incessantly striving to get on the A-list, all based on her out-of-context quote. My conscience is forcing me to drop this post because "old school Dave" doesn’t believe in the value of comments on his own blo (blogs without comments are only partial-blogs), but did you notice that Dave will flame somebody within their own blog post comments?

And he’s the old guard netizen?

Dave finishes off his post (after waxing poetic on issues ranging from being a Boomer to Apple execs in Africa to a smart Carl Sagon reference) with this gem:

"When people get the idea that they’re on some righteous path that’s exclusive of others, that’s when I start shaking my head. It doesn’t matter who they are, who they work for, or how much (or little) money they have. Get a clue, we’re all bozos on this bus, and none of us gets out of this alive."

How very true, but how very pathetic to so blatantly step on someone to get a seat on said bus.

I’m the “big brother” in my family and growing up, well, I played the role like a champ with my “little brother” Andy.

When we wrestled, I’d pin him after giving him false hope of a tap out. When we played Intellivision, I’d beat him as soundly as humanly possible. When my 12 year-old friends came over, I’d embarrass his 8 year-old ass in front of them. Why’d I keep him toiling, frustrated and fuming in "little brother" mode? I don’t know, I was a kid… maybe I watched too much TV?

In retrospect, I’m willing to get deeper. I probably needed the power in the relationship to make me feel whole and stroke my ego on some level. Just coming home from the hospital, he took away the focus on me. With our mom working three jobs, being latch-key kids, I probably craved even more attention. Eh… that’s all bullshit psychobabble crap; I was a kid—I thought being a big brother meant that it was my job to be a dick on some level.

But for every time I played the classic big brother in a negative way, there were at least five times that I watched his back and made sure all was good.

When Andy had a problem with a kid on the bus coming home, I marched my eleven year-old ass over to the kid’s house to make sure the there wouldn’t be a problem the next day. When my dad had a few too many Martini’s and threatened to get rid of him because he didn’t finish his vegetables fast enough, I packed my bag with him and forced my dad to decide to get rid of both of us. As much as I teased him, I looked out for him more so. Somewhere in between we teamed up and became tight and the big and little signifiers dropped.

We were brothers.

And then life happened; we grew up.

We’ve been living in different states for the past 12 years. Andy’s been in Greensboro since his freshman year at UNCG, focusing on his documentary work and video editing, while I spent my time moving all around the northeast as a designer for hire. We’ve always stayed in touch via the phone and holiday visits, so when I moved down to Greensboro in September, I fully expected to pick up our tight-knit relationship where it left off as post-adolescents.

I’m coming to understand that life isn’t that simple.

It’s not that we’re not still tight, we are, but for some strange reason we don’t quite see and react to the world in the exact same same way. Somehow, different life experiences over the past 12 years have shaped our individual goals, perspectives and perception of the world we interact with.

Crazy, eh?

We hit The Scene on South Elm the last two nights, catching both the Wal-Mart and Outfoxed documentaries. On the way home last night, while discussing the possibility of shooting a documentary together in the near future (I’ll keep you posted on where that conversation goes), we ended up bumping heads on a variety of subjects and a few stinging perception issues that we had about each other—issues that must have built-up between us over the years in our separate lives—came to the surface.

Quite honestly, if this conversation were over the phone sometime over the past 12 years, these pent up perceptions probably wouldn’t have made it to the surface. Looking back, we both became proficient at not pressing our conversations when anything became close to uncomfortable, as (I think) we both wanted to ensure that our tight relationship as kids remained just as tight as adults. I’m thinking that we both must have felt that challenging each other too much might have snapped that carefully crafted ecosystem of "safe" interactions.

I’m also thinking that it would be stupid for us to continue along these lines; thankfully, Andy feels the same way.

Us Coon brothers are creative souls and creative souls often have problems communicating and taking feedback. But if we want to work together professionally, allowing ourselves to evolve to understand each other as artists, adults and brothers, we’re going to have to lock in and listen to each others perspectives by trusting in our common, positive intent.

On that note, come on bro’… try to pin me.

A legendary poet and prophet lives on…

(reminder via The Republic of T, "Working Class Hero" personalized video by Don Thrasher)

Awesome mashup.

Clayton James Cubitt is living in a world of shit.

His mother evacuated New Orleans when Katrina hit and lost everything, including the trailer she lived in, which Clayton bought for her. Now FEMA refuses to provide grant money to her because the trailer is in his name and he lives in New York City; FEMA considers him to be an absentee landlord and his mother a mere tenant.

Un-fucking-believable.

Clayton is doing what he can to keep on rebuilding, one part being a donation page on his blog. It’s the holiday season; do what you can to help.

Here’s a comment I pulled from his blog, left by one of our men in Iraq, which frames these times all too clearly:

clayton,

Although I cannot directly share in the pain you are suffering now, nor the pain that your family will experience in the coming months and years to rebuild the generations of your family that seem to now be lost, I can offer you one glimmer of hope and faith… there are many wonderful people who would be by your side right now if they could.

Unfortunately, we are stuck… because of the decisions of the same bureaucratic SOBs that are making your life hell right now. They are and have been affecting many lives recently. I am serving for a military that has failed to appreciate its members for the better part of a decade, for a people that barely appreciate us, in a country (right now) that wants fiercely for us to just go back to our own home. The worst part isn’t knowing that the destruction we have seen here in Iraq is comparable to that which is found in a once glowing city of vast residency, a landmark of what it truly means to be an American, but it is in fact worse to know that the destruction, while comparable… was caused by US here.

I do my job because I have to help provide for my wife and son… but I’d rather be in New Orleans!

Keep on keeping on, bud. Eventually we will all be home… and to tell you the truth, your pictures and your words have created a connection. From half a world away in a war zone I can somehow feel that every service member would be proud to call a little house between two levees right underneath I-10… HOME.

-feeling the connection, and I’d rather be in New Orleans.

from Iraq,
-josh

Vladimir Yarets Alexeevich is on a mission that he can’t tell you about. He’s both deaf and mute, but don’t think for a moment that stops him from reaching out and touching your soul with his story.

I met him at a vista point above the Golden Gate Bridge last Sunday. Apparently, he’s been traveling the globe on his bike since 2000, trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most distance traveled on motorcycle by a deaf mute. Yeah, their categories are awesome. Vladimir showed me where he’s already been and it’s pretty much the entire globe (including all 50 states). He’s about to head to Hawaii then Australia and Japan to wrap up.

The guy had me rolling on the ground when he mimed his 2003 crash experience. He pointed to his replacement bike (a BMW) and then clicked his heels together, threw his right arm up with a flat hand extended and made a serious face (pretending to be a Nazi). Then he points to his ride and throws up his two thumbs and grins.

Fuckin’ A.

He pointed to a laminated card that said that donations get him around the world, so I peeled off $10 and shook it into his hand. I’m now living vicariously through the guy. When I got home yesterday, I Googled him and found an old article about Vlad, two years into his journey.

How this hasn’t become a movie, I have no idea.

Why I started my Chomsky indulgence with Understanding Power and not this digestible gem I’ll never know.

Uncle Sam is a brilliant pocket reference of Noam Chomsky’s world view, specifically his unflinching criticism of US foreign policy. His genius with linguistics provides him the means to absolutely tear apart the propaganda surrounding isms, bringing the conversation and arguments back to the table of reality. By comparing declassified government files, public policy and geopolitical events occurring between the early 1940’s to 1992, Chomsky cuts directly through the posturing of the US to frame cause and effect in the struggle for global power.

The man is fearless. He critically deconstructs policy from within the sovereign US to expose the post-WWII new world order policies of US planners — clearly describing how the Third World has been shaped to remain the peasant working class via neo-Nazi techniques of torture and intimidation, satisfying the needs of the US investor class.

His arguments are completely lucid and relevant in today’s world, even though it was published in the early nineties. Want an example? Keep an eye on the US propaganda regarding the “left-wing rhetoric” of Hugo Chavez. The BBC is already picking up the US talking points of Venezuela elections being rigged. Chomsky describes these US tactics in detail.

Chomsky’s take on US indoctrination of its citizens to contributing productively to pure capitalism is classic, as he tackles complicit participants from the mainstream media to academia. Just as stinging is his perspective on the marginalization of 80% of our population, which reminded me a bit of the 5% Nation, but without the optimism.

Here’s a section about the US in a Rent-A-Thug role (remember, this was written during the original Gulf War conflict with George H.W. Bush in charge):

[…]

“In any confrontation, each participant tries to shift the battle to a domain in which it’s most likely to succeed. You want to lead with your strength, play your strong card. The strong card of the United States is force—so if we can establish the principle that force rules the world, that’s a victory for us. If, on the other hand, a conflict is settled through peaceful means, that benefits us less, because our rivals are just as good or better in that domain.

Diplomacy is a particularly unwelcome option, unless it’s pursued under the gun. The US has very little popular support for its goals in the Third World. This isn’t surprising, since it’s trying to impose structures of domination and exploitation. A diplomatic settlement is bound to respond, at least to some degree, to the interests of the other participants in the negotiation, and that’s a problem when your positions aren’t very popular.

As a result, negotiations are something the US commonly tries to avoid. Contrary to much propaganda, that has been true in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Central America for many years.

Against this background, it’s natural that the Bush administration should regard military force as a major policy instrument, preferring it to sanctions and diplomacy (as in the Gulf crisis). But since the US now lacks the economic base to impose “order and stability� in the Third World, it must rely on others to pay for the exercise—a necessary one, it’s widely assumed, since someone must ensure a proper respect for the masters. The flow of profits from Gulf oil production helps, but Japan and German-led continental Europe must also pay their share as the US adopts the “mercenary role,� following the advice of the international business press.

The financial editor of the conservative Chicago Tribune has been stressing these themes with particular clarity (William Neikirk, “We are the World’s Guardian Angelsâ€? 9/9/90) We must be “willing mercenaries,â€? paid for our ample services by our rivals, using our “monopoly powerâ€? in the “security marketâ€? to maintain “our control over the world economic system.â€? We should run a global protection racket, he advises, selling “protectionâ€? to other wealthy powers who will pay us a “war premium.”

This is Chicago, where the words are understood: if someone bothers you, you call on the Mafia to break their bones. And if you fall behind in your premium, your health may suffer too.

To be sure, the use of force to control the Third World is only a last resort. The IMF is a more cost-effective instrument than the Marines and the CIA if it can do the job. But the “iron fist� must be poised in the background, available when needed.

Our rent-a-thug role also causes suffering at home. All of the successful industrial powers have relied on the state to protect and enhance powerful domestic economic interests, to direct public resources to the needs of investors, and so on—one reason why they are successful. Since 1950, the US has pursued these ends largely through the Pentagon System (including NASA and the Department of Energy, which produces nuclear weapons). By now we are locked into these devices for maintaining electronics, computers and high-tech industry generally.

Reaganite military Keynesian excesses added further problems. The transfer of resources to wealthy minorities and other government policies led to a vast wave of financial manipulations and a consumption binge. But there was little in the way of productive investment, and the country was saddled with huge debts: government, corporate, household and the calculable debt of unmet social needs as the society drifts towards a Third World pattern, with islands of great wealth and privilege in a sea of misery and suffering.

When a state is committed to such policies, it must somehow find a way to divert the population, to keep them from seeing what’s happening around them. There are not many ways to do this. The standard ones are to inspire fear of terrible enemies about to overwhelm us, and awe for our grand leaders who rescue us from disaster in the nick of time.

That has been the pattern right through the 1980’s, requiring no little ingenuity as the standard device, the Soviet threat, became harder to take seriously. So the threat to our existence has been Qaddafi and his hordes of international terrorists, Grenada and its ominous air base, Sandinistas marching on Texas, Hispanic narcotraffickers led by the arch-maniac Noriega, and crazed Arabs generally. Most recently it’s Saddam Hussein, after he committed his sole crime—the crime of disobedience—in August 1990. It has become more necessary to recognize what has always been true: that the prime enemy is the Third World, which threatens to get “out of control.�

These are not laws of nature. The processes, and the institutions that engender them, could be changed. But that will require cultural, social and institutional changes of no little movement, including democratic structures that go far beyond periodic selection of representatives of the business world to manage domestic and international affairs.”

[…]

Exactly.

Okay, I’m off to read Cluetrain again. I call this “gray matter iteration.” ;-)

After a ton of hard work by many people, the redesigned Media Matters for America site has launched.

OLD:

NEW:

Behavior Design knocked out the visual design, we shared the information design, I handled the tagging schema/information architecture and we all tag-teamed with the Media Matters crew.

Now that the site is live, I’ve a bunch of tagging and findability methods I’d like to discuss here, but not tonight. Tonight I digest my sushi dinner with friends in San Fran.