connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by cjsylvor)

(originally uploaded by Von Hutchins)

“Terrorists can be defeated simply by not becoming terrified — that is, anything that enhances fear effectively gives in to them.”
- John Mueller, Ohio State University

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(originally uploaded by jamarju)

“I am worried that I have a finger-pointing President who quite possibly does more damage to more people every day than any traditional terrorist could do in a lifetime and most likely won’t be happy until he completely isolates America from the rest of the world, throwing all of us into a third World War.”
- Alex Sandell, Terrorists in Business Suits 2: The Second Coming

Dave Winer has expanded on his “It’s the users, dummy!” statement and I couldn’t agree with him more:

There’s actually a neater solution, especially if you’ve put a piece of software on the user’s desktop to facilitate uploading and editing of the data — keep a copy of all the data on the user’s desktop, and just mirror it in your web app. There goes the problem (or is it an excuse) that your competitor would be using your CPU cycles to grab a copy of the user’s data (with the user’s permission, I should add, you need a username and password to get access, so the argument that they’re protecting against scrapers and abusers doesn’t hold water).

Following the Beyond Broadcast conference in May, Nate Aune and I began jamming on a similar concept; something we loosely called myTag.

(click for entire .pdf)

The major difference in our approach is that we’re trying to create a “piece of software” (actually, an online service) that can work across all online services, serving as a meta-data hub for all personally tagged information objects — blog posts, photography, video, audio, social bookmarking and possibly service metadata, such as Amazon tagging.

Unlike Dave’s example, we would scrape external services for newly updated, tagged objects. The goal is to centralize people’s meta-data and provide ownership of said meta-data, not to interfere with people interacting with these decentralized services. The scraping would only occur when a person accesses myTag to review their current tag universe, so the impact on external server CPU cycles would be innocuous at best.

Dave’s idea focuses specifically on the data editing and management issues that exist when users attempt to move their data across existing services:

With a local copy, the user can point any service at the data, and it can suck up a copy, and the competitor’s app would run on the user’s desktop too, using their (abundant) CPU cycles. The vendor’s server (in this case Flickr) wouldn’t even know that a copy of the data has been made, and since it’s the user’s data, that’s exactly as it should be.

Yet another reason to use rich clients. I use Flickr Uploadr, always. It’s just a bit easier to work with than the browser-based method of uploading, and that bit of easiness has proven to be worth it. Then of course the competitor has to offer a desktop tool as well. We do it with the OPML Editor. The server components, the directory browser, blog renderer, work with a copy of the data, the originals reside on the user’s machine. It also protects against a system failure, or a company failure.

I completely agree with his ownership point regarding meta-data, and his perspective of safeguarding information objects from system or company failure is extremely valid as well.

So how could we extend his concept of locally managing data (both the information object itself and its meta-data) across same-type services (flickr, zooomr, riya, etc.) to include culling meta-data across different-type services that leverage tagging (del.icio.us, YouTube, flickr, WordPress, etc.)?

See, the reason we’re sketching a thin client is because our primary goal is to enable individuals to be able to review and curate various slices of their own concept terminology — meta-data or tags — as they’ve been applied to information objects over various services and periods of time.

The way I look at it, an aggregate of tags can serve as a looking glass into the personal linguistic structure of each of us, as we make explicit choices when applying specific concept terms to our objects. As competition to flickr and YouTube enters the market, our POV’s will undoubtedly become further dispersed across the web, increasing the findability of our objects, yet conversely affecting our own understanding of our perceived output.

If we’re going to arm citizens with media tools, then we need to provide intuitive, smart representational interfaces for accessing and modeling our own strategic output. Why? Well, we need to be on-point, constantly iterating our understanding of our own perspectives and biases as we venture further into producing our own media.

Otherwise we fall into the same trappings of the mainstream media.

An example… take the limited nature of my tag cloud on this blog as an example. Click on a term, such as Greensboro, and a narrative will unfold over the period of time that you choose to explore and read. While it’s useful to understand more about my relationship with and perspective on Greensboro, the cloud doesn’t include my photos tagged with Greensboro, nor my video clips tagged with Greensboro.

Citizen media operatives need an centralized interface to access decentralized information objects. From my perspective, the value of these interfaces is huge — both to the content creators and potentially to the content consumers.

The first two scenarios I mapped out in the above sketch were for searching and browsing ones existing tag library. Any other primary scenarios jump out at you?

Technorati tag results for “information architecture” (feed | page)
Why? It’s what I do, so why not filter through everyone’s posts tagged with IA? I mean, who tags their posts with IA other than IA’s?

Technorati tag results for “linguistics” (feed | page)
Why? I had thought about going to grad school for a linguistics degree… and then this web thingy came along for free.

Bill Readings introduced me to linguistics back in my undergraduate days at Syracuse University. It was a low-level Critical Theory class, not enough knowledge to rest a proper degree upon, but that wasn’t Bills concern. He just wanted us to listen and think.

Bill had a wonderful way of illustrating his teachings — placing our 19 year-old minds into comfortable arenas where we could casually move towards comprehension, eventually grasping the core concepts of deconstructionalism and linguistics he tossed about with ease.

After choosing Blade Runner as an explicit assignment for visual deconstruction, and his daily, illustrative call-outs of us numskulls to apply a “bit more apperception to your day-to-day existence,” I’d have to say the strongest, most visceral lesson that stuck with me was his conversation around the English word “tree” and the Spanish word “arbol.”

An Attempt To Share Knowledge

To monolingual, English speaking folk first exposed to the authority of the Spanish translation, the inherent belief is that the two terms (English and Spanish) are perfect representations of the signifier, “tree”… which is wrong.

The signifier of “tree” is more akin to your personal mental model of the physical representation of:

original photos by icathing and Melete

Viewed through the lens of semiology and linguistics, we cannot absolutely assert that tree = arbol, because the signifier of “tree” has a unique representative interface to each of us, as does the percept of the translation of “arbol.”

Our individuality is too explicit to absolutely relate to explicit terminology.

Or put into political terms, in this society of modern constructs — one that consistently nudges us towards silos of absolute knowledge, relationships and definition — we are presupposed to assign relative constructs of our world to get by, based on what, in essence, is an aggregate misunderstanding of our own individual cognitive processing.

Back to the tree example; Roland Barthes on Saussure:

Until he found the words signifier and signified, however, sign remained ambiguous, for it tended to become identified with the signifier only, which Saussure wanted at all costs to avoid; after having hesitated between some and seme, form and idea, image and concept, Saussure settled upon signifier and signified, the union of which forms the sign.

Nowadays, whenever I stumble upon a conversation about knowledge and structure — such as Are trees natural? over at David Weinberger’s blog — the information architect within me rests in a state of nirvana, coaxed into releasing control by his neighbor, the experience designer.

Each day we rely on our own trees of knowledge — branches of immeasurable directions and depth, overlapping and crossing one another to form meshed nests of position. The common faith we tend to hold regarding knowledge, is in the strength to overlap our individual trees with one another; the more the overlap, the more the homogenous culture, driving civil movement within this complex ecosystem and jungle we’ve created for ourselves.

Well, some people seem to prescribe to such theories.

In the midst of this information revolution, when we engage in the practice of tagging our information objects, we’re not only engaging in an activity to increase the discovery of our position via the use of common signifiers, we’re implicitly participating in a form of expression — painting our personal mental model of our signified constructs onto the sign itself.

In turn, the degree of shared context an individual holds on the receiving end, determines the degree to which her reception of the sign becomes explicit communication.

Enabled by technology, we can now easily add descriptive tags to the aggregate objects of words, colors, sounds and movement delivered more directly to the branches of each other’s trees. In this flip scenario of retrieval, we now rapidly stumble across these additions, assigning them as variants of welcome or disruptive bits of information.

In any case, our common trees of knowledge are being affected… they are evolving.

To this day, these particular words of Ferdinad de Saussure cannot escape my purview:

In the lives of individuals and of societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain soley the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs. In practice, the study of language is of some degree or other the concern of everyone.

photo by heather allison

If Bill hadn’t stepped into the wrong plane at the wrong time in the fall of 1994, he would’ve witnessed rapid advancements of the inner-workings of the web — specifically the participatory meshing of topics, interests, desires and perspectives via individual and social tagging through citizen blogging, vlogging, podcasting, etc.

The post-modern, knowledge craving, subversive side of Bill would be beaming right about now… just about as brightly as the multinational, career for-hire professor.

In the name of knowledge, and a hat-tip to my mentor, I think I’ll be busy late into the evening this October 30th.

Two master linguists, in an interview for the ages:

[…]

AG: So when animals chat to each other, does them talk in language?

NC: Well, that’s more or less a matter of definition. I mean, every organism has some means of communication, including insects.

AG: How many words does you know?

NC: Well… the… normally humans, by maturity, have tens of thousands of words…

AG: For real?

NC: Yeah.

AG: What is some of them?

NC: Well, the ones we’re using.

AG: For real. Me know loads of words: parachute, photograph, anthems, spaghetti, camera…

NC: Well, if you count them up it’ll be in the tens of thousands.

[…]

It’s amazing how much you can learn about yourself and someone else over a “coffee cup” of coffee.

Cara Michele and I agreed to meet over at The Green Bean yesterday to discuss how we can get moving on our new joint project. Well, after 4 hours of caffeine and an intense conversation ranging from the project at hand to religion to the MPAA, I realized that while we’re very different, amazingly enough, we’re so very much the same.

She’s a devout Christian, living and serving humanity through the love of Christ, and tends to look for absolutes to help guide her through life.

I’ve found my higher power, yet I don’t call it anything particular, believing instead that “it” is woven throughout our actions and surroundings. I’m wary of anything claiming to be an absolute, instead looking for natural patterns to clue me onward to my next experience.

We’re completely different, right? Wrong.

We both share a strong desire to empower the men and women who are left on the periphery of society; Cara Michele has been walking that walk for years, while I’ve been going all city since ‘91. So while I strongly believe in the power of information and she strongly believes in the power of Christ, our common desire is upliftment.

It’s all good.

Now if I can only get her to be comfortable with the fact that there are endless ways to describe a “coffee cup”… ;-)

All signs point to George W. Bush being a man of God, right? I mean, apparently the man upstairs told him to go to war — and we’re now at war — so there must be some truth to the observation.

Ludwig Miles van der Rohe, the architect of architects, famously stated that “God is in the details.” Just as compelling of an absolutist argument is the entire argument for Intelligent Design, which essentially states that life is too complex for evolution to produce our existence, so a master creator must have designed every particular detail of our being to work within a grand scheme of this stage we call Earth.

Using such logic — living in the modernist world of W. — wouldn’t that hold our most innocuous squakings and flubs as being divine instances of truth? That Freud guy had some major God love running through his veins, eh?

The Huffington Post
W: “My Government”
by Marty Kaplan

Here’s how W is defending the Dubai decision: “The more people learn about the transaction that has been scrutinized and approved by my government, the more they’ll be comforted…”

For a moment, set aside the “trust-me” part of this, and focus instead on the “my government” bit.

If he’d said “my administration,” I wouldn’t have blinked. “My cabinet” would also have raised no hackles. If he really wanted to use the word “government,” then how about these pronouns as antecedents for “people”: “their government” or “our government.”

But no, he said “my government.” I don’t think that’s just a garden variety Bushism, a trivial malapropism. I think it goes right to his understanding of who he is, and who we are. It’s not a Freudian slip; it’s an Orwellian siren, an anti-democratic red alert.

The founding documents of our nation talk about the government, our government, a government, any government. If my is used, it’s said on behalf of the citizens, not their rulers.

But W really believes that it’s his government. He doesn’t see himself as a steward, a trustee, a caretaker, someone who temporarily gets to steer the ship of state because of the momentary consent of the governed and an enduring set of rules. No, he believes it’s his ship, his state, his rules — his and his ideological fellow-travelers.

The heads of some countries with parliamentary systems, like India, sometimes say “my government”; when they do, it means ‘my Cabinet,” “my temporary ruling colition,” “my majority” — which could fall in an instant, if there were a no-confidence vote.

But in the US, we don’t have governments that get made and dissolved year-round; we have Administrations, that get formed every four years.

In the American context, unless it’s an ordinary citizen like you or me speaking, let’s recognize the expression “my government” as what it really is: a deeply troubling oxymoron, the inappropriate yoking together of a democratic institution and — well, a moron.

In 1998, I found myself working for my first professional web design agency. I stress professional not only for the brilliant talent within the walls of the shop and the output they generated, but for their business etiquette as well. You see, I was specifically trained that when speaking with a client, I was to refer to my design iterations as “our” ideas and “our” designs. Self-referrential language shifted the focus of the client from the team to the individual, and within such a big money, high-pressure profession, that’s the last thing an account executive wants to deal with.

How does this anecdote fit with this latest Bushism? I honestly don’t know. But if it isn’t too much too ask from his highness, how about acting professional and pretending for a minute that we’re in this together, because unfortunately, we are.

(via Matthew Gross)

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.

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.” ;-)

I tag like a 15 year-old kid in the South Bronx with a box full of Krylons and a yard full of freshly sandblasted cars.

I tag like I just got jumped by a handful of punks who made the mistake of letting me follow them to their trailer park homes adorned with freshly cleaned aluminum siding.

I tag like I get told who I am, what I’m supposed to believe and how I’m supposed to act on a daily basis.

I go all city, hoping that one day, the vehicles I’ve touched get stitched together to form a complete sentence.

I tag because I saw you leave your mark and it was dope.

I tag because I know how to freeze, watch TV and (kinda) avoid the kissing bugs.

I tag because the words I drop in time will find a way to form a cohesive rhyme.

I tag because the world may be getting smaller, but it’s damn sure not coming together.

I tag your name, your spot, your position, your mood, your frame of mind when it’s too hard for you to see it for yourself.

I tag the expected terms of modern constructs.

I tag the post-modern undercurrents of miscellaneous descriptors.

I tag my tags so that when structure is forged out of chaos, you’ll know how to find me.

I tag so that it’s me you won’t be looking for.

When I tag, I’m regurgitating the meal I’ve caught for the chicks in my roost.

When I tag, I feel one with the universe of the collective unconscious.

When I tag, I can see the pillars of control quaking in their foundation.

When I tag, I experience therefore I understand.

When we tag, anything is possible.

————

Tag! We’re It! Part II
Tag! We’re It!

Noam Chomsky is the most self-deprecating “intellectual”… ever. When told that he was voted “World’s Top Public Intellectual,” Chomsky probably let out what amounted to an uncomfortable sigh.

You see, Chomsky actively participates in the world through the construct of language, which is highly relational and contextual, not hierarchical. This is why his political views are so unpopular with the American power elite; he’ll play along with their restructuring of nature’s flax matrix of relationships to fit their greedy motivations, while simultaneously challenging their authority by insisting that they must be held accountable to the consequences of their explicit actions within this structure of authority. Crazy notion, eh?

This award is a hierarchical assignment, obviously something Chomsky doesn’t believe in. If his fervent supporters and lobbyists would recognize this perspective and his core point about intellectuals using (completely paraphrasing from “Understanding Power“) “big words to explain concepts in confusing ways just to remain intellectuals,” maybe they’d be better equip to challenge more hierarchical structures in our quickly changing world.

This highly oxymoronic intellectual stratosphere should be reserved for Christopher Hitchens and the ilk.