First official comment call-out!

Perhaps it's not too hard to tell, but I spend a fair bit of time reading The Economist online and commenting on their blogs. So I was pleasantly discovered to see one of my notes pulled out in a 'most interesting comments' post. It's not my most serious work but it's always nice to be acknowledged.

Their recent business article reports that Gen Y has a voracious appetite for positive reinforcment, and as much as I hate to prove them right, I seem to be doing just that.

Designing Social Web Apps

Every once in awhile Techrunch has (or rather links to) a really interesting piece that lifts them beyond the realm of Start-up Newsfeed & Commentator to Industry Analysis. This is one of those pieces.

Riches and Fame-ishness

I went to a mixer at Facebook a few weeks ago, (yes that Facebook). CEO Mark Zuckerberg was there in flip-flops and an Arm and Hammer t-shirt. It's funny how someone so close in age can be in such a different world.
I was so certain that he wouldn't be there I hadn't bothered to think of what I would say. I asked him a question about using Facebook as a platform for politics but I don't think he understood my full implications and I was too flustered to explain. In retrospect, I wish I had asked him one thing: How much has being rich and famous changed the way your friends treat you?

Names are just words, words, words

It's not an assumption I've really examined before, but why do we have names?

Names are just a string of characters that may or may not have a literal meaning in some language. Sure, names used to convey information such as personality attributes or occupation, but that time is long past. The only thing names seem to convey these days is a general indication of your ethnic heritage. Even their primary purpose as a unique identifier of a person is slowly losing effectiveness; I know of another person with my exact first and last name that lives within 100 miles of me, and both my names are uncommon to rare.

My primary conclusion is that we have names precisely because we cannot vocalize mental images of faces. However, computer networks are making it extraordinarily easy to broadcast images these days, and even live videos. Will this make our textual names less important?My guess is no. Rather, as the world reaches into 10s of billions of people, every opportunity to distinguish ourselves from eachother will be needed.

It seems certain that our individual identities, whether in a face or a name, will continue to shrink in importance next to abstract concepts and large organizations. Yet, it is through our relationships with other individuals that we build our identities and derive meaning.

The Aim of "Web 3.0" - Capturing Human Context

Given that the aim of the Internet is to deliver information, or perhaps to deliver it with more ease than other sources, I have been wondering how it might be improved.

My conclusion is that the biggest informational challenge is no longer "What is the answer to my question?" but "What question should I ask to find something useful in [a given area]?"

This meta-question is not provided by traditional informational services (encyclopedias, search engines, etc.) because it contains a value judgment; information sources have no business telling you what to pursue or be interested in.
Instead by this role is traditionally filled by friends, family, communities, research tanks and even business competitors. Most of these entities now have varying degrees of presence online and yet many of my informational searches are first prompted by things I hear directly from other people.
Mostly want what we want is trusted expertise: deep knowledge, created through experience and backed by reputation. After all, if you knew one or more such people for a given topic, would you ever bother with an Internet search? Of course not!

We don’t really want a network of web pages, we want a network of people that have made their information available on web pages.

(The publishing of knowledge is key here because is makes the system scalable in a way that 1 to 1 conversations are not.)
Now consider the main problems of finding experts on the Internet: you don’t know who they are, you don’t know how deep their expertise is and you don’t know if you can trust them.
Each step has a cost of time and further reduces your final pool of experts that you will listen to. Each step also takes more time than the last, perhaps exponentially more, unless that meta-information about the search is shared with you by others. Trust is the most costly hurdle of all.
These steps are also true for off-line searches as well. In Economics they are called transaction costs: expenditures (usually of time) that must be made before any trade can be conducted. Since each trade by definition makes both parties better off, enabling more is better for everyone. The Internet is celebrated for reducing transaction costs, but I think it has a ways to go yet.