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Thursday, March 22, 2007
Much now do we all know 
Don't be mysterious
| | Mark Pilgrim: There are two basic visions of the future of the web, and one of them is wrong. I¹m going to work on the right one for a while. At Google. Starting today. |
Blasering trails
| | In the age of Big Media, It was the only thing we could count, but those times are months behind us. In social networks, everyone is a potential participant, but if your 10,000 readers leave 100 comments but don¹t take your ideas and run with them, so what? Leaving a comment is a lot like leaving, because Embrace is not the same as Extend. |
| | A network's value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe) (but) Network nodes are significant only when they¹re verbose. |
| | If your network has mechanisms for encouraging outreach and constant chatter among nodes, it will grow. News and juicy tidbits flow down the nervous system and questions and energy flow back. That sound you hear is the twittering of the network's nervous system. Every political campaign is learning the same lesson in this transformative election cycle: The movement's not about the candidate, but about the conversation. or, |
| | It¹s not about the Twit, it's about the Twitter |
| | Only interactions count, and the richest count most |
| | ...to We The People out here, the arcane and convoluted ramblings of the pundits fall on deaf ears. What we care about is learning something we don't know from someone a little closer to the action, and pushing our unique point of view back in toward the center of the movement. |
| | So let¹s put that silly Power Law to rest at last: it's a monument to outmoded metrics. The People Law is the one we¹ve been conforming to all our lives: Where there¹s folk, there¹s fire. |
| | What¹s more, networked markets get smart fast. Metcalfe¹s Law*, a famous axiom of the computer industry, states that the value of a network increases as the square of the number of users connected to it — connections multiply value exponentially. This is also true for conversations on networked markets. In fact, as the network gets larger it also gets smarter. The Cluetrain Corollary: the level of knowledge on a network increases as the square of the number of users times the volume of conversation. So, in market conversations, it is far easier to learn the truth about the products being pumped, about the promises being made, and about the people making those promises. Networked markets are not only smart markets, but they¹re also equipped to get much smarter, much faster, than business-as-usual. |
| | — in large measure because business-as-usual is still looking at customers as an "audience" and measuring power in terms of consumption alone. That might be good for TV shows, but not for ideas that change the world. |
Identity sprouts in Brussels
| | There are conferences, and there are things like conferences, except you go there to get stuff done — to move a whole topic forward in tectonic ways. The best of these have been unconference workshops such as the BloggerCons and the Internet Identity Workshops. |
| | In every case I've been amazed and gratified at how much whole fields move forward at these things. |
| | In the case of the IIWs (Internet Identity Workshops), the progress has verged on the miraculous. Lions not only lay down with lambs, but all species of partipants get down to work toward the common and converging goal of equipping individuals with the means to control their own digital identities — and to put identity tech to fresh and practical uses. |
| | I'm especially excited about the Brussels workshop, because it will provide European participants in the Identity Gang and its members' many projects with a venue for getting together and moving both their projects and user-centric identity forward. |
| | I'll be there. Hope to see you there too. |
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