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meshforum

Broadband Mechanics

 Marc Senasac of Broadband Mechanics – user generated content using open standards as much as possible.

Examples – Structured Blogging, Our Media (as part of the Internet Archive).

People Aggregator project – different ways to connect to each other – groups, individuals and heirarchy rules – based on standards and open source. Will include structured blogging, multi-level access controls to your stuff and your media.

Free download for non profit and student, one time fee for commercial use, and also as a hosted service. Free for hosted of 128 member network, some fee will apply above that.

 

 

 

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meshforum

Aaron Burcell, Podshow

Podshow, 18 months of growth, top 100 indie content creators, partnerships with Sirius and iTunes.

Audience creates or co-creates the content

movement will be driven not by tech but by consumer demand. The nature of the content people consume will change dramatically.

In Q4 2005 – hit shows had 500k per month, now they have 1.5 MM downloads per month.

Podsafe Music Network – artists allow podcasters to play tunes, consumers buy them in pure mp3 format.

Advertising 2.0 – Hasbro and Earthlink – allow audience to create the ad content

Talks a little about working transparently– the managment states their plans publicly.

Podsafe music network – artists allow listeners to listen, and podcasts to play with proper attribution.

Categories
meshforum

Large scale social networks panel

Anil Dash:

when typepad started most people had ratio of blog to readers – 40:1 now it is closer to 1000:1 at Typepad.

LiveJournal – huge community – primarily or 2/3rd woman 18–24, very geographically and technologically disparate. Communities like this allow interest groups (That guy who loves cars can talk to car lovers) without boring people. Live Journal ratio of writer to reader is about 1:8 – much smaller ratio.

Almost no one on Live joural has more than 150 connections in an organic fashion.

Many people check their live journal “Friends” page many times a day– to see how friends are doing, what they’re writing about, if people left them comments, ect.

I realize I’m more interested in listening to Anil than taking notes now.

 Christopher Allen: Life with Alacrity

The Dunbar number – here’s Chris’ blog about this. Smaller the neo cortex in a primate, the smaller the groups people collect in.

People can handle about 147 to 150 people in a group on a regular basis. -this tends to apply to nomadic tribes, sustinance villages, terror organizations, ancient armies (Roman Centurion – 100 soldiers).

To maintain a group of this side, you need to spend 40% of time social grooming – glancing, listening, talking, responding. If you don’t do this with a group, you can’t maintain the connections.

Groups don’t scale – what are the limits to group size in modern culture – based on Christopher’s research –

from Online games – ultima online – guild numbers – most guilds are 37–85 in size, 61 is the major high point in a histogram. World of Warcraft – Xerox Parc – 250k users, all data for month – how did groups interact – Subgraphs – max is 6 for a particular guild – for all guilds – it is more difficult to get people together after around 77, and very large groups it is very difficult to maintain cohesion. Easy to form group of 10, but it gets harder after that.

Groups that behave in particular way – between 5 and 11 (7 is the peak) and another one at between 50–70, but around 12–15 there is a problem with 12–15 – the ‘judas number’ small group dynamics don’t work and large don’t work – it is a dangerous time in a group.

Too small– insufficient critical mass, unable to sustain conversations, group think or echo chamber, feels like you’re alone.

Too Many People –

Too noisy, not enough signal, lack of trust or unequal trust, clicques and bad gossip,  inappropriate politics

Other social contract failures – flames, trolls, tragedy of the commons

 As software gets to understand this number – they’ll be able to design for it. One example: YackPack – BJ Fogg – software for intimate social networks.

Electric Sheep:
A cyborg mind – 30k computers, plus people and a genetic algorythm. Runs on evolution and mathematics.

It would have taken 100 years to create this video using single computer, but with collective power, you can get it in a few months by itself.

It is a distributed screensaver using same architecture as SETI at Home. This project doubles every 9 months. The animations are each called sheep – each has 250 floating points as its’ “genetic code” – they reproduce with other animations and there is family resemblence. If people like what they see they vote (up arrow key)– the animations that recieve the most votes “live” longest and reproduce.

In 2003 people created editors,and people could manipulate and see their creations, and this introduced an element of “intelligent design”  – people upload what they like and if others vote for them, they live.

Half audience votes for humans vs half for the genetic algorythm.

There is also mutation and crossover.

To deliver all sheep to all users – 20Terrabytes/day would be needed  – so they need to build in bit torrent in some way.

The main network is the lineage of each sheep – there are hundreds of thousands of them.

He did go from a linear model to logrythmic model for voting -because reproduction was following a power law – so he changed it to log, and that works better.

Each video gets rendered to 1000 clips, each clip is related to 5 others, so you get almost seemless transitions between the clips – true nonlinear video.

 

Categories
howardgr

I’m the top article on Optimze Magazine today!

Fun to be the top article (Link to the front page). Check the direct link to the article here.

Categories
meshforum

MeshForum in SF 5/7

I’m at Meshforum. Blogging less than I wanted to, because I was setting up the wireless LAN and the sound recordings for Shannon.

Shel Israel and Robert Scoble of Naked Conversations are on stage right now. My notes are notes for self – you may or may not get value from them…

 

Shel and Scoble

 

 

Word of Mouth – used to not be able to listen in and respond – now we can – technorati and other tools lets us monitor conversations.

 

Startup getting instant global feedback –

Shel mentioned example of VYEW.com – someone blogged about it, they got the feedback, then added features, added a blog and started conversation with users – they’ve posted 14 entries since they started their blog.

 

There are more passworded blogs than public blogs – according to Mena Trott from 6 Apart.

Shel: Emergence of Personal Brand – Scoble is 7 levels down from the CEO but is among the most well known people at Microsoft.

Scoble – He’s getting a lot of different views of corporate culture – some companies allow communication, some can’t talk without getting PR approval – but people are interested in hearing about real things in companies.

Shel – test the membranes of the corporate culture, but don’t do anything stupid. Don’t do things to get fired – digital last forever.

Scoble – If you’re going to do things that don’t agree with corporate culture, or take on boss or management – you have to know you’re taking a risk and know that you’re taking on a culture. Go in with eyes open and also have a reason to do this. 

SHel – don’t just jump in, you have to poke toe, go to ankle

Scoble – there is not a ‘line in the sand’ – there is a membrane – you have to know how to strech the line – without popping the membrane.

Scoble – blog comments – livingroom rule – if you wouldn’t say it to me in my living room, I’ll delete it from my comments.

Shel – when people make insulting comments go past the ‘you’re an idiot’ part and think about what the point is.