digitaldust

If you do things right people wont be sure you’ve done anything at all.

Was Kool. Though at times they looked more like 4 middle aged German business men at a conference than boom boom tchak geeks.

More pictures…

Another go at scaring christian aid workers for REDR. I got some pictures of the fire college at Moreton-in-Marsh, a place that is spookily similar to the Zone in Stalker.

Note the presence of the Lolaville brigade of the JPFOR regular army attempting to be poorly paid west african soldiers.

The bodgemeister himself just came back from Molvania and recommended this little guidebook as being the best.

I just did a quick search and found the IMDB entry for the Golden Compass, due out according to them in 2005.

The screenplay is being written by Tom Stoppard who wrote the screenplays for Brazil, Empire of the Sun, Shakespeare in Love, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and more. So hopefully it will stay true to the books.

Also some good crib notes on yahoo

I’ve just been musing over the idea of social capital again, a long journey starting with some talk today about messagesboards being old skool and all the YASNs being the nu thang.

Anyway, was just thinking about the fact that social capital is just what it says on the tin; Capital. In fact the term was coined by sociologists looking for a term to show the value of personal relationships. Hence social capital. Makes sense really.

As anyone knows in a free market capital begets capital. Even just having it in the bank gets you more. Social capital the same. If you have a lot of it, ie lots of friends then you get more easily. If you want to make your social capital work for you and collect friends then you can too. If you take a look at technorati the people at the top of the linked in stakes keep getting more without even working at it. And it would be an interesting study to see how people’s linkages grow on friendster, et al; see if the well connected keep getting better. Which I would expect to see, in line with Barabasi and all those other network researchers have proven. And the distribution of those links or friendships or that total social capital would be a power curve. An uneven distribution of wealth, just like in the real world with real money. There’s an awfully long tail, and most people are in that tail. But then life is tough aint it…?

Anyway here’s my pitch…

Where the BBC should be taking communities. Maybe we can make a real difference in the world around us. Can we provide a place for those who live in the tail of the curve? There are an awfully large number of lonely and sad people out there who are having a hard time working up their social capital and can we help them?

We have in our power the ability to hack around with the social space and provide an environment where it is less risky to gamble your social capital, easier to build up a social network, make some friends and engage with those around you.

We aren’t ever going to beat the power law distribution, but we can make the curve fatter. Effectively play with the social coefficient that powers the power law. Reduce it so that everyone gets a fairer deal, maybe not quite a fair and even deal but we can do our best.

This is no easy thing, and I’m not saying that there is a purely technological solution. It’s going to require a certain type of person in the beeb to do this, a type of person we don’t have many of. It’s also going to require some technology to support it, but I want to make sure that that doesn’t overshadow the people aspect.

A little a-life style game that I found after looking for Dave McKean stuff. Colony, who made it seem to be his agents or somefing.

That well worn number doing the blogosphere rounds from the Pew Internet & American Life Project makes more interesting reading when spit into the different types of content created.

Some 44% of the nation’s adult Internet users (those 18 and over) have done at least one of the following:

21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.
17% have posted written material on Web sites.
13% maintain their own Web sites.
10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.
8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses.
7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups.
7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.
6% have posted artwork on Web sites.
5% have contributed audio files to Web sites.
4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families.
3% have contributed video files to Web sites.
2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs

More people run webcams than post to blogs.

And if you read the small print there is a margin of error of +-3%. So in fact it could be that no one is blogging at all.

Well, I may be being too harsh in the title, but Reed’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law are both slightly wrong. They both treat the subject at hand, Social Systems too simplistically.

One of the phenomena of social systems is that they undergo connection reduction when they reach a certain size. Luhmann identifies two levels of scale in social systems. Simple systems where every actor in that network is connected to ever other (a simple network graph, which does match Reed’s Law). But when they reach a certain size they have to become complex networks; the linkages are not evenly distributed and not every actor is linked to every other. This in my opinion happens when a social group gets above about 150 in the real world (maybe a few more when computer supported). This is your tribe, or wider circle of friends. Beyond this point clustering happens. So in a network of up to 150 then Reed’s law applies, beyond that it is 2^N less some level of conection simplification.

There needs to be some kind of expected value or statistically reduced value of the links that could possibly be made above a certain level. Social systems do not split evenly down the middle when they reacha certain size, they end up as a complex but not fully linked system.

Even Metcalfe’s law seems to me to be mistaken. The network of communication is only as valuable as the number of people you want to talk to. So althought the global communication network is constantly adding people in developing countries the value to the network to me isn’t increasing. If the people I want to talk to are hooked up, and all the people I could ever really want to talk to are hooked up then the value to me is fixed. I think that Metcalfe’s law is stuck in first order cybernetics. The value of the system needs to be worked out in a slightly different way, and taking into account the observer; the person making the value judgements.

Just got Luhmann’s seminal text on socio-cybernetics and haev started reading it. Very tough going. I’ve laboured through the forewords. In one he even goes so far as to say it’s hard going in German and even harder in the translated english. I think I will make notes and publish them. I might resurect my other blog to do this properly.