From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don’t want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military…. Otherwise you are trying to freeze an [...]
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, security | Comments Off
From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
Here’s another contender from Julian Bleecker …
“Blogjects” – objects which emit data about their use.
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Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
Here we’ve got the canonical Tim O’Reilly definition of Web 2.0:
“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society | Comments Off
From Clay Shirky’s “Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software” (Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet: 5 November 2004):
This possibility of adding novel social components to old tools presents an enormous opportunity. To take the most famous example, the Slashdot moderation system puts the ability to rate comments into the hands of [...]
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, history | Comments Off
From Clay Shirky’s “Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software” (Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet: 5 November 2004):
Learning From Flame Wars
Mailing lists were the first widely available piece of social software. … Mailing lists were also the first widely analyzed virtual communities. …
Flame wars are not surprising; they are one of [...]
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, history | Comments Off
From Charles Arthur’s “What is the 1% rule?” (Guardian Unlimited: 20 July 2006):
It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.
It’s a meme that [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business | Comments Off
From Reuters’s “YouTube serves up 100 mln videos a day” (16 July 2006):
YouTube, the leader in Internet video search, said on Sunday viewers have are now watching more than 100 million videos per day on its site, marking the surge in demand for its “snack-sized” video fare.
Since springing from out of nowhere late last year, [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business | Comments Off
From Nate Mook’s “Cross-Site Scripting Worm Hits MySpace” (Beta News: 13 October 2005):
One clever MySpace user looking to expand his buddy list recently figured out how to force others to become his friend, and ended up creating the first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. In less than 24 hours, “Samy” had amassed over 1 million [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business, security | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “Hiring is Obsolete” (May 2005):
For example, the stated purpose of Powerpoint is to present ideas. Its real role is to overcome people’s fear of public speaking. It allows you to give an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it causes the audience to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Paul Graham’s “Hiring is Obsolete” (May 2005):
Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they don’t always realize at first that the door’s open? Often they have to be poked with a stick to get them out. Something similar happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in 1995, [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, history | Comments Off
From Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength Of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited” [Sociological Theory, Volume 1 (1983), 201-233.]:
The argument asserts that our acquaintances (weak ties) are less likely to be socially involved with one another than are our close friends (strong ties).Thus the set of people made up of any individual and his or her [...]
Posted on May 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society | Comments Off
From Clay Shirky’s “File-sharing Goes Social“:
The RIAA has taken us on a tour of networking strategies in the last few years, by constantly changing the environment file-sharing systems operate in. In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now. With the RIAA’s waves of legal [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From David P. Reed’s “That Sneaky Exponential - Beyond Metcalfe’s Law to the Power of Community Building“:
Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet, is known for pointing out that the total value of a communications network grows with the square of the number of devices or people it connects. This scaling law, along with Moore’s Law, [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Technology Review’s’ “Creepy Functions“:
Consider one example of function creep. The Electoral Commission of Uganda has retained Viisage Technology to implement a face recognition system capable of enrolling 10 million voters in 60 days. The goal is to reduce voter registration fraud. But Woodward notes that the system might also be put to work fingering [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Webster U: InfoSec Management, security | Comments Off
From Information Week’s’ “ Trojan Snags World Of Warcraft Passwords To Cash Out Accounts“:
A new password-stealing Trojan targeting players of the popular online game “World of Warcraft” hopes to make money off secondary sales of gamer goods, a security company warned Tuesday.
MicroWorld, an Indian-based anti-virus and security software maker with offices in the U.S., [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, security | Comments Off
From Ulises Ali Mejias’ “A del.icio.us study: Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community“:
A socio-technical system is conformed of hardware, software, physical surroundings, people, procedures, laws and regulations, and data and data structures.
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Posted on April 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society | Comments Off
From Ulises Ali Mejias’ “A del.icio.us study: Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community“:
This principle of distribution is at work in socio-technical systems that allow users to collaboratively organize a shared set of resources by assigning classifiers, or tags, to each item. The practice is coming to be [...]
Posted on April 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From James Grimmelmann’s “Life, Death, and Democracy Online“:
… The necessity of a ‘Quit’ option is obvious; no adventure game yet invented can force an unwilling player to continue playing. She can always give the game the three-finger salute, flip the power switch, or throw her computer in the junk heap. …
Banishment is the absolute worst [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Writing Ideas, politics | Comments Off
From Ron Dulin’s “A Tale in the Desert“:
A Tale in the Desert is set in ancient Egypt. Very ancient Egypt: The only society to be found is that which has been created by the existing players. Your mentor will show you how to gather materials and show you the basics of learning and construction. These [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, education | Comments Off
From Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society“:
After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Language & Literature, Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Writing Ideas | Comments Off
