October 2007

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Seven Years, and How Social Software eats everything

October 25, 2007 by Andrew | No comments

I can’t believe I’ve been “blogging” for over seven years. How the hell did that happen?

Actually, I think it was longer — if I remember correctly, my first blog was on some service whose name I simply cannot remember now, until I ran across Blogger in 2000. Then I switched to there, using their service to run a blog I hosted on server space my then-employer let me use for free, and even let me use their nameserver for my domain name … drewspace.com. That name is now gone to someone or something else. But I did manage to suck all the old archives into my web space here. Here’s the first posts I have a record of, from August 2000.

This boggling (bloggling?) stretch of time occurred to me once I saw Ross Mayfield’s recent post about how he’s been blogging for five years. Of course, he’s much more industrious than I, what with a company of his own and writing that’s a heck of a lot more focused and, well, valuable. But of course, social software has been his professional focus for quite a while, whereas for me it’s been more of a fitful obsession.

“Social software” is turning out to be the monster that ate everything. Which only makes sense. The Web is inherently social, and so are human beings. Anything that better enables the flow of natural social behaviors (rather than more artificial broadcast/consume behaviors) is going to grow like kudzu in Georgia.

Anybody thinking of social software as a special category of software design needs to wake up and smell the friends list. Everything from eBay to Plaxo is integrating social networking tools into their services, and Google is looking to connect them all together (or at least change the game so that all must comply or die of irrelevance).

Innovation: tinkering, failing & imagining

October 22, 2007 by Andrew | No comments

I like this column by Nicholas Taleb. I haven’t read his book (The Black Swan) but now I think I might.

I’m more and more convinced that this ineffable activity called “innovation” is merely the story we user after the fact, to help ourselves feel like we understand what happened to bring that innovation about. But, much like the faces we think we see in the chaos of clouds, these explanations are merely comfortable fictions that allow us to feel we’re in control of the outcome. When, in fact, success so often comes from trying and failing, even playing, until the law of averages and random inspiration collide to create something new. The trick is making sure the conditions are ideal for people to fail over and over, until imagination stumbles upon insight.

You Can’t Predict Who Will Change The World – Forbes.com

It is high time to recognize that we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. But we don’t know it. We truly live under the illusion of order, believing that planning and forecasting are possible. We are scared of the random, yet we live from its fruits. We are so scared of the random that we create disciplines that try to make sense of the past–but we ultimately fail to understand it, just as we fail to see the future. … We need more tinkering: uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering. We need to make our own luck. We can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie outside the path of our imagination.

He rails against the wrong-headed approach factory-style standardization for learning and doing. He doesn’t name them outright, but I suspect No Child Left Behind and Six Sigma are targets.

Caveat: the column does tend to oversimplify a few things, such as describing whole cultures as non-inventive instruction-following drones, but that may just be part of the polemic. There’s more good stuff than ill, though.

Poor old blog

October 18, 2007 by Andrew | No comments

I looked at my blog (this thing I’m writing in now) today and the thought that surfaced, unbidden, was “poor old blog.”

I felt bad because I haven’t been writing here like I used to, so sure I get the “poor” part — poor pitiful blog that isn’t getting my attention.

But where on earth did “old” come from? Besides the fact that “poor old whatever” is a common figure of speech, it felt a little shocking coming to the front of my brain while looking at a blog. I mean, I wouldn’t say “poor old iPhone” if I hadn’t picked one up for a week (and if I owned one to begin with).

I mean, blogs are still new, right?

But here he is (I’m convinced my blog is a “he” but I have no idea why, really). My blog, like all the other blogs, just taken for granted now. Blogs — part of the permanent landscape, like plastic grocery bags and 24 hour gas stations.

It was such a big deal just not long ago, but now here they are, blogs, sitting around watching other, younger, nimbler channels giddily running around their feet without a care in the world. The Twitters, Jaikus, Facebook apps. The Dopplrs, Flickrs and the rest.

It’s like somebody took a hammer to the idea of “blog” and it exploded, skittering into a million bits, like mercury.

So that’s what’s been up. I’ve been twittering, facebooking (yeah, it’s a verb, as far as I’m concerned), text-messaging… even the occasional “instant message” through the venerable old AIM or iChat, even though now that’s starting to feel as antiquated as a smoke signal or carrier pigeon.

If there was ever any chance of keeping focus long enough to write sound, thorough paragraphs, lately it’s been eviscerated to a barely throbbing stump.

I wonder if my poor old blog will rally? If it’ll show these whippersnappers it’s not done for yet? Like in the sports movies, you know, where the old batter who everybody thinks is all washed up slams another one over the bleachers?

I don’t know. All I know right now is, there’s my blog. With its complete sentences, its barely-touched comment threads. Its antiquated notion of being at a domain-named location. Its precious permalinks & dated archives, like it’s some kind of newspaper scholars will scan on microfiche in future generations.

Doesn’t it know that everything’s just a stream now? Everything’s a vapor trail?

Poor old blog.

Dibbell on the game-reality shift

October 15, 2007 by Andrew | Permalink

Julian Dibbell has a marvelous post about how game realities are symptoms — sort of concentrated, more-obvious outcroppings — of a general shift in economic and cultural reality itself. The game’s the thing …

Online Games, Virtual Economies … Distinction between Play and Production

And I’m arguing, finally, that that relationship is one of convergence; that in the strange new world of immateriality toward which the engines of production have long been driving us, we can now at last make out the contours of a more familiar realm of the insubstantial—the realm of games and make-believe. In short, I’m saying that Marx had it almost right: Solidity is not melting into air. Production is melting into play.