Endless Knots

Egyptian revolution on Twitter

Thanks to Susan Scrupski:

Andre Pannison, a network scientist at the University of Turin, hauled out some network tools (and some clever thinking) to map one hour of Twitter activity at the time of Mubarak's resignation on Feb 11. It's worth reading Andre's post describing what he did. And it's really required viewing for those interested in how networks evolve. Such beautiful patterns emerge from the simple act of messaging.

 

 

And here are a few paragraphs of his explanation:

This is a preliminary result of the network of retweets with the hashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of the announcement of Mubarak’s resignation. If you retweeted someone, or has been retweeted, it is possible that your username is one of these tinny points (or maybe a bigger one?).

To collect the network data, I used the Gephi Graph Streaming plugin, connected it to a Python web server I made myself. This web server works like a bridge, it connects to the Twitter Streaming API using the statuses/filter service and converts the users and retweets to nodes and edges in a network format that can be read by the Gephi Graph Streaming plugin. Nodes are twitter users, and links appear between the nodes A and B when B retweeted a message of A containing the hashtag #jan25.

"PPPSSEOT(3)SIL: Please, please, please stop sending e-mails over three (3) sentences in length"

If it makes you laugh once (yes, lol), it's a pretty funny piece.

Twice, well, you're thanking Martin Marks, for "E-mail Auto-Response" in October 25, 2010, New Yorker. Some lols:

"Thank you for your e-mail, which, if it is under three (3) sentences long, I have read...

"If your e-mail has been cc’d to three (3) or more people, and includes complicated yet unresolved logistical information regarding the location, time, or general coördination of an upcoming social gathering involving five (5) or more people, then please wait until two (2) hours after the last respondent has answered and then please call the number provided at the bottom of the e-mail. (Be prepared to detail the conclusions reached by the e-mail chain.)...

"Should you receive a speedy one-to-two-word response, please do not read anything into it. More often than not, such a response doesn’t even correspond to the content of your e-mail..."

And my very favorite:

"In closing, I would like to say that the Internet has become a veritable buzzing, stinging hornet’s nest of pings and pongs and klings and klangs, so please do not e-mail, text-message, instant-message, direct-message, Facebook-message (if you’re still on MySpace or Friendster, that’s just plain creepy), Facebook-chat, iChat, tweet, retweet (don’t even mention Twitter mentions), StumbleUpon, LinkIn with, zoom into, Google Buzz, Plaxify, Jigsaw, Digg, Skype, Spoke, poke, flick, or tag me..."

Read more

Frankston's Imperative

Interesting view from Bob Frankston (whom, along with Dan Bricklin, we have to thank for spreadsheets) of the plumbing beneath/between all this crrrrazzzy online stuff. Bob was challenged to reduce his thinking "on infrastructure to four bullet points in five minutes." Excerpt from Frankston's Imperative:

In the 19th century people communicated by sending telegrams. The telegraph companies built their own infrastructures to support telegraph services. We built special infrastructures for telephones, television etc.

Today we use email, Twitter, Skype etc. We can represent all the content, voice, text or whatever as bits. Bits have no meaning in themselves – that comes from how people use them, not from the network. This means we can use a common infrastructure, a “Bit Commons”.

Yet we still use business models that date back to telegraphy. We have an expensive infrastructure designed to carry expensive messages yet all we are exchanging is bits. And we can’t even communicate unless we pay a provider a high price to do it for us.

We can look to our network of roads and sidewalks for a better model. With telegraphs and railroads you are charged for what you are saying or shipping. Roads don’t judge the content...

Internet stats, c. Sept 2009

The numbers always astonish me.

 

The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas

2010!

As promised, back after a digital break. Those used to seeing me affixed to a screen have been asking what it was like to go offline for nearly two weeks. Quite pleasant. I liked being free of the burden; of sitting without wonder as to whether I'd received a response -- or of fidgeting with guilt because I hadn't responded to a request. In the interest of honesty, that dreaded cloak, I did log on twice to deal with financial matters. I did answer my phone and respond to texts but missed a number because I didn't keep my phone by my side. And, since I apparently cannot live without some modicum of guilt, I fretted that I hadn't informed some people that I would be taking a break. But all of us survived. Try it sometime.

Stop(ped) the presses at 140 papers and counting

Ian Lamont, editor of The Standard, alerts us to this great/concerning/comprehensive "Best blog on the business of news(papers): Reflections of a Newsosaur. If you're not reading it, start now." I've done a few tear-stained posts here, including referencing Paper Cuts which the Newsosaur mentions as its blogger, Erica Smith, is keeping a map of where newspapers are disappearing. As per the title, 140 in 2009 gone, kaput.

For any of us who got our start getting high on newsprint and printers' ink (legal but so addictive that at 16 I preferred reporting from 3-11 at The Pottstown Mercury to going to the drive-in to meet boys), the transformation from packed newsroom and the ca-thunk of presses churning out papers to sitting alone and googling for sources--while charming in its own right and oh-so-efficient--is nevertheless unnerving and filled with loss.

The biggest byte yet

I thought what was interesting about Nick Bilton's NY Times story was its headline: "Part of the Daily American Diet, 34 Gigabytes of Data." OK, we're info hogs; we can quantify it; the number is soaring, etc. But talk about burying the lead: we now have a word for a VERY BIG NUMBER: a zettabyte, or, start counting now, and continue into infinity, a billion trillion. Sounds like something a three-year-old would say, no?

Collectively, American households consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information of all kinds in 2008, the researchers estimated.

A zettabyte is equal to one billion trillion bytes: a 1 with 21 zeros at the end. A single zettabyte is equivalent to 100 billion copies of all the books in the Library of Congress, or as the report says, seven layers of textbooks covering the continental United States and Alaska.

Internet history in a few short screens

Cameron Chapman has put together The History of the Internet in a Nutshell beginning with ARPANET in 1969. Worth the look when you have the urge to know how we got here. Lots of other tributaries have fed into the history, of course, like Doug Engelbart's contributions, and, no doubt, a zillion, I mean, a google others. One thing worth noting: if you look carefully at the first graphic (I enlarged it), you can see how many of the original machines on ARPANET were from Digital Equipment Corporation--PDP10s and PDP11s. Sad that the company who gave us this miracle couldn't survive the explosion of the web.

One other "tiny" nit: the 2008 presidential candidates' use of the web mentions Ron Paul and Hillary Clinton but alas omits one Barack Obama.

Nice work, Cameron.

If it's Friday, it must be Adobe Connect

All of a sudden, the webcams, used principally for family connections for years, are workhorses (so to speak). All of the meetings we've had with Cisco of late have taken place in Webex, culminating in the extravaganza last Tuesday that combined Telepresence, Webex, and Cisco IPTV.

Then on Friday, for another client who shall go nameless but whose name you know, another webcast, this time via Adobe Connect, topic = "Leading and Motivating Remote/Virtual Teams."

An increasingly familiar format: slides on the left of the screen, occupying about 50% of the layout, me in the upper right, then a pastiche of chat, presenter, and poll windows that popped up to survey the crowd, none of whom was co-located either.

The polls serve a useful purpose. For example, how many of you are multitasking, we asked? 100% responded 100%. (At least they were paying enough attention to respond, I quipped.) Feedback like this mid-presentation helps guide what to say next, much as it does in a face-to-face preso when you ask people to raise their hands.

At the same time, people were throwing questions into the chat box, a long list of which now await answering as there wasn't time to in the session to respond. Likewise, the questions help frame Part 2 of this webcast "series." Last week's event centered around the most scarce of current resources, real-time interactions; the next centers around over-time communication.

Which brings up this last point, which really belongs in yesterday's post: If people are spread all around the world and the time difference spans 15 hours, where is the meeting taking place and what time is it? Online and cybertime are the obvious retorts but think about it. If our communication travels via packets, all split up into tiny digital bits, where is "here," and if it's 6 AM for Amy, 9 AM for me, 2 PM for Jim, and 9 PM for Neil, what time is it "now?"

A little history on the Computer History Museum (and MassNet, RIP)

A comment today on another post by Harry Stevens prompts this post. Harry asks whether I've ever visited The Computer Museum in Boston and if so whether they would be interested in the donation of a server with his ground-breaking software, Participate, on it.

Long before most reading here were even thinking about email (or for that matter computers), Harry Stevens had developed Participate, computer conferencing software described below. Visionary and its basic design still underlies most really good discussion software.

Alas, The Computer Museum in Boston exists no more, having closed in 1996 (what does that say about our history), its collection now belonging to The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California (i.e. Silicon Valley), which opened in its current location in 2002. Watch what's coming there: next year they're opening an exhibit called "Computer History: The First 2000 Years." Bold. I also will refrain from commenting on the endless rivalry between Silicon Valley and Boston's MIT/Route 128 cultures, evidenced by the museum ending up in "their" vicinity rather than ours. Harrumph.

Why am I writing this post really? Because for a few years before and after 1995, a group of us, including Jeff Stamps and me, volunteered to create a new initiative here in Boston that would engender the kind of collaborative culture that, for all its cutthroat competitiveness has characterized Silicon Valley: "MassNet: Collaboration for the Commonwealth," which leaves but this small trace on an MIT server.

On a cold January day in 1995, MassNet brought together 250 representatives of each of the area's major sectors--from business, education, the denominations, foundations, healthcare, government...you name it, they were there. Among the event's sponsors was The Computer Museum, then housed next to Boston's incomparable Children's Museum right along Fort Point Channel, which provided the space for the event. (John Marchiony was then executive director of the museum--forever thanks, John).

When not talking about collaboration and how to forge strong links across the notoriously non-collaborative sectors in the area, participants wandered around looking at the first 1000 years of computer history. It was a beautiful space to hold this event and the cast of presenters and participants was stellar.

Among those who spoke: Congressman Ed Markey, an early visionary about telecommunications, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Harvard Business School prof and author who has written often about collaboration, Peter Drucker, yes, *the* Peter Drucker, who participated via videoconference from his home in Southern California, Drucker's grandson, Nova Spivack, late of Twine, Harry Saal, then CEO of Smart Valley, an initiative in Silicon Valley to wire the area (the digital divide was then the major topic among computer aficiandoes), Charlotte Kahn, who leads the Boston Indicators Project at the The Boston Foundation (and was my high school classmate), and others, including, need I say, moi. David Straus, founder of Interaction Associates, led the band of facilitators who conducted the breakout groups.

I could go on with all who participated and how ambitious our agenda was. Like so many great ideas, MassNet ran its course then died, having left a lot of people educated about the value of collaboration.

One last bit of personal history: Jeff's and my book, The Age of the Network, had its launch that night, also at The Computer Museum, where our publisher, Darryl Landvater of Oliver Wight, and our editor, Jim Childs, now publisher at Time Inc., hosted a book party

So, thanks, Harry, for giving me the opening to write about MassNet and...try The Computer History Museum. If they're not interested in a server loaded with Participate, they should be.