BookBlog

Thomas Vander Wal - Tell me something I don't already know

Thomas Vander Wal wrote as a comment to How Buildings Learn, for social software

This idea of ease of finding people to talk to around popular books, but difficulty finding more niche books is something the dating tag site Consumating.com called quirkiness. Ben Brown explained they had a measure for quirkiness that surfaced quirky connections between people. It was just above outliers to a few 10s higher. With 300k people in Consumating the quirkiness factor ran from 7 to about 40.

Quirkiness was people who had relatively rare tags in common. This rare commonality was something that was really difficult to find in the wild. This is one of the benefits of using digital means to connect people. Consumating found the relationships that were lasting quite often were grounded in this quirkiness. This came up on a panel I was on w/ Ben Brown, which was moderated by Heath Row who met his wife on Consumating as they were both Manhattanites who were tagged "mountain climbers", hence quirky.

This is the drawback of popularity-based recommendation systems. Sometimes they tell us things that are new and hot that we haven't seen already. But often they tell us things we already knew. If you liked Harry Potter Book 5, you might like Book 6. Statistical improbability, social filters, and the combination of the two can lead to more interesting results than popularity alone.

Comments on this blog are broken, and will stay broken til I upgrade to the next version of MT or to WordPress.

Social media hasn't crossed the chasm in California politics

I had a fascinating conversation at EqualityCamp about the status of social media in California politics. Apparently, despite the dramatic upset success of the McNerney campaign, fed by "netroots" small donor fundraising and upstart blog-driven citizen journalism, oppo research and organizing, the political mainstream in California is still fixated on mass media politics. Big-block fundraising is used to fund mass media advertising campaigns with highly controlled messaging created by campaign consultants based on focus group research.

The collossal failure of this model in the NoOn8 has driven those of us who live in a social media, grassroots world absolutely bonkers. But apparently, even the dramatic Obama victory fueled by small-donor fundraising and grass roots, neighbor to neighbor organizing, hasn't done much to change how the California political class thinks about campaigns.

The state of affairs smells like a classic early market, which in Geoff Moore's classic taxonomy, hasn't yet "crossed the chasm". There are classic barriers, and some classic tactics for overcoming the barriers.

Barrier: There is a well established process for funding and running campaigns.
Opportunity: Identify a niche where social media tactics provide an advantage. Marriage equality is clearly in this category, since personal outreach is the best known way to change hearts and minds on the topic. There are likely other niches where a social media strategy can gain a foothold and win success.

Barrier: Costly tools and data
Opportunity: Blogging and social networking is very low cost. But until now, the data and tools needed to facilitate neighbor to neighbor get out the vote has been very expensive and inaccessible. Innovative business models with California Voter Connect could conceivably make voter data more accessible to the niche markets that would take the risks to innovate with social media grass roots strategies.

Barrier: Mainstream folk lack role models.
Opportunity: Politicians seeking to run for office look to their peers for models of successful campaigns. There are politicians who are "early adopters" of social media, who can integrate social media into their campaigns. Then those politicians can influence others personally, and their examples can be used as case studies.

Barrier: Mainstream politicians lack a mental model of social media campaigns.
Opportunity: Over the last few years, the business and nonprofit worlds have started to evolve a rich set of useful practices for the use of social media. Analyst houses like Forrester Research and independents like Tara Hunt and Beth Kanter have built consulting practices and spread knowledge. There's a related opportunity to spread knowledge with writing and conferences The best time to build an reputation as an expert in an early market is before the space is crowded, when the topic is still unfamiliar to many people.

When a market is "in the chasm", it can feel rather grim for the early adopters looking up at the high walls. But early markets are times of amazing potential. There is a wide range of tactics, and the universe provides a variety of opportunities to take one or more of the early market plays and take innovation mainstream.

Blog aggregation state of the art

I've been wanting to recreate the Austin Bloggers magic, and just found a tool to do it.

Back in the day, I was part of an Austin Bloggers group that set up the Austin Bloggers blog aggregator. The site is still going strong is a fun way to check in on Austin-related people and things. The cool thing about the site is that it aggregates only blog posts that people make about Austin. Your blog can be about a variety of topics, but only the posts about Austin will be aggregated. Blogs need to register to be automatically posted. Otherwise, posts are moderated. Registration and moderation is needed to prevent spam.

I really love this model. It pulls together an interesting site, out of the independent actions of decentralized bloggers. By linking to each of the bloggers, it gives credit and traffic to the individual blog. By aggregating posts in a category, it pulls together a coherent site, without forcing the participants to change their writing, and requires minimal editorial effort.

For various reasons, we built the site using TrackBack to aggregate the posts. Lead developer is Chip Rosenthal. The tool is open source, but wasn't really packaged to make it easier to use for other purposes. And if the site was put together today, RSS would be a reasonable choice.

Easy Automated Aggregation

I've been looking for tools that do similar aggregation, in a packaged and reusable way, since then. I've recently found it. FeedWordPress is a WordPress plugin that aggregates posts from multiple sites via RSS. It can be set up to pull posts by category/tag, and to link to the authors' blogs. It's easy to install and works as described. The bit that is missing is a tool for bloggers to register themselves. Currently, the editor needs to add the urls of the blogs manually.

Calendar Aggregation

Calendar aggregation is a piece of the puzzle that isn't quite there yet. It would be really cool to be able to aggregate calendar events from decentralized sites. Calendar aggregation today appears to be where blog aggregation was in 2003. Calagator is an open source ruby-based project. developed by and for the tech community in Portland to create a master calendar of tech events. To share an event stream, participants add a url that contains data in any of several popular formats: iCalendar, hCalendar, Upcoming, and MeetUp. The tool with then import new events as they are posted.

Like AustinBloggers, this tool is first being developed for a specific community, for a specific purpose. If the developers wanted, they could make a more re-usable tool. Or, the idea and the code are available for extension.

Why not FriendFeed

I love Friendfeed. Friendfeed is a wonderful tool for building a crowdsourced link blog, with links, posts, tweets, photos, and more. Items are posted to Friendfeed by participants. If nobody posts a link, it doesn't get aggregated. There a way to filter by topic. And fundamentally, Friendfeed is Friendfeed. You can set up a FriendFeed room about a topic, but you can't turn that into a destination site with a url and identity of its own.

Aggregation and community

In a world with decentralized organization and creativity, aggregation can be a powerful tool for building useful resources from decentralized contributions. I can see uses in political / civic organizing, local journalism, creative communities and more. With the WordPress plugin, an aggregator site is now a simple install.

How Buildings Learn, for social software

LibraryThing, a site for booklovers who catalog and review the books on their bookshelves is the opposite of those FaceBook junkfood applications designed to get you to use them once or twice, annoy all your friends, and move onto the next big thing. LibraryThing is deep. The social features of LibraryThing aren't about popularity and making lots of friends, but the opposite -- they are designed to help people find a few "like minds" with the same obscure shared interests. From the LibraryThing blog: the fun of LibraryThing isn't just in the widely held books, it's in those that are shared by only 10 or 20 other members. It's easy to find someone who has read The Hobbit. Finding someone to discuss your more obscure books isn't quite so simple.

Recently I listened to Jon Udell's interview of Tim Spalding, founder and programmer at LibraryThing. Spalding designs LibraryThing for engagement and depth. It's best customers are booklovers who put in the time, not only to catalog, rate and review, but to disambiguate titles, variants, translation, and authors helping to build a coherent database out of a gnarly ontological problem, and making the tool more useful for all.

In the interview, Spalding has an interesting insight about why Amazon's customers don't tag. When you're browsing Amazon, your goal is to find books to buy, and to leave. You don't have an incentive to stick around, to make the site better for yourself and others. LibraryThing is for connoissieurs, not shoppers. LibraryThing's customers appreciate their collective bookshelp and want to keep organizing it and making it better.

Spalding approaches LibraryThing as a tinkerer, experimenting, remodeling and building wings and extensions. His recommendation tools are works in progress. He's been gradually adding social features: groups, discussions, recommendations of others with similar tastes. It's not a site designed to get big and get bought. It's designed to continually add engagement for members.

Several takeaways from the interview about the design of social software
* Social Software doesn't get "finished". It's more like a building, in Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn. Brand writes about how buildings are continually adapted, remodeled and refitted over time for new uses as its occupants' needs change.
* Social software rewards depth over time. The joy of Facebook, Friendfeed, and Twitter is about letting people know what their friends are doing moment by moment. LibraryThing enables you to make a friend because you have the same 15-year old book (tip: you can run LibraryThing through FriendFeed to get the immediacy, too)
* Social software rewards deep engagement. The reason to add features isn't because there's a checklist, it's because people can continue to do more valuable and enjoyable things in the environment over time

Your Inner Fish

The evolutionary history of animal development is producing some thrilling science these days. Like Endless Forms Most Beautiful, by Sean Carroll, Your Inner Fish is written for a general audience by one of the pioneering scientists in the field.

Neil Shubin is a paleontologist and developmental biologist whose team discovered Tiktaalik, a Devonian fish that is evolving toward tetrapod. The stage of tetrapod evolution is intriguing on its own -- the creature jointed fins with ends that bend and splay, and a neck, allowing it to do "pushups" in shallow water to catch prey or watch for predators.

Carroll has more in-depth information than Shubin about the core of evo devo, the evolution of the developmental program that builds creatures with bodies. Where Shubin's book shines is exploring the deep evolutionary history of different parts of the body, such as teeth, eyes, ears, and the head. The developmental program for teeth, out of the interaction between layers of skin in the embryo, also generates hair, feathers, and breasts. The bones, cartilage, and nerves in the human jaw, ears, and throat, expanded from tissues that served as gills in fish; the straightforward nerve routes in fish became convoluted in mammals now that the location of the tissues has been rearranged.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book covered the evolution of the building materials of bodies: collagen, cartilage, bone, intercellular communication. One fascinating hypothesis in this section is that one of the key bodybuilding materials, collagen, requires a lot of oxygen to produce. Therefore, a key factor in the explosion of animals with bodies in the Cambrian era was a rapid rise in the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.

To follow up on this idea, I'm now reading Oxygen, the Molecule that Made the World.

Evolution, meta-evolution, and persuasion

In general, I strongly prefer reading about the science of evolution, rather than arguments defending evolution against its detractors. The beautiful, rich stories of the evolution of life, supported by interlocking evidence in fossils, rocks, and dna are more interesting than the meta-argument. I don't run into too many creationists in my usual social circles.

Every once in a while, I bump into some creationism. During the long wait for a car repair the other day, I was reading the fascinating story of Oxygen, in which the rocks, air and climate of the earth have been intertwingled with the evolution of life. On the drive back, flipping the tuner in search of a news station I stumbled upon a "creation science" radio show.

The theory of the creationists on the show depended on an assumption of rapidly varying rates of radioactive decay. They couldn't explain why decay rates would fluctuate, except that God is all-wise and all-powerful. Moreover, they explained, all of the rock layers on earth, which conventional science attributes to billions of years of geologic story, were actually caused by intense volcanic activity and sedimentary deposition during the Flood 5000 years ago. How did Noah survive on the ark, with all the earth's volcanic and sedimentary rock erupting and flowing around him? Miracles, of course. God is all-powerful.

Science is somewhat harder but much more interesting when you can't use miracles to patch up the gaps in your logic.

This does raise interesting questions about information and persuasion. Americans' beliefs tend to divert from orthodox religion when their personal experience diverges from religious teaching. A majority of young people support gay rights, and in general, people are more likely to support gay rights when they know family members, friends or colleagues who are gay. Their emotional experience overrides religious arguments.

Similarly, according to a a new Pew study, a (narrow) majority of American Christians believe that non-Christian religions can also lead to salvation. When people encounter good people with varying religious beliefs, they conclude that it isn't plausible that only fellow Christians will go to heaven.

Americans come to support gay right and religious pluralism, based on their personal life experiences. So what of evolution? A person isn't going to meet an australopithecus on the way to the store, or have a feathered dinosaur as a pet. The beautiful and compelling ideas of evolutionary development depend on basic understanding of genetics and developmentary biology. The case for evolution is made of fact and reason, not personal everyday experience.

There is a disturbing sub-plot running between the lines in Oxygen. Much of the innovative geology and paleontology was done in pre-WWII Germany. Science, of course, came to a halt, when society was taken over by a political movement with demented beliefs. What sort of society can educate its citizens so that a majority supports science?

Food culture: The Story of Sushi, United States of Arugula

Trevor Corson, the author of The Story of Sushi, is a sushi concierge. For an undisclosed fee, he will impart the secrets of sushi to a private party or corporate group.

Corson knows and loves sushi, and loves to teach about it and that shapes his book. Casual sushi fans will learn surprising facts: sushi evolved from a dish of preserved, fermented fish. The "traditional sushi bar" arise from the post-WWII reconstruction period, when the American occupiers banned outdoor stands as a health hazard. The little cultural habits of American sushi eating aren't authentic. Japanese eaters of sushi don't mix wasabi and soy sauce; they dip the fish side of the sushi; and they use fingers not chopsticks. Readers will learn about the biology of fish and fermentation, subtle techniques of shaping rice and slicing fish.

With a cultural historian's eye toward the evolution of sushi, and an educated palate, Corson is cheerful about many adaptations of sushi in American culture: the field is more open to newcomers, including women and people of various ethnicities. California rolls and western-style sushi bars have become popular in Japan. His dislikes - sweet, fried adaptations of sushi - are esthetic but not purist. He is sympathetic to working class people who see sushi as a source of jobs, celebrities drawn to fashionable tasty food; learned and creative scholars and artisans. He's an esthete but not a snob.

David Kamp, the author of The United States of Arugula, enjoys food. He's a second generation upper middle class foodie, the child of parents who went through phases of Julia Child, Moosewood, and "do everything the New York Times weekend section tells you to do." Most of all, he loves chronicling the mores and foibles of upper middle class trendsetters. The United States of Arugula is at least as much about the rise of food publicity and celebrity as it is about food.

The book chronicles the rise of promoters of American food culture, from the francophile tastesetters Child, Beard and Claiborne, to California's post-hippie promoters of fresh local food at Chez Panisse and Niman Ranch, to the celebrity chefs of the day before yesterday, with shows on the food channel and franchise extensions in Vegas.

Readers will learn the origins of numerous food trends that have flitted into fashion; baby lettuces, pizza with artichoke hearts, sundried tomatoes and balsamic vinegar. An underlying theme of the book is food as fashion; an individual or group discovers or invents a style; popularizes it, and creates a career. Another theme is foodiehood as social climbing. The aspiring upper middle class uses culture as a badge of membership in the club, and chases the latest trends in cooking and restaurants to compete for social status.

Kamp has some self-awareness about food-snobbery -- he's a co-author of The Food Snob's Dictionary. But it's self-awareness of the Saul Steinberg New Yorker Map - poking fun of one's own parochialism while celebrating it.

Readers will learn about the love affairs of Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower, the drug and alcohol habits of various food celebrities. Kamp feels the need to take sides in various internecine feuds. For example, he quotes numerous rivals and detractors of Alice Waters, pioneer of the goat cheese/walnut/baby greens California local style. Over the years, she has struck some ex-friends, ex-lovers, and ex-acquaintances as smug, bossy, promiscuous, politically naive, and not a very good cook. The takedowns of Waters strike this reader as a "foodie" variant on "punching up" - drawing attention to oneself by criticizing someone who is popular in order to get attention. Waters didn't have to be perfect to be a pioneer. Though she may be temperamentally unsuited to win the political battle for a sustainable food system, she has been a founding visionary, and that counts.

I enjoyed the book. It was fun to read about the origins of trends that played as the food version of life's soundtrack. But it made me squirm a little. While I was reading the book there was butternut squash evangelized by a Full Belly Farm stall staff person waiting on my countertop. I craved raisins to go with it, inspired by childhood tzimmes. In the supermarket bulk bins, next to the golden raisins were tasty-looking sour cherries. I bought them instead. I mixed the squash with chopped walnuts and sour cherries. Yum, and wow. Farmers Market butternut squash bears no resemblance to the bland supermarket product. The sweet squash, tart cherries, and savory walnuts were a simple and inspired combination.

You see, I am also a bastard cultural stepchild of Alice Waters. At social events in the Bay Area, one of the perennial topics of conversation is local food. As someone who came up from middle class cookery in which canned mushroom soup was a major food group, I've looked to magazines and cookbooks and blogs for entree into broader worlds of tasty and sophisticated food. The pleasure and guilty self-recognition reminded me of the promo blurb on the 80's classic "Preppy Handbook" -- "look, Muffy, a book about us!"

The King of California

Who are the agribusiness giants with a lock on so much of California's water? The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of A Secret American Empire is a history of the vast cotton empire in the dry bed of what used to be a large inland lake in the California central valley. The founders of the empire, Horatio Alger adventurers from Georgia, bought up land, had four rivers dammed, dried up the lake and used the water for irrigation.

The Georgia farm emperors brought elements of plantation culture with them; poor white, Mexican, and black laborers had rough lives, with the most opportunity available for whites, some opportunity for Mexican immigrants, and the least opportunity for black laborers, although racist violence and sharecropping oppression wasn't as vicious as the south. There were attempts to organize, and grueling strikes; in the end unions lost their foothold.

The cotton empire was able to lock in its own water supply from the rivers that used to feed the lake, so they weren't involved in the great state and federal water projects that send Sierra water south. They did participate in the strange alliance between Northern environmentalists and central valley agriculture to defeat the peripheral canal in the early 80s; the greens thought the proposal didn't protect the environment enough, and the farmers thought that it might protect the environment too much. The cotton giants also played a role in the endless legal battles to work around the 160 acre limit for federally funded irrigation projects, a rule which was only obeyed in creative workarounds and exceptions. The book has interesting, behind-the-scenes glimpses of the seduction of politicians to support the exemptions.

The book touches on the environmental degradation caused by industrial agriculture; the destruction of the native habitat, of course; the poisoning of water, fish, birds from toxic buildup in the water; the poisoning of workers from pesticides, and the hostility of the farmers to the scientists attempting to measure the impact of the poisons.

The authors are former LA Times journalists, and it shows in the style. The story is built, piece by piece, from interviews with the secretive main character, family members, executives, retired laborers, washington lobbyists, and from records of legislative sausage-making and legal battles. The strength of the style is journalistic narrative drama and attention to detail, in stories about family feuds, boardroom battles, and immigrant sagas; and a fine eye for tragedies that passed un-noticed in the wider world; the babies who died of hunger in strikes, a 16-year old black farm worker without a license who died when the truck he was driving overturned, the Native Americans who remembered the once lush lake territory. As journalists in the muckraking tradition, the authors have a keen sense for corruption at petty and grand scales. The book's weakness is a lack of systematic perspective on the social, political, and environmental context. The authors are Californians and have a strong feel for the background stories. They have opinions that shape the stories, and they state their conclusions explicitly at the end; plantation agriculture is by its nature bad for democracy, and the balance between commerce and environment has been drawn much too far towards commerce. But the authors' style or knowledge shies away from the big picture.

Conclusions for peterme: I strongly recommend this book. Excellent in sweep, drama and detail. I bought the book wanting to learn more about California's agribusiness giants, and their role in politics, environment, society, and the book satisfied those goals.

The book also got me thinking more about cotton. I prefer to buy produce local and organic where possible, but hadn't given too much thought about fabric. Given the environmental cost of cotton, perhaps I should go for organic cotton too. But where farmers market food is a good value in high season, and the quality is astoundingly great, organic cotton staples seem to be 4x the price of conventional, the selection is skimpy, and the quality, hard to say. Organic cotton seems to be at an earlier stage of market maturity than organic food, which was pricy and scrawny 20 years ago. Being an early adopter will help grow the market.

Who is the online chief of staff?

Big news and much chatter this week about the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff for Barack Obama. The chief of staff is head gatekeeper for the office of the president, and chief of outreach to Congress. A critical organizing role for the community that is the 3D US Capitol.

What about the online community that the Obama administration wants to continue into the presidency. With Change.gov, and the post-election evolution of MyBarackObama.com, who will coordinate outreach to and filter input from the communities online who have new capabilities to communicate directly?

What year will the online chief of staff be a role whose influence is powerful, acknowledged, announced and debated in the news?

Republicans, meet reality.

I listened to a telling example of the detachment of Republican conventional wisdom from reality, last weekend while washing dishes. Two conservative bloggers, Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg fretted on Blogging Heads about the impending Democratic victory. How could it be that the Republican party betrayed our vision of limited government, and what will happen to that vision when the Democrats take power? They did see that Republicans had *not* lived up to their promise of "small Government". But they had only the foggiest of pictures of what Republicans had been doing.

They acknowledged some of the Bush administration's problems with incompetence and corruption. What they didn't see was that their beloved vision of "small government" had been paid for by corporate interests who wanted the freedom to dump hog manure into vast lakes, or invest vast quantities of other people's money with minimal collateral. The small government vision hadn't been betrayed by a few corrupt greedy people. It had been bought by the corporate lobby from day one. Libertarian arguments, and honest libertarians, too, are and always have been the pawns of communally destructive self-interest.

Douthat and Goldberg acknowledged that some of the issues like "busing" and "crime" that helped Republicans gain power decades ago were no longer salient, that recently, Republicans had not been successful at persuading the public about the dangers of immigration, and that Republicans had not delivered on the social conservative agenda. What they didn't see at all was the pattern behind these single issues -- the fact that, from Nixon's southern strategy to Karl Rove and Sarah Palin, Republicans have sought to win elections by picking some minority to demonize, and that strategy is starting to backfire spectacularly, with Hispanic voters, young voters, voters in the "unAmerican" parts of Virginia, all voting for the candidate who inspired with a vision of American unity in diversity.

They acknowledged that the Iraq war was a well-intentioned mistake, and the neocons had been a bit too optimistic. But they saw the failure as a failure of tactical execution. They didn't acknowledge that the fearmongering, militaristic style of patriotism that characterized the Republican convention had burned peoples synapses; the word terrorist is a Pavlovian cue for many fewer people, and the promise of the circus isn't distracting people this year from the uncertainty about where they will get bread.

It is a fine thing that conservatives and Republicans are reflecting on their recent failures. But unless they understand the relationship between the goals of the coalition partners - corporate, fundamentalist, pro-war; and the outcomes of Republican governance, they may not make much headway. Whether and how they can face these things honestly? Not my problem. I do miss sane republicans. How to wrest some sanity out of the corporatist, militarist, nativist, theocratic mess that Bush republicanism became? Really glad that's not my problem.