Infinite names

More reflection on why I find the Don Park diagram horrifying. Meeting new people teaches you distinctive new things to appreciate. Getting to know another person well is a glimpse of the infinite.
The dimensions of the chart ramify infinitely, the more people you know, and the closer you know some of them.
What poverty of expression, to try to constrain the infinite into a 5-scale in 4 categories.
Pete, of course, suggests a Friendship Wiki.

That Which Should Remain Nameless

Don Park has a draft of a user interface to diagram the level of closeness of one’s friends. I hope this is intended as satire!

A Friendship Circle is basically a nested rings of people (represented by icons with miniture photo and name) around a person. To use the Friendship Circle, the user drag and drops icons from a palette of friends to the circle. Note that this can be done using DHTML+CSS.

Does one spend time with this graph every morning, and move one friend-counter closer, after he has been helpful in a difficult situation, and move one of the mistress-counters further away because she used a unappealing perfume?
Very clever and amusing if satire. Repellent if sincere. It might have a certain appeal among playboy geeks and junior high-school girls.

What I like most/least about Orkut

Most: the pictures. There are people I know through blogs, #joiito, and other online settings. It’s nice to connect faces with names and personalities.
Least: reminders of old squabbles. The trouble with online communities is there are fewer opportunities to make up if you disagree. I wish that Orkut had a “send roses” feature.

Creepy spam

I just got spammed today by something called Word of Mouth Connections, noting that: a user at our website has just begun to look into your background via our anonymous online community.
In order to find out more about the request or contact the person making the inquiry, you need to pay them $10.
This smells like a scam. They’re probably using it to verify email addresses for spam purposes, and to scam money from people gullible enough to pay.
Ptui.

Intellectual Property is the Inquisition of our time

Before modernity, the Church held exclusive rights to authorized representation of the life and beliefs of Jesus. Ecclesiastical prosecutors searched far and wide for unauthorized representations. They issued cease and desist orders to heretics when they found them, and conducted criminal prosecutions when the heretics persisted.
Cory Doctorow reports that Marvel and DC Comics successfully dissuaded GeekPunks comic books from using the term “Superhero” in their titles, claiming they own the trademark on “Superhero”.
In our era, we are free to invent stories and interpretations about Jesus or the Kabbalah in the public doman. If an existing religion doesn’t approve of the ideas, we are free to tell our non-standard stories in public, and gather like-minded folk to start our own sect, without fear of criminal prosecution.
But in our era, some of the most powerful mythical ideas are owned by corporations, not the Church. Disney, Marvel and DC Comics have the right to search out those who transform their message in an unauthorized manner, and criminally prosecute those who refuse.
We the people have given up ownership of our culture’s myths to powerful copyright-holders. And we accept the state of affairs, as most people in medieval times must have thought the Church was right to search out and prosecute heretics.
Future civilizations will consider the corporate monopoly on our cultures myths as absurd and barbaric as we think of the Inquisition.

Political clicks and mortar

Clay Shirky alleges that the boost Dean got from the internet was illusory; internet campaigning is a substitute for the real thing. That’s only true if the legions of new internet activists give up, and don’t learn the next steps of political activism.
I’ve seen the gap between familiar and new in Texas. I participated a little in the project to get internet tools for the Texas Dean campaign. Glen Maxey, a sensei of local politics, runs the campaign, and talks about precincts and delegates. The enthusiastic crew building web tools talk about blogs and RSS, PHP and MySQL.
My main political experience has been digital rights issue activism, not political campaigns. Last year, fighting the SDMCA battle, we used email, blogs and wikis to co-ordinate; shoe-leather to lobby legislators, and old-fashioned connections to invite tech industry lobbyists to help fight off the movie moguls.
In the comments to the Shirky post, Rusty Foster explains how the Dean Campaign dropped the ball in the field campaign in Iowa.

The field ops were not, as far as I know, too busy blogging pictures of their cats to handle the strategy. Their strategy and execution just didn

Technical support by RSS

Last week I was scanning my RSS reader and stumbled across a Socialtext bug report. The Shifted Librarian wanted to scan the RSS Winterfest weblogs, and ran into a bug in our new RSS feed. I reported the bug. Pete diagnosed the problem in the blog comments.
RSS for information discovery, and weblog for collaboration. It works.

RSS Attention Management

RSS readers are very handy for people to manage attention to incoming information.
Debates about the relative superiority of RSS readers and web browsers are missing the point. Nobody wants the whole web coming to their desktop reader.
You use RSS for sources that change periodically, that you visit again and again. Bug-tracking is a great application — several people in the RSS-Winterfest IRC mentioned bug-tracking as handy use of RSS.
A few people in the IRC mentioned RSS for alerting. The RSS polling design isn’t intended for real-time notification. For that you need IM or Jabber or Tibco. Real-time notification and periodic updates can be used nicely side-by-side — for example, a system administrator might want routine human and system notifications via RSS, and system-down or danger-zone alerts by IM or pager.
Information updates have different levels of urgency — “the building is on fire” is more urgent than “the room temperature has increased from 68 to 72 degrees” (unless you’re managing a temperature-sensitive lab culture).
A given piece of information is more urgent for some than others. A customer support query is urgent for the service reps on duty, and of background interest to product managers and developers.
We need a range of attention-getting media.
* IM/pager for lapel-grabbing alerts
* email for important, short-notice items
* RSS for alerts for discretionary attention
* Weblogs and wiki providing a “browse mode” fix for recent changes junkies, and a searchable archive for occasional readers
(We also need a Ross Mayfield trademark colorful chart to gain fame for the concept.)
These modes complement each other. They help individuals manage attention, and they help organizations focus attention on urgent matters, while building knowledge in important areas.