Jeff Random - new media and metatheory remix




When you make sure that things validate they just seem to go better. Web standards, societal standards etc etc.

OpenMoko is a GNU / Linux based open software development platform. Developers have full access to OpenMoko source and they can tailor their implementations to underlying hardware platforms. -openmoko

Back in an old post about Mobile music & DRM I suggested that an open platform handset was a paradigm busting market opportunity.

OpenMoco seems to have gone there especially in their philosophy:

For the core team pushing this project, an open phone is not really even a product. It’s the very embodiment of their vision of technology. They absolutely, passionately, believe that something as fundamental to our lives as the mobile phone must be opened.

It seems like carrier-hopping, mesh-networking, flipt to SIP, P2P mobile apps that allow users persistent data access through dissemination networking are only a hop skip and a jump away. Especially the way the rate of change (delta) is increasing visions of ubiquitous computing loom large.

In the near term anything that helps with blurring the lines between carrier, ISP, peer, wifi access point, voice, VOIP, IM, and all of the other roles/participants in a networked conversation is welcome.

Of course all of this open opportunity means that it’s more important than every to focus on the metatheory. Whether you call them corporate constitutions or philosophy, more and more the purpose/goals of a company/platform/meme are as important if not more important than their current technological capabilities.

corporate constitutions based on theories of stakeholder justice {…} do what few strategic heuristics and frameworks are capable of in a world of growing hypercompetition, hyperimitation, and discontinuity: they unerringly guide decision makers towards defensible sources of value from which to craft revolutionary strategies. But more importantly, they define and shape purpose – which is, and always has been, the only mechanism for going beyond market advantage. - Umair Haque

It’s great to see what looks like a very serious player entering the market with a commitment FOSS type philosphies.

Viva La Revolucion!

Dissemination Networking

Van Jacobson gave this talk.

There’s too much good stuff for me to even summarize

I left my notes below.

Data has a name - but not a location

Opportunistic transport - Anything that moves bits can be used to communicate

Everything responds - (seems like a step towards Thalience)

Returned data is signed & secure by making data repositories sign data when it’s put in.

names & naming

time/version. certify relationship between generic & specific version.

integrity preserving data segmentation so all responses are small

Explicit data vs Implicit data

Trust is a property of the data - not of the way that you obtained the data.

data properties = no need to trust remote agents

request / response model

network transacts in content not conversations

nodes don’t need names

Intermittent connections stop mattering

trust is associated with user level objects

a dissemination network (distributed) = a very resilient network

“We”ll need to rethink a few things
copyright
authorship
identity
ethics
aesthetics
rhetoric
governance
privacy
commerce
love”

From this excellent video




Sounds exactly like what we should be considering regarding a singularity.

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

KK for Wired

One of the basic building blocks of optimization is split testing.

While the metatheory is the same regardless of what you are testing, this is an example of applied marketing theory. This tool is focused (labeled) on conversions (sales) as the datapoints, but you could just as easily use it for any other kind of success (such as opt-ins, free downloads, registrations etc).

Whether you call it AB split testing (or even A B C D E testing), using split testing software, conversion optimization, landing page optimization or any other name you still want to act on your tests as soon as possible.

The split test sample size calculator will show you how much traffic you need to send to each test segment, based on how confident you want to be in the results.

This part of the materials from the Metric & Analytical Marketing workshop at Internext-Expo. While the workshop was focused on adult website marketing, the tools & theory should be useful in almost any vertical.

During an online conversation I recently came up with the word Brandverb.

A brand becomes a brandverb when it becomes commonly used in place of a verb.

It used to be that brand managers were always concerned about having their brand fall into the public domain. The travails of Xerox and Kleenex were legendary as they tried to prevent genericide. Aspirin, linoleum, nylon, escalator, kerosene and zipper are all former brand names that have become generic.These days brandverbs seem to be the mark of success instead of the kiss of death, becoming useful when they carry a better meaning than the generic term they replace and spreading the brand awareness.

For example when someone says they will Skype you, it serves to reinforce using a particular VOIP service.

Without doing any due diligence, or even bothering to Google (look it’s a brandverb) for info, I notice a correlation to noun based brands becoming genericized when popularized, and brandverbs becoming stronger when popularized.*

It seems as though if a brand lends itself well to becoming a brandverb, then it is an advantage. Maybe it’s an edge in culting your brand, maybe it helps through WOMB (word of mouth branding), maybe it’s more.

These thoughts have lead some serious second thoughts about the brand for a project, including potentially scrapping a nice 5 letter domain for a project.

* Xerox seems to be somewhat of an exception as you can Xerox something, but perhaps their danger was based on people buying ‘Xerox Machines’ from HP and others?

Program yourself. Make sure that you have the volume turned up.

These Animated Search Engine Bot Crawl Visualizations are the result of a one year experiment on the behaviour of Yahoo, MSN & Google search engine bots.

You can click on the pictures to watch the animated visualizations from drunkmenworkhere.

MSN Bot Visual Animation




Yahoo Slurp Visual Animation

Google Bot Visual Animation


Definitely worth further study.

Quick Conclusion - For Google shorter URLs help rankings & comment spam does hurt rankings.

For you SEO types wistful for the days of chasing the green fairy, there is even a graphical visualization of pagerank in their test matrix.

The paths are similiar to natural forms. That fits with the idea that evolution is efficent search leading leading to winning forms. Perhaps we will find that the closer advanced visualizations resemble natural forms, that the visualization improves and/or the engines become.

Previously I referenced the value of trust.

Idea - The more a network facilitates trust, the easier it is for network users to form groups.

From David Reed re: The Power of Community Building
Group Forming Networks maximize per user value and the dominant value in a typical network tends to shift from one category to another as the scale of the network increases.

If so then: Trust enabling tools not only allow your network to be group forming, but also maximize per user value in your community (Group Forming Network).

Meta-Theory of Optimization

Optimization is the discipline (art/science) which is concerned with finding the maxima and minima of functions, subject to constraints.

In Meta-Terms, Optimization does not necessarily mean finding the optimum solution to a problem. Often this is not possible (constraints), and this is where the balance (heuristics) is used to make principally accurate judgments factoring in given circumstances. Then these are tested and refined to a degree that is itself part of the Optimization, which grows into a self-referential diminishing curve.

Knowing what questions to ask (your metrics), what tests to run (your data), and what to do with the information (analysis) is the Art of Optimization.

This is a definition in progress. What do you think? Let me know