Jeff Random: musings and metatheory

Linked Data

TimBerners-Lee takes the concept of mashup and goes beyond giving the world a structure for powerful change.

Basically a way to move from the economics of scarcity, to the economics of abundance when it comes to data.

This just spawned a whole new thread of research/reading for me to examine how & where I can apply this, but I’m posting this video without delay.

Published by r8ndom, on April 16th, 2009 at 11:37 pm. Filled under: Content,Metatheory,New Media,Personalized Content,Posts,Trust,Videos • Comments Off

We are the web

“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

Published by r8ndom, on February 6th, 2007 at 5:23 pm. Filled under: Community,Content,Media 2.0,Metatheory,New Media,Personalized Content,Posts • No Comments

Program Yourself

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

Published by r8ndom, on September 29th, 2006 at 5:15 am. Filled under: Content,Media 2.0,Metatheory,New Media,Posts,Videos • No Comments

Viral Marketing Example

Viral content is content that consumers want to propogate, in essence creating word of mouth marketing (WOMM).

Roundabout is a great example of a viral marketing video for this crossfader.

Published by r8ndom, on February 2nd, 2006 at 10:35 pm. Filled under: Content,Media 2.0,New Media,Posts,Videos • 1 Comment

Glad to get a Virus?

With reports that a “New Worm Chats with Users on AIM” link and even goes so far as to respond “lol no its not its a virus” when questioned it’s not too far of a leap to imagine personalized viruses.

Don’t imagine the personalized viruses tailored to your DNA that many sci-fi novels talk about, but instead think the evolution of Spear-Phishing.

This kind of an attack could use the information it gathers about you (contact names, frequency of contact, online purchase history, emails, IM history etc) to masquerade as a “trusted” contact to everyone you know. If it wasn’t too intrusive, then it would be difficult to even notice if your system had been infected.

Imagine that instead of trying to steal your credit card numbers, or other information that has a lot of attention focused on security this “personalized” virus simply pretended to be you occasionally.

It could IM/email your contacts, and suggest products or services. If it only chose things that you would recommend, or have purchased (think of Amazon’s suggestion engine), to the type of people who would be interested (search for keywords in email/IM interactions), and could do it in your ‘voice’ (copy phrasing from IM/email) it would be very effective. Perhaps it would even place VOIP calls, and remix your voice for maximum effectiveness.

Whatever the mechanism, the fact remains that eventually one of your friends would say ‘Thanks for the heads up on that (stock pick, book, software package, membership website etc)’ and it would come out that you didn’t actually tell them about it.

The question is – would you mind?

Think of it this way – If someone had a website with EXACTLY the news that you were interested in, and nothing else you would be very happy to read it. It wouldn’t matter that the site was a ~~splog~~ newsmaster site, or the product of a great news team. Either way you are happy with the end result.

By the same token, you really would like to let all of your friends know about the products and services that you think would improve their lives. It would be even better if you were able to do so without taking any effort on your part, and it just “worked in the background”.

By making itself unobtrusive, and even helpful you would have very little incentive to track down and remove the bot. From there it’s just a short step to reminding you about appointments, screening phone calls etc. After all if it’s doing a good enough job, you might even want it to help you to manage your relationships a little. Imagine being able to delegate those obligatory chats to your Fetch* .

As I have discussed before the revolution in personalized content may well evolve from search engine spammers. That is just one niche in the digital ecosystem. In order for digital life to evolve there needs to be competition and consequences. With anti-virus, anti-spyware and other types of competitive software in the mix only the fittest will survive.

I can’t wait to see what comes out from this.

* Fetch = autonomous adaptive software agent or knowledge based agent.

Published by r8ndom, on December 8th, 2005 at 1:10 pm. Filled under: Content,Metatheory,Personalized Content,Posts,Trust • No Comments

Intriguing Interface

The Billy Harvey website – clever, understated, technically brilliant. Hat’s off to SoFake.

Via Creating Passionate Users

Published by r8ndom, on September 16th, 2005 at 1:35 am. Filled under: Content,Media 2.0,Posts • No Comments

New Media Economics Today

“Work It Harder Make It Better Do It Faster, Makes Us stronger” DaftPunk

Looking at revenues & users for Ebay, Yahoo & Google is where new media economics really begins to come into it’s own. This is web 2.0 theory being proven in the market today.

Times of great change mean times of great opportunity.

Web 2.0 is a shift to from tight, hierarchical architectures which realize exponential network FX, to loosely structured architecture which realize combinatorial network FX.

More simply, Web 2.0 is about the shift from network search economies, which realize mild exponential gains – your utility is bounded by the number of things (people, etc) you can find on the network – to network coordination economies, which realize combinatorial gains: your utility is bounded by the number of things (transactions, etc) you can do on the network.

via bubblegeneration – strategy, business models, and innovation

Published by r8ndom, on September 13th, 2005 at 6:21 pm. Filled under: Content,Media 2.0,Media Economics,Metatheory,Posts,Search • No Comments

Trust is not Trusted Computing

While I have written about The Value of Trust before, trusted computing is entirely different.

This incredible short is both a beautiful example of messaging as well as a good explanation about some of the issues with trusted computing.

watch it now

After watching that, it’s an ideal time to enjoy reading the story
0wnz0red to take your understanding to another level.

Via Boing Boing

Published by r8ndom, on September 10th, 2005 at 1:17 pm. Filled under: Content,Media 2.0,Media Economics,Metatheory,Posts,Trust,Videos • No Comments

Copy Optimized- DVDA & more

Metadata that reconstructs the file via the web – exactly what we need these days. The more granular content gets the better this works.

There needs to be a standard so that it’s completely unambiguous just what one means when one says “Copy Optimized DVD Audio disc”. It’s that clear specification that will make embedded players and perfect peer-to-peer network copies possible. A disc containing such files could be popped into your home stereo DVD player and made to play, copy and share with no more user intervention than hitting a button…

But here’s the key: each file will be named in a way that’s optimized for file sharing, with artist, album, title and track number right in the filename, and with all the right metadata already embedded in the file when the album was mastered at the studio. To share Copy Optimized music you just direct your peer-to-peer filesharing application to your DVD drive so it will share what you’re listening to, have your friends copy the tracks onto their computers’ hard drives, or else burn them copies of the whole DVD.

But wait: there’s more! The DVD disk itself will have a metadata file in its root directory that will specify the contents of the entire disk. My idea is that one could make a bit-for-bit reconstruction of the whole disk just by grabbing this one metadata file and then looking for the tracks on the file sharing networks. This file would be one or two kilobytes of XML that would have each track’s metadata as well as its Secure Hash Algorithm checksum so it can be uniquely identified over the net.

Via Boing Boing

Published by r8ndom, on September 5th, 2005 at 2:27 pm. Filled under: Content,Media 2.0,Media Economics,Metatheory,Personalized Content,Posts • No Comments

From Tastemaker to Collaborative Filter

“DJ’s are like collaborative filters – but the best ones are also sources of novelty. Noise, if you like, – but good noise. Filters that can jump from peak to peak – from things I might like now, to things I will like when my preferences will evolve (or, better yet, that evolve my preferences). Algorithmic solutions don’t do this yet – and probably won’t for a while, because it’s a (really) hard problem. But it’s also a (really) big market gap.” link

You don’t need an algorithmic solution when you can have your users brute force it for you more accurately, and also introduce novelty.

The question becomes where are you going to get a dedicated group of users who are willing to invest their time, efforts and attention into your system?

Untold numbers of music fans & teenagers seems like a good place to start.

“MTV Hits, an MTV offshoot channel in UK, will turn into a fully interactive service, encouraging viewers to choose playlists and influence the on-screen look of the network.

From later this year viewers will initially be invited to create their own home pages on MTV.co.uk, with features including personal blogs, all-time favourite track lists and current favourites.” –link

Published by r8ndom, on September 3rd, 2005 at 12:52 am. Filled under: Content,Media 2.0,Media Economics,Metatheory,Personalized Content,Posts • No Comments