Jeff Random: musings and metatheory

Grateful focus

Published by r8ndom, on September 21st, 2012 at 11:30 pm. Filled under: Metatheory,Videos • No Comments

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

Validation

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

Published by r8ndom, on January 5th, 2009 at 11:57 pm. Filled under: Metatheory,Posts,Videos • Comments Off

Open Mobile Handset

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 â€“ 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!

Published by r8ndom, on July 10th, 2007 at 2:07 am. Filled under: Metatheory,Mobile,New Media,Posts • No Comments

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

Published by r8ndom, on May 20th, 2007 at 8:09 am. Filled under: Community,Metatheory,Posts,Trust,Videos • No Comments

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

A B Split Test Confidence Based Sample Size Calculator

a b split testing sample size calculator

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.

Published by r8ndom, on January 24th, 2007 at 11:01 am. Filled under: Metatheory,Optimization,Posts • No Comments

BrandVerbs – Brands that become verbs.

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?

Published by r8ndom, on December 15th, 2006 at 5:32 pm. Filled under: Integrated Marketing,Metatheory,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

Animated Search Engine Bot Crawl Visualizations

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.

Published by r8ndom, on June 4th, 2006 at 10:41 am. Filled under: Metatheory,New Media,Posts,Search,Search Engines,SEO - Search Engine Optimization,Videos • No Comments