What is pinterest?

Pin it - a picture that is - to your list and other people can nonchalently browse your links - making an easy to view gallery with a closer up view of a single print.  Social networking at its most basic or is this something entirely else?

Take a look at this:  http://pinterest.com/katiebedlow/historical/

Here were have an informative collection of ideas nicely documented.  It is quite an impressive way to build content via pictures and get some clicks generating about a subject if you have great photos.

Google's algorithm magically knows I was looking at shoes and advertise shoes at me.  There is a minor flaw to their plan.  I see the shoe adverts after having just bought the shoes.  Now, do I want another pair.  Not for a long time, but seeing the ads for the shop I just visited and did not buy things from is one thing but seeing ads for what I just sought out and bought is something else.

Google has better think this one over.  It could put people off.

British Stupid

Jimmy Wales has criticised the UK government for plans to snoop on all internet traffic.  One can imagine how this sort of information will be useful to the security forces and police.  It is a bit like keeping an eye on every tire impression on the road of every car.  Maybe they do that already.  No wonder they can not balance the budget.  They spend money on reducing freedom and individuality because it is convenient. They have no real idea how expensive this is to the social order and reputation of the West as America and Britain evolve police states.



 

Experience and expression

A Critical Analysis The web is a wild western gorge full of guns and lovers. The problem with polarisation is that the loudest views are not necessarily the most beneficial. Sometimes it is the quiet troubadour in the corner strumming that bestows the wisdom that prevents a fight from erupting but instead of augmenting art, has the internet actually watered it down? Some may see a post-modern content in the every-man contributions of social networking, but where does it place the extraordinary? Does its marketing muscle only flex for mediocracy? Or am I describing cable television? One could say that there is an inverse relation between context and meaning. But nobody would understand. A better way of saying the same thing is that the crowd has wisdom. That heat creates fire. That love is a function of the heart, and not the brain. It is the movement of clouds of meaning passing across the digital divide that makes this internet into something fantastic. It is the release of a spray of ideas into an atmosphere that knows how to pluck the good bits that provides its progressive strength. As a distribution system and filtering of knowledge that enables it to be a fluid representation of thought. Fluid, not liquid. Like a lava flow, it emerges and reforms its landscape. Looking at web archive sites is an adventure into an already antique territory. The inverse of "Steam punk" which for me feels like an outburst of the artist attempting to create a sense of provenance of ideas - this thing about hot media and cold media - due to a complete absence of feeling in wireframe construction containing a cold plethora of evolving ideas - utility without indulgence - we have alternative media online which are far warmer and dynamic. From Youtube to Second Life - the web "experience" is a mutual universe of representation. The idea of avatars being a military tool involves a transfer of consciousness to the machine, but that is not what we are doing. It is a transfer of the machine's imprint upon ourselves that this hot media impresses. The conveyance of real experience is diluted - but the internet enhancing experience not so much by social networking but by providing a fabric where human experience and joy can be expressed and enjoyed. This balance between utility and pleasure dictates how information is accumulated and presented. It is remarkable how easily it teeters over the edge and falls into one side of that equation. The goal of software now is to achieve a constancy in balance between the two.

The Role of Trivia

The fabric of the internet has transformed in its serious approach to a social interaction - a set of coda to be adjusted to, that consume our time and hone our thinking into new paradigms. The triumph of trivia over academia on the internet is the interchange of reactions to things. An interplay ofpersonae. Mere membership of a website and marketing to buyer could not exceed the point of membership - which is constantly growing content - a magazine approach of the blog - every week you cut a new one, so to speak. It is only the interesting magazines that will survive so you are dependent upon having things to say. But visitors to a site are more a consequence of word of mouth than it ever will be merely by advertising and for that reason we selected social networking as the main modulator of popularity. Increasingly we find that the more pure the social network the more slavish and dull the posts become as people strive to be popular. No, not you, your posts on Facebook are of course important to me - and I will react to you because I knew you. Not because what I have to say means much. Just leaving my mark. Shouting into the air like a Western tourist upon reaching their goal of their private pilgrimage, arriving at their statue of Elvis they all wrapped in self congratulatory fizz. The old model was to try and attract readers by having something relevant that was all exciting and fizz for the search engines. This means maintaining your blog religiously but when the number of visitors is not growing and the ideas dry up, then progress will stop. There is an inert pull toward relaxing - toward delay and away from decision or action. The secret dark art was "optimisation" and "having the right domain name: title: content" was a duty in the artistic originality stakes. Now we dive into the popcorn rather than absorb the movie. We end up throwing it at each other and complain as it sticks in our hair. Our addiction to each other ensures that we remain famous to our friends and that as an engine of growth being mildly offensive or wildly funny proves more effective than saying something effective. Triviality is a code that travels faster, ironic observation on a personal level spreads in all directions at once and the ubiquitous "sharing" that rates your level of success online is key to search engine modulation. Creating a conscious limiting current stifles innovation. Social interaction is very good but a backbone of relevant content is of great value. The turn over of marketing responsibility to the consumer. Social networking requires "popularity" which no longer ensures that anything but the lowest common denominator - a sense of the illicit - is appealed to. So you would think. Then again, George Takei is one of the funniest and most popular master of the meme. He routinely make tens of thousands of followers a little happier. It is a wonderful thing, really. But so is lasting originality. If the web becomes a way that sharing results in discovering new and wonderful art, it is serving humanity in a sort of left wing way. And if a funny picture amuses our friends it also serves to convey a sense of belonging. Social networking is more fun than endless memberships and mailing lists churning out sales talk spam. Advertising can be fun too, and useful. Google's promotion of relevancy is a judgement based on criteria that may or may not lead anywhere. But the honey will be smothered by ants. The tension of knowing why is rooted in the nature of the logical structure of things that are interlinked. One can imagine the shape of knowledge is a multidimensional fabric extending in all directions. When knowledge is constrained into one mode or method of thinking, then it is weakened as it is the connections between in which thought may exist. Thought requires an object, not always, but generally. Thoughts do however require a subject and without one thoughts become abstract. These abstract thoughts may involve others in a common ground such as humour, and for that value it is rewarded. There is a pressure of crowd reflection. This works as a modulator of fame. A responsibility of a performer's retinue, best when brief and innocuous and personal. Twitter is the most abstract social network and success there depends on many things. Having something to say may not be one of them. Making a lot of noise works best.

Business intelligence

Programmers spend so much time configuring software to do utilitarian functions when the greatest advances yet to tap into our creativity have yet to be realised, (although photoshop was a good start). Business intelligence goes beyond the size of the audience. Mashups and mobile apps are a beginning not an end unto themselves.

Some online games employ complex analytics on a simplistic model (a game is complex but the real world more so) but those ideas could be extended to provide for business intelligence. For example predicting changes in the weather as they may affect delivery of goods, and planning ahead of that. Or personal assessment based on how much they are improving in their work and monitoring their health and communications. The Orwellian and complex web of intricately involved but not dependent web services await.

We used to speak of neural networks. But then the internet has evolved certain types of programming to create new breeds of environment. The challenge for software writers is to safely establish elaborately mathematical associations between abstract object methods along a non-deterministic path-finding randomised directional method, that evolves pathways like vines that grow in collaboration with each other.

The models of programming have been highly deterministic. The task is to use languages in a way that learns about its environment and grows new wings when it needs them.

Copyright © 2011 by Nicholas Alexander
ALL RIGHHTS RESEREVED

its interconnected process

the medium is not merely communication, it is process

twitter for example is an extended work of art by a large number of people and the more that it casually represents the threads of reality, the less use it may be. To make use of it in a traditionally advertising way seems logical, but is it?

the medium is defined by the activity people engage in

this appears self evident. Between online functionality and real world needs appears and opportunity, the process of which is financial benefit. If it fails to gather enough steam to effect change in its audience, it slogs. If the audience engages with it, it thrives.

Blogger

Blogger has upgraded its templating systems.

Emotions

No! Not those awful designed "emoticons" that were "popular" but seem to have become less so, at least on the services I choose to use.

Services like Twitter, where 140 chars or less is supposed to support a "conversation" seems to support something else - and its name is the clue. It is supposed to be a place where a meme can spread due to its inherent usefulness. It is promoted as "a place for conversation" but that is a bit like saying the training wheels on a kids bike are useful for transportation.

Treating Twitter like it is a conversation opens up its doors to its world of water cooler comments and useful links that you can respond to with your own links.

It is also a far better way to get curious eyeball traffic to websites. So all the mad marketeers love it, and get quietly unfollowed by most of the saavy accounts. I keep a few pet marketeers just to remind me not to fall into the squawking insistent enthusiasm that seems to be their art.

The limiting of the line to just text, just 140 chars constrains language to such an extend as to reduce meaningfulness. Conveyance of emotion by reaction is confined to ReTweets - repeating or supporting a view. It is designed as a cool medium, so that a real meme can only take off due to its inherency. Trending topics is an attempt to identify memes but it actually is a guide to being rather dull. Twitter is not a popularity context, more a voyage of tepid discovery and wonderful surprises like discovering Read Write Web.

See also:
Read Write Web

Knowledge

There are alternative models for thought storage and retrieval.

Knowledge is language based and can be stored as historic documents with providence, both electronically and physically. What we know about specific objects is enhanced when viewed historically, the artifact and the digital study of the artifact, plus all the collected strands of human experience, thought and academic reasoning that can be attributed to it, all available wherever and whenever required.

This is the model of the universe envisioned at first by Encyclopedias, which Microsoft modeled digitally as Encarta, available on CD, now discontinued. Along came the new model of shared information: collaboration. Wikipedia revised the printing press revolution that produced forests of expensive books of knowledge. The internet supercedes printing. The economics were turned inside out, and properly so. Advertising brochures are great, but we all throw them away.

Mobile phones hooked into storage retrieval is a far better personal model than lumbering PCs, even laptops are almost redundant around the truncated reality of a 3x2 screen. iPhones are the most perfect expression of the paradigm. Yet the majority of gadget-ware is like the almost magical Twitter application - it is functionality, not substance.

They provide vehicles for the carriage of knowledge. All these companies competing to tweet, it is really just a function. Google Wave is a smarter expression of a more in depth paradigm. Very few get it yet. As a programming development tool, it is far better than twitter which is universally distracting.



The sharing of information is a new model of commerce, espoused mainly by google and the Open Source movement.

Shaken, not Stirred

Programming is based on certainty. You can only write code if the layers that connect together do so without any holes in the logic. When you discover a method by which an infrastructure should produce a bunch of objects you do not need to be concerned that the infrastructure gets it wrong, that is why it is infrastructure.

When the infrastructure does not respond in the most wholesome way, crashes the server memory or simply seems to fails inexplicably and you have checked things, your confidence in the infrastructure may be shaken, but if, for example, the infrastructure delivers a set of objects cleanly, and also provides a method that sets a filter for that selection in the infrastructure but that filter method crashes badly, there are two approaches:

a) develop a work around that applies the filter at the higher (application) level

or

b) rewrite the infrastructure to do what is required without crashing

Always, always aim to do b), unless you do not have enough time, in which case always do a). Or of you are developing against a "code freeze" version, then never do b). The infrastructure could be incomplete and you can not reach your deadline.

Good software, infallible software is written in layers each of which can be separately monitored. If the infrastructure is broken, then a software team with a good architect will know what is going wrong and may rewrite the infrastructure.

The worst thing to do is to rewrite infrastructure incorrectly and allow untested bugs into the system. And if you are using a "version frozen" open source module, you may be in for a quagmire.

Suddenly you have 10 days work being added to the schedule already agreed, and there is no way
to do that. So, you do option a). The software gets delivered and it is slightly less efficient but it only affects the instance of the decision tree that it affects.

Now, you can upgrade the infrastructure, it will still work, but you can replace your workaround and test it on a staging site before you release it.

A new copyright model

Should original works be protected by copyright? I think there is merit in rewarding writers and originators of new ideas with financial reward. It encourages me to write more interesting and accessible articles, giving away years of experience and knowledge - there has to be a reason to do this.

Passing on knowledge makes it more valuable. Copyright law should never prevent the passing on of knowledge but should ensure that the rights of the owner are respected.

With the advent of the Internet, file sharing and republishing, the question of "enforcing copyright" is a major legal problem. Who to accuse? A fictional average individual who has perhaps ripped an average of 1 film or one album from the web really would not be able to front up with payment if sued for copyright for their brief career as a file downloader. In other words, the prosecution of users is counter productive.

We have the internet. It is the solution. Distribution of information can be tracked with meta-data that allows it to be attributed correctly. Any use of information should be rewarded with a right to pass it on to another. The old model suited the creation of artifacts.

The new model is more to do with the fluidity of distribution. Knowledge shared is knowledge that benefits people.

An international copyright register makes more sense than all these prosecutions. If we create the roads for data to travel on, then we should expect that people will use them. Subscriptions could contain a copyright tax that adds to the international pool and the number of times an article or item is copies could then allow an artist to make a claim for copyright.

This model has the intention of rewarding sharing.

Ways to use Twitter

Here are some working phrases:

"More than it appears to be"
"Deceptively Simple and Mad Enough to Work"
"More return than effort put in"

and some more

"Less than you expect"
"Elegant design fits so easily with other applications"
"Returns come when you put the effort in"

which set of statements (assumptions) are more true of Twitter?

The answer is dependent on how you want to use Twitter.

If you are a programmer, like me, then you want something to "just work". You do not ever want to see it "fail sometimes". It has to be consistent. Therefore simplicity is a distinct advantage, just look at all the problems Microsoft had with it's less popular version of Windows (Windows 2.0, Windows 4.x, ME, Vista) vs its more popular renditions (Windows 1.0, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, NT, 98, and Windows 7). Complexity can lead you astray. (Windows 4.x?)

The "small is good" approach to software engineering brought utility as entertainment. It is a mistake. iPhone apps are great if they reduce human time involvement with the gadget, otherwise they are entertainment.

Entertainment eventually fades, you can only watch the same film a few times, really. Software must have "utility" and that means that from day one to day last it must function 100%, it must be able to establish your data from import or carry you though all the boring data entry somehow, it must work with that data and finally, be able to export the closing balances of the life of the computerised activity. That is "utility". It is there when you need it.

The internet is both utility and artifact. By making everything artifact, we fail to discover the most current services; conversely, making everything utility means that brains switch off.

It is like art vs science. Both being present in an invention is what gives it both legs and continuity.

Twitter feeds that are using the first set of assumptions seek to sell. These do not work.

Twitter feeds that use the second set of assumptions are smart services that have a chance of attracting customers.

How to do that...? Something to think about....

.

CMS page structure

Think of the page structure as three primary objects:

either:
[LEFT CONTENT RIGHT]
or:
[HEADER BODY FOOTER]

are defined as Primary, the other is contained by the middle element of the other.

i.e. [HEADER BODY FOOTER] defined inside CONTENT; or, [LEFT CONTENT RIGHT] defined inside BODY.

It is a column arrangement (not all columns need be used) that can be used to slice the site into "containers" that define how far the right icons are from the right edge, etc. i.e. to get stable pages (without having to fix it at every design change, requires you only change the BODY-CONTENT or the CONTENT-BODY module, and nothing else changes.

Think of coloured blocks. Take a big red one, and lay two skinny blue ones - one on each side. Now you can find a yellow one to cover the top and bottom. That is the expected behaviour of page structure. These are not rules, but guides to help to design rapid consistent pages without a CMS or a basic object strategy in a CMS.

Frameworks

Everyone loves Frameworks but there are good software stacks that follow design patterns and there are ones that labour away in your browser.

The whole idea of RESTful design is that the client has an independent life. But RESTful design coupled with intelligent clients that are now possible to write with Javascript frameworks (so we now have two separate software stacks talking through the TCP-IP stack - do we see a pattern here?) so stuff that gets transmitted to the client is designed for that client only, so we craft a software "one fit only" key so that the server can know which client it is talking to - this "state" is preserved in a cookie.

That is what happens when you log in. Your authentication token is added to the package of information providing a secure network. Is this new? Not at all. Why do we not do it all the time? We do, it is called SSL. It provides a "standard" - a measurable way of doing something with an agreed visual clue. Is it secure? Yes.

Innovation and Capital

Over seven years ago I created a website that published academic articles of a leading professional and put in links that allowed you to generate links for your own site to link to the article, or get a link to email to your friend. I also provided lots of expensive looking paper backgrounds with multiple style sheets. It was all innovation and if things had gone better, could have gone somewhere.

Unfortunately when I billed out the work, things did not go as smoothly as they should and that perhaps is a matter of luck or personality. Apparently computer programmers do not have either, but after one year the "dispute" was settled, albeit without no handshake. The client could have angel-invested these social networking ideas, but it was not to be.

At the same time I was suggesting to another client that having groupware could be valuable and was told that they did not want any kind of social interaction on the web. That ex-client now uses Facebook to achieve the same thing.

Both clients basically were not sold on the ideas I had invented. They could have invested in social networking and as an early start been bought out, but those for whom I worked found no confidence in these ideas. Frankly, I was not that committed to them either, but I had worked on a website's groupware functionality in the UK and that website was sold to the Metro group for five million pounds.

Later on I had this other crazy idea for a shared poetry site, only to see it appear about two years later in the form of Twitter. What I tried on AucklandPoetry.com did not bite and I am not really claiming prior art. When working on that groupware in the Cambridge lab I worked in, another programmer was demonstrating his Flash games. We all laughed thinking this was going to be a hard way to make money. Of course on line gaming using Flash may be the most successful business model of all, so far.

The next big business model is what I am thinking about. But there is no time, I have to go and get a job. My clients are all worried about their mortgages and its back to implementing other people's labour intensive ideas.

One of the jobs I decided not to go for was a local version of Netflix. Mailing out DVDs is a wonderful business model but with a limited life as bandwidth rolls out over the next three to five years.

The infamous P2P work that supports skype, bit-torrent and joost.com - allowing video distribution over the current AM quality internet (it may be faster in New York city, but so is everything else) will become better and better as more people use it. It is a bit like electricity, it relies upon all the connections of the grid to maintain the grid.

And that leads me to the next idea. The next big thing (for me) may be to collect all my blogs into an online magazine and start to get some income from them. But for the internet, and the world, it is ...

Follow this blog

From somewhere this blog found a follower. I maintain about 30 blogs. The ones with followers get updated more often. If you want to read more "Web Theory" follow this blog using your google account.

Free advertising for a giant. A very big giant.

Social Security and Networking

A recent case of a woman who's password was hacked and her account cracked, meant she had to shut her Facebook account down as the hackers then harvested pity from her close friends and actually extracted $1000 via Western Union from one of them within 24 hours. She found the "report" link on Facebook and after 12 hours, Facebook closed her hacked account.

The first line of defense is your password. Quite often it is your only line of defense, and that should NOT be the case in a public networking environment where identity is important.

There has to be a better way. Online password safes (repositories) are asking you to trust them to never make a mistake. There has to be a better way. There is. It is the Law.

Identification of an individual is a human right. Long have civil libertarians fought for universal anonymity, but in the digital age more individual freedom may be had from universal identification. Not so much by Government. But by anyone.

How do you know your Facebook postings are not being hacked? You do not. You trust Facebook to have thought it through. Governments have been thinking laws through for centuries and still people will find loopholes. It follows that software, especially things used by millions, are going to have security holes.

It is easy to blame Facebook rather than the victim. But in this instance, it was one person vs unknown criminals and all she had to go on was being unable to login to Facebook, followed probably a phone call from a friend or finding her page had been changed from her friends login, still connected to her.

It may be that Facebook are seen as guilty of a significant oversight here. One could wonder, why is there no heuristic testing of identity? Why was it so hard for her complaint to the police to not immediately ring alarm bells at Facebook - a business?

Security takes vision, it must be thought out for the application. It could be that they are so busy being successful they become too focused to realize what safeguards they may need to wrap around new features like plug ins (which must follow certain sandbox rules, certainly, but that does not stop them being implicated in data theft). The value of social networking is limiting marketing costs.

The cost of social networking is: enormous distraction. Do the staff at Facebook get enormously distracted? If so, is this the real problem with this fractionation? As the rivers of human attention fractionate into many tiny streams we seem unable to keep commercial reality afloat. President Obama's warning to teenagers "be careful of what you post on Facebook, it may come back to haunt you" in response to one who wanted his job was appropriate advice.

If anyone has, President Obama has proven the social business model works for politics has it been adopted universally due to it being so successful. But it is just one path to success. Back in the day, businesses paid people for their work. We now seem so keen to promote our works on a social network for the attention, never mind the moola. It will change.

But at the moment it is a bit of a case of the Emperor's new clothes.

Web 2.0 interactivity

When a field selector is used to load values or a web interface wants to interact with a back end process, a useful design pattern to use is Ajax MVC.

This works very well with jQuery, PHP and a database.

MVC

Model

The model is a map of how data is stored. The model may also provide object structures that inform the view how to use data.

View

The view is a form with active fields that talk to the controller. The fastest way to make an interactive view is using a smart template system such as TAL or Smarty.

Controller

The controller mediates messages from the view, and formats data according to the Model which gets delivered to the view.

Intelligent View

Ajax requires that the View contains scripting that allows page elements to POST and GET data. HTTP has several methods of packaging data to be sent to the server.

RESTful Web services

RESTful webservices conceptually implement PUT and POST. GET is simply used to sent record filters (i.e. selection criteria) and is considered "Safe" - that means that it must never be possible to change data in the Model using a GET. This prevents user database poisoning by URL.

HTML 5 allows PUT - which simply means record establishment. If you PUT a record that already exists - it will create another record, or better, results in an error condition. XHTML does not incorporate PUT, so it is common practise to overload POST.

POST is common to all versions of HTTP and is implemented in HTML 4.x and XHTML. POST packages and sends data via a mechanism (called Standard Input) that is not available for hacking except by modifying the form sending the data. Of course it is possible to do that, so some serialisation or encoding is important, minimally a timestamp and a hash that ensures that the data is recognised as valid.

The Web is distracting

The internet is distracting humanity from the humdrum pointless paper pushing inanity that used to rule us. Now we can share without authority, now we can make things and see them without institutions dictating, but it helps academia prepare our minds.

Compare TED.com with Sarah Palin. One shares ecology and values, educating humanity. The other exposes the mind of a greedy person.

Now, back to Facebook...