Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Ten Immutable Laws of Baby Proofing

Law #1: If a baby can persuade you to run his milk bottle on your computer, its not your computer anymore.
Law #2: If a baby can alter the operating system on your computer, its not your computer anymore.
Law #3: If a baby has unrestricted physical access to your computer, its not your computer anymore.
Law #4: If you allow a baby to upload milk bottles to your web site, its not your web site any more. (okay, this one makes no sense)
Law #5: Weak baby proofing trumps what you thought you taught him.
Law #6: A machine is only as secure as the baby is trustworthy.
Law #7: Locks are only as secure as the plastic they are made of.
Law #8: An out of date milk bottle is only marginally better than no milk bottle at all.
Law #9: Absolute peace isn't practical, in real life or on the web.
Law #10: Technology is not a panacea.

Adapted from Microsoft: Ten Immutable Laws of Security [via Mark].

Skype Estonia

You may know that Skype, the P2P telephony platform that is all the rage in early adopter circles, is being developed in Estonia. You may also know that the little country that could is dear to my heart. But you might not know that in Estonia, Skype adoption has already crossed the chasm.

When something big happens in a little country, word gets around fast. Even my father-in-law is using Skype to call us (instead of our Vonage line). Family doctors are using it to set appointments and communicate with patients. I don't have any country-by-country statistics (do you?), just personal anecdotes that regular people are using Skype in droves instead of calls. People are using it for more than saving money with call quality above standard (better than mobile) -- but because the mode of use differs it is gaining a different culture of use.

Some context. Estonia gave a monopoly concession to the state operator for local and international telephony in the process of privatization. However, the concession agreement explicitly granted exception to IP communications. Competition for broadband and mobile operators is relatively healthy; Internet and Mobile adoption rates are among the highest in the world.

Don't be suprised to see Skype-to-Mobile features soon -- and that Estonian article in the above link says they will have a Skype-to-terrestrial phone service this winter.

Oh, as an aside, some people call it E-stonia. Recently the UN recognized it in the Top 10 government websites. A long time ago I helped create president.ee, but that's nothing compared to what they provide today. Most notibly Today I Decide (T?na Otsustan Mina), where citizens can provide direct feedback, poll and track the decisions of the Parliment.

Lobbying for Emergent Democracy

Smart Mobs points to Lobbysmith.com, a marketplace for hiring lobbyists run by a neutral entity: Lobbysmith.com is an unaffiliated, non-partisan e-service designed to facilitate and encourage public participation in political and corporate affairs. Lobbysmith.com is in NO way affiliated with any political party or political interest organization, public or private. There is no mention of who is behind the marketplace, but the policies imply good intent.

This is a key component for making emergent democracy work.

I've written before how emergent pluralism needs to harness institutional (lobbying) and individual (activism) pluralism to allow easily formed constituencies to have influence:

Today the US has an unconstructive balance between Institutional and Individualized Pluralism. Weakened parties reduce longer-term best interest decisions. Lobbying only is effective in highly organized groups on select issues that resonate for deep dedication and financial backing. And where lobbying groups do not achieve critical mass, decision makers rely short term polling of sentiment. The majority of the U.S. doesn't participate in the party system nor special interest groups. This lack of participation results in a disenfranchised public and ineffective government of both long and short-term issues.

If simple tools could decrease the cost of organization as well as enable a transactional norm between organizations, a new form of pluralism could arise. Emergent Pluralism depicts a society whose members who have institutional loyalties to easily form issue groups that have direct interaction their elected representatives and the media.

If emergent democracy is to take hold, its mechanisms for group forming need to leverage how institutional decisions are influenced, not a new form of direct democracy.

Weblogs and other tools increasingly enable group forming, deliberative polling and consensus forming. While adoption of these tools is relatively small, emergent constituencies that use them have proven their ability to influence, largely through the means of individualized pluralism: petitions, shaping media, emailing representatives, activism and facilitating grassroots support.

Loose coupling of constituencies with lobbyists has been just an idea. One notable exception is MoveOn, whose leaders lobby on behalf of its constituency. But having lobbying organizations independent of static constituencies could enable flash constituencies to gain influence on under-represented issues could shift the political landscape. Its already happened with the state-DMCA thanks to the hard work of good people. But if their coordination risks and costs were lower and they could leverage existing relationships with decision makers, democracy would benefit.

Blogrolling On

Maintaining blogrolls (list of links to blogs) is a well-known pain-in-the-arse. The problem is we don't have much motivation besides the pride of a well-crafted blog, your interests change, the URLs and even the names of blogs change. The one list active bloggers maintain is their subscriptions and its the one of highest value -- each subscription is a time commitment to someone, the clearest indicator of a relationship. When I blogged on Radio I took advantage of Jon Udell's channel roll to share my subscriptions as a blogroll alongside a blogroll was of the members of the Blog-Network. Maintaining the Blog-Network is a chore beyond me at this point and it seems to continue to serve a purpose on its own, but its time for me to provide a blogroll representative of my interests and relationships.

So at the bottom of the left margin you will find a blogroll. Posting it made simple by importing my OPML file into Blogrolling.com. Now I just have to get into the habit of renaming subscriptions from the wacky neologism people come up with for their blogs into their names within NetNewsWire. But that's a metadata and cultural issue I really don't want to get into.

The interesting thing is my subscription count hovers around 150. That magical number.

Map of the Internet

The Opte Project claims to have mapped the entire Internet [via Slashdot]

Startup the Commodity

Om Malik writes in Business 2.0 how a new breed of startups are embracing commoditization. I've written before on datacommodities. Not only is the cost of company formation is falling because of the forces of physical commoditization, but it creates new opportunities because of increased volatility and complexity. Smart startups are now proving paths that leverage low-cost inputs with unique bundles, risk management and management layers.

John Patrick on Weblogs in Business

This CIO Insight interview with John Patrick, former VP of Internet technology at IBM on Blogging in Business is one of the best on the subject yet. John gets bottom-up and translates it well for the the top. Read the whole thing.

"Knowledge management wasn't overhyped," says Patrick. "It was underdelivered. Blogs can potentially deliver the grassroots discussions and knowledge-sharing that top-down, corporate-sponsored efforts never could."

...The goal is to improve the leveraging of the expertise within the department and across the corporation...So where does blogging fit in? It's a way to energize the expertise from the bottom―in other words, to allow people who want to share, who are good at sharing, who know who the experts are, who talk to the experts or who may, in fact, be one of those experts, to participate more fully. We all know somebody in our organization who knows everything that's going on. "Just ask Sally. She'll know." There's always a Sally, and those are the people who become the bloggers. And such people write a blog about, say, customer relationship management, and they're taking the time to find the experts and the links to leverage, to magnify what they're writing about. And from those links people can be led to information and see things in a context they might not have considered before...

There is a link to wiki.org in the resources section, but its broken and there is no mention of wikis in the interview. Guess that part of the story will have to get out another time.

Social Software Reader

Contributing to the Eventspace of the Bay Area Futurist Salon gave me an opportunity to go back and dig up some key posts from the past year. An enjoyable exercise I recommend for any blogger. By all means, this isn't an all encompassing reader for Social Software and Social Networking, but some highlights from a personal perspective.

Some stuff on Social Software

• Mayfield: Social Software 12/07/02
  
• Mayfield: Distribution of Choice 2/10/03
  
• Mayfield: Ecosystem of Networks 2/12/03
  
• Mayfield: Social Capital of Blogspace 4/9/03
  
• Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups
  
• Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
  
• Matt Webb: Defining Discussing Social Software
  
• Stowe Boyd: Are you ready for Social Software
  
• GBN/Shirky: Social Software and the Next Big Phase of the Internet
  
• David Weinberger: The Unspoken of Groups
  
• Kevin Werbach: Post-modern Knowledge Mangement
  
• Jerry Michalski: Dysfunctional Relationships
  
• Joi Ito (et. al.) Emergent Democracy, 1st draft, also see Emergent Democracy for links and resources.
  
• Lee Bryant: Smarter, Simple Social
  
• Seb Paquet's: wiki page on Social Software
  
• SocialSoftware on Meatball Wiki
  
• Topic Exchange: for Social Software

Some stuff on Social Networking

• The Blogmap Project
  
• Social Networking Models 3/30/03
  
• Web of Trust 5/9/03
  
• The Network is the Market 8/25/03
  
• The Value of Latent Ties 9/9/03
  
• The Weakening of Strong Ties 9/15/03
  
• The Forrest for the Trees 11/20/03

Bay Area Future Salon

Tomorrow night I'm speaking at the Bay Area Future Salon. Seven PM at SAP.

The Eventspace is here, still contributing links and resources. If you come, bring your laptop so you can play along.

Social Capital and Global Tribes

In response to my post on M2M on Merging Networks and Global Tribes, Lee Bryant asks a wonderful question:

Is the level (or direction) of social capital in a given society in inverse proportion to its propensity to engage in online social networking? Where levels of social capital are seen to be low or decreasing (e.g. US, UK), are people more likely to reach out online? Similarly, where levels of social capital are much higher (e.g. China, more “traditional” societies) do people want or need to make new friends online? In most of the world, peoples communities, “tribes”, etc are given by birth rather than developed by mobility.

I replied in comments:

What a wonderful question. Says’ Law applies: the market flocks to scarcity. Similar to how bandwidth is like a vacume. Networks are markets. Beyond the very human need to be social, in the absence of connections ― nodes are state attractors. With a dearth of connections and an abundance of options to connect, what’s new is the search and transaction cost for forming connections plummets with these services. But that’s just one theory.

What I am not certain of is if more traditional societal structures represent a more heirarchical form with untapped latent potential for the informal network.

Cultural norms provide barriers, such as arrangement or patriarchy, for non-traditional friendship and dating. But the backchannel of connecting online provides ample opportunity to arbitrage and circumvent, at least virtually.

A business network in a more traditional society would be more driven by preferential attachment to existing nodes of power. However, there are even stonger incentives to arbitrage.

You have got me thinking. Boundaries are self-selective. But even in the most traditional society boundaries are transcended from the bottom-up.

The theory of political integration that I subscribe to is neofunctionalism. You can’t force large political institutions and societies to merge. But smaller localized decisions to cooperate eventually result in a e-mergent pattern.

Take the EU. First their was the Marshall Plan and former enemies had the technocratic task of distributing aid. These technocrats formed connections across boundaries, felt accomplishment and wanted more. Functional spillover occured from technocratic to social to economic to political and perhaps military realms (e.g. EMU->EU). Never underestimate the power of initial connections, of early adopters, of technocrats. Even overcoming culture or nationalism.

I'm posting this because I don't have all the answers to this very big question. Interested to know the opinions of expats and members of other global tribes.