Community, Identity, Reputation, Friends

For online communities to work, there's a need for a trust network to grow within the membership. The advantage that the social networking sites have claimed they could bring to communities is the idea that by connecting to people as "friends" this would imply some level of endorsement between the linked participants. Even if the "friends" have never met face-to-face, the fact that they have interacted to the point where they feel comfortable being linked to each other, has value. It has value for the purpose of establishing an identity through one's reputation, which is how we begin to address issues of trust online.

But too often, people accept others as friends without really knowing much on or offline about the people they are connecting to. This isn't always the case, and I do know people who are quite strict about wanting to know someone well before agreeing to a connection. However, the point being that other people being able to vouch for you becomes more and more important as we develop our online reputations and identity. This always needs to be a consideration when accepting "friends" requests from people online.

What's important to grasp in all of this, is that once connected, people will contact a person's friends when wanting to get an independent confirmation that the virtual interactions are indeed happening with a person who has a good reputation and can be trusted among those who consider him or her a friend. But the system doesn't always work. Where it can fall is in people not understanding the value of community and abdicating their responsibility to vouch for those they consider friends.

Unfortunately, I hit this wall over the past two days with a member on Tribe and it was truly dissappointing. His attitude was righteously indignant when asked to vouch for a friend, as though there was some sort of inquisition (or "witch hunt" as he put it) going on (like I have the time or the desire for such things…oy-vey!). The matter was so simple and struck at the root of how communities need to interact, and he's supposedly a blogger who should be on top of these matters, but he refused to participate. Instead, he decided to go public with the interaction and position himself as the one that was wronged on the basis of some social commentary I made to him on my dissappointment that it appeared that people in Canada seemed to be suffering from a similar level of apathy as has been plaguing people in our own country, in matters of community interactions and responsibilities.

If you're bored and feel like reading the interaction, check this out. What saddened me most about this whole episode is how this blogger decided to go public with this through his blog (where I was forced to respond in his *comments* which are not readily visible unless one clicks to see them) and other channels by yelling "harassment" rather than trying to understand the request for what it was, and working with those trying to make the environment he spends much of his time in, a nicer and more trustworthy place to be…sad.

In re-reading the interaction with him several times, it began to feel like perhaps he was a blogger who needed something to write or make noise about. A pseudo scandal to break, or something. Is this what the blogosphere is coming to…a place where tolerance will no longer be the norm, but instead without rhyme nor reason, people will just spurt out their one sided perspectives for the masses to unravel and see through their smoke? I sure hope not. But for communities to work online, we have to understand the responsibility and the interrelationship this has with identity, reputation and friends.

An awesome posting by John Perry Barlow

Tonight I decided to surf through some blogs I like to keep up with but have been neglecting as of late due to my current work schedule. The closer I got to reading John Perry Barlow's "Barlowfriendz" blog the more I began to get excited like a little kid about to get some candy. Something about Barlow's expressions and how he writes, that inspires wonderful images inside my head and delivers an instant feeling of jubilation deep within me. Today's post lived up to my expectation and was as fascinating and insightful as always. It's just great when people like him see the big picture from the thousands of little pictures all around us, and can deliver that clear translation for the rest of us. With that said, anything that I could come up with tonight would pale next to John's recent experience, so instead I'll leave my blog tonight with a link to his post titled "The Intimate Planet", and the words, "thanks John for another awesome post".

Reading John's post on the heels of Jerry Michalski's Sociate post titled "Reposting Michael Schrage's great essay" is gonna keep me up all night…again :-)

The common thread in these and so many successful stories I have been hearing about the past few months, is the importance of relationships and how important to understand and realize this.

Good night.

‘K, Y Stay Free when you don’t have to?

In my first blog posting back in October 2004, titled "Cialis, Viagra, Levitra…oh-hey!", I talked about the dichotomy between what I will call, for lack of a better term, "sex drugs", and the cannabis plant. Really, it was more about the absurdity of one being advertised on TV and the other being illegal punishable by prison terms, one being made available for men to get erections while the other being deprived from terminally ill people who need some relief from their pain. As it turns out, it's beginning to seem a lot more like it's about sex pure and simple.

So tonight, after a long day into the night at the office, I came home after picking up a thin crust pepperoni pizza at the neighborhood spot, and posted myself on the couch to watch some mindless TV while eating, before getting to a book I've been trying to finish. Didn't take long for a commercial to catch my 'absurdity meter'.

The camera zooms in on an attractive well-groomed woman telling us how relationships take work, how they're not easy. Her significant other sits behind her reading a newspaper apparently ignoring her, if only to prove her point. She then turns to a bottle that she's holding of K-Y® Brand Liquid Personal Lubricant. She tells us all about its gentle warming sensation, which instantly raises the attention of her man with a sly look, as she smiles to us and says, "you see". We get the voice-over saying "discover a whole new world of intimacy", as the happy couple smiles knowingly at each other. If you follow the above link to that site you're also treated to the following line: "K-Y® Brand Warming Liquid is water soluble and compatible with latex condoms". In the words of Kyle Broslovski's mom (from Comedy Central's South Park), "WHA-WHA-WHAT?!!!!".

So let's see if I understand the gist of this commercial by answering a few questions.

1) What's K-Y® best known for?

Being a lubricant.

2) Lubrication for what part of the body is it most famous for?

The vaginal or anal areas.

On #2, it's also known as a jelly lubricant for all sorts of applications, but as far as between a couple, anal sex would likely rank the top vote getter on uses for K-Y®. Which now brings us to the next and more important point. Was TNT allowing an advertisement in support of anal sex on TV during what I understand to be a very popular show, "Law & Order". Holy shit (pardon my language), there was an ad promoting anal sex on TV!!! Whoa!

So what's so amazing about this? Well for one, there are still sodomy laws in several states. But even more, at least half the people (men and women) I've ever discussed the subject of anal sex with in general, have said they would never do it. So will someone explain to me, how this subject makes it into a commercial without any one making a peep about it. No mother's groups trying to shut down the company or the Web site. God forbid that Howard Stearn says "ass" on the radio, and the FCC is all over him, but a large corporation talking about K-Y® goes unnoticed by the great puritan unwashed masses.

It couldn't stop there however. Moving into more of the disgusting side of things, two commercials later came a Stay Free maxi-pad commercial, but unlike the general sort of mild tampon commercial, this was full on about odor and how women can smell badly at different times of the month, and really digging in to the whole freshness and odor thing over and over. Amazing.

So from all of this one might begin thinking that I have issues with these messages, but actually I don't. It's just that in our prudish society I once again find it hard to understand why some things or drugs are OK, but others aren't. The lines are so blurry but yet so arbitrary. It always seems like it's about following the money to find out what's good and what's bad, right and wrong, where of course the corporate powers are good and right ;-) There's an inherent hypocrisy here that I have a difficult time understanding, not so much for what goes undiscussed or uncelebrated (good or bad), but rather for those issues where attention is raised and judgments are made. Why does it seem necessary to bring up the idea for a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages, while not saying a word about K-Y® advertising Liquid Personal Lubricant in prime time on national televion. Why?!

Anyway, this is more about questions than answers, but it just seemed like a point worth raising…again.

Innovation is all around us…

…we just have to have our eyes open and be willing to see it.

It's funny, as this statement is probably common sense to any one reading it, and though it was for me too, I had to rediscover this today. While reviewing some of the members of an insiders' tribe on Tribe, I discovered that one of our developers who doesn't sit too far away from me, and who's profile I decided to check out, E-Nel is really into House music. So much so that on his profile he provides a link to a site he and a buddy created and run called deepmixes.com. It's a totally jamming site for those in the deep underground house scene to put up their work. His visitor and contributor numbers have steadily increased and the growth is purely organic. Both E-Nel and his partner for this site have day jobs, but still find time to tinker and and proof the content and also mix at some clubs in the Sacramento area at night.

What jazzed me so about seeing this site was not just my own proclivities towards house music, but the fact that I had just stumbled serendipituously on this. The idea that yet another member of our team with the dream and the fire of his passion, was driven to develop this, is AWESOME! That's what it's all about. That's what the power of the Internet and the innovation it inspires is all about and why I got into this game back over 10 years ago.

Craig Newmark of CraigsList didn't set out to build a huge biz and get rich. Jerry Yang and David Filo didn't start Yahoo! with visions of grandeur in their eyes. All of those tireless souls that are writing open source software also aren't driven by the almighty dollar. The commonality in all of them is that they started something that they thought was useful for them or someone else independently of anything else. The fact that these things have been turned into money making businesses is more of an ex-post rationalization for justifying them rather than what any of these innovators were thinking when they started them.

In speaking with E-Nel, I was throwing statements out like, "you could leverage this for that" and "what's your traffic like", but that's not what where his head was. Screw that business talk, for him it was all about the music and creating a place where others like him could post their stuff easily and share it with others. It was about community and doing something for them as his contribution based on his skills and ability to run such a service. Great!

I like to think of folks like E-Nel as being the Accidental Innovators. It's a pure descriptor that talks directly to the passion of the innovator who isn't really trying to innovate…if this makes any sense. Their motives are pure, idealistic, without the need for financial or expansion justifications. It just is. Sounds very "Power of Now"ish, but so be it. It's a good thing.

Anyway, if anyone who reads this is into house music, this site rocks. Again, it's http://www.deephouse.com/ and it's worth checking out.

Porch Light’s “More, More, More – Stories of Gross Excess”

Well, here it is only minutes since leaving Cafe du Nord a club in the Castro district of San Francisco. I've seen some awesome musicians there, with the two most memorable to-date being Red Meat (a really unique honky-tonk band with an fabulously clear and together sound, mixed with some really funny lyrics), and Ledisi (a kick-ass soul singer in the style of Erika Badhu and Lauryn Hill). Every time I walk into that club, visions of these two shows and an incredibly wild halloween party I attended in '98, rush into my head and immediately put me in a pleasant disposition there.

All this to say that I attended a story telling show there tonight presented by Porch Light called "More, More, More – Stories of Gross Excess". I was first greeted by a $10 cover charge which in and of itself wasn't gonna kill me, but it would have been good to yield my party days mantra "beware of a $10 cover charge for an event on a Monday night" ;-) But hey, this was Cafe du Nord, pleasant memories, fun vibe, must go with the program. Besides a friend was one of the performers, and that alone should have made this worth it. Right. So in I went.

It was to be six performers armed only with their unrehearsed and unwritten stories, and the mind to deliver these. In order of appearance and per the program, the performers were: Karen Ladson, Garth Steel Klippert, A. H. Weatherman, Stephen Brophy, Chelsea Starr, and Mark Pincus.

Karen Ladson was first up, a voluptuous black woman from the Bronx talkin' about the evolutionary growth of her great big breasts…which used to be bigger than the rack she sported this evening. Much bigger!…double 'D' and growing, though now greatly reduced. This was the tale of a well endowed girl from the age of 10 and the challenges that went with this. She told an interesting story with plenty of comic relief to keep the festive mood in the room, though the lulls in the story were some times a bit longer than comfortable or enjoyable, but she was endowed with a wonderful and unmatched vocabulary, which kind of led me to conclude that her story was not as unrehearsed as had been advertised. On a 10 point scale she got a solid 6 from me, though I would have given her a 7 on the poetic scale.

Next came Garth Steel Klippert, and he discussed several of his neuroses and his compulsiveness to understand TV over the years leading to his abuse of the Internet. Now Garth definitely picked things up a bit, and was more consistently funnier than Karen, while sharing some infamous Richard Lewis moments which the crowd could relate to. He got a more solid 7 from me (every one wants to be the critic :-)

The next story teller was the one that forced me to not only question my $10 investment this evening, but whether my life was worth living long enough to see my friend go on stage…last! Had I had a gun in my mouth, pulling the trigger would surely have followed. Her name was A.H. Weatherman. It was my assumption that story tellers had to be mildly entertaining to be qualified or selected for this event. Well, apparently that was not the case. She set us up with the "this is a story I've been wanting to tell for a very long time" line. I should have seen it coming a mile away. We had to sit through her telling a story about her mother's obsessive compulsive disorder, the messy kind. While, no one says that sad stories cannot be entertaining and perhaps even of human interest, this was like being forced to sit through a therapist session with someone who can lull you to sleep and make you wonder why they would ever share such an uninteresting story with any one, much less a crowd of people who actually paid money to come hear their stories. Am I being aweful?…well it's in hopes that she never does this to any one again, to make sure that any one who might want to see this show and see her on the program, be advised that this is a good time to make sure that you go smoke a cigarette or buy some gum or a few drinks, during her set. It wasn't even a depressing story in the tear-jerker style. It was just a whinny, badly told and very uninteresting story. Now, having said this, a psychiatrist-in-training friend of my buddy's and her sig. other, thought it was a wonderful story…but also admitted to going to see the movie "Rwanda Hotel" on a Friday night ;-) I polled another 6 chics leaving the venue during the intermission and they assured me that A.H. really did suck and that it wasn't my imagination or bad taste…phew! I gave her a 1 because I felt too sorry for her to give her the 0 se deserved.

Sorry for this rant, but I've never had that "kill me now" feeling during a performance no matter how bad it's been. This was definitely a first. Fortunately, next was intermission time and we got a chance to decompress from this lousy story telling. Sadly, that last one single-handedly took away from the momentum the first two performers had built up.

Next came a randomly selected audience member who added to "Stories of Excess" with a pretty funny binging and more binging and then lots of puking, story. In a morbid college boy way, it was a really funny story.

He was followed by Stephen Brophy, a writer on the "Average Joe" reality TV show among projects. Stephen told of reliving his youthful drug and party all day fantasy with some old friends and how it not only didn't live up to expectations but also led him to quit drugs altogether. His story definitely had its moments and began rebuilding the momentum, which by now was well behind the 8-ball.

Finally, the stars were up. First came Chelsea Starr, a hottie dyke stripper, who was doin' it for the money. She was precious in her story telling and in how she confided in the audience. Her aloofness and subtle natural sensibilities made her fabulous. You could sit there and listen to her all night. Sure, it didn't hurt that we were hearing the inside dirt on what strippers are thinking when doing their shows and bachelor parties, but she was on. At this point, the investment in the show had just paid off, I hit breakeven!

So now I knew that the next guy up, Mark Pincus, the founder of the start-up I work for, would at worse drop a notch below Chelsea but not much further (having heard him deliver presentations in large forums, I knew he'd be comfortable on stage), so I tried to keep my expectations low. Sure enough, he was there to tell of the excesses that have come with his successes as an Internet entrepreneur. So blow me away when the guy was actually "fucken" hilarious. Not only did I think so, but the room was rolling. Here, people were being empathetic with a millionaire who was having his Larry David moments of how the U.S. Treasury and the state of California should be sending him 'Thank You' notes for the amount he has been paying in taxes. Drop dead funny. Mark took Chelsea's aloofness to another level, and had that space cadet persona that one can only laugh with. Between him and Chelsea, I would have paid $20 for the night, but it would have also required that we get rid of at least two of the other performers.

And one piece of advice to all you story teller wannabes, tell stories you really think other people want to hear. Getting access to a mike doesn't mean you *have* to tell every one a story, you are allowed to just keep these to yourself and give the mike to someone else, especially if your story is bad and the event is about entertaining an audience ;-)

Check me out!!! :-)

Brad Feld posted to his blog on 1/8 that Quentin was a God. While I agree with Brad’s assessment he also posted a link to the site that tests “Which Pulp Fiction Character Are You?”. It’s pretty funny, and I’m happy to say I totally relate to the character that was selected for me :-)

Check it out…”mmm, that’s a very tasty burger!”

You don’t tolerate shit. The .45 you carry in you pocket is scary, but your words are the real threat, especially when you decide to get Biblical. Try to take it easy, but maintain that edge of yours, which tends to keep people wary in your presence. Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz.

NY Jets vs. Pittsburgh Steelers…man, am I torn :-(

Though I haven't officially lived in NYC since May of '95, and that was for a year, having lived away before that for nearly 11 years, I'm still a devoted Jets fan. Through ugly seasons and uglier ones, I've always stood behind them as a supportive fan. During that 11 year hiatus where I'd only make it back to NYC to visit family, I was living in Pittsburgh, PA during the Steelers' worse years, probably ever. But the community of people in Pittsburgh is awesome and really know how to support their local franchise. It was infectuous to be there and want to be a Steeler fan despite how badly the team was playing. I'm reminded of how outsiders describe Packer fans. I guess in those cold towns, the warmth generated by the love of their team and the community that ensues from that, really makes it a tough thing to fight, and to not want to be a part of.

Hence, I was assimilated into the Borg that was the Pittsburgh Steelers fandom :-)…and I liked it! No one can ever acuse me of being a "fair weather" fan, as I was never there during their glory years. Even with the hope that Kordell Stewart brought, their performance overall was still often dismal at best. But I stood by them. Still had that special place in my heart for the Jets, but so long as the teams didn't play each other, I was safe in the knowledge that I was as much of a Stillerz fan as the next guy :-)

Well, the sugar plum fairy tale is now bursting. These two teams now meet in the AFC quarter-final match-up this weekend and I'm all broken up about it. A therapist would have a field day with the schizophrenia I'm going through right now. Of course, the Jets franchise has helped ween me from their likes by such actions as moving into Giants Stadium and playing in New Jersey. That alone was reason enough to disavow the team entirely. But still, childhood respect is tough to just drop. As of late however, they've played like every possession is to set themselves up for a field goal, not a touchdown. That has been very frustrating to watch.

With that said, I'm going to probably be rooting for both teams to make nice plays so that at least the game will be well fought and enjoyable. My intuition however, says that the way the Jets are playing, it's the Stillerz that will take it in a commanding way. I guess on the bright side of things, this game is a no loose situation for me…"yeah, that's the ticket"… :-)

Digital Lifestyle Aggregators…for a fee?

There's a fine line between being considered a visionary or a madman, and yesterday a madman became a visionary…again! The funny thing is that only one thing to affect his status was…my perception.

Marc Canter, has been espousing for a while now the idea of Digital Lifestyle Aggregator (DLA). One of his arguments has been that given how much people have migrated many of the functions of their life into the electronic medium (the Internet), the need arises to be able to manage these disparate sources of functionality and content. For example, even lay people are now using the photo services offered by Ofoto and Shutterfly, iTunes and iPods have become the craze and this is being accelerated by entries from Real and Microsoft, blogging is also catching on with close to 10M people now reading these and growing, free web-based e-mail services from Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and others are common place (even those who have other e-mail addresses, also have one of these), Evite has become a common way to invite people to parties, online calendars from Yahoo! are also being rampantly used. So what is this telling us…that lots of stuff is going on online, and not just for the digirati, but for every one. DLAs are about helping people manage all of this.

However, it gets more interesting as you follow the growth happening both in the blogosphere and in services like those offered by the company I work for, Tribe Networks. People enjoy being part of a community and enjoy easily communicating and staying in touch with their community. Whether that community was formed online or whether it was already in existence off-line and was brought online to facilitate more frequent interactions.

So a couple of noteworthy items, RSS is really delivering beyond its promise. For example, from Tribe one can do something called TribeCasting and push out to a blog with the list of what communities one participates in (see my Tribes on the right column of this page) with links leading back to those. Listings and friends' lists can also be TribeCast. All of a sudden, the Tribe experience can be used as a means to provide people outside Tribe with a context for who I am and the things I like and do. Finally, the discussions that take place in Tribes can be pushed out and read using any blog reader. One of our engineers has created a Tribe that he treats as a blog (briatribe). There are certain limitations to this use, but it was never conceived as a blogging tool, which gives you a sense of just how powerful this really is.

Now, Canter doesn't stop at the thought of merging these concepts, he goes well beyond this and begins to explain how all components of my digital lifestyle should syndicatable or better yet, any one should be able to subscribe to any one or to any part of any one. So imagine that I'm a voracious music discoverer, always finding that new up and coming group, well perhaps some of my friends want to begin subscribing to my playlists. They don't necessarily want to actively link to my page each day to figure out what's changed, but rather want a place they can go where they track my lists as well as those of other friends, perhaps track a few blogs of deep interest, perhaps keep track of a museum's schedule, maybe even find out when there's a sale at REI, and definitely keep up with your nieces and nephews latest pictures. Even more, perhaps they want to cross post a request to several places (ie. their blog, various discussion forums, and out to their friends).

Well, this is where the idea of the DLA really takes shape. It's the control center for all of this. While I don't like the term control center per se because of the monolithic feel in conjures in my mind, it's the idea of having a tool that helps manage all of these interactions in a meaningful and contextualized way. It's also a destination, that with the appropriate privacy controls, can be set-up to display information about oneself tailored to the audience visiting. For example, provide prospective employers access to my resume but not a view into the communities I participate in, allow my mother to see some of my latest pictures kitesurfing but perhaps not those of me snowboarding off of 50 foot cliff. Perhaps even creating a public personna, and keeping my private info and friends list behind protected areas. Anyway, all of this and more would be possible through the concept of a DLA.

With this said, the madman has become a visionary and now I need to stop my rambling and put some assemblage to what this all means from a business perspective ;-)

The Periodic Table of Cognition

What if you had access to a technology that was dubbed the periodic table of cognition by mathematicians and scientists who had taken the time to deeply review it? What if this technology was the closest thing to software that could identify ambiguous concepts within articles or communications of all sorts, or from disparate types of data (ie. Web sites, Word docs, Research Reports, etc.)? Even take the English SAT and score a 700. What if it could even get at the powerful ideas and issues being tackled by such famous literary works such as “Aesop’s Fables”? What would you do with this, how would you apply this technology in a meaningful way?

Imagine that it could outperform offerings from Verity, Autonomy, H5Technologies, Convera, and others, take much less time to operationalize and deploy, and was available in an open source model. Likely it’s closest competitor technology-wise (though not application-wise) was Applied Semantics, before Google acquired them. Hmmm…intriguing isn’t it?

I’ve had the pleasure of being associated with the team from a technology company named Management Information Technologies, Inc. (aka. MITi) that has produced a superior search/categorization engine named Readware. After much work and many years in the field, their theories are proving to be correct in field use with several large companies in Germany (including an OEM deal with Gauss (the content management company), now part of OpenText), and now they’re beginning to get attention from the academic community in the U.S. They have basically built a natural taxonomy for language that enables the simplification of the complexity associated with traditional semantic networks. Where such systems normally need to maintain connections and relations between all of the words represented in the domain that they’re tackling, Readware has found a grouping taxonomy that enables the connections and relations to take place between the groups of words, not between the words themselves, hence reducing the complexity of the network by two orders of magnitude. This grouping taxonomy goes far beyond the idea of synonyms tables.

MITi is contemplating going open source with Readware as the applications for the technology are varied and they’d prefer to see the technology used than it being held back until MITi can develop all of these. It’s too important of a technology not to share it.

Already they are being approached to have their technology used for compliance applications in the financial services industry, where they can more easily than other technologies, detect improper terms or ideas being discussed over IM in near-real-time and in e-mail. The Readware code is also written very tightly and as a result is very high performing and can be embedded in firmware. This could be powerful in mobile applications. Other areas for which they’re getting attention include recommendation engines and contextual content matching.

Would love to hear any comments or thoughts others might have given how cool this technology is, and how broadly it can be applied. I’m already giving thought to applying their tech along side affiliate programs where one would take product databases and have these contextually matched for content sites wanting to generate more revenues. Kind of like a Google AdSense for specific databases of products rather than the free-for-all currently happening with that program.

Go to Readware‘s site to read more about it: http://www.readware.com/

Plain High Drifters at Club Deluxe on Sat night

The PHD boys were totally "on" at Club Deluxe with their special concert celebrating KC's (aka. "Therm") 40th birthday party this past Sat night (1/8/05). The house was rockin', the music was clean, and the sound in this venue was pristine, with that honky-tonk sound really making you wanna get up and stomp your feet. It's funny, this is the 2nd time I've been to a show here, the last time being with Smelley Kelly and Red Meat playing rather than he and the PHDs. Must be something about Smelley and this venue that really jive well together. I'm just happy I got to be there to hear the sounds :-)