I finally managed to take some time and create a new one. With all the discussion, buzz and spam around and about the economic crisis in recent months one could wonder “where did the crisis go”? Is it because of winter time, is it because of general information overload? The crisis is gone. Suddenly no one even talks about it on Facebook. Well, wait a minute … they didn’t talk about the crisis on Facebook at all.

So I restate my assumptions as the crisis has to go on!

Sujet 3: Die Krise muss weitergehen!

English version of Microsoft ad campaign

Polish version of Microsoft ad campaign

At first I thought this could be a Microsoft problem only. But now it seems as if this might be a general polish issue. As I got to know via Twitter (thanks to @kleinermundvoll) the Medical University of Lublin goes even further and changes the header image on its website depending on the language you’ve selected.

English version of website

Polish version of website

So it seems that polish people in general have their issues with black people. I still can’t believe it. But go and check it out on your own: http://www.am.lublin.pl

– »Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There« by Lewis Carroll –

Everyone of us knows the situation: someone is talking to you in a long and endless flow of words. A stream of thoughts raining down at you. Your conversational partner is so focused on his topic that the only thing you could possibly inject every now and then is a slight »you are right” or »I understand your point of view« or »I like what you are trying to say«. Appreciation or rather say positive acknowledgment of someone’s statements or opinions is one of the basic elements of a conversation. It enables you to express your compliance with your dialog partner as well as asures him that you both are in the same universe topic-wise. What’s true for real life conversations is true for social media conversations as well as micro-blogging too.

A history of appreciation

In the beginning there have been message boards. Starting with – nowadays – almost antique systems like CompuServe, discussion boards and forums could easily be called the first social networks ever. They brought together people of the same interests and enabled them to talk about topics in a group interactively. Someone posted a topic and others could react on it or discuss it, adding comments to a single topic-focused stream. All the essential elements of modern community plattforms were already in use: frequent user generated updates in the form of new topics or threads, comments, user profiles and of course the facility to share external content like links or images (video was not a real »burner« then, so to say). This early implementation of a social plattform is still in use. Just head over to the Apple Discussions and ensure your self of their unbroken liveliness. One significant attribute of them has been and still is the strong orientation towards a long and verbosely type of dealing with topics. Discussions can easily go one for months and even years.

Things started to get a little frustrating. Users wouldn’t respond to your topic, others would take over opinion leadership within your own threads – to make a long story short: your reach would go down. Never mind the nerdy smack dicussion boards were putting on their heavy users and the lack of real analytics (for its still some kind of ego-thing to talk in public, isn’t it? ). Something should change. By the end of the 90s Xanga – being one of the first multi-user blogging plattforms – had grown from little more than 100 blogs to the sheer catastrophe of well over 20 million blogs. To blog on a weblog – or »online diaries« how they were called way back then – had become the new way to publish everything that you would like to share with the world. It was and is like building your self a social network profile without an actual social network being involved. It’s just like a Facebook »wall« without Facebook. But everything else was there: frequent updates in article form or within an RSS feed, comments, etc. Discussions could go on for weeks not months but you had at least a certain amount of control about oppinion leadership. Still there was this ugly part of flipping through a huge amount of comments, reading them, understanding them and responding to them.

Now fast forward to present. Blogs have become micro-blogs and micro-blogs have been incorporated into social networks. Facebook – being one of them and setting some kind of standard – established and standardized new ways of discussion and commenting. You could still enter a nice and lengthy conversation, but why should you want to do so with a more easy and convenient form of reaction: the infamous »Like!«. Suddenly reacting to a new topic (a status update) had become a matter of seconds. Just click one button, and you are done. But with briefness comes a lack of precision, »I like this« being only an inaccurate translation of »Oh my god, how fucking right you are!« or »Your point of view on this is so erroneous, you could easily kill a population with your dullness.«

Wildcard communication

»I like this«, don’t you? Using the more or less generic term »Like«, a user (let’s call him the sender) is heavily relying on the availability of his respondents to share his mindset, his values and inherent assumptions. On the other hand the respondents are also forced to compress whatever they want to say or comment into a single phrase, not having any kind of guarantee that the sender will know what they wanted to tell him. Only if the sender’s and the respondents’ semantic interpretation of »I like this« are overlapping at least situationally will this wildcard deliver its message. The syntactic reduction comes with a small but important downside: whatever your »I like this« means to the sender, it could never possibly stand for »I do not like this«. A fact more and more people are starting to complain about, hence arrogating some form of »Dislike« button. In the meantime there’s only silence. People could certainly use traditional long-form commenting, but – as you may have heard – they don’t tend to do so. A huge amount of all the interaction going on within Facebook happens to be clicking on the »Like« button. Facebook Developers describe the function of the »Like« button as being that of a rating. But how exact and accurate could a rating possibly be offering only one single level of weighing?

Saying more with less. Although Twitter – as another example of a social media plattform – is a low-level implementation of a social network, putting most of the common tasks like publishing images and videos or tracking stats on the shoulders of third-party applications and only implementing the most basic featureset in a uniquely distilled way, it still offers a richer form of commenting or reacting to topics. Of course it limits you to 140 letters (or less, counting @usernames and #hashtags) but it lacks one singular semantic approach to one-click-reactions. One could argue that Twitter offers some sort of expressing the respondents’ compliancy with the »Retweet« syntax – either coming as an »RT @Username« prefix or as a »(via @Username)« suffix. But the very idea of having two different ways of retweeting a topic could be seen as an effort to emphasize on what the respondents are trying to say. Still retweeting a post (without the respondent adding some extra words to the original tweet) could mean a lot of different things, e.g. »I like what you just said.«, »This guy shares my point of view.«, »I confirm your opinion.«, etc. And it is certainly a matter of semantic-interpretational overlap between you as the sender and your respondents again to be able to be sure what someone wants to express retweeting you. Retweeting primarily and syntacticly evolved out of a user-driven motivation to share acknowledgment. With Twitter incorporating it as an official feature users should be aware of the fact cannot be sure about its intended semantics without looking at the context of its situational use.

Saying less to more people. Social networks and community platforms tend to be seen as a huge leap forward in terms of interactivity and interconnectivity. Everyone can talk to everyone else about almost everything using any kind of content to express himself. Theoretically. Again we use Twitter as a role model. It offers you a chance to speak to millions of people instantly. But this promising opportunity comes with no guarantee that anyone will listen to you let alone responding to you or starting some sort of conversation with you. With wildcard communication like retweeting on Twitter or »Liking« things on Facebook all that you will get if someone finally reacts is some kind of blurry and fuzzy rotten tomato of a word. Being no useful answer to your questions nor some honest expression of feelings these wildcards are the preliminary culmination of a trend towards shortening our communication and sacrificing its accuracy in the name of efficiency.

PS.: I wonder how many of you are going to »Like« this.

Further reading

Twitter to make retweeting official with Project Retweet

Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting

Understanding the Name of the Game: Retweeting

Facebook Developers on “I like this”

Wikipedia: Semantics

Sujet 1: Wir sind hier nicht in China!

Sujet 2: Angst essen Freiheit auf.

Stay tuned, as there are more to come.

First impressions

Apple did a lot of changes under the hood. The OS feels faster and snappier over all. I tested the new software on an “old” iPhone 3G, so there are no new hardware features like compass or video camera. In fact the most significant changes to the home screen are the addition of the voice memo icon (which seems – for me – a little bit dull compared to the other crisp icons used for built-in applications) and some subtle changes to the icons of the telephone, iPod and messages applications. As you can see, there is a small magnifying glass to the left of the home screen dots, indicating that Spotlight is waiting there once you flip to the left.

Spotlight is really a great addition to iPhone OS. It’s indexing everything on your iPhone including your media library, your mails and your applications. The best thing about it? Its fast!

Cut, Copy & Paste

I don’t really know how but I managed to live without Cut, Copy & Paste on my iPhone for well over one and a half year now. iPhone OS 3.0 finally enables this user interface paradigm across the board in every application. It works in all textfields, inlcuding input fields like the Safari adress bar. It works in landscape mode and across different applications. It even works with HTML in Safari, preserving HTML formatting if you are pasting the clipping into some HTML enabled input field like a mail composition window.

Lots of refinements

Apple did a good job in pimping what already has been great. Cut, copy and paste also works in the message applications which is subject to some interface refinements too.

The edit mode now enables to to selectively delete or forward messages. Of course sending and composing of MMS are now supported. But honestly – who needs it?

In iPhone OS 3.0 you are finally able to forward a contact from your adress book via MMS or e-mail.

Selecting the e-mail option will add a .vcf file attachment to a new e-mail.

As with all other text-oriented applications landscape mode is now also available within the mail app.

There have been minor tweeks to the telephone application’s incoming and outgoing calls list as well as to the YouTube application which now allows you to log in with your YouTube account credentials.

Voice memo

This new application sports some fresh interface elements for cropping and editing your sound recordings. The recording quality is astonishing and may be good enough to record small sound samples for music production. Of course you are able to share your recordings via MMS and e-mail.

Minor tweaks

Due to the changes in key applications like the message application and the addition of “Find my iPhone” to Mobile Me there have been some tweaks in the interface of the system preferences too. Enabling and setting your prefs for push synchronisation is now hidden in the mail and contacts section and there have been some additions to the messaging preferences.

With iPhone OS 3.0 you are finally able to edit your iTunes account information right on your iPhone.

Conclusion

iPhone OS 3.0 adds some new features and lots of refinements to a platform that is starting to reach perfection. Whether or not you like the changes they will for sure simplify your live with iPhone. I would recommend the update to every existing iPhone user even if you are not using one of the new and shiny iPhone 3G-S models. If you have any questions feel free to ask or leave a comment.

But with an uncountable number of services available at your finger tips the task of managing and keeping them all up-to-date gets harder and more complicated. You want your blog posts to be shown on your Facebook profile, your Twitter updates should flood your blog, your YouTube favourites may also be mirrored to your FriendFeed account and … well, you get the message.

We may identify to major challenges in digital DNA building:

• Ubiquity of content: Your content is precious and you want your content to be consistent and fresh on every single one of the platforms and channels you are using. But the afford to manage separate, un-connected profiles and accounts is unbearable. Hence a method of centralizing the management and updating affords is required.
• Ease of connection: You may use service X while your target group is divided by service Y and service Z. You cannot guarantee that everyone uses Twitter but you want everyone to know about your tweets. Thus you should provide as many interfaces for your visitors or subscribers as possible while not compromising on low-afford administration.

Service classification

Of course you don’t want to limit your possibilities to publish content of all kinds of media (Video, Text, Images). But what is your primary content consisting of? If you are a blogger your main content may be text oriented. As a photographer you would naturally publish images with some textual descriptions or essays now and then to accompany your photos. A video artist would heavily rely on moving images platforms (like YouTube or Vimeo) to get his content out. Defining your primary source of content is the first step in building a hub. It is the central part of your digital DNA. The one platform that delivers what is most important to you – your own user-generated content. This could also be your Facebook profile or your Twitter account. It all depends on what you have to say/share.

Social media lives from interaction, discussion and exchange. Exchange and discussion can take place on your blog, your Flickr account or your Facebook profile(s). Again – the possibilities are endless. But you should decide on which networks and platforms you want to focus. Which of them are you on your own using regularly and with passion? Where are your best-equipped profile pages located and where are your friends? Take your social networks and platforms and make them your social substrate. You may use some criteria in your decision:

• Credibility – as a key driver of digital DNA building – results from your ability to communicate with friends in a natural, dialog-oriented way. Real-life contacts (i.e. linked friends that you also know in real life) can be a precious substrate for your communication, as they are more likely to share and re-publish your content.
• Connectivity results from the interfaces a platform provides. Facebook for example offers a broad variety of interfaces to all kinds of services. XING will open up in that direction with its move towards Open Social. If you can manage to integrate your social network on a technology side, this will immediately reduce your update affords.

With syndication services (e.g. FriendFeed, Ping FM, etc.), RSS integration, Plug-ins for Wordpress and other social software offerings you can then build a transportation layer that will take your content even further. This layer also offers users of other platforms the possibility to connect with you or your content. It is also the primary foundation for all sorts of viral activities as it will enable you to seed content in a wide user area. The transportation layer heavily relies on integration on the technology side. Embrace open APIs, industry standards and inter-operability.

Building a hub

After defining your primary source of content you should start to build a hub out of it. Let’s take the example of a multi-purpose blogger. Use your blog to regularly publish articles on selected topics. Integrate features for social sharing. Start a twitter account and tweet your new blog posts with interesting questions around them. Of course you won’t only tweet new blog posts. Embedding your Twitter account in your blog gives you the possibility of updating both services at once. The same goes for Facebook or other social network services. Integrate them. With RSS and syndication services your blog will shortly become the center of your digital DNA. This is what the term »hub« stands for: It integrates your various social services but builds a strong foundation for your readers, followers or subscribers to get the »complete picture«. Your hub is where they can come back to after having read some interesting tweet or Facebook status update. This is where you catch them. This is where only you rule.

1. Use technology

Use the best available technology. In every aspect of your geek life. Use best hardware combined with perfect software. Because technology helps us to get rid of real handy work. No weals or scars any more. Devices render communication (with friends, family or whoever) an afford-less experience. They are the hammers and ambosses of post-modern post-industrial mankind. Let yourself be a glowing piece of metal and become a sword. Ah … never mind. Just go ahead and use Apple. You can always safe money shopping in their refurb stores. They offer stores for Macs as well as for iPods and other devices.

2. Manage your personal relationships

Clean out your adress book regularly. If you haven’t called or mailed someone within the last 120 days … delete this contact. No mercy. Don’t let your contact zombies be the swamp in your iPhone. Heavily rely on your own attraction. Hence surround yourself with people who feel your gravity and cannot resist contacting you. This will even further shrink your afford communicating with them. But be sure to found an inner circle. This group should include your family members (for you could always expect help from them) as well as the few friends that you are willingly and on purpose stay in contact with.

You should get managed the contacts in your various social networks too. Make use of privacy features to selectively open up your personal information, your updates, your tweets to individual and specific groups of people. This is also a great opportunity to cut out your colleagues and co-workers from your daily update-hell and eliminate any unwanted eye contact with the more confidential parts of your photo library.

3. Take your time

Unless you get paid for it … try to let go of your Twitter account or your Facebook profile for a few days a month. Don’t panic. They won’t stop, they won’t un-follow or un-friend you immediately. Enjoy the silence.

4. Trash your bottles

Every time you buy drinks in bottles (e.g. beer) and pay more because of bottle deposit, trash the bottles after consumption instead of returning them to the shop. There are poor people out there. But you don’t have to have to pay donations. Just commit your bottle deposit to them. This will again make your life easier because not even have to think about returning bottles to shops anymore. Call it social-responsible pollution or SRP.

5. Eat some sugar

It will keep you going.

How would you feel if you are the (co-)inventor of something rudimentary as USB? And don’t miss this other great video of the campaign. It is some kind of ironic and tells us about how you could do the press call for the “world’s smallest micro processor”:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Success is a number. If you can’t measure it isn’t worth the afford. But what number do you look for? How can success be measured and what does it look like in a social media context?

The small-world network

A small-world network is a network in which most nodes can be reached by a small number of hops, thus making it easy for users and/or consumers to go back to the original source of an information and evaluate its authenticity. People trust information from friends or colleagues. They do not trust information from anonymous sources or from brands pushing out their messages without listening to consumers. This concept of perceived credibility and the fact that perceived credibility is directly related to the degree of node proximity within a network leads to the conclusion, that communication in a social media context and thus success is mainly driven by two key factors:

• Do users feel like the social network is extending their real life in a useful way? This may be the key factor behind platform stickiness. Thus a sticky and attractive platform is more likely to catalyze successful communication.
• Is it easy to copy or re-establish connections between nodes that do already exist in real life? This would create multiple sources of information that are of a high perceived credibility to a user. With many seemingly credibly information sources that spread the same word, communication is more likely to be successful.

What separates social media and the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon from the ancient days of interactive communication is the fact, that platforms and networks work as an extension to your real life contrasted by being a second, virtual world to live in. Social networks are built by a deeply intrinsic motivation to stay in touch with people you already know well from real life encounters or – and that being postulated as the main force behind cloud communication services like Twitter – an extrinsic motivation to get in touch with people you would like to know better in real life (see also).

Both motivational models share a common denominator: the real life part. A social network without a profound effect in or a strong push from real life will not satisfy users. Building successful communication strategies for social media should therefor take this into account and try to bridge the gap between reality and virtuality.

It’s the reality, stupid.

Is it possible to measure success in an objective and analytically sound way? Are there any numbers, any key performance indicators to the apparent success of communication strategies in social media? What about followers? Ashton Kutcher is followed by a rough number of 1.9 million users. Does this make him successful? Ashton Kutcher has already been more or less successful as an actor. Isn’t his status as a real world VIP directly influencing his ostenisve success on Twitter? How could you translate his virtual »success« into real-life context?

1.9 Million people reading your thoughts is not more or less a success than one single person reading your thoughts. One single person actively executing what you order, actively promoting what you have to say in real world should be counted more successful than even 3 million people passively drooling to your info trash.

You could argue that success is not about real life effects because its measurement is roughly the same as with traditional communication. Hence you could go on counting clippings in different blogs, count mentions on profiles or on Twitter. You could also observe on the spreading behaviour of a viral clip. But this is all virtual. It is the reality, stupid. A viral clip spread across thousands of websites, blogs and video portals should – and that is it’s only legitimation – finally pay off in terms what effect it has in reality.

By any measures

Of course – we should not let go on measuring key performance indicators. Visits, hits, followers, spreading paths, dynamic network analysis – they all provide meaningful and important insights into user behaviour and the dynamic structure of communication, it’s »flow«. But what it all boils down to is, that you shouldn’t plan your communication strategies around what numbers you want to reach. Plan your strategies with the effects in mind that you want your communication to have in reality. You want thousands of teenagers to wear your logo on their shirts? Fine, than go, find a strategy that makes them do that and don’t mind how many people will follow you or your corporate profile on Twitter.

Put into simple words by a friend of mine: »A million people jumping out of their windows after you shut down your MySpace account – this is success.«

• Publish images showing your friends in crappy situations (wearing nothing but underwear or drinking liquor out of giant bowls – the possibilities are endless) and link every single one of them with the correct people. This works even better if you promised your friends not to publish their pictures in advance.
• Spam their profile pages with endless amounts of useless status updates for every second of your life. Usually this takes 300 to 400 status updates – a day.
• Link their profile pages or other private information to dating platforms or – even more efficient – set up a profile for them on the most disgusting or perverted dating platform you can find. And then, try to make out dates between your friend’s boss.
• Get yourself a secondary Twitter account named after one of your friends. Boy, in the right hands … this could hurt!
• If you find yourself trapped and unwatched in your friends apartment, install some webcams here and there and set up the hottest YouTube channel ever.

This should work, I think.

Certain overlay dialog boxes are blocking the interface. Rien ne va plus. Until recently I switched to Firefox to edit my blog posts. But this was increasingly not fun. So I decided to look behind the bug and it seems that the Safari 4 beta is using a buggy build of WebKit, the underlying rendering engine of Apple’s browser.

Hence the solution to this problem is quite simple. Just go to nightly.webkit.org, download the latest nightly build of WebKit, install and never use FireFox again.

I’m still not sure what I should think about it. Countless (well, to be hones, not that “countless”) videos without any apparent way to search or filter. Just mindfart after mindfart. Like this one, this one or this one.

Is this the future of YouTube? With premium content getting banned from the portal (like it happens with music videos in Germany) all that’s left will be crappy profanity. An interface as stupid as its users its content.

What’s it all about?

Polluted communication is the term for information that is either unsolicited or sent by an unknown or at least not well-known communication subject, i.e. sender. Polluted communication not only relates to the information being transmitted but also to the dynamic process of exchanging information. It usually includes sending or receiving information with an half-life equal or smaller to 10 seconds.

There is nothing bad with polluted communication. But we should use this force wisely and with responsibility.

The initiative

Nothing demonstrates the concept behind polluted communication better than Twitter. You can go on for hours reading more or less senseless information and mind regurgitations. If this is what you are looking for … fine. But don’t expect everyone else to follow. Don’t expect anything. The purpose of the initiative is to build sensitivity for cases of polluted communication and for the occasions where users are made to believe they are using some innocent services while on the other end of the chain they are tied into a web of data warehousing and customer communication analysis.

Per se this isn’t that bad. It opens up your world to the world of others and it enables you to discuss thinks public.

But … you should know what you are doing. To inform people about the technologies and communication paradigms they are currently using is the motivation behind Please Twitter! The Initiative for Polluted Communication. Our first action is a fake Facebook quiz informing people on Facebook about the fact, that they are granting some unknown developers access to their profile information whenever they are doing a quiz.

You may check out the quiz here or join our Facebook fan page. And there is more to come.

So what, you ask? Well, just go on and use social media technologies and user generated content. But be aware that you are communicating with a lot more people than you might think. You might know them or you might not. But what it all boils down to is, that you should use these technologies with wisdom and respect. Otherwise you won’t only receive spam but you are becoming spam on your own. Happy polluting.

“Dies ist ein großer Ort. Ich möchte hier noch einmal.”

Re-translated into english language it says something like “This is a big place. I want again here.”

Of course it seems to be a little too much to expect correct German language or at least correct translations from spam-bots.

There is of course an official interpretation as to what people mean by 3.0ing the web. They usually reference the semantic web concpets out there. Semantics in web technology often relate to a certain amount of added meaning that glues together otherwise unconnected and wide-spread singular objects of information to a cluster of wisdom referenceable in natural language.

Instead of typing a generic search query into the search bar of Google, tweaking its efficiency by using logic operators like AND or OR, people should be able to send requests shaped after how they think. Instead of managing the question “How do you search for something?” people are supposed to focus on the “What are you searching for?” part in a semantic web environment.

Semantic search engines more or less become a generic meta-browser, drawing information from different sources, connecting it by meaning and presenting a cluster of knowledge to the user in a clean and transparent way. Be sure to check out the Freebase Parallax (Christoph, thanks for the link), an open source project trying to reach out for this new kind of web experience.

Instead of searching for “European Union Members” on google you start by typing “European Union”. Afterwards the Parallax will present you a number of possible alternative contexts to surround your search, like e.g. “Member States”. After adding “Member States” the interface of the Parallax will sequentially adapt its interface to present more complex associations and contexts to your initial request. You could even start to visualize your results on a map, defining charts and statistic analysis.

At the moment the interface is far from being intuitive. But an intuitive and usable interface seems to be a killer feature to semantic web applications.

Another approach to semantic applications is Ubiquity. A project by the Mozilla Foundation. It’s essentially some kind of browser plugin that gives you the power to work with information showed in your browser in a new, direct and semantic way. Let’s say you are searching for movies that are showing this coming weekend. After selecting the search results of interest with your mouse you could enter “map this” into the Ubiquity interface, resulting in a map representation of your search results withou having to launch Google Maps or another geo-mapping service. The official project video gives you a glimpse at what it’s all about:

On Twitip I came a across an interesting article by John Goalby basically arguing that the way we interact with Twitter and other social messaging tools will – in the years to come – replace the current paradigm of search engines. Entering your search query into Twitter and receiving context-sensitive direct responses from other Twitter users could be seen as a new kind of search engine. A social search engine with every single user representing one processing unit.

At the moment there are still some uncertainties to that kind of search engine as to how long you have to wait for your results (remember … we are talking about people. 100% availability seems to be utopian from that point of view). There is also no guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS) involved in querying this human search engine. Hence one can never be sure if the resulting information is completely dumb and unrelated or if it is a precious piece of scientific expertise to name it.

But the implications reach further. This Twitter-Google analogon is founded on one simple axiom: people being not much more than information processing units woven into a worldwide grid of information clusters and workstations. Am I the only one who is forced to think about this:

Seeing Twitter and it’s brothers and sisters as a legitimate replacement to the traditional search engine concept also implies that we explicitly accept the chaos of the web. There is no FAT32 or NTFS of cyberspace. Information is stored chaotically across the web as soon as you lift your view up from some standardized transport and infrastructure level.

The future of the semantic web? Maybe it is some kind of meta operating system. An operating system for the web. Translating our queries into a chaotic pool of information, while this system itself is capable to build new connections and retrieve additional refining information on its own that – in turn – might or might not be of interest to the user. So the web itself becomes some kind of soup-like file systems presenting no apparent arrangement and being only accessible by search queries instead of a traditional path and address structure.

Have fun reading/viewing!

Be sure to check out the complete photoset on Flickr.