Chris suggests using the slash character, '/', as a general indicator of metadata, as well as introducing a number of English prepositions, as what he calls 'pointers', but which are intended as prepositions.

[via New microsyntax for Twitter: three pointers and the slasher]

First, I’ve decided to migrate from encapsulating my metadata in parentheses to using a slash delimiter (”/”), which, for shits and giggles, we’ll call “the slasher”. This saves you ONE character, but hey, those singletons add up!

Now, the pointers. “Pointers” are short words with different intentions. A group of pointers should typically be prefixed by ONE slasher character. You can daisy-chain multiple pointer phrases together, padded on both sides with one whitespace character. There should be NO space following the slasher. Hashtags should be appended to the very end of a tweet, except when they are part of the content of the message itself and indicate some proper name or abbreviation. Normal words that would be part of the content of a tweet anyway SHOULD NOT be hashed.

So Chris is suggesting a sort of fixed syntax for tweets, where non-encoded information would be at the start, then a '/' would set off the back end of the tweet with various prepositions and nouns, and all hashtags neatly stacked at the end. Chris also makes a plea that 'normal words' should not be hashtagged.

The various 'pointers' he suggests are things like 'by', 'via', and 'cc'. A post following these conventions might look like this:

This is history. /via @barackobama cc @chrismessina #election2008

While a more casual twitter might be this:

This is history. via @barackobama cc @chrismessina #election2008

Messina's proposal has some merit, since it could lead to some increase in clarity. But I don't think the '/' character adds much to the inherent meaning of the prepositions, which are, after just English words used in pretty much their usual way. These won't easily pass to other language groups.

It may be that 'via' and 'cc' could be better represented by some shorter microsyntax, one indicating a source and one indicating a target for information transfer, but what I have seen emerge are the words themselves. Various schemes for the use of '>' or '<' seem arbitrary -- which is pointing to and which from the author? -- and nothing consistent seems to have come up.

There is a fledgling use of various characters that set off an original comment or tweet, and a comment attached to that:

This is history. -@barackobama | A great day! #election2008 @chrismessina

I have seen other characters used, like '>>', but the idea is that the original, leftmost part was said by someone other than the author of the tweet, but the rightmost part, following the '|', is the opinion of the author.

I also used the '-' to represent 'by' or 'via' when preceding an @username, which I think is both shorter and language nuetral.

And the 'cc' idea is captured by putting the names of users at the end of the post, which is sort of cc-ish and doesn't require new microsyntax: the '@' is doing the work, really.

One thing that Chris doesn't mention is that I suggested the use of the '/' or 'Geoslash' character to represent geolocation (see Geoslash), and that has been implemented by a few tool vendors, like Nearyoo. With the folks at Twitter hatching their own geolocation plans, we'll have to see where all that leads.

It's clear that there is a real difference between this --

I will be landing in /New York City:tomorrow:8:00pm/ Hope to see you @chrismessina #w2e

-- and the geolocation of where I was sitting when I posted that tweet, which is what Twitter's geolocation is going to capture.

So, despite my avid support for microsyntax.org emerging as it is needed, I think we should have only as much as we need, and no more.

I am among the folks fooling with the new implementation of RT, and it works as advertised. Which means that I don't think it adds much to the user experience. And it specifically does not allow me to add a comment to a tweet that I am retweeting, which is bad. Clicking the retweet never leads to a text experience with anything editable, so the richness of the RT experience is being drastically curtailed.

I guess there is some performance rationale for implementing RTs this way, since the initial tweet can't be altered, and 100 retweets to the same initial tweet don't create a hundred copies, but just a hundred pointers. This may be an implementation that is inherently better for tracking references, for example, but is also inherently worse with regard to communication between people.

I would like to see Twitter implement the RE microsyntax (see A Useful Bit Of Microsyntax: RE), as part of the RT overhaul. A RE -- as implemented currently in Tweetdeck -- is like a RT, but doesn't copy the text of the message. Instead, it has a pointer to the original message (in Tweetdeck this is encoded as a short URL), and then the remaining characters are available for making a comment:

RE http://bit.ly/892d6 I disagree with @gregarious about daylight savings time

Of course, within Twitter, the URL would not have to be exposed and could be part of an internal implementation. But the idea of a RE could be paired with the new retweet as a second tweet, associated with the retweeted message, and then displayed as a pair, like this:

gregarious I really like when the clocks change

about 2 hours ago from Twitter
Retweeted by you
    stoweboyd: I disagree with @gregarious about daylight savings time

Perhaps more interesting would be if a number of other folks retweeted @gregarious' post as well:

gregarious I really like when the clocks change

about 2 hours ago from Twitter
Retweeted by 3
    stoweboyd: I disagree with @gregarious about daylight savings time
    themaria: he sleeps all day anyway
    brianthatcher: I never come out in the light of day

I don't hold out much hope that Twitter will be stop, and to take ideas like these and incorporate into the current plans for retweet. They have gone a long way down a cul de sac, I fear, that will in the long run decrease the richness of our interactions on Twitter. Perhaps the howling from the user community when this is rolled out will get them to reconsider it.

My prediction is that people will revert to manually copying and pasting messages when they want to do something more than just a blind retweet. So we will have two contending sorts of RTs -- classic RT v new RT -- until the Twitter folks get around to implementing something like RE.

Yes, I have created a handful of lists, but mostly they have only a cursory few names in them. But then, I realized that there is a subset of Twitter accounts that make sense to relegate to big static contextual buckets, and to unfollow them. I am doing that with non-individuals, like software companies, airlines, news outlets, and food wagons. Why does this make sense?

1. My interest in what they are putting in front of me is highly variable. When I am in NYC and hungry, I am interested in NYC food trucks. Otherwise, I am not. 
2. Some of these accounts generate a gazillion posts a day: they seem to lack discernment about what is truly important, and of course there is no personalization in Twitter, per se (more about that later).
3. A bunch of what comes through from many of these accounts is retweets of other people saying nice things about them. I am happy that @anairline has made someone happy, but actually I am more interested in when people I know are happy, or sad, rather than @anairline blowing its own horn.

Immediately after I put @mashable into a new list called @stoweboyd/tech-news and unfollowed, a friend of mine pulled something out of the @mashable stream and tossed it over the list-based filter I had created. @sarahkennon acted as what I am now calling a fonter: she 'filtered the post on' to me.

So I now expect that I will diminish the number of accounts I am following, perhaps by as much as one quarter or one third. These will be relegated to lists, which I will open and look at contextually. I will catch up on all the airlines news at once, once in a while, or when I am thinking about travel.

Note that some big news breaking at @jetblue will still reach me in moments, because other people will see some breaking news about @jetblue and fonter it to me. This is the personalization of the twittersphere: the socialization of news through personal connections, personal relationships.

The good fonterers make the best Twitter friends. I will always depend upon the kindess of fonterers.

I would also like to see dynamic agents: on-the-fly lists created by algorithm based on those tweeting about a breaking meme or hashtag. For the moment, we will have to do with static lists as filters, and dynamic agents, real people, as fonters.

Personally, I find Howlett's argument unconvincing, but then I look at it differently. In my experience (and I have been working the field long before E 2.0 came about) metaphors are lies, since they overemphasize some characteristics and leave out others. I don't expect metaphors to be 'true', just to create insight.

Enterprise 2.0 has been a simple and useful metaphor that assumes that Web 2.0 technologies (like contemporary social media, social networking, social tools, and the underlying set of technologies that make up the Web 2.0 model: open source stack (LAMP), web as a platform, open APIs, and so on) can be beneficially applied in the enterprise context. This means the eventual displacement of various enterprise technologies and business practices by new ones, strongly influenced by what is happening and working in the open (not enterprise) web.

Howlett's post caused a minor stir in the E 2.0 corner of the galaxy, including a response from me:

[via Social Business: Why The ‘Enterprise 2.0′ Moniker Is Wrong]

Denis Howlett recently stated that Enterprise 2.0 is a crock, basically making the case that the knowledge management-ish arguments in support of E 2.0 don’t gibe with the way companies actually have to operate, what their drivers are, or what problems confront them. Andy McAfee responded with a not particularly brief or convincing response, stringing together a number of very narrow use cases — like bringing new hires up to speed, or internal prediction markets — and stating that since these problems exist, and since various solutions to those problems are being herded together as Enterprise 2.0ish applications, therefore Enterprise 2.0 is a good thing, worthy of our attention.

I did find a few points that arose directly from Howlett's posts and the resulting debate at the Enterprise 2.0 conference interesting:

• A great deal of the discussion around E 2.0 has gotten bogged down in adoption arguments based on premises tied to pre-Web 2.0 values. The question of how and who should be using social media within businesses or to reach from a business to its customers or markets has been going on for years, to little result. Opposition in the form of endless demands to ROI, pilot studies, and analysis of results goes on, and meanwhile social media is so rapidly evolving that the planning that started a year ago is now totally outdated.
• The functional view of Enterprise IT types, like Howlett, is based on a world neatly partitioned into CRM, ERP, and other functional domains. They are used to this model, much of today's software is based on this approach, and the hows and whys of new webby models for software and business processes don't line up neatly with the nicely square boxes on the systems analysts' graph paper.

As I wrote back in September in that same response:

[via Social Business: Why The ‘Enterprise 2.0′ Moniker Is Wrong]

Web 2.0 as a phenomenon is strongly tied to social tools […] in which the individual is primary, and asymmetric networks of relationships with other individuals form the principal mechanism for connection and information flow. However, this does not gibe with the enterprise obsession with groups: where the rights and responsibilities of individuals are derived from group membership, and these rights are granted by the enterprise.

I think something more significant is at work, and those things called Enterprise 2.0 form only one bit of this bigger whole. The world in which work exists has changed fairly drastically in recent years, and so we are seeing a fundamental reset in the nature of work. On a secondary level, this translates into changes in how people communicate, coordinate, and collaborate, and this, then, leads to changes in information technology and related practices. Note, however, that talking about the secondary effects of these global business and social changes in and of themselves is, from my point of view, not a very illuminating exercise at the best, and at the worst, completely misleading.

In a way, you could interpret Denis’ polemic as making a similar point, but I don’t think that his perceptions are based on the sense of a sweeping change in the world of business, but rather the views that the timeless nature of business operations have nothing to do with knowledge management.

Howlett’s grumping is just some context for my point: ‘Enterprise 2.0′ is a not particularly useful characterization of what is going on with the spread of Web 2.0 technologies and practices in the world of business.

Note that I am a strong advocate for the use of the Web 2.0 handle, despite the various attempts by iconoclasts to topple it in 2008, or Arrington’s theory that a overpheromoned party of cool kids meant the demise of 2.0. I think Web 2.0 is fairly well-understood to represent a set of convergent and mutually supportive ideas — the Web as a platform, open standards, APIs, social tools, fast and low-cost development tools and techniques — that have come to define a generation of Web development and business.

Enterprise 2.0, on the other hand, does not have the same coherence. Perhaps this is because so many of the principles of Web 2.0 are blunted by the command-and-control needs of the enterprise. You cannot state that Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0 for the enterprise because much of what defines Web 2.0 does not easily translate to the enterprise context.

In particular, Web 2.0 as a phenomenon is strongly tied to social tools — social networking, social media, and so on — in which the individual is primary, and asymmetric networks of relationships with other individuals form the principal mechanism for connection and information flow. However, this does not gibe with the enterprise obsession with groups: where the rights and responsibilities of individuals are derived from group membership, and these rights are granted by the enterprise.

This apparently minor mismatch between the individualistic web and the organizational one desired by management leads me to believe that we are looking at the wrong end of the sausage machine. We need to switch our attention to the shifting nature of work itself, and how business needs to be reconsidered in a rapidly changing world (which includes a revolutionary social Web, notably). Toward that end, all manner of innovations, tools, and practices might be evaluated for their utility and impacts, but they cannot be considered hanging in space, in some sort of strategic vacuum.

First and foremost, management must settle on some principles around which work itself can be reworked. Difficult questions must be posed, and deep and principled thinking must take place before tactical software and business process changes can take place. In essence, forward-looking companies will devise something like a constitution and a bill of rights that attempt to lay out a worldview about the purpose of the firm, what it stands for, how it will treat its customers, what is expected from employees, and what the social contract between the company and individuals — employees and customers — is.

So, I have come to believe that this is the place where companies need to focus their attention: socializing the business, not adoption of Web 2.0

I guess it is unsurprising that in Howlett's most recent polemic, he takes aim at the 'social business' heresy that he sees arising:

I’ve argued for years that the notion of anything that has ’social’ attached to its moniker is about as welcome as breaking wind in a spacesuit. I’ve also argued that I’ve never heard anyone ask for some Enterprise 2.0 though I’ve heard plenty ask for ERP, CRM etc. Most recently, the new buzz phrase ’social business design’ has hit the streets. Here’s one definition:

Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.

Its goal: helping organizations improve value exchange among constituents.

Good luck with that one.

Perhaps the panel would have done better had they taken a leaf out of Andrew McAfee’s book. In his presentation about Enterprise 2.0 no-no’s, he says:

Like too many words in the English language, ’social’ has taken on a handful of different meanings. Though most would probably agree that technically it’s an accurate word when used to describe various enterprise solutions, the implications are not always desirable.

“I have never come across a word that has more negative connotations to a busy pragmatic manager,” said McAfee, explaining that he’s seen many-a-boss assume that ’social’ tools wouldn’t help anything but employees talk too much and goof off.

Though McAfee didn’t suggest a new or better word to use (collaboration? communities?)  he finished the presentation with an interesting image choice to illustrate how some managers interpret the use of ’social’ solutions: two dirty hippies hugging it out at Woodstock, surrounded by litter and despair.

[My emphasis added]

At this point I must give Andy McAfee full credit for acknowledging the bleeding obvious. Isn’t that what I’ve been saying for years? The problem for those trying to pimp this stuff is they’re now stuck with two things: ’social’ intermingled at every turn because no-one can think of anything better and 2.0 which roots them at a moment in time. It’s a classic example of bandwagon marketing that looks sexy yet has gone nuts in the process. Crowdsourcing at its worst.

So, if I can try to cut through the incredibly intertwined logic here, Howlett is making this case:

1. The 'social' dimension may be factual (McAfee), since that what is being brought to the fore by Web 2.0 technologies, but it is unattractive to 'pragmatic' (conservative, risk averse) managers.
2. Social might mean a lot of things to a lot of people, and some of those meanings may be unhelpful, despite the consensus around the term in the larger Web community.
3. Howlett doesn't actually talk about the technologies or business practices involved, but just about the attractiveness or unattractiveness of the term to management.

Dennis is joined by others, like Mark Fidelman, in his disdain for 'social business':

I happen to agree with Howlett on these two points.  First, using Social and business in the same sentence scares decision makers in the corporate world today especially with a lackluster economy.  We can use social to describe aspects of Enterprise 2.0, but not lead with it.  In my experience as a senior executive in large and small companies and with my discussions with executive peers, social does not resonate with board members or decision makers with large budgets. 

Second, I don’t see many companies buying Enterprise 2.0 solutions.  Sure they are purchasing solutions from vendors in the Enterprise 2.0 space, but there is not a collective push for an Enterprise 2.0 solution in the corporate world today.  Companies do buy ERP, MRP and CRM because they are succinct mission critical solutions with proven ROI models and case studies.  

We need more groups like the Adoption 2.0 Council and industry analysts like Gartner, Forrester, CMS Watch, Gilbane etc. to create ROI models and to start categorizing Enterprise 2.0 solutions into recognizable buckets.   For example (and I am not an expert on naming conventions) I bet if there is an Enterprise Business Collaboration (EBC) category with well defined boundaries, case studies and ROI models, companies will start to budget for it.

What, more ROI studies?

In the final analysis, this seems like yet another example of paradigm change. Kuhn, in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions, detailed the research that demonstrates that schools of thought fail and are replaced by revolutionary viewpoints exactly when the old theories cannot explain what is happening in new research.

Kuhn also makes the case that the old paradigm -- in this case the conventional establishment IT perspective of functional silos and silo-based business processes -- cannot effectively disprove the new paradigm, and vice versa:

[via Wikipedia]

Incommensurability

According to Kuhn, the scientific paradigms preceding and succeeding a paradigm shift are so different that their theories are incommensurable — the new paradigm cannot be proven or disproven by the rules of the old paradigm, and vice versa. The paradigm shift does not merely involve the revision or transformation of an individual theory, it changes the way terminology is defined, how the scientists in that field view their subject, and, perhaps most significantly, what questions are regarded as valid, and what rules are used to determine the truth of a particular theory. The new theories were not, as the scientists had previously thought, just extensions of old theories, but were instead completely new world views. [emphasis mine.] Such incommensurability exists not just before and after a paradigm shift, but in the periods in between conflicting paradigms. It is simply not possible, according to Kuhn, to construct an impartial language that can be used to perform a neutral comparison between conflicting paradigms, because the very terms used are integral to the respective paradigms, and therefore have different connotations in each paradigm. The advocates of mutually exclusive paradigms are in an invidious position: "Though each may hope to convert the other to his way of seeing science and its problems, neither may hope to prove his case. The competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proof." (SSR, p. 148). Scientists subscribing to different paradigms end up talking past one another.

Here, I think we have a bastion of the old guard arguing that the new ways of thinking are illegitimate, have not been proved, and those that espouse them are crazy. 

I deeply and strongly believe in a different worldview, as I recently stated, on the Social Business Epicenter blog:

[via Social Business Epicenter]

Today, more than ever, management is reexamining and rethinking the basic principles of business: how to innovate and prosper. To that end, managers are looking to stay in step with a changing world, and the rise of the social web in particular.

How should today’s business leverage what is being learned about the social web? Certainly what is going on today is more than just social media marketing, limited to marketing and community outreach efforts. Some of the leading thinkers in this area believe that we are at the start of something much larger than a retake on marketing.

We are seeing a rethinking of work, collaboration, and the role of management in a changing world, where the principles and tools of the web are transforming society, media, and business. The mainstays of business theory — like innovation, competitive advantage, marketing, production, and strategic planning — need to be reconsidered and rebalanced in the context of a changing world. The rise of the real-time, social web has become one of the critical factors in this new century, along with a radically changed global economic climate, an accelerating need for sustainable business practices, and a political context demanding increased openness in business.

These issues cannot be dealt with one by one, but instead approached as connected elements of a new world order for business.

I believe that Kuhn was right: there is no way to logically encompass the new, revolutionary worldview through the terms and values of the old. Which is one of the motivations of leaving behind the Enterprise 2.0 handle: it is too mired in years of argument firmly rooted in the web 1.0 and pre-web world views.

To the extent that a post-industrial or 21st Century worldview has begun to emerge, it is being applied to a new set of principles and practices surrounding the future of work and business. It cannot be judged by the dictates and dogma of the past, as much as the naysyers would like that to be true. We will have to develop a new set of values -- and rules for defining them -- based sui generis in the heart of what we discover, not what we find in the trunks up in the attic, left over from an earlier generation of IT strategy.

Winston Churchill once said, "Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together- what do you get? The sum of all fears." If you collect a group of commentators, just like any Sunday morning news show, you will hear the sum of their fears, all the reasons why not.

I am interested, these days, in spending my time with folks who are rethinking the premises of business, society, and media, since it is self-evident that we have critical problems in all these areas. And it is unlikely that the means that we used to get ourselves into the mess that the world is in, now, will work in getting us out, and into something better.

First time I tried the app, tracking chatter with my pay, @euan, and he and I have have had just too many tweets since we started. I hazard this will be unusable for anyone with a long history, since the tool has to hit the Twitter server to get at the data.

[via interviews.slashdot.org]

7) Money - by querencia

[...]

You've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about money lately. Is there anything going on in the modern world with monetary systems (barter networks, for example) that you find particularly interesting?

What do you see on the horizon with respect to money?

Neal:

Actually, what's interesting about money is that it doesn't seem to change that much at all. It became fantastically sophisticated hundreds of years ago. Back before people knew about germs, evolution, the Table of Elements, and other stuff that we now take for granted, people were engaging in financial manipulations that seem quite modern in their sophistication. So if I had to take a wild guess---and believe me, it is a wild guess---I'd say that money and the way it works is going to be a constant, not a variable.

I have talked to futurists, scifi writers, artists, and all manner of folks deeply involved in looking at money, and in the final analysis, money looks like a constant, not a variable.

There have been some very interesting advances in economic exchange, especially among the unbanked, with the proliferation of low-cost networks, like cell phones. In particular, the possible uses of cell minutes as a alt-cash is promising. Cell minutes can be transferred from one party to another simply by passing along codes: no physical exchange needs to happen, and the codes never have to be on your person. It makes them hard to steal, hard to track, hard to tax.

But the anonymity and trust associated with most fiat currencies make them very resistant to being displaced.

More than anything else, I have come to believe that complementary or local currencies will go nowhere, at least in the presence of strong fiat currencies. Much of the heat around local currencies is strongly linked to 'transitional thinking' as Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.org styles it:

[via Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities? by Alex Steffen]

All over the world, groups of people with graduate degrees, affluence, decades of work experience, varieties of advanced training and technological capacities beyond the imagining of our great-grandparents are coming together, looking into the face of apocalypse... and deciding to start a seed exchange or a kids clothing swap.

Transition thinking seems obsessively focused on coordinating individual actions (like helping people barter their free time or connecting people who want to garden); even at its most ambitious, it generally focuses on building alternative systems (say, starting a local currency scheme) rather than reforming the larger systems that shape life all around us (say, starting an actual credit union or rewriting banking regulations).

My inquiry into the future of money was subsidized by Neo.org, a non-profit whose principals envisioned a great deal of transitional coordination: a digital alternative currency intended to act as a means of lubricating the friction involved in time barter around good works.

200 One Dollar Bills, Andy Warhol

And in a way that is strangely paralleled by Steffen's two paragraphs, above, I become (briefly) involved in the Slow Money Association, acting as a temporary editor of their blog and helping to coordinate a social media policy. My most basic recommendation to the Slow Money founders was that they drop a variety of fragmented activities, and start a credit union. A credit union is a direct way to harness the financial power of a large group of people who share common purpose, and based on the money invested in the CU, loans can be made to members at very low interest rates. This is a lot better, in the long run, than advocating that people should visit farmer's markets regularly, or that the soil is a resource to be husbanded, not washed in chemicals.

I had entered into this project thinking that I would find some magic wand, a spell that could revitalize local communities, increase social capital, and make communities more resilient. The answer to that is not is some alternative currency, or in small scale projects like Steffen's clothing swaps. Instead, we need grassroots activities that can scale into national policy.

We need to scream at the local level about food policy: school lunches, public support of local agriculture, and ending food deserts. But we need to do this in a form that can scale, like credit unions, and organizations where local chapters collate their efforts with others.

So I give up on the search for an abracadabra coming from future forms of cash. It is up to us to redistribute value and exchange, to decide which parts of our world should be outside of economics and which should be in. For example, who says that health care should be dominated by market controls? Why should its dynamics be driven and shaped by making a profit? If we believe in public education, administered by the government and controlled through public means, why don't we believe in public health?

This topic is a bit off tangent for /Message, as well. The digital aspect of new money systems made it seem like a good overlap, but if I were starting this project today, I would have run it at my Ambivalence blog, where I deal with politics, green issues, and society in the large, not just social tools.

Alt Cash isn't a social tool, at least no money I have seen. And until it is, look to me writing about it there, and not here.

The Future Of Money series is sponsored in part by Neo.org

The project is an ambitious one: it seeks to quantify connection and to derive a monetary value from it. Or as it says at the website:

The Whuffie Bank is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a new currency based on reputation that could be redeemed for real and virtual products and services. The higher your reputation, the wealthier you are.

It’s in the same spirit of Creative Commons, an organization that’s changing the contract between our ideas and us; we want to build an open organization that aims to measure and enable the exchange of online reputation.

The value of your Whuffie is obtained from your online reputation by tracking your interactions with social networks and the feedback from your contacts.

At this time, it seems like Whuffiebank just calculates a monthly 'salary' of 'whuffies' based on by whom and how often you are being retweeted. Here's my page:

The interview:

Some highlights:

• Santiago borrowed 'whuffie' as an organizing principle for the service from Cory Doctorow, based on the blurring of social capital and 'whuffie' (also called 'karma' or 'swarmth').
• His goal is to develop a standard way to measure reputation across all communities and social networks.
• His interest isn't fictional, but to dig into systems like Twitter to measure influence, and shape that into a currency that can be exchanged.
• An example, how would WhuffieBank interact with people's lives? Imagine Tom has dedicated his life to the study of Borges. Within that context, Tom would be rated very highly. Others could find Tom who is an expert in that field. Others could use their whuffie to get Tom's advice or contribution to a project.
• I argued that mixing social interaction with financial interests causes problems.
• I pointed out that this system has all the problems that Digg has encountered with gaming of reputation.

I have not seen anyone doing it, but whuffie can be passed around through Twitter like this "WHF # @username", as in "WHF 10 @santisiri" or through the app. Note: I have not been able to get it to work for me, but it's probably me. Also, I would have liked to see a more general approach to currency exchange employed, but that's a microsyntax detail.

I wonder whether this will turn out to be more than an experiment. I'll have to revisit this in a few months.

The Future Of Money series is sponsored in part by Neo.org

[via www.briansolis.com]

The reality is that embargoes are an important and fundamental part of the news ecosystem. They mustn’t lose their stature. As such, it is the responsibility of PR to use them only when warranted and not relegate them merely as part of a day-to-day tactic in the process of PR pitching.

Leaving aside who wrote what recently about embargoes (Brian does a good job of that), I think it's important to look at the basic issue of trying to 'time' the news, which is one way to look at embargoes.

A company desires to get what they think will be the biggest bang from the release of some news, like the acquisition of a competitor or the release of a new product. The old school idea of an embargo is that if a collection of media outlets all push the news at once, then nearly everyone in the company's marketplace will hear the news. It's a carpet bombing approach, with the goal of having news shrapnel reaching the largest number of people.

The question is, does this approach matter any more?

First of all, we have moved to a smorgasbord style of media: people pick and choose want is newsworthy, and are much less likely to all open their newspapers over breakfast, at the same time. So, even if you can line up all the media to print at the same time, people don't read at the same time.

Second of all, and more important, given the world we live in today, what leads to the biggest stories? As Dylan Tweney said during the panel session that seemed to motivate Brian's post, "The stories that get the most pageviews are almost never embargoed stories."

How do the biggest stories break? Well, they do so a little at a time, and then explode after some tipping point has been passed. One commenter talks about a product  -- say a new iPhone app release -- which leads to a pile-on with others agreeing, disagreeing, adding on more ideas. A cascade of interest that spills out into a growing sphere of interested parties. When communication media like Twitter are involved, this cascading is even more clear than more established social media, like blogging.

So it seems to me that companies choose to embargo in this age because they are hoping for a moderate level of awareness of what they are pushing. They have little aspirations for a big story: that doesn't require an embargo. What they want is carpet bombing.

But this doesn't line up with the needs of either writers, who have no motivation to be involved in carpet bombing, where their role is to stay in line and do what every other writer does, or of readers, who are interested in unique stories, or stories where opposing views yield a cumulative insight that's greater than additive repetitions of fact.

Basically, companies that want to use embargoes want everyone else to play highly limited roles while they manipulate the medium to push their message. They want writers to act as a channel, not voices. And they want the average interested party to act like a news consumer, not an active participant in the discourse about products and their utility.

This is why we should drop our support of embargoes, more than any other: they limit us to antiquated and limited roles that don't match our current and future interests. And they don't even serve the needs of the companies that employ them: they are just conventional, a meat-and-potatoes sort of PR in a time of infinite options and choices.

via www.microsyntax.org

OMHE (Open Mobile Health Exchange), pronounced “ooommm” is an open-source microsyntax for medical devices, and other “short text capable” systems. OMHE is used for sending blood pressure, blood glucose, weight, step-per-day, pain levels, and other common information often sent between people and their health care provider. It’s designed to be easily typed on a mobile phone, while at the same time, easy for machines (i.e. computer, applications) to understand. Although OMHE is simple enough for manual human entry, its not always necessarily typed directly by humans. For example, many applications may present the user (human) with a graphical user interface (GUI), but still use OMHE as the underlying data format. OMHE can also be used for “machine-to-machine” communication. For example, OMHE is an output message format suited for medical devices such as pedometers, blood glucose meters, and blood pressure meters, weight scales, and other hardware.

I think OMHE is a good indicator of how machines in the future will be communicating with us, and each other, via microsyntax.

For more information, please refer to the OHME project.

via www.dagerot.com

[via Dunbar's Number isn't just a number, it's the law]

Dunbar's number is 150.

And he's not compromising, no matter how much you whine about it.

Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can only have 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren't cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily. That's why, without external forces, human tribes tend to split in two after they reach this size. It's why WL Gore limits the size of their offices to 150 (when they grow, they build a whole new building).

Ok, slight problem. Dunbar's Number represents the largest stable social group, 150 people more or less, where all the members not only know each other, but understand how each member is related to the others, and the nature of their social interactions.

Clearly, knowing that much about everyone is like the senior class at your high school, or all the people at a small company where you have been working for 10 years.

But Dunbar never states that we are limited to 150 people that we can know, or even know pretty well. Many connector types know thousands of people reasonable well: their work, their reputation, their accomplishments, perhaps even the name of their spouse (if any). It's a well-known human skill.

Our limit is the 150-to-the-150th connections involved in a tight and bounded social network.

I maintain that we can repurpose the space in our head that might otherwise be dedicated to Dunbar, back when we lived in a Dark Age village or in a band of neolithic pastoralists.

So, the rest of Godin's screed has no real anthropological basis:

Facebook and Twitter and blogs fly in the face of Dunbar's number. They put hundreds or thousands of friendlies in front of us, people we would have lost touch with (why? because of Dunbar!) except that they keep digitally reappearing.

Reunions are a great example of Dunbar's number at work. You might like a dozen people you meet at that reunion, but you can't keep up, because you're full.

Some people online are trying to flout Dunbar's number, to become connected and actual friends with tens of thousands of people at once. And guess what? It doesn't scale. You might be able to stretch to 200 or 400, but no, you can't effectively engage at a tribal level with a thousand people. You get the politician's glassy-eyed gaze or the celebrity's empty stare. And then the nature of the relationship is changed.

I can tell when this happens. I'm guessing you can too.

Well, we can't be 'actual friends' with thousands if we use Dunbar's notion of a stable, closed social group. But since most of us are not living in that context, the notion that our contemporary sort of friendship isn't 'actual friendship' is pretty empty of meaning.

What we have is a world of open, unstable social networks. People come and go, most of our friends don't know the rest, and we have incomplete knowledge about nearly everyone we know.

I agree in a small way with Seth: we can't create closed and stable social groups with thousands of people. But that's not what we are trying to do. We are creating 'continuous partial friendship', as David Weinberger called it. Our strongest ties remain strong, in this new world, but we have less of them, perhaps only a few dozen. What we do with the rest of our Dunbar neurons is up for grabs, but the obvious observation is that we are doing something with them: we are creating lots of weak ties with people that we only know in an incomplete way.

I start following someone on Tumblr, perhaps, knowing only that I like some photos he has posted. Over the course of the next weeks or months I learn more about him, and perhaps start following him on Twitter, where I learn even more. He may become a closer friend and we might meet, or I may lose interest and stop following him. I believe it is possible to have hundreds of these weak ties, perhaps even thousands, and to gain something from them.

What is gained through these weaker relationships is not the same as what comes from strong friendships, but then, weak ties are not replaceable by strong ones either. For example, most people meet future dates and mates through weak ties, because they open you up to a wider span of possible heartthrobs, and ones that may be from different locales, neighborhoods, or background. Hint: Ones you don't know already.

Neotribalism isn't going to take us back to the Stone Age. We will be living in a world of open, fluid networks, with an endless flow of possible contacts. The stuff in our heads we formerly used to keep track of kith and kin -- who was in the turtle clan and who could marry into the crow clan -- isn't being used much in the West. We can reorient it to new uses, like keeping a partial awareness -- an 'ambient intimacy', as Lisa Reichelt called it -- of the most interesting thousand or so people we keep bumping into online.