In case Amazon cleans it, that is a product for a ‘steering wheel desk.’  Clearly a horrid idea due to inevitable misuse.  But the remarkable thing is that, of 287 reviews (when I clicked on it) every single one in the 5 pages I skimmed was completely tongue-in-cheek and sarcastically humorous.

For example:

“…loved my Laptop Steering Wheel Desk so much I got one for my 90yr old mother. She is an avid crossword puzzle fan and now she can work on them while she is driving back and forth from bingo at the senior center…”

“…great! I use it as a “mini-bar” when the friends and I go out to the bars. I can quickly fix multiple shots of tequila for myself and the friends as we drive from one bar to the next…”

—–

287 reviews.  All consistently tongue-in-cheek.  Now I recognize that its entirely possible that some honcho over at 4chan dreamed up a campaign… but if that isn’t massive coherent behaviour (and humorous!) I don’t know what is.

(I’m pretty sure they took down the review about the male gigolo already.  Or it’s buried.)

Anyhow, what I find interesting is how ideas like these gain traction.  I first came across VRM in the beginning of this year, and its been around in its current incarnation since 2006 or so, I believe.   Not a whole lot of coverage had been devoted to it, outside of the interested in the media and blog sphere.

Then I see VRM, and the ideas it spreads, start popping up in other places, as illustrated by Doc’s post and others.  I even see business models that have similar concepts.  It was also heavily covered at a recent conference.

Doc is a far more eloquent speaker on the subject of VRM than I.  What I wonder on seeing that is, how do potentially revolutionary ideas  spread?  Evangelism and quality, sure, but how do you create widespread distributed change in a repeatable, or at least manageable fashion?  We are a far more complex and distributed society than we were during the revolts of history, or even the protests and rallies of the middle of last century.  An immense amount of pressure needs to be exerted to influence the institutional forces of the world today – at least in a meaningful fashion.

Not saying it can’t be done.  The effect of a good idea and persistent evangelism is enough to make an impact, as shown above.  But the days of rallies and focal media channels are ending, and in the noise of a society where we all have a voice I have trouble seeing how to fight institutional forces.   This is a problem when the powers-that-be – governments, corporations, cultures, and economic forces – may not be on the right track.   Instead of a globalized world, are we turning into a highly fragmented, isolated world?

————-

In other news,  if anyone else would like to get involved in the WebCoherence Project,  let us know.  Heeman has been busy at work, and far more of my writings and interests don’t fit into the ‘coherent behaviour’ framework.  Interested in highlighting oddly synonymous behaviour on the web?  Let us know.

Anyhow, a recent news story came across my consciousness. I don’t recall which one, precisely – let’s say it was the balloon boy thing. Now, I have a decently established methodology for learning about what’s been going on, at least things that I care about. Generally, I don’t care about the balloon boy thing. General news falls pretty low in my process, I’ll admit, but I noticed the balloon boy thing, and one thing about it stood out. Almost everything of ‘general news’ that I’ve noticed lately I didn’t notice from the internet news services, or twitter, or my RSS feeds, or the paper on the tube.

So what do Ted Kennedy, Michael Jackson, recent US football scores, the balloon boy, the old guy on the Tube, and other general news stories have in common?

Facebook. People talking about these stories on this bizarre misanthropy of a social networking site, one that doesn’t quite seem to know what it’s purpose is. And I’m not an avid Facebooker, nor do I track down history streams (whatever they’re called?) when I don’t log in for a couple days.  Yet I still noticed all of these via my friend’s ramblings on Facebook.

So – I end up with heavily filtered, likely inaccurate pictures of what’s going on of general import. Once or twice was understandable… but lately its been a trend. Are we creating a method of social news distribution that is more focused on inaccuracy than accuracy? Sure, we can see what people care about – but people are going to come to rely on this, something the opposite of journalistic distribution.

Opinions?

*On the subject of Twitter – yes, I could learn of things like this from twitter, but for whatever reason I find twitter tends to carry more professionally relevant information. I can think of a couple reasons out of hand, but that’s not the point of this post.

…
Erm.  Incoming ‘information.’   And we got to discussing how we processed these inputs.  In particular, the individual methods we used to filter and sort out the gleam from the dross.

Before I go on, please note, I’m not talking about spam here.  We all sort that out to varying effectiveness with our spam filters.

I’m really just referring to the amount of input your average digerati tends to (chooses to) process.  It reminded me of how I approached a recent situation.  I had to contact someone, rather urgently, as I had forgotten to RSVP for an event that night that I needed prior permission for, which was then two hours away.

I chose to email two of their email accounts and send them a tweet.  I did not call them, despite having their phone number.

Let’s dissect that.  I saturated their email and primary digital input method (twitter.)  I did this because I knew they checked those, and yet at the same time did not feel my lack of initiative justified interrupting them via a demanding attention mechanism.

Ignoring the huge degree of choice and personal preference exercised there – what if I hadn’t known?  How did I know this person would check their email or twitter?

…

What the information saturated among us are developing are our own personal set of information processing heuristics.  Each person approaches this type of thing in different ways, reads different info, and finds different methods of contact socially acceptable at any given time.  Worst (best?) – these standards are *all* individual.  Without a personal degree of knowledge, something that doesn’t scale over time or quantity, we can’t know the best way to contact people.

So this brings us to the new standard for personal information management.  A very… individual standard.  How do we know how to contact our (distributed) friends as distance continues along it’s path to zero?

As always… just a point for thought.

What’s significant about this is not that poor infrastructure is being put into place with government money. Sadly, that in itself is nothing new. What is interesting is that the security-focused folks at SANS have an insightful observation, especially coming from security practitioners (speaking as one myself, there are perceptual limitations in our community.)

They are saying that this ‘insecure’ meter can very well trigger a large amount of economic stimulus, with new jobs being created (meter replacer, etc,) continual income streams(replacement upgrades,) and so on.  Sure, this will impact the consumer – there is already is proof-of-concept, that these meters can create a large blackouts that can then self-propagate – but on the bright side, the savvy customer will probably figure out how to make his, and his neighbors, meters free without identifying himself.  (It was a hacker who made that statement, I swear!  Look, it’s not just me!)

Wait, is this good or bad?  And for whom?  The economy, power company, manufacturer, consumer?

This is yet another clear example of an unintended consequence from a ‘modern-looking’ innovation. What else is being rolled out in the first waves of this so-called ‘ambient intelligence’ environment?

However, it’s time to get back in gear. (At least for a week, then I go to Greece (;  ) I have a long overdue piece that I am to write about today.

Some time ago I was talking with Ian about coherent effects on the web, and I brought up the Slashdot effect. To my amazement, he had not heard of it – as any good geek would think, I thought that it was universal among tech types. So I’m writing about it here – not to illuminate the many of you who undoubtedly know about the Slashdot effect, but to further explain what ‘coherent’ behavior is.

The Slashdot effect is, in short, redirecting a massive crowd of internet users to a specific site, spiking traffic and loading the destination server, especially in these days of dynamic pages. It is so named as the notorious geek site Slashdot was the first to consistently reproduce this effect, often bringing down web pages or servers completely.  More info here.

Intro done, so why am I saying this?  To explain coherent behavior yet again.

This is a perfect example of direct behavior having coherent effects.  It is intentionally funneling the massive hordes of the internet to a specific site, not through malicious hijacking, but through common interest and community.  The effects it generates (traffic spikes, down servers, instant sales and reputation) are in a large part both emergent and unplanned.

The Slashdot effect was happening shortly after the site was launched in 97. It’s “community” was solely tech-savvy geeks, nerds, and programmers, yet they could knock down small-to-medium size servers with nary a problem.  Nowadays, the Internet-savvy population is much greater in volume, needing a much smaller interest profile to generate critical mass.  Most internet users are not aware of Slashdot, digg, the blogosphere or anything like it, but they are quite capable of joining (or creating!) a coherent effect.  These effects are not studied, not planned for, and are capable of astounding divergences.

Why aren’t we watching this again?

This morning I was browsing my feedlist (nevermind why I was up in the AM, I assure you that it’s not something I care to repeat (;   .)  At the end of a post by a useful but ad-heavy site, I got a distorted image, which turned out to be a phrase.  Quick investigation revealed that it was a Google Adwords ad – turned to image, and then mutilated by my feed reader – Google Reader.

So, Google Adwords, meet Google Reader.  If we can’t trust Google to talk to Google successfully… what else?

Reading today’s xkcd popped a thought into my brain.  The ‘alt-text’ (see below for an explanation of the jargon) on the comic referred to the glut of … “enhancement”… remedies peddled on the web.  What if, in other situations, there really were phenomenal deals out there?  Nigerian 419 scams that actually were real?  Products and inventions that could solve the world’s problems, but are drowned out by the noise and spam of herbal remedies and get-rich-quick schemes.

How do we get through the noise to uncover the gems, which usually have much less promotional power than the hordes of spam zombies and schemes, to actually make them  noticable?  Get people to treat them as relevant?

It’s a thought.

(FYI – all xkcd comics have an ‘alt-text’ that pops up when you mouse over them.  That’s what I refer to.)

Flash mob pillow fight

So far on Web Coherence we’ve been exploring many different phenomena.  Web vigilantism, twitter clatter, the trail of online activity, and some of our earlier work on email spam exploration – that we still want you to perform, by the way.

But that’s what it’s been about so far – exploration.  We have talked about the phenomena, and gotten a few of you involved in the conversation.  But we haven’t taken the other part of this story to fruition yet.  And that is the role of the active web ecologist.  Part of our mission is to do more than just comment on the coherent behaviour that comes out of the web – it is to study it actively, to use the massive resources of our activated minds to see really what is going on.  And of course, maybe we can give these web creatures a little prod from time to time, just to see how they react!

So what does this mean?  It means we want you to participate.  Read our experiments, and send us your data – we promise that even if you accidentally give us something of value (like your IP,  name, email address, etc.) we will not use it or keep it.  Suggest your own experiments – what we want is kick-start a community of self-motivated ecologists who think this sort of thing is cool.  Those who think that if, one day an internet-flash-mob of ecologists all decide to check certain preferences in snazzy-web-retailer-A’s marketing profiles, it would be cool to see what the reaction is, how things happen from there.  How do we as individual humans, acting in a coherent group (a mob!), affect the internet?

But to get there – well, it’ll be a long journey.  So sign up – become a web ecologist.  Propose experiments, listen to ours, send feedback, spread the word.  We want to tweak this internet and see how it reacts – it is not just the commercial world’s creature anymore.

But this whole twitter-during-conference thing is an interesting phenomenon.  On one side, it’s rude – typing instead of listening, talking about the speaker as if they aren’t even there – and yet on the other side it creates a whole backchannel of information.  Sure, there are the usual idiots – you can’t fill a room with educated geeks, lawyers, and businessmen without finding some are actually 4-year olds once you give them anonymity – but it serves it’s own niche, and has it’s own culture.

I mean think about it.   By participating in the #communia hashtag, I met, virtually, other twitter users who follow the same topics, and now have a greater source of noise – I mean information with which to use.  These conventions – hash tagging, tracking by subject, forming a backchannel community of shared knowledge to be referenced later – all came together through the designs of users, not admins in the ivory office of tweeting.  And further, it’s become pervasive enough that it has been recognized as socially acceptable, not rude, and papers exist on how to maximize the microblog backchannel!  This is despite the heckling!  Emergent phenomena indeed.

And to what effect does this have?  It depends on your point of view.  I’ll say that in the afternoon, when most attendees lost internet access, I found it much easier to concentrate on the speaker’s content and not what my fellow attendees were saying.  But, I also was not gaining the oft-cited value of what the other people felt was important – and what sucked -  through their comments and what they chose to broadcast to their personal twitterstream.

Indeed, if I really wanted to get technical I could go in and see what the different types of twitter ‘animals’ there are… or you could.