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?

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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.

You wont need all of that anymore. I have recently come across a website that allows anyone to hunt for personal information at a single click. The website hosts a free to use service which gives information about any person just on the basis of “firstname lastname” and results in presenting a whole load of information containing photographs, email addresses, youtube videos, biographies, books, blogs, news articles, IMs and even social networking profiles including Facebook, myspace, Twitter, Linkedin and many more… The search results are aggregated from a plethora of common and uncommon search engines, social networking sites, blogs, news channels, ecommerce websites, photo album websites such as Flickr and Picasa and hundreds of other websites that you wouldnt have even heard of.

The website is 123people.co.uk. This afternoon, I tried putting in my own name and I was shocked to see quite a lot of my own information being presented on a single page. I would recommend that you search yours and check if your information is being correctly displayed?

If the website shows your accurate information as results, don’t blame your parents and complain about your unique name. The results you see on 123people.co.uk are fruits of your activities that have created information on the web which is now aggregated for anyone to spy on you. If you see too much information being displayed and would like to get rid of it, think about changing privacy settings of websites that are contributing to your information being displayed.

Just to let to know, several web ecologists at WebCoherence are working on finding solutions to these problems of personal identity management on the web. If you are willing to participate and contribute in our solution finding exercise, please write to us at webcoherence [at] gmail [dot] com.

In the meanwhile, please do leave in your comments and suggestions based on your findings and experiences. This will help us in our research.

“Oh! I just love Twitter.”
“Twitter is cool.”
“I can write on the move and the message goes out! Isnt that great!”
“I confess, I am indeed obsessed.”

These are some of the responses I have received from Twitter users who tweet more than 20 times a day. The community of users who adore Twitter and find it useful is no doubt huge. Along with it is growing the number of Twitter applications that could be used. Fancy some? The web is full of applications which could generate move value for a Twitter account with free to use functions like Personalised Auto responders to Twitter follow requests and messages, auto-follow whoever follows you, Twitter Rank Check, Twitter Friend Suggest or even you could try the Twitter CRM. There are thousands of applications, just google them up!

Twitter users are now increasingly using these innovative free to use tools, but do they ever check who owns these Twitter applications? I found that some of these Twitter applications were developed as school or college projects and were launched by students for people to use it for free. Amazing! isnt it? No, its NOT. Most Twitter applications ask you to supply your credentials so that the applications can work with Twitter and you dont know who is storing your passwords!!

And are these applications bug free? You never know, afterall they are student projects. I have just heard a sad story from a friend who lost all his followers because he was using a free tool to send personalised messages back. The tool malfunctioned and all his Twitter contacts were lost!

…
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.

On facebook alone more than 5 billion minutes are spent each day (ref: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics) which is equivalent to keeping 3.47 million computers switched ON all the time! This excludes hundreds of servers running Facebook applications and the website itself. While organisations are trying to reduce their carbon footprint by switching off machines when employees leave office after their work hours and are trying to save small chunks of electricity, there is a major problem lying beyond organisational control. Who can control more than 200 million facebook users spread across the globe who spend hours on facebook each day? And facebook is just an example! The list of social networks is endless but not longer than our list of climate change issues.

There you will see when the last login was effectuated, and using which IP address. You can also click on “Details” to see a list of the last logins, their IP address, browser and so on. All you need to do, therefore, is to check if you are really the only person using your Gmail account!

Make sure that you pass on this trick to everyone you know, just everyone. Most common culprits are friends and relatives who might be more interested in keeping track about your activities and the idea of getting caught will keep them away from your Gmail account! Start using all the social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut or Digg to spread the word around – passing the link to this article, telling everyone that you’ll find them out if they tried looking through your Google Mail account.

Why did the gaming company waited so long before slamming the user with such a big bill, and allowing him to continue playing the game for over six months? No doubt the company waited for the fruit to ripen before cutting it. Web Coherence warns its readers to be even more cautious as the predators are now actively using legal powers to bail out themselves out of the recession!

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?