by fetie

In no particular order, these are the blogs that made me say "Ooo," "Whoah," "Hmmm," "Wow," and "Ah Ha!" in 2007:

Noah Brier - www.noahbrier.com
Noah is a communications strategist at Naked. He was one of the first people I met as I began my job search last spring. His blog is delightfully eclectic, yet always seems to be right in line with my own fascinations and interests. A great example of how, if you don't limit your curiosity, you don't limit your discoveries.

Tina Roth Eisenberg - swissmiss.typepad.com/weblog
Authored by a Brooklyn-based graphic designer, and one of the most well curated and prolific design blogs I've come across on the web. SwissMiss is one of the few blogs whose entries I'm careful to never skip. With a dash of humor, I never know what I'm going to discover – whether it's a great new photographer, a tattoo mustache, or even a portable bbq – but I always go away feeling inspired.

Sean Howard - www.craphammer.ca
Sean works for a Toronto based branding firm. He's turned out to be a source of inspiration, and a great sounding board for my exploration of new media communications. Sean is one of the few bloggers I've found who is tackling some of the most conceptually expansive questions about social networking, marketing, and how we talk to each other in an increasingly digital world.

Scott Schuman - thesartorialist.blogspot.com
Although I was probably at the peek of my sartorial prowess in third grade, in my smart gray wool short suit and bow-tie, my affinity for great fashion has never wained. Scott's fashion photo blog is a stunning, and relentlessly inspirational collection of fantastic and original men's and women's clothing creations.

Tom Stafford and Matt Webb - www.mindhacks.com
I can't remember how I ended up stumbling across Mind Hacks, but it's turned out to be a terrific little thought-nugget of a blog. Covering interesting discoveries in neuroscience and psychology, it's introduced me to some incredibly eye-opening ideas about human behavior, and how much we still have to learn about the human brain.

Haalo - cookalmostanything.blogspot.com
If you're looking for a reason to do more cooking, Cook (almost) Anything at Least Once, will whet your appetite with its beautiful photos and mouth-watering recipes.

Nadejda - pan-dan.blogspot.com
This Italy-based blog is a carefully focused stream of some of the most beautiful industrial design I've ever seen. Chairs, lights, coffee tables, beds, benches...like you've never seen before.

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Another important report from PEW - Teens and Social Media: The use of social media gains a greater foothold in teen life as they embrace the conversational nature of interactive online media.

Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004.

via AllFacebook.

From the official Facebook Blog:

The new Friends page lets you create named lists of friends that you can use to organize your relationships whichever way works best for you. These private lists can be used to message people, send group or event invitations, and to filter updates from certain groups of friends.

I've been very anxiously awaiting this feature for some time now. Unfortunately, it's just a way to enhance your messaging, for now. It doesn't allow you to filter your privacy settings, which I think will be a key upgrade.

If Facebook continues to build on this feature, in an aggressive and meaningful way, it could keep Facebook on top of the Social Network Sites pile for another year.

Today on Mind Hacks I stumbled across this fantastic little flash interactive that teaches you about the different parts of a neuron, and how neurons function.

I've harbored an intense fascination with the basic premises of neuroscience for a few years now; in particular I've been interested in how the functions of our neurological system provide an apt metaphor for how we share information in through the web.

So, here's an oversimplified explanation of how neurons are like people connected to the internet.



Dendrites are the sensing, or listening part of the neuron. Any given neuron might have as many as 2,000 dendrites.

For internet users, our dendrites are our collected sources. Our list of RSS feeds of blogs that we've subscribed to. Our bookmarks. Our Facebook friends. These are all the voices we're listening to.



The Axon carries the signal from dendrites out to any other neurons that the neuron is connected to.

This represents our outgoing feed. After we've filtered all of the information that is coming in, a small portion of it is deemed worthy enough to pass on. This gets passed into our information stream and sent to the people who are listening to us.



The Myelin Sheath protects the axon, and also increases the speed and strength of the signals.

These are the tools and services we use to amplify and/or direct the information being passed through our feed. We may have a blog. We might use Twitter. We may share links through Facebook. Digg. del.icio.us. StumbleUpon.



The Synaptic End Bulbs are where electrical signals passed down the axon release neurotransmitters that are received by other neurons.

These are the posts themselves that show up on our blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, etc.



The human body's central nervous system consists of billions of neurons connected in an infinitely complex network.

This sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it? Think about all the sources you have coming in, and all the sources that are listening on the other end. Some of us might be powerful super neurons - like the NYTimes, for instance. Some of us might be minor neurons with less than a hundred regular listeners. And some of us might be relatively insignificant neurons with hardly any listeners. But, we're all connected to each other; it's the sum of those connections that makes the internet so revolutionary. And each day the number of listeners grows, and more and more neurons become connected to other neurons.

Also, like a typical electric circuit, the neural circuit only lights up if enough of the individual neurons are passing on the signal. In our world, an idea will only light up the network if enough individual users decide to pass it on.

We are in the midst of building a hugely complex and powerful system for sharing information; and it is continuously becoming exponentially more powerful.

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Flickr just launched a Stats tool for Pro users. First impression - it's very nice. It will allow users to see when viewers are checking out their photos, which photos they're checking out, and most importantly where your viewers are coming from.

I'll be in Boston this weekend, at the Futures of Entertainment Conference.

If you're there, too, drop me a txt - (347) 228 Three Eight Five Two

- mike

As I wrote back in September, we're getting closer and closer to the moment when any individual's ability to access any information is ubiquitous and instantaneous. The day when any bit of knowledge is merely a thought away. This realization of a Functional Collective Conscious is technology's natural and inevitable destiny, from the printing press to radio to TV, and now the internet. Each innovation has added a layer of communication that makes our ability to share information increasingly effortless.

But in order for any individual to access this shared knowledge in a meaningful way, the information needs to be organized. Right now, the best organizer of information we've seen is Google. But Google, and the other search engines, only organize information at a collective scale, rather than at a personal scale. Google results reflects the Internet's consensus opinion of what your chosen topic means. But it can only guess what your chosen topic means to you. This personal relevance is the key to making the collective conscious functional.

How will it be possible to organize every bit of information in a way that will be personally relevant to each individual?

This is where Social Network Sites (SNS) come in.

(I'd be remiss if I didn't address the big news from the past couple weeks, so here's my two cents. Google's announcement of the OpenSocial API and Tuesday's introduction of Facebook Ads have sparked a tremendous amount of chatter around the blogosphere. I'll leave it to the online pundits to analyze the pros and cons of the specific aspects of these offerings; I'd just like to mention their relevance in the long term. OpenSocial represents a major alignment with the progressive internet tenets of universal standards and shared intellectual property. It will prove to be an important victory in the fight to give individuals the ability to control their own online existence in whatever way they choose. Facebook Ads is simply a new experiment in engagement and word-of-mouth marketing. We'll see how engaging it is, and how much word-of-mouth it inspires.)

After reading this terrific summary of the history of SNS by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications, I realized that the conception of SNS as "sites," per se, with unique domains or urls, doesn't leave room to appreciate their grandest long-term ramifications. The greatest promise of SNS is a seamless network of personally relevant digital channels through which we will be able to share and retrieve information that is personally meaningful and useful. Our experience with SNS up to this point, has merely been an exercise in adding that digital layer to our real-world relationships. We've just been playing around with various prototypes. Eventually, though, we won't have a "site," but rather a unified chart of all of our social relationships that will exist independently of any website or web-based service. These relationships will be organized in a dynamic and organic method. Relationships will be intuitively grouped in broad categories like college friends or co-workers, as well as idiosyncratic categories like friends who like David Lynch or friends who like the ocean. These various groups may overlap, and each individual will create a unique network structure.

To some extent we have already started to do this. Think of your Labels in Gmail. And hopefully this will describe Facebook's "Sort out your friends" feature, which is currently in development. The difference is that right now we have to author a separate structure for each domain - one for Gmail, one for Facebook, etc. None of them will let us take our friends with us when we leave the walled garden. Eventually they will.

What role do SNS play in organizing every bit of information in a way that will be personally relevant to each individual?

Well the first step is to appreciate that everything can be anything to anyone. Just as we identify relationships with many overlapping labels, we do the same for ideas. How would you categorize "books?" Literature? Research? Entertainment? Hobby? Paper Product? It depends on your perspective. But the great thing about the digital universe, is that "books" can be all of these things simultaneously.

Each of us implicitly categorizes every bit of information that we encounter. And like our organic categorization of our relationships, we apply the same intuitive method to the categorization of knowledge. No two individual's systems of categorization will be identical. Will there be some overlap between certain individual's categorization? Absolutely, and that overlap is part of what identifies a given community. For instance, the group of people who agree that striped tube socks and mustaches look cool are known as Hipsters. There will also be overlap between categorization structures of entire communities, e.g. Hipsters and creepy Uncles who still think they're living in the 70's. (I couldn't resist adding this Jessica Hagy-esque illustration.)



Where do these intuitive personal categorization systems come from? What inspires each of us to choose particular associations for books or tube socks? They are inspired by our relationships; by the people we've known, the people we know, and the people we want to know. Our perception of the world in which we live and what we learn about it is framed by social context. We evaluate information's relevance based on the communities that a particular categorization will connect us to or alienate us from.

So now our self-authored Social Network has profound importance for making our ubiquitous and instantaneous access to information useful. The network is the ultimate filter for personal relevance. When we search, we will search through a system that understands what the topic means to us. And when we share, we will be able to pass on the content to only the people who we know will find it compelling. Some tools are beginning to attempt this. Think of the "post to _____" links you see popping up everywhere. "Share on Facebook" "Digg This" "Post to del.icio.us" They are all ways for us to pass on information that we think will be compelling; but, at best, the tools only have a rough inkling of how to filter that content in a meaningful way for our community of listeners.

Our social network is the chocolate to infinite information's peanut butter. And when that network is liberated from the domain in which we choose to create it or manage it, it will become the key to unlocking the full potential of technology's greatest promise: the Functional Collective Conscious.

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