mark-elliott.net

Via the Collabforge blog

A question I’m often asked by clients, friends and people just passing by on the street is, ’so what’s the big deal with Twitter anyway?’

This is of course a great question - that is, how is Twitter different than Facebook or any other social networking platform and why should one dedicate their precious time to learning and engaging with yet another web community?

There are a few reasons why Twitter is a big deal, but from my perspective, the primary one is that,

Twitter spreads ideas like air travel spreads the flu

Simply put, Twitter spreads ideas by liberating them from the ‘Facebook social graph’, enabling them to quickly and effectively leap across networks. This is due to the fact that when you post a message to Twitter, it is sent to the entire 19 Million strong network.

So effectively, the tweets of all 19 million Twitter users are thrown into one big heap and then sorted after the fact by followers, or, by hashtags. For example, this allows one to follow the tweets associated with a specific conference - here’s the tag for one I recently attended using: #ccisumit - or discover people interested in and providing information surrounding social media marketing.

While it’s true that most messages you send will be read by those following you (i.e. they get your message in their ‘inbox’) the fact remains that your ideas are open for anyone to discover through a vast range of third party tools made possible by Twitter’s API (and this is something you should be well aware of when using Twitter - unless you are using a ‘Direct message’ (D), you words can be discovered and read by anyone and everyone).

Once discovered, your message can be remixed through simple copy/paste/edit, and then ‘re-tweeted’ (RT) back out to the entire network, and of course to the network of those following the re-tweeter. To give an example, my modest network of 414 followers gives me a second-order reach (those who follow my followers) of 5,928,649. That’s a heck of a lot of people who will receive my ideas should my followers decide to re-tweet them.

So there it is, Twitter spreads ideas like air travel spreads the flu - which makes it a tool like no other when it comes to discovering ideas, news, information and importantly, the people behind them. The flip side of this of course is that you can leverage this tool to spread your own ideas, and if they are contagious, then you just might infect the world…

This is undoubtedly a fantastic video that highlights the interconnection yet independence of individual creative efforts on social media sites such as YouTube.

However I don’t think it is right to call it any form of collaboration - unless there were multiple people putting this track together (as opposed to simply contributing their individual elements). I call the individualistic input of contribution that aggregate to form a whole, ‘cooperation’. Collaboration requires multiple participants add/edit/deleting the same domain. Or at least, that’s what I came to in my phd :-). What do you think?

In any case, this video rocks and thanks Rob Stewart for bringing it to my attention!

Direct link to the whole album by Kutiman: http://thru-you.com/#/videos/

I just saw this this morning (emphasis mine):

THE Federal Government is planning to make internet censorship compulsory for all Australians and could ban controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia.

Australia’s level of net censorship will put it in the same league as countries including China, Cuba, Iran and North Korea, and the Government will not let users opt out of the proposed national internet filter when it is introduced.

Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy admitted the Federal Government’s $44.2 million internet censorship plan would now include two tiers - one level of mandatory filtering for all Australians and an optional level that will provide a “clean feed”, censoring adult material.

…

Groups including the System Administrators Guild of Australia and Electronic Frontiers Australia have slammed the proposal, saying it would unfairly restrict Australians’ access to the web, slow internet speeds and raise the price of internet access.

EFA board member Colin Jacobs said it would have little effect on illegal internet content, including child pornography, as it would not cover peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

Aside from the obvious issues regarding censorship and freedom of speech (something not constitutionally enshrined in Australia and therefore not ensured) this is a very bad idea. This will at a minimum,

• introduce a ’state approved’ perspective on reality which can then be more readily extended,
• generate network inefficiencies for most of us, and for those who actually want to get to what is blocked, they will work it out (even most primary school kids I talk to these days know how to get around access restrictions imposed upon them).

To draw upon that a classic web quote attributed to John Gilmore: “The net treats censorship as damage and routes around it”.

I thought this kind of logic would depart our federal government with the Howard administration! Apparently I was wrong.

And why isn’t this making bigger news? Perhaps mass media doesn’t care? - after all, the medium is the message - i.e. if you’re interests and life are all bound up in broadcast (push) media, perhaps you aren’t so likely to care about distributed media etc?..

I’m in the process of migrating my phd from the wiki where I wrote it, to this site. I thought I’d write a post for each chapter as I get them up. You can find more out about my phd here, or in the links in the banner. So, here’s the first chapter!

This initial chapter sets the scene - how does a long time artist / composer move into the world of online collaboration? Easy:

• creative exploration + digital media + collaborative practice + research + synthesis = stigmergic mass collaboration.

Here’s an excerpt:

Having grown up in Alaska spending a great deal of time in small aircraft (my first fly-in camping trip was at the age of 3 months), I grew up accustomed to seeing and thinking about vast and variegated spaces from an aerial perspective (see figure 0.0). Later in life, I came to realise that my thinking had been dramatically shaped by this —I still experience a strangely disorienting feeling in new places if I don’t know what the terrain looks like from the sky. This desire for aerial, meta, holistic and encompassing understandings has stayed with me throughout my life, evolving in its application and complexity.

As part of One Web Day (a global event to celebrate and take stock of the value the web provides humanity) Future Melbourne took part, with Melbourne’s Lord Mayor John So as the 55th One Web Day ambassador, as well as hosting a event to communicate our experiences to those who are in positions to effect change in our local government towards participatory governance. It was my honour to be the keynote speaker for this event, talking about the wiki-base collaborative environment designed and built by my outfit Collabforge, as well as the experience of taking part in one of the world’s first large-scale collaborative endeavours for local governance. Here’s a video of my presentation:

It’s been a busy few months for me and have taken on a few new projects which I hope to talk about soon. Till then, peace out.