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Jul
31
Quote to remember
Filed Under Network, Privacy & Security, Quotes, Web/Tech | Leave a Comment
When you want to make a private picture or note available only to your friends, why do you hand it over to a multi-national corporation first? What use is a mobile phone running Apache? Does IPv6 really exist? Can we be ecologically-sound and still run our terabyte home servers? Please?
- Danny O’Brien in Living on the Edge (of Network)
Jul
15
VRM echoes
Filed Under Network, New models, Social web, Web/Tech | 1 Comment
Post VRM workshop, conversations and meetings, there is much that I want to capture and blog later. For now, one thought kept going around my head, I twittered it but here it is for the record:
Why do we need 3rd parties? network is node2node, relationships are person2person. 3rd parties are hierarchy hangover.
Planning to do more on this and think about design principles for networked environment as many things we do online are still following mental models from centralised and non-network world.
Jul
8
Reaching limits of silos not of networks
Filed Under Network, Individual, Stuff | 1 Comment
There is talk of Metcalfe’s Plateau. Not convinced at all! Networks can but don’t need to plateau, which is defined as a point at which the marginal value of another node added to the network decreases. Depends on a type of a network and to what extend is the nature of the network understood and utilised.
Alas, no time for deeper analysis so just a few thoughts thrown into the spokes.
1. In non-networked (e.g. channel world) scale happens via aggregation. But in a decentralised network scaling happens via distribution. And yet, we still aggregate online rather than design for distribution indigenously. We still think ‘centralise’, get it all in one place so we can then find our way around and control our environment that way. It’s like going to one giant car park where everyone keeps their car every time they wish to start a journey, instead of taking their car with them as they need it and parking it as suits them. And so using as the entire road system as the platform, not the parking lot.
2. Search is the most primitive form of filtering. Also, it’s still centralised. So the limits of the web are not due to ‘there is simply to much info/too many friends etc’ but due to lack of tools that help the individual to benefit from the network to the full. Outside platforms and locks in.
3. So we may be reaching a plateau or a ceiling of our centralised channel world thinking as applied to and within the networked environment of the web, not necessarily a plateau in the Metcalfe’s law.
4. And Doc is right about the distinction between networks and groups. Groups are still siloed - an attempt to lock in the benefits of networks in the social context (social graph etc) into a ‘monetizable’ platform. No wonder it’s not working as planned! Long live the two natural online platforms - the individual and the web.
