I don't know Jay Deragon, but he's co-authored a book (with Scott Allen, an acquaintance of mine who's clueful about social network platforms and strategy) called The Emergence of the Relationship Economy that focuses on "relationship-driven commerce," a vision for online commerce that is similar to the approach Paco Nathan and I advocated via FringeWare, Inc. – in 1992, so this isn't exactly new thinking. Our vision for interactive commerce was buried in the industrial-strength broadcast-mode developments throughout the 90s, though the Whole Foods ecommerce projects I worked on had an interactive aspect. In fact, many ecommerce projects paid lip service to community, but they weren't what you would call "relationship-driven." I was part of a consulting team led by Casey Hughes earlier this decade where I strongly recommended just that approach – the company's model was an ideal fit – but I don't think they got it.

Back to Deragon – yesterday he made a post that asks the musical question, "Will 2008 be the Year of Social Commerce?" Social commerce, he says, is "the holy grail of economics." He's talking about commerce consulted on or via social network platforms. Okay, forget the tech platforms: do we ever see commerce conducted in social environments? Via social networks? When I was active with the now-defunct FringeWare project, I called it a street market in cyberspace. It made perfect sense that, with technologies that facilitate interaction, we could bring buyers and sellers closer together, which is how you would image markets have forming originally, as person to person trade, inherently social. We've been trending in this direction since 1991-92, when the web first appeared. These marketing folks (Deragon, Scott, and their other co-authors) are presenting this as a dramatic change, but to me it's old news, though we can certainly take it to another level given the evolution of the social web since 2000. My own consulting practice now is all about leveraging web presence and social network thinking to improve business and create targeting messaging and interaction, and though I don't see anyone else with just that approach, it doesn't seem new to me. But I'd like to hear more abut the specifics of "social commerce" – how do you sell through social networks? Does it mean, as I had suggested in the consultation I mentioned earlier, that members of a network sell to each other, and share the profits with the operators of the network? Or does it mean that social network platforms might be useful for the same top-down sales we all know so well – that the social network platform is a place to aggregate "consumers" so that they can buy the same way they've always bought. (This is where Second Life seems to be going.)

The annual Bruce S. - Jon L. "state of the world" conversation launched today on the WELL. I'm feeling a serious H.G. Wells Mind at the End of Its Tether vibe. [Link]

Now the Americans have clearly lost the thread... the Americans are really just horribly out of it, they're like some giant fundie Brazil, nobody takes their pronunciamentos seriously or believes a word they say... Whereas the world is much more seriously global now. China and India are real players, they're part of the show and they matter.

Serious-minded people everywhere do know they have to deal with the resource crisis and the climate crisis. Because the world-machine's backfiring and puffing smoke. Joe and Jane Sixpack are looking at four-dollar milk and five-dollar gas. It's hurting and it's scary and there's no way out of it but through it.

Everybody's reluctant to budge because they sense, probably correctly, that they have to wade through a torrent of mud, blood sweat and tears. Maybe, then, they emerge into the relatively sunlit uplands of something closer to sustainability.

So: I don't expect too much to happen in 2008: except for that intensified smell of burning as people's feet are held to the fire. "Nothing changes if nothing changes." But if nothing changes, then more and more china is going to flat-out shatter and break.

THEN they'll move. If they see somebody making money at it, they might move pretty fast.

Ryan Norbauer at 43 Folders considers whether life is all about achievement, or whether we can be more human, and in a sense more effective, by living our lives as underachievers. He's influenced by a book called The Underachiever's Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great, which espouses these principles:

• Life’s too short.
• Control is an illustion.
• Expectations lead to misery.
• Great expectations lead to great misery.
• Achievement creates expectations.
• The law of diminishing returns applies everywhere.
• Perfect is the enemy of good.
• The tallest blade of grass is the surest to be cut.
• Accomplishment is in the eye of the beholder.

Albert Camus was but one of many philosophers and poets seriously to tackle the question of how we are to fill up the time that we have while we are here on earth, but I like many of his answers best. He saw the futilely struggling Sisyphus as a strangely sympathetic figure. Camus—who was in fact one of the more accomplished and ethically upright individuals with which the caprices of the genetic blender have gifted our species—embraced the absurd futility and overwhelming insignificance of our individual lives as a counterintuitive source of hope and empowerment. “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd [than that of Sisyphus]. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”

Camus believes that it is not the activity of work that leads us to despair, but the hope for some sort of grand success that will never come. Insofar as we can resist the temptation to view our lives as goal-driven in this way, we have at least the prospect of happiness. As The Underachiever’s Manifesto has it: “striving is suffering.” It is only by accepting the illusory nature of achievement that we can hope to transcend it. Would it be mawkish of me to invoke Steve Jobs?: “our time is limited, so don’t waste time living someone else’s life.”

I find that by trying to achieve much, I spread myself too thin and begin to lose focus. In that sense, I suspect that one can do more by doing less, or do more effectively, at least. Living and working in a more limited and focused way is more sustainable, as well. I was already giving this a lot of thought.

This reminds me of Suzuki-Roshi's talk about life as one continuous mistake.

In 2004, Valdis Krebs analyzed patterns of political book purchases at Amazon, looking at Amazon's "also bought" data. [Link] Says Valdis, "Analyzing the patterns of directed links in the network above, we determined the most influential books in each cluster using a social network analysis metric. Broken Government is the most influential blue book, and An Inconvenient Book is the most influential red book, just beating out Power to the People."

If you'd met me in the late 60s, I would've convinced you by my passionate dedication to the proposition that I had only one calling, and that was to write fiction. At some point thereafter I concluded that I wasn't much of a storyteller, and started writing nonfiction instead. The real truth behind my decision was that I was undisciplined and couldn't grasp the importance of revision, then revision of revision. My curse as a writer for years, whether with fiction or nonfiction, has been that I wouldn't take time to revise (a problem I'm correcting, finally getting back to writing and taking it seriously again).

The three writers of fiction that most influenced me were James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, and Malcolm Lowry. (Philip Dick's in there somewhere, as well). Of the three I spent less time with Lowry, who'd only written one book, Under the Volcano. Lowry was a powerful author, but the story he told was more personal and bleak than anything I'd read by the others. He was drunk, crazy, and ultimately suicidal – I've been reading a piece in The New Yorker about Lowry's life and death, and there appears to be some evidence that his wife, Margerie, did him in, with good cause (he was an abusive drunk). [Link]

“Under the Volcano”—his “ultima thule of the spirit,” as he called it—contains a remarkable death scene, and some of the language evokes Lowry’s own. The Mexican paramilitaries close in on the consul. One pulls out a pistol and shoots him, then shoots him twice more, and the world becomes a giant symbol of despair: “Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echo returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying.” This is pure Baudelaire. But, at the moment when the consul sees the gun firing, Lowry sees things more plainly: “At first the Consul felt a queer relief. Now he realized he had been shot. He fell on one knee, then, with a groan, flat on his face in the grass. ‘Christ,’ he remarked, puzzled, ‘this is a dingy way to die.’ ”

Ieronimus Cathedral in Salamanca has a carving that includes the perfect likeness of a contemporary astronaut — pretty funny. (According to comments, the anomalous astroguy was added as a joke by a restoration team.) [Link]

Today was supposed to be blog silence day, a silent protest of the detention of Saudi blogger Fouad Ahmed al-Farhan, who's been held since early December. I wasn't silence (I already posted something), but I suggest you follow this link, read about Fouad, and take action in his behalf. We'd really like to see this free speech thing catch on, globally.

Clinton's campaign was revived by the New Hampshire win, and McCain is in the race after trailing along behind the likes of Giuliani, Romney, and Huckabee. The race is on... [Link] I suspect Gloria Steinem is feeling better today than yesterday

Note that the results still show a very tight Hillary/Obama race.

Via Bruce Sterling: Design Democracy is a site and online event all about mass customization, which (according to the Wikipedia entry) is "the use of flexible computer-aided manufacturing systems to produce custom output." It's kind of a contest, where anyone can vote "early and often" on designs posted to the site. I love the logo.

(I wrote this on January 5, but failed to publish it.)

How did Huckabee beat big spender Romney in Iowa? Valdis has a great post explaining how Huckabee sold himself into established social networks. [Link]

He found local social networks of conservative Christians, gun owners, home schoolers and tax reformers. It was in these networks that Huckabee's message caught fire and spread to other networks that intersected with these. Soon Huckabee had large clusters of interconnected supporters, all reinforcing one another -- friends talking to friends.

Meanwhile, Romney and the others where following common campaign wisdom and setting up phone banks, canvasing neighborhoods and spending money in the mass media -- strangers talking to strangers.

What was the big difference between these two approaches? Huckabee was connecting to intact networks that had a long history together, while Romney was connecting to individual voters -- one at a time. While Romney's supporters were also members of social networks, they were talked to, and influenced individually, alone. Who knows what they did when they went back into their social network? Huckabee's networks all got the same message at roughly the same time -- they probably had very fewer defections.

And here's the zinger:

Messages to people alone on the phone, alone in the car[radio], alone on the couch[TV], alone with the newspaper, alone with the computer, don't STICK the same way messages conveyed in a group of trusted others. Alone, we hear the message, forget the message, make the promise, forget the promise. In a group, we hear the message, discuss the message, internalize the meassge, make the promise to the group, keep the promise to the group. Huckabee supporters were more likely to remain in support for their candidate during the caucus process, than Romney's supporters -- who promised support when alone, but had to act in a group at the caucus.

Gary Wolf at Salon reviews a new book by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel called Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic, wherein the two authors explore consciousness from their combined perspectives – Hurburt is a psychologist, and Schwtizgebel is a philosopher and the "impolite" skeptic who "boasts that with some rather basic interrogation techniques, he can impugn almost any person's credibility as a self-witness." The book is about the reliability of introspection.

The classic account of the implications of neuroscience for philosophy is Daniel Dennett's 1991 book "Consciousness Explained," in which he argues that humans are complex machines, without any extra something -- soul, mind, spirit or will -- that does not have its basis in our biological components. Dennett's philosophy is summed up by a beautiful motto he later acquired from the Italian philosopher Giulio Giorello: "Yes, we have a soul, but it's made of lots of tiny robots!"

Dennett did not convince everybody right away. His opponents pointed out that to explain something is not the same as to experience it. Consciousness is not outward behavior, but an inner fact. If we built an automaton that imitated humans, it would still not be conscious, as long as nothing within it had been programmed for consciousness. And since consciousness is inward and subjective, how could we possibly learn to create such a program, or be certain it worked?

At the book's core is about sessions in which the two authors interview a subject, called Melanie in the book, asking her questions about what she was thinking after random beeps, and wondering to what extent the observation is altering the thing (person) observed. Gary ends with a reference to contemplation in Zen, saying "perhaps Hurlburt's lowly beeper, accompanied by an uninhibited skepticism and taste for the comic, can perform some of the same work as the old style of ritual contemplation. Melanie, who begins as the subject of these experiments, promotes herself to co-investigator." [Link]

I found in interesting post about the book at Schwitzgebel's blog (proving again how wunnerful it is to have the blogosphere to extend explorations and conversations). He mentions how, in the book, his co-author defends "the idea that much conscious thinking takes place neither in speech, nor in images, nor in any other symbolic format. He calls this "unsymbolized thinking" and describes the resistance many people have to this idea."

I was then surprised a couple weeks ago, when chatting with a brother in law about his stream of experience, when he casually said -- as though it were the most obvious thing -- that he just had a thought that was quite conscious but neither spoken nor in any imagistic form. When I asked him how he knew that he thought was imageless in this way, he said that it had a specific content but nothing visual, more like words, but actually lacking words, since it was neither in English nor in Hindi.

I was then struck by the following idea: Might bilingual people -- really bilingual people who shift easily and regularly between two languages -- more easily recognize unsymbolized or imageless thought than monolingual people? A monolingual English speaker might experience a thought content and then falsely assume that the thought must have taken place in English. A bilingual person, forced to think about what language the thought transpired in, might in some cases find no basis for choice and so more readily recognize the non-lingustic nature of that thought.

Speaking for myself, I've seen many clues over the years that my metathoughts - thoughts about how I think and what I think, or what I think I thought - are not to be trusted. For instance, as I've become increasingly careful about reviewing my writing before publishing, I've found several instances where I was thinking one word but wrote another; or instances where recordings or photographs or older written passages reveal that some memory I had was inaccurate or plain wrong. Because over the years I've been known among others for my memory, I always assumed that it was always correct - the way intelligent people often assume that they're intelligent about everything.

We depend on our minds for memory and world view; how can we know, other than phenomenological feedback from time to time (like the recordings or images I mentioned), whether our memories are accurate? In fact, our memories of the past may be quite inaccurate, and we should always be suspicious of them. This is a troubling thought.

If you've been around someone with Alzheimer's disease, you know that one of its most devastating effects is the extent to which people so afflicted can be unaware of their gaps and lapses. They may not realize that anything is wrong, and they can be hostile when challenged.

To what extent is our flow of "consciousness" faith-based - not that we know who and what and where and when we are at all times, but that we believe we have that knowledge, are reinforced by what's accurate, and ignore the inaccuracies; sweep them under the rug and forget about 'em.

My wife and I have caught each other, from time to time, remembering vividly something we did, only to realize that our memory is transforming an intention we had to a supposed action. "I put the keys on the table." In fact, I only thought about putting the keys on the table, they're still in my pocket.

To the extent I've come to realize the flaws and gaps in my thinking, I think I've been smarter in general, which is interesting.

I spend much of my time with very smart, often brilliant people who have signficant flaws and gaps, who are really not very smart about some aspects of their lives. This is consistently true. Some work very hard to create the impression they are smart about everything, or to reinforce others' impression that their intelligence is heroic. So much of genius is really just PR.

Harry Knowles caught a preview of "Clovefield"; raves about it at Ain't It Cool News. We'll be there opening night!

But this film isn’t about the scientist, the generals, the Presidents, the mayors or any of the big people. This time, the film is from the perspective of those people that live in those buildings that the monster is breaking through. This is about the people running in the street that scream, “GODZILLA!!!” and run. This is about trying to survive that insanity. Not just that, but to try and save one life.

Like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, but instead of Nazis it’s a giant monster.

This is a handheld camera movie – knowing this and knowing not to sit too close is probably a good thing… but having said that… you can’t sit far enough from the screen to feel safe. As many of you people know, I am in a wheelchair – and while watching movies, I have my brakes on. There was one moment, so unexpected and so intense that I went 3 ft back.

Oddee has posted a dozen crazy ads – you have to see 'em to believe 'em.
[Link]

Coming to Austin in March and April: Radical Urban Sustainability Training by Rhizome Collective. [Link to Virtual Tour]

RUST is an intensive weekend workshop focused on skills related to building autonomous communities in today's cities. We will share the cumulative knowledge gained from the past seven years of building the Rhizome Collective, an urban sustainability and community organizing project based in Austin, Texas. The training will have both hands-on and lecture/discussion components. The interrelatedness of sustainability and struggles for social justice will be emphasized. The many innovative sustainability features on display at the Rhizome Collective will be used as teaching tools.

Tom Hodgkinson at The Guardian explores the politics of Facebook's directors, Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer. First, he makes it clear that he doesn't buy the premise of Facebook, regardless. Then he explores the philosophy driving its evolution, especially Thiel's neoconservative positions. [Link]

Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian". . . . This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined."

So, Thiel's politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe."

Read the rest of the article, there's quite a bit more. Is Facebook the Internet's version of television, i.e. a system that transforms a potentially worldchanging technology into a dumbed-down marketing machine? That's the thrust of Hodgkinson's argument... and it's applicable to other popular systems (I'm thinking Second Life).

I'm not feeling quite as negative and Hodgkinson about Facebook, and certainly not about virtual community – he despises the whole idea of online relationship vs alternatives, e.g. hanging out with friends at the pub or reading books. These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

Like any online community, Facebook will become what its users make it, regardless of the plans of Thiel et al. We're only susceptible to commercialization a la television if that's what we accept. I'm glad Hodgkinson's given us this background info to ponder, but it doesn't worry me. We get the communities we accept, just as we get the governments we deserve. If we don't make the effort to be better citizens, better community members, better people, that's our fault, and not the fault of manipulative neoconservatives.

A compelling Library of Congress set of color photos from the 1930s-40s has been posted at Flickr. [Link]

These vivid color photos from the Great Depression and World War II capture an era generally seen only in black-and-white. Photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) created the images between 1939 and 1944.

ChaCha is a search engine that adds a wetware filter: human "guides" field search queries. [Link]

I doesn't always work:

Using ChaCha can be easier and faster than using a smart phone. But it faltered when more than one step was required to answer a question -- like my request for directions to the McDonald's closest to my company's headquarters. The directions, which came a few minutes later, started from the correct address, but sent me much farther away than the McDonald's right outside.

Plus, I didn't get an address for the restaurant, just a direction to head down the West Side Highway and, inexplicably, go ''Left on Canal/Hoboken St.'' (there's no Hoboken Street in Manhattan).

I'll be presenting at the February Social Media Club meeting in Austin (third Thursday, February 21). Join us! [Link]

I ran across a set of amazing, kind of surreal high dynamic range images on Flickr, in the Japan HDR Pool. (They were all "all rights reserved"; the image posted above is a Creative Commons-licensed HDR posted at Flickr by Christian Meichtry.) Wikipedia has a good overview of HDR. explaining that "its wider usage was, until quite recently, precluded by the limitations imposed by the available computer processing power." You can produce HDR images with any camera - it's a matter of post-processing, combining several exposures to get a greater dynamic range, i.e. the range of values between light and dark areas. You can create HDR images using Photoshop.

Image of Ambrogio and Chasny from NarcoAgent review of an Amsterdam Six Organs show.

Thursday, Marsha and I caught Six Organs of Admittance at the Mohawk in downtown Austin. It was a chilly show for a chilly night. I'm a huge fan of Ben Chasny's recorded music, via both Six Organs and Comets on Fire, but the Thursday night show lacked the range and subtlety I associated with that work. Chasny was accompanied by his SO, Elisa Ambrogio (of Magik Markers), and I wondered after the show if the almost-hostile extended feedback jams were a manifestation of tension between them. Understand, it wasn't horrible – they both know how to "play" feedback skillfully, and it's the fuzzier aspects of Six Organs and Comets that I really love. But this show felt overall like a downer; Chasny seemed pissed off, and when the crowed wanted more, he shrugged it off, saying something like "maybe I'm a dick, but we're done." Headdress and My Education opened the show. Headdress was good but a little monotonous... My Education was very good... they made me think of the old Jerry Goodman/Jan Hammer collaboration.

I'll be attending the March 1 Texas Community Media Summit - I was at a similar gathering 2-3 years ago, which was useful, but citizen media was new; it's matured since then, and I suspect we'll have more to talk about this year. This summit is for "Texas community media makers, stakeholders, activists, and advocates." If you're a Texas blogger, you should be there. [Link]

We saw Cloverfield last night. Don't believe bad reviews – I saw several, and I can summarize by saying that they didn't like the film because they didn't get it. One of the more clueful review I read: Marc Savlov's in the Austin Chronicle. Marc knows about this stuff:

Cloverfield is the most intense and original creature feature I've seen in my adult moviegoing life, and that's coming from a guy who knows his Gojira from his Gamera and his Harryhausen from his Honda. Cloverfield isn't a horror film – it's a pure-blood, grade A, exultantly exhilarating monster movie in the grand tradition of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, It Came From Beneath the Sea, and, to a lesser extent, Merian C. Cooper's King Kong. What makes Cloverfield so memorable and such a genuinely riveting filmgoing experience has less to do with the creature itself, whatever it is, and everything to do with Reeves' direction and a whip-smart, stylistically invisible screenplay that dispenses entirely with any and all genre rules and, brilliantly, views the catastrophic, literally earthshaking events through the lens of one character's digital video camera, complete with rough, nerve-jangling, in-camera edits and an "official" Department of Defense Eyes Only time stamp.

My own thoughts about why the film's great:

• It's a giant monster film told from a different perspective, that of the people on the ground, running.
• It's brilliant about using the constrained perspective of a single handheld camera to tell the story.
• The filmmakers showed real intelligence in realizing their monster.
• So much of the story is inferred, not explicit.

Remind me to pay more attention to Joanna Macy...

A revolution is underway because people are realizing that our needs can be met without destroying our world. We have the technical knowledge, the communication tools, and material resources to grow enough food, ensure clean air and water, and meet rational energy needs. Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning. It is happening now.

Whether or not it is recognized by corporate-controlled media, the Great Turning is a reality. Although we cannot know yet if it will take hold in time for humans and other complex life forms to survive, we can know that it is under way. And it is gaining momentum, through the actions of countless individuals and groups around the world. To see this as the larger context of our lives clears our vision and summons our courage.

Not Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, but co-producers of the upcoming EFF-Austin-driven Plutopia party at SXSW Interactive. Plutopia is a loose collective of artists, technologists, and futurists, formerly called Futurama. We organized for an installation at Maker Faire; the SXSW party is looking more ambitious. The Plutopian producers are Maggie Duval, Randy Jewart (of Austin Green Art), and Bon Davis. More about the party as the planning evolves. It'll be a Scholz Garten, a bier garten with an opinion of life...

Lori Hawkins at the Austin American-Statesman has written a good article about Ruby on Rails' adoption by Austin programmers. My company, Polycot Consulting, for years used a php framework developed by my partner Matt Sanders. Matt and Polycot's Ethan Burrows were early adopters. Eventually we made a whole division, Polycot Labs, that does nothing but Rails development. With the Rail framework, coders can prototype quickly, so it's good for rapid, agile development - where you spend less time planning and more time building and tweaking to get the system right.

Just upgraded Weblogsky to the latest version of Movable Type, 4.1, which is a significant upgrade from 3.x. The upgrade seemed smooth, but because MT4 doesn't support the Rightfields plugin, I had to delete all the Rightfields tags from my templates. I was using Rightfields to facilitate photo upload and positioning, and removing the fields means that many photos will no longer appear on archive pages, once they're rebuilt. Coincidentally I recently stopped adding photos using Rightfields, favoring the native MT upload utility because it gave me more flexibility. (Note: There'll be a Rightfields plugin eventually for MT4.) The new MT has a slick new interface; still getting used to it.