Ryan Price and the Media

After watching Chris Messina's existential DiSo Interview, I decided to go check out a bit more about the distributed social networking stuff Chris and Steve Ivy have been working on - there are 160+ people on the mailing list now, and hundreds of threads.

Here's a little bit about the DiSo Project:

Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction.

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

Our first target is Wordpress, bootstrapping on existing work and building out from there.
So what does that mean?

We’re building Wordpress plugins that implement or build on:

* Microformats like XFN, hCard, XOXO — wp-contactlist, wp-profiles
* OpenID — wp-contactlist, wp-openid-server
* OAuth
* …and others

They also ask you to state a reason for wanting to join the mailing list, which I've copied here:

I am a big fan of microformats and distributed, semantic applications. I work for a social network that's a little bit different because we're mapping the relationships between animals. It gets even more interesting there, because some animals live together, some animals play together, some share parents, and then they all have one or more people who take care of them. It's been difficult for us to take open source software and shoehorn the relationships into it, and what that means as far as a user experience goes.

One funny thing is the idea of your "active pet" or active profile - if a person can create multiple resumes, one for film jobs and one for programming jobs, for example, then maybe this idea of having multiple profiles is important. The people you play poker with on the weekends might not want to be notified when you update the work blog - others will.

So there's another layer. If someone subscribes to your updates, can they subscribe to a subset of those, so as not to get loads of BACN in their activity stream reader?

I think about these things.

If you haven't seen it, check out that weird animal social network.

My last Friday in London was the cause for Likemind London and (directly across the street, 5 minutes after) Social Media Café. I'm pretty sure the idea is to eventually own a physical piece of "IRL" space - this goes beyond coworking - London has several coworking spaces already. We're talking a place for social media nerds or pros, however they choose to label themselves, to get together and talk. Now taking place every Friday Morning near London's glitzy West End, behind the theatre where you can see "Spamalot".

Don't believe me? Here's a video by Mike Atherton (sizemore).

Click to play Social Media Cafe

Here's a bit from Lloyd Davis, the organizer, on Social Media Café as Platform:

“What I want to create is a platform that enables people to create value for themselves.”

The inspiration for this comes from the tech world - CP/M & MS-DOS, the IBM PC, the Internet, the Web, Amazon Marketplace, Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook - what they all have in common is that no matter how they get paid for or how they’re organised, or whether or not they make money for their inventors, they have also given other people the opportunity to create new relationships, markets and businesses that weren’t possible before

Also met some cool peeps there, they'll be showing up in the blogroll on the left sidebar soon, and probably the daily Ma.gnolia summary in the RSS as well.

My dad watches Fox News, and I am personally embarrassed for him. He says they provide a "balanced" view of things, but I feel like I understand media, and it's my opinion that they don't really say anything, but really everything they're saying is just designed to keep you from changing the channel. Take this YouTube clip from Red Eye as an example.

They start with a good idea: let's do a news show in a bar with no green room, no makeup and really short segments. Sounds good so far. Here are several problems with the show:

1. Short segments? Put them on YouTube. This one was uploaded by a Novick supporter
2. You had a politician on your show and said many times you had no idea what his platform was, and when he tried to tell you, he was interrupted and told to make funny jokes.
3. The first line of this video claims you've got "too much news", but you spent the whole time talking about the beer in the commercial and the fact that Steve Novick has a hook for a hand. Surely there are better ways to fill 3 minutes.
4. I feel that by speaking in a raised tone of voice (like every commentator on the Fox News channel), you're trying to make me feel stupid, like what you're saying is so important that I should keep your station on in the background all day, because otherwise I might miss your half of the story.

Fox News, you make me very glad that I don't own a television.

As I was sitting in a café here in London yesterday, I picked up the Guardian's Thursday Technology Section and saw this rather large story a few pages in - there is a picture of some cute African kids with XO laptops, but the headline read Crime fears as cheap PCs head for Africa

Initiatives such as the OLPC and the Classmate are intended to help bridge the digital divide. But security experts warn that there could be an unforeseen negative effect.

"There is the possibility of creating the largest botnet in the world," says Yuval Ben-Ithak of Finjan, a computer security company. This view is borne out by a recent report by F-Secure identifying Africa as one of the emerging cybercrime threats.

Sidebar: The tinyurl link was printed in the paper, but the original URL was way too long and difficult - these British kids understand how to use the tools. Hopefully, the service is letting them track how many people actually type in the URL so they can understand conversion rates? PLZ?

As to the connection with OLPC, that was completely the reporter's doing. I skimmed through the report, and there was no mention of cheap laptops. Example:

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, believes malware creation hotspots are defined by a number of socio-economic causes – particularly in terms of job opportunities.

"Within the last few years, Internet take-up in emerging markets has been phenomenal. For example, Brazil now has over two million Internet users," says Hypponen. "And coincidentally, since 2003, computer crime has really taken off in Brazil, China and the former Soviet countries."

"The trend is expected to continue and spread into areas such as Africa, India and Central America," predicts Hypponen. "This is partly due to the limited IT job prospects in these markets. People are developing sophisticated computer skills, but have limited opportunities to profit from them legally."

But the OLPC security guy they talked to, Ivan Krstic, easily squashed the possibility of OLPC's default software having any possibility of easily becoming a botnet. The reporter then counters that OLPC's are supposed to be able to run Windows XP, and that's not secure - BUT XP is like 7 years old now, and I think the number of vulnerabilities and possible back doors has been addressed so many times that new exploits will be fewer and farther between.

The problem is interesting, but in my opinion not believable. I'd like to get Erik Hersman on the phone to talk about it, but he appears to be out of the country right now as well, so I guess it has to wait.