More information + Skyrails Blog: official blog by the author + Download Skyrails beta: PC only, one generation before the current release, published on 2007-10-10
I haven't read the book yet, but it looks quite interesting based on the book review on New York Times, where he suggests that the AIDS epidemic is "the price of our permissive attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms of extreme sexual conservatism."
[AIDS] must have followed the route already spotted in the spread of innovation and computer viruses: Hubs are among the first infected thanks to their numerous sexual contacts.
...The scale-free topology at AIDS’s disposal allowed the virus to spread and persist.
...Whereas the early spread of AIDS was attributed primarily to homosexual sex, today heterosexual sex is the leading means of transmission. As we’ve established, hubs play a key role in these processes. Their unique role suggests a bold but cruel solution: As long as resources are finite we should treat only the hubs. That is, when a treatment exists but there is not enough money to offer it to everybody who needs it, we should primarily gives it to the hubs.
...The problem is that we do not know for sure who the hubs are.
SML Reference: Barabasi. Linked: how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science and everyday life. pp 138-139 (Google Books)
Analyzing the sex web is a huge undertaking.
Whereas most will be happy to disclose their personal or professional relationships using sites like Facebook, Friendster or LinkedIn, few would be readily compelled to disclose personal information about their sex life.
Finding out the topology of sex is important in the ever-changing web of human existence, however. So it is not at all surprising that a scientific research tool called Sexual Relationship Database was created.
According to the Website, the World Health Optimization Management created the project “in an effort to better understand society’s interconnected nature.” For this project, a sexual partner is defined “as a human with whom a person has had oral, anal or vaginal sexual contact.”
Like the Wikipedia, anyone may edit the sexual histories. To ensure accuracy of the study, the organization requires that users log in with a valid email address. They also reserve the right to ban users who knowingly provide false information.
Here is a map of the sex web of a few celebrities to get you started:
Found these amazing maps today which visualize the economics of nations from Albania to Zimbabwe. The maps are available in vector-format (EPS and PDF) showing data in 1985 and 2000:
The concept of proximity formalizes the intuitive idea that the ability of a country to produce a product depends on its ability to produce other ones. For example, a country with the ability to export apples will probably have most of the conditions suitable to export pears. Unfortunately this intuitive definition of proximity is, very cumbersome to measure. It requires quantifying the overlap between the set of markets related to each product. On the paper "The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations", published at Science magazine, the authors explain how they've measured proximity by using an outcome based method founded on the assumption that similar products are more likely to be exported in tandem.
The authors generated a network representation of the original proximity matrix to help them develop intuition about its structure as well as to visualize and study the dynamics of countries on it. The matrix representing the product space has many small values which represent weak connections between products. That is why a network representation becomes an adequate way to layout the products, giving the researchers a quick visual way to show the relevant links and to determine where countries are located and where they could be headed.
Another advantage of using a network representation is that we can simultaneously look at the structure of the space and other covariates. In this case, the authors painted the network using the product classifications performed by Edward E. Leamer, and made the size of the nodes proportional to the money moved by that particular industry or World Trade. To give a sense of the proximity of the links involved in our network representation we color coded them by using dark red and blue for strong links; and yellow and light blue for weaker ones.
I think that everything that fosters communication is addictive. If you think about it like this:
Email, the original means of Web communication, was very addictive. Do you remember the days back in 1995 when you typed and quoted people's emails for 4-page long and conversations which lasted over months?
Then IMs came about, and that was essentially a digested form of email, except that you don't really have to edit much because it's not very formal.
People like to voice their opinions and made themselves heard, not just to a single person, but to many at once--that's where chatrooms come in, allowing individuals to broadcast their opinions to a group.
But chatrooms are instantaneous, and are not permanently stored, so most don't find that extremely effective. That's when you have blogs, where their opinions and discourses are permanently stored on databases, and remained indexable and thus searchable by search engines.
Blogs require authorship, and most don't have the time to do that, and that's where comments came in. Friendster was originally very viral, but Friendster calls them testimonial, and testimonial sounds very serious and so it never really kicks off.
Comments, like IMs, are intentionally casual, so people write more often. What makes Flickr popular is that users can submit whatever they want to on the Web (a subjective perspective), and people can write whatever they want. Its database is hosted by Yahoo, and so it becomes very searchable. In fact, you will find your Flickr comments get onto Google index within 4-5 days (I subscribe to my own Google Alerts so I know that)
Facebook is addictive, possibly because it allows you to install multiple applications based on interest, which is the link that link people together originally anyhow, and connect them together (see SML Pro Blog: Innovation = Synergy of Existing Ideas). In other words, Facebook creates multiple points of entry for communication. If Flickr would allow users to easily comment on other people's tags, date, EXIF info, etc, it might make it an even more interesting product. The notes feature is definitely a pro.
Mashing up your life
An easy way to mash everything up would be even more powerful. I am working on a project to mash every single social network that I have a presence in. This project, code name SML Lifelog, is a venue to provide multiple points of linking possibility to create a summation of all the social networks where I have a presence (See SML Network), and foster the ability to comment on a single topic spanning multiple networks.
Hopefully, when the product get onto beta in 2011, it will be more addictive than any networks you find today :)
In the world of SEO (Wikipedia: Search Engine Optimization), content is king. If you write good content and thus draw enough target audience, search engines will be your friends.
If you are mainly interested in the U.S. market, then Google is your friend, because that is where this search engine has the highest market penetration. If your target audience happens to be in Asia or Europe, then you are probably better of with Yahoo!, because it has long had an international brand presence and Google just started to expand into those markets recently.
Interestingly, most Americans find it surprising that Yahoo has more netizen population than Google overall (Source: Compete.com). Since Google has more American population than any other search engine, it is natural to assume so. However, if you survey your friends outside the U.S. to see which search engines they use most, and you may be surprised with your results. In my random sampling, I have found that almost all of my friends in the UK prefers MSN Live Search.
To find out just how well you rank among all the search engines, I recommend Jux2, a meta search engines which combines and compares the results of Google, Yahoo and MSN. You may be surprised of how many results are specific to a single database. If you are trying to appeal to an international audience, you will do best to optimize your search strategies for all three primary players.
If you are an individual, can you utilize these techniques to compete with global international companies? I think so. I Googled SML (initials for See-ming Lee, my name) today, and this blog is prominently featured on page one among approximately 7,450,000 results. I am competing with global players and acronyms here. It's definitely a very 'gratifying' activity. :)
Do you have to spend a lot of money? Does it take a long time to see your ROI (Wikipedia: Return on Investment)? I don't think so. I believe that I am gaining these benefits all by writing a few poems recently. And I published pretty much all of them within the last four months.
I fell into all these mostly out of my recent interest in network theory. Based on my research, I have a hunch that Google's algorithm has largely to do with network theory (Wikipedia: Network Theory / SML Bookmarks: Social Media / SML Bookmarks: Network). This is a hunch, not a proof. Theoretically speaking, I don't think that any proofs are definite. You can, on the other hand, validate your confidence level based on statistics and analytics reports.
I just received the A2 print of the Web Trend Map 2007 by Information Architects Japan. It visualizes the Internet in the form of a subway map and is very well done. You can also view the interactive version on their Web site, which displays a snapshot of that Web site upon rolling over the nodes on the network.
A letter from Oliver Reichenstein (Google / jux2 / LinkedIn) accompanies the shipment and provides additional background on the map:
The first map was conceived in 2006 as a fun Christmas card for our Japanese clients and friend. To our surprise it gained worldwide attention, which encouraged us to release a more meaningful version. It now shows over 250 websites on 16 lines, and people have reportedly spent hours analyzing it. We greatly look forward to hearing your interpretations.
AIGA is holding a conference on user experience design called dux07.
Besides being an interesting event, the site is also very well-designed. Sweet typography. I also like how when you rollover the logo the type changes. True, it's not a new idea, but it's rarely done well. Check it out!
From the AIGA Communique newsletter dated 2007-08-16
DUX07: Conference on Designing for User eXperience: Early registration deadline is September 5 Chicago November 5–7
Social media and networks are creating new design challenges. How do we inspire and enable people to contribute, create, personalize and share experiences? How are design roles changing in the face of this shifting landscape?
This conference is the premiere global forum dedicated to the exchange of radical new user experience strategies, providing exclusive insight and discussion about new design methods, and offering access to research and design practitioners with a visionary perspective on the future of the profession. Discuss current issues with other designers and strive to define your own role in shaping user experience.
DUX07 is presented by AIGA, the professional association for design, the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM), SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI. Register by Wednesday, September 5 for the best rates! For more information, visit dux2007.com
After reading Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams, my exploration of decentralized networks went down a very viral path. I discovered that the application of network theory is enormous and has huge implications and applications on every seemingly unrelated topic that I have come across.
It can be used as a tool and device to understand cities, computer networks social networks, human-human interactions (speech), human-computer interactions (HCI), computer-computer interactions (protocol), diseases, computer viruses, nature. If you think about it, all these things boil down to a single category: communication.
My recent interest in networks has in turn got me into search engine optimization — because search engine is essentially a highly networked database with stored properties between data collections. Here are the steps I have taken to research this topic:
Study network theories (mostly through books and wikipedia)
Dive into every social-networking sites and analyze their business strategies
Domain-shopping and create targeted content as a way to validate the theories studied
Innovation is about the creation of a new idea based on existing concepts.
This applies to Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, where medical researchers look through NCBI, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, to browse connections among proteins to look for clues to fight diseases and human health crisis.
It applies to Internet culture, where users mash-up existing services together to create new products and services where 1+1>2.
It applies to human relationships, where human beings unite through common interests, via six degress of separation: Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn.
It applies to agriculture, where farmers combine different species of vegetables through genetic mutations to produce seedless watermelons, tomatoes that do not bruise during shipping, high-starch potatoes and cataloups that resist viruses.
In the business world, innovation is about connecting existing ideas into new concepts. The idea behind Social Retailing (SM) is made possible by connecting shopping and community, a concept which seems odd at first but once you find the key to connect the two, it makes sense.
The challenge in linking these nodes lies in finding the chain of links (the key) connecting these concepts. However, I have found a very powerful tool today on the Web that may very well be used as a successful formula generator. It's called Six degrees of Wikipedia.
Here are some interesting searches I conducted on the site and their resulting degrees of separation:
Social - Community - Internet - Shopping
Social - Community - Public space - Retailing
Retailing - Online shop - Web browser - Wii (a)
Retailing - Department Store - Hercules - Playstation
Retailing - Consumerism - Mass media - Xbox
Bottom line: brainstorming is made much easier when the path of connections is clear.
