Deleting discussions...closing discussions...deleting comments - is it ethical?

The more I am involved in social networking writing contributions to various sites, the more I am increasingly aware of the ethics of deleting other people's comments, closing a discussion to comments, or deleting an entire thread/post/network.

Right now, there are literally thousands of ning.com networks, and some of them have tens of thousands of members. The members can spend hours per week or even entire days preparing and posting blogs, comments, opinions, original ideas, creativity, research etc. They can develop close frienships with long, complicated email histories in private conversations, and they can also upload their pictures and videos to contribute.

Now the scary part. The network creator can delete the entire network with the click of a mouse. Years of contributions can be erased in a second by the Network Creator. Its not entirely easy to do by accident, it would require forethought, but, for example, if a network was taken over by someone other than the originator of a network, the content would all become jeopardized.

Slightly less scary but also worth considering is the fact that on most blog posts, the OP (original poster) can delete the discussion. For those of us familiar with how the internet works, quite often an OP's statement ends up merely being a catalyst for what turns into a very deep, involved conversation that will invariably involve countless man-hours of research, writing, proofing and posting, not to mention emotions. Friendships can often start or end in a thread, and people can have their world views altered or completely changed. Its big stuff!

Further along this line of thinking, OP's can generally delete individual comments as well. This exists obviously as a way to prevent spam, but it is also a very dangerous form of censorship, as the OP can spuriously delete dissent while allowing flattering comments to remain to alter the perception of the OP's message.

What do I propose to solve this? Well, a partial solution might be that a general feature be added internet wide to sites that emails your comment or an entire thread to you if your comment is ever deleted. This could get tricky for the case of an entire network, but might be OK if every thread you participated in was sent to you do on the deletion of an entire network.

There could be a standard on the web like the IEEE or some kind of best practice for social networks where you as a contributor are guaranteed a certain set of rights and can hold certain minimum expectations. Your contributions will not be deleted without your express permission could also be a solution. These would be difficult and time consuming to implement. Alternatively there is the concept that wikipedia.com offers with the history, which also seems very elaborate but seems to work in terms of ensuring everyone's say continues to exist (albeit hard to find in a massive list of historical versions and unsearchable)

Also, being able to close a discussion to new comments in context seems highly unethical, because then anyone who may disagree or enhance your statement, or even clarify for accuracy, becomes muzzled by the OP. This is not the mark of a civilized society, and truly seems like a form of oppression and censorship.

I feel as the social networking revolution takes over, new ethical dilemmas will come along that we as a species will need to grapple with and solve to ensure our collective rights and efforts are protected vigorously!

-Ryan Cameron, the Code HandyMan Feb 1, 2010

Side Door? Try Butterfly Effect!

Side Door Economics? Try Butterfly Effect Economics.

How does Google make a 30% increase this quarter in the middle of an economic downturn when they give everything away for free?

Selling advertising? Bums in seats?

Sorry, Charlie, its not that simple. In fact, as the social networking neural pathways develop, they create vastly more complex paths between you and financial success. Fortunatley, there are theoretically infinitely more of them.

To determine the intelligence of an animal, they are often tested to see if they can establish an abstract relationship between them and their food and thus achieve the goal. For example, if a lever is pressed, it opens a gate which allows poor rat 23756 to get his cheese. The more steps the rat is able to use his hunger to motivate him to learn, the more "intelligent" the rat is. Say the lever is on the opposite wall of the cage, thus away from the food. The relationship becomes more abstract as the rat then needs to figure out the relationship of the lever and the door without necessarily seeing them both and their mutual effect at the same time.

Add to that complexities, perhaps the lever needs to be held down while the door is open, but its too far away for the rat to rush from the lever to the door before it closes, so the rat needs to find something else (another rat perhaps?) to hold the lever while they go for the door, and mabey even figure out that sharing the cheese will result in this partnership working out in the future.

Welcome to a social networking business model. Those who manage to solve the puzzles currently being generated by the massive abstract neural network of people... connected across geography, time, and modes of communication...win the cheese. Those who give up on the puzzle early starve.

Sometimes it may be as simple as this. I have an island in Second Life. That island costs me $295 a month to maintain as my own. Many people just rent their islands to other people and get a direct A-B business out of it. Not me, no revenue, it largely just sits there, mostly vacant, with some nice free areas for people to roam and reflect in a lovely virtual forest with beautiful ambient music. What a waste of money, people might say. Wow, you must be rich, others say. Nope, neither. Im quite poor, and have significant debt at the moment (but the relationship to the island is again, abstract)
Because I have it, I take my time in second life and think about it quite often. I think about how it works, the significance of it. Because I have an island, when I do speak to other secondlife people, I get instant rapport and am not dismissed as another freeloader. It is a massive, interactive calling card that immediately demonstrates to all who visit my skills and taste in asthetic design, environment, and for those who like it, it begins a conversation without words.

What has all this brought me personally? Well, over the past year, I have had many things happen that I can trace back to my island ownership in one way or another. Amazing things. I was hired to do a job that paid me $15,000 over 3 months part time that I would not have gotten had I not set up this virtual, conversational context for myself. I met a composer who liked my island so much, he composed an album of ambient music specifically for it. This person also represented "Gibson Guitars" in second life and now my island is positioned next door to theirs.

I met an engineer/producer named Gary who flew me and my wife to L.A. for a visit thanks, in part, to my context. I was flown to SanFrancisco and met the CEO and staff of Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, again because of the context I established. In SF, I met others who were working to establish their own "contexts" and were making, in some cases, upwards of 10,000 a month with theirs. I couldnt begin to describe the convaluted paths money and opportunity takes to flow to all these people, but it does, and they were all happy, intelligent, and excited about their lives.

If you arent in Second Life, you are missing out. I dont think you necessarily have to own an island to derive value there, but it could be relative to the level of success.

Ive often thought to myself, how does Coke, Pizza Hut, and what not REALLY make money from an ad on television? Its hard to trace and probably benefits their competition just as much.

Thats THE KEY. Social networking is about you doing some action that benefits everyone. You dont get paid in money right away though, instead, like Coke, Pizza Hut, etc, you need to think about your actions creating ripples that tell two friends who tell two friends, they buy the other guy's product but are still encouraging support for your market vertical, your locale, your community (online or off).

If Dell advertises a mini laptop, Sony actually indirectly benefits in some ways because the person who saw it buys the even smaller sony...and then someone who saw these two computers at the airport makes the buying decision to get an acer aspire one. While at the mall to buy the dell, they all buy a coffee and some thumbdrives, and a lovely wicker stand. The ad dropped the stone in the pond, and many benefitted from the waves.

Of course, in TV advertising, none of those pathways can be traced by the vendor, they just assume it will happen when they pay 1,000,000 for a 30 second spot on tv for the super bowl.

In the new social networking economy, those pathways can be traced and turned into hard data that can influence the next "stone dropping" position, force, or size. For the first time, social networking enables the public to benefit from this en masse advertising for "brand awareness" that rivals or even trumps the capabilities of the big corporate juggernaut.

I used to play a game called "Myst URU", kind of the realtime 3d first person puzzle solving version of the original myst. Eventually I played a game which I believe to be one of the most brilliant puzzle games to date, called "Portal". Both of these games require the player to be observant of their surroundings, acknowledge that the answers are all there, just not quite grokked, and with time, experience, and a dash of cleverness, can all be solved with relatively simple tools. Sometimes the steps proved quite irritating and over convaluted, but the reward of solving the puzzle in both of those games were well worth the chase to me.

Another important thing to realize is that rewards will be delayed, or non monitary, but sometimes the non monitary rewards end up being the most treasured, the most valueable. If you are able to pay your rent with the income you make, you are in a position to use whatever other time and opportunity you have to build wealth in relationships, asthetics, social wealth etc. Fortunately you dont (yet) have to pay tax on those things.

I'll end with this example. Ning.com is a social network platform. Ive been setting up ning networks for clients who either 1. cant afford a big CMS / UMS but need one, or 2. are new to Social Networking but hesitant to invest the big money.

In both cases, the personal wealth I have derived from doing this work has been incalculable. No money per - se, yet, but I have established several life long friendships, gotten respect at work and among my peers, and even have an 8 ton granite inukshuk in my backyard all as a direct result of my efforts with Ning. The effort of a few hours here and there have made me more skilled, got me blogging, and helped me help dozens if not hundreds of people discover their own new pathways. I'll keep you posted. Oh and check out my virtual self's blog...he owes his existence to my virtual island!

Why Facebook Looks Like Twitter...

Here is a snapshot of the traffic on these websites, ranked where "1" is the most visted website on the 'net, and 10000 is the 10000th most visited website. As you can see...Facebook is plateauing with a gentle increase in the past year, Yahoo has seen a recent sharp drop, twitter.com and ning.com are experiencing significant increases, with Twitter being the most pronounced most recently, and second life has a steady decline.
Now its interesting that roughly when Twitter sees the spike in their useage is close to just before we saw facebook change its pages and profiles to look almost exactly like twitter's.

My purpose in grouping these particular websites is to draw a comparison between sites that are "open" and let you put content from them on other websites, and others that are "closed" AKA "walled gardens" that will let you post content to them from other sites, but they wont let you pull content from them to other sites.

Yes, the sites in decline or plateauing fit the walled garden category, with Second Life being the most severe walled garden largely due to the bulky client "viewer".

Conversely the sites with the sharpest increases in traffic allow you to easily put content YOU create on their sites on whatever other sites you want. Twitter makes this perhaps easier than any of them.

Again, this is all predicted in "What would Google Do" by Jeff Jarvis, and its interesting to see which companies here need to smarten up, and which ones are the future leaders, so lets just hope for their sake when they do get to the top...they dont forget how they got there, like Mr. Zuckerberg apparently has begun to do.

Run your own analysis for free at Alexa and see how your favorite sites stack up! Just replace the sites in the text boxes with whatever you want for .com and play with the date ranges. Its a very handy, free tool that makes Alexa another big winner in the traffic world. If only the big CEO's would realize, the most honest, open companies will always win in a world where "Free is a business model".

In facebook, it would be great if you could RSS the updates feed, and all the feeds, for that matter, and get the content out from inside the "blue and white utopia" of facebook if we wanted to. Its our content after all right?

Crowd Computing and 6 steps to make it work for you

I have a lot of people coming to me for advice on their websites. Here is my personal philosophy on the topic and what drives my advice to pretty much everyone these days.

First of all, websites as we generally think of them, are dying or dead. The idea of a static page with some sharp graphics, perhaps a fancy flash logo animation etc. has largely become irrelevant to most people in the past few years.

I like to correct people and say web presence instead of website. Web presence means just that, your presence on the web, in all forms. Your emails, your facebook pages, profiles and groups, your blogs, your pages on other social networks like ning.com, linkedin, twitter, second life, myspace, wikipedia, and your AIM/MSN/Yahoo chat handles. That list seems to be getting longer and longer, but essentially its all just where you're at on the web.

It may seem intimidating to have all these things out there and feel like you HAVE to be on all of them. The good news is, you dont. You only have to participate where you feel most comfortable, and where you get the most "bang for your buck". Buck in this case translates to time and effort.

I watched from the outside for 10 years this blogging and social networking phenomenon, really staying out of it and focussing on my job of building dedicated flash applications for online training. I stayed out because what I saw was millions of people with what I would characterize as a very shallow web "presence" in a wide range of media. I would call it spamminating, or just dipping your toe in a lot of different pools. That sort of thing didnt mesh well with my personality. I like to get into something and go very deep, explore it to as far as its limits, and master it, THEN move on to the next thing.

As the technology evolved, I did too. With the advent of more and more cross linking between them, badges, open application architectures, and flexibility, I saw a new opportunity to dive deep. With all the cross linking done automatically by things like badges, you can now write once, publish everywhere. That exicites me.

I read this line in a book called What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis that talked about how linked in disseminates the hundreds of millions of photos by using algorithms that monitor the cross promotion and cross talk between members about photos, and basically could use the wisdom of the crowd(crowd computing?) to determine interestingness.

Now, like the new ad companies, my audience gets my content not by how good my SEO skills are, or my raw willingness and lack of social life to post to thousands of networks all day, rather...and this is important so I'll bold it...my content automatically goes to people who are interested in what I have to say.

This is game changing. I've always thought that the internet was the dawn of a collected conciousness, but now with vastly more intelligent search thanks to google and the like, everything we say can and will be said to the people who need to hear it.

It effectively turns everyone's brains into one giant brain, with computers as the connectors between brains.

For now, we have to post our thoughts in writing to things like blogger, but eventually I think thanks to voice recognition, our every thought, our musings, will bring us kindred spirits to develop those thoughts either into new thoughts, learning journeys, personal catharsis, and evolution.

Crowds have always been feared by people, as angry mobs with pitchforks, but in What Would Google Do, Jeff Jarvis talks about the wisdom of the crowd. If properly analyzed and understood, a crowd is vastly intelligent, it is the sum of all its parts. If you take an individual neuron, its not capable of much, but put them all together and you have the most complex thing in the known universe, the human brain.

For the first time in history, sites like Flickr and Google have begun to speak to the crowd in its language (or even give it a language for it to articulate itself) And its talking. It has a lot to say. Democratic ideals have always tried to make this a reality, but voting never really captured the true meaning of what the crowd wanted, only grunts and warbles. With AI and computing however, the crowd now can finally talk with unprecidented precision.

What will we say to the crowd? More specifically what will you say to the crowd? Here is where we get out of the clouds and return to earth with actionable items:

1. Make sure you have and control your personal brand on as many social networks as you can find. This means own your own domain www.myname.com if you can. Own your company name www.mycompany.com, myproduct.com etc.

2. Create a facebook fan page for your product or service. Get everyone you can to join. If there already is one, become an active and leading participant. Always Give Value in everything you do.

3. Create and own your facebook profile, before someone else does. Facebook is used by 150,000,000 people as of this post, and by default is quickly becoming the defacto identity source. If you dont own your facebook profile, you are wide open to someone else taking it for you. And that is still legal.

4. Create your profile on everything else. Ning.com, Linkedin.com, blogger.com, myspace.com. All these can be more or less empty but just grab and own them.

5. Now that you've experimented with all these things and learned all these new skills... :) Pick which one you like the most and dive deep. In linked in, get all your friends in there, find new contacts, find opportunities, recommend people you respect. In facebook, post funny and entertaining things to your status, make people smile daily. Tell people things they can use, share your ideas, your concerns, your hopes.

6. Watch the comments roll in, tweak what you are doing based on them. If one thing you do gets no fans or comments, but another thing does, do more of the other thing.

That is how you can, right now, capture the wisdom of the crowd.

Good Luck!