Facebook Caught Experimenting on Users

Social Network Analysis research gets icky.

I have to admit that I see how this happened, and I would probably have signed off on the ethics of it myself (or been willing to be part of this). But I can see how it looks pretty bad to be caught doing it. And frankly, maybe it is pretty bad.

OTOH : I think what they found out knowledge worth having. But it's largely worth having in order to know the danger that corporations having this power present. You wouldn't want the academic study of this to be banned, and for the research to disappear into internal surreptitious tinkerings where no-one else ever sees the results except in private reports to the marketing department and advertisers.

Good Zed Shaw talk (in tweets)

(Covers everything from python to music to banks and economic crash.)

Good Clay Shirky interview with thinking from his latest book.

You don't understand Twitter!

That's OK. It's kind of weird and hard to get your head round. And if you aren't using Twitter, absolutely there is no way you're going to understand it. It looks ridiculous; the most pointless thing ever,

But the hype is justified. Twitter is unlike anything else out there. A kind of Flow Internet version of del.icio.us. The most successful example of Zby's "social routing" I've seen. The nearest thing to plugging yourself live into massively parallel hive-mind.

Update : Big Scribe post on Twitter today.

Playing loud music in public may be anti-social, but isn't it also an attempt to be social?

Note : this is pre-response to a longer post I'm writing but haven't posted yet. When I do, read it, then get in your Tardis and come back and read this. :-)

Is it just me is there a YASNS surge going on at the moment? Yeah, I got sucked into Facebook and discovered Victoria Real, the Musical

While the Runtimers seem to be more LinkedIn kind of people. And Bebo (I hasten to add I am never going to have a MySpace account or contribute even a (whatever-the-smallest-unit-of-attention-is) to a Rupert Murdoch-owned property) has kindly given me a place to upload all my old musical meanderings. (It's time to stop pretending music comes from "bands" and people anointed by some military-dionysian complex, and recognise that heretoforthwith it's nothing but part of that glorious woven matrix known as "people messing about")

Meanwhile, I am so out of supply-chain management for the next few weeks, and so into trying to get the Wittgenstein Symposium to think seriously about right-wing flying-saucer conspiracies ... but really what I'll be ranting about if I come round your house is spimes and a daemonology where getting anything done (and I mean any-"thing") requires the blessing or patronage of the great lords Google and Yahoo and SkyPal. And where all the world is written in magic books, only by those who understand the arcane APIs of supplication.

I guess that's not so out of supply-chain management at all ... spimes get created as and where needed, except when they are mere imminences, addresses encoded into an Arphid that link to a design on some server. Are you really going to track their flickering trajectories in the cloud-chamber of psycho-history with good old-fashioned ERP? I think not, it's the great search engines and social networks that are going to reach out and embrace them : your shopping is coming by RSS ... if you say your prayers right and have been a good boy or girl.


And where the fuck is GeekWeaver? Not ready ... :-(

David Weinberg : We exult in a smarmy self-congratulations as if none of our moments would make us look bad if posted to YouTube.