It’s been quiet here, because my word press account got hacked, so I’ve been archiving, researching and upgrading. Cross your fingers, folks. Update: It just hosed my theme. I’m super depressed…

While you are waiting, check out Facebook Lexicon, which lets you search the popularity of words that appear in Facebook Walls. Here is a graph of Clinton and Obama. Many of you will know how about my feelings towards the awesomeness of word frequencies.

On a rainy Friday, here are some follow up tidbits to some previous posts that have been collecting in my mental Inbox. I think it’s a good practice to follow up on posts. In both blogging, even more importantly traditional journalism, the story after the story is too often neglected.

1. A few kind readers have asked me about the other youtube famed video, D.A.N.C.E., by French techno duo Justice. While it is a great track and video, I still like DVNO better. Superimposing motion graphics on a shirts is a brilliant idea, however the visual effects prowess of the creators overtakes the visual imagery. The viewers spends a lot of time thinking, how did they do that? and what a cool effect. DVNO required a similar level of design skill (with albeit less rotoscoping.) As stated before, in the case of DVNO, the technology is invisible and the viewer can focus on the imagery.

2. The game designer who created Passages, which I alluded to as work of interactive fiction, has created a new work called, Gravitation.

3. From March 1 to March 31, Google blog search reveals: 16,526 results for awesomenessand 706,055 results for awesome, which is lower than the results from my original post:February-2008: Awesomeness: 17,182 ; Awesome: 736,783 ; Are: 61,531,049
January-2008: Awesomeness: 9,627 ; Awesome: 429,769; Are: 57,214,958

Is the use of “awesomeness” leveling of?
I’m not sure. The results that Google is now giving me is different results for previous months when I first collected data, which is a little troubling.

However, if I really want to understand how search engines work, I may have to try to read this suggestion from Wojciech, Introduction to Information Retrieval, by Standford profressors, Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze.

Image source: Barron’s Online

One more note on subscription content. Last week I had the fortune of hearing some editors at Barron’s magazine speak, including managing editor, Richard Rescigno.

He noted that Barron’s main selling point is that they provide evaluations of (mostly) equities which they feel are either overvalued or undervalued. Unlike, many of their competitors, their company profiles offer an opinion to respectively sell or buy these stocks. They also publish reports cards to show readers how they are doing. Not surprisingly, their circulation is stable, and at near high levels.

Like the Economist which has been covered here, Barron’s has a subscription based business model, which is supplemented by advertising. They means they they are not as beholden to the companies who advertise on their pages, or the shifts in the media buying landscape. Paying readers get this weekly paper on Saturday. On Monday noon, they also publish their articles on the web for free, as not to take away too much on paying readers who may want to buy or sell when the markets open on Monday morning.

As newspapers and news weeklies continues to see their revenue, stock prices and staffing levels drop, my conclusion would be to aim for in depth reporting that gives an clear opinion and point of view. People will pay you for them.

Image source: Wikipedia

This is going to be slightly off topic, so you’ve been warned. Carly Simon seems to be bubbling up into pop culture consciousness, even without being included on a Quentin Tarantino/ Wes Anderson film soundtrack. Her controversial “He Hit Me” she wrote that is covered by Grizzly Bear on their Friend EP and in live shows.(Please read comment thread.) On an anecdotal level, a friend, Ray, randomly mentioned that he has been into the Simon track “Why.”

A little additional internet research is showing that she is also releasing her next record on the Starbucks label, and one of her songs was featured on American Idol. I’m waiting to see if she shows up anywhere else. How are these related, if at all? Can the fluctuations of the comeback popular culture be tracked, traced, understood and gasp predicted?

All this leads up to the big question I want to ask, which has to do with her ode (dare I almost say, pre-rap battle?) to Warren Betty (or Kris Kristofferson or Mick Jagger, depending on who you ask) “Your So Vain.”

The lyrics of the accusatory chorus “you’re so vain, you think this song is about you, don’t you?” have always confused me.

um… the song IS about him, isn’t it?

Image source: Economist.com

Coming from home last Thursday, I sorted through my mail to find my copy of the Economist, one day early from its usual Friday delivery. Of course, last week’s copy has barely been opened, and now the pressure it on. I don’t often read it cover to cover, but I try to skim each section. I am a firm believer in the ideas that is always a good idea to have a vague notion of what you don’t know. But each week around Wednesday or Thursday, I get a little nervous but I know the next issue is on the way.

The Economist, as a publication itself, got some press recently. Mostly because it is one of the few news publication that is pushing for more growth, rather than shrinking, trying to grow from 700,000+ US subscribers to one million in the next five years. Jon Friedman at MarketWatch wondered out loud if they push would dumb down the coverage. I certainly hope not, an doubt that they will, unless they want to alienate their constituency, which editor-in chief, John Micklethwait, describes as “people who want an intelligent read.”

Although the wit of cover headlines and artwork is amusing, that the fact that the magazine has a distinct point of view is one of the most important aspects of the magazine and why it is successful. It has a single value proposition: The weekly magazine in depth analysis of of global news from a pro-free market perspective. How would you describe Time or Newsweek in one sentence?

The Economist provides coverage on every region, each week. (You get a steady stream of articles on the developing world, that are go beyond natural disasters and civil wars.) They stay away from celebrities, popular culture coverage, scoop driven reporting, and thankfully “best of” lists. Their unified perspective is so rigorous that they don’t provide by-lines, even to their columnists.

Fox News’ success can be similarly linked to attracted audiences, because their viewers are looking for a specific point of view. However, the Economist is able to stay above the fray of partisanship, and the criticism that is linked to it. Because the position they have taken is not directly linked to a political party, they can be more critical of both sides. One article can be pro-privatization of state owned industries and another can be pro-stem cell research at the same.

Today, “mainstream” journalism thrives for “objective” coverage, which I’m starting to feel is impossible. Balanced reporting often becomes let’s try not to upset our sources, advertisers and readers. Articles in the Economist offer opinions (which I don’t always agree with) if a policy is good or bad, as well as recommendations, and solutions to problems. Readers rarely get that in other US news publications, outside of the Op-Ed pages. Traditional news organziation, such as Time, Newsweek, but also the New York Times and the Washington Post, need to be more polemic, not less. As stated in a previous post, people will want to pay for quality content, even in the (gasp) print media format, while competing with all that “free” information.

Image source: Style.com and Vogue.co.uk

When March rolls around each year, fashion magazines present their Spring/ Summer fashion issues. This usually means issues of a US-published magazine such as Vogue are hundreds of pages thicker than others times of the year. Most of the additional pages are advertising from fashion brands. UK and European magazine, while still focusing on the upcoming season, maintain their standard, thinner size. As with many similar US versus European comparisons, American Vogue more heavily relies on ad pages to generate revenue, where as British Vogue which is more subscription based business model. Regardless of business model, both maintain their statue in the fashion publishing industry.

As I understand the magazine publishing world, magazine advertisers pay rates based on circulation. Higher circulation leads to higher ad rates. Although, some niche audience magazine will command higher rate for somewhat lower circulation numbers, about the marketing will be more targeted. American Vogue, along with many other magazines published in the US, has the incentive maximize their circulation. One result of this incentive, is that American Vogue has expanded beyond pure fashion editorial, and into what one might call “Vogue lifestyle.”

To spread the appeal of American Vogue, celebrities most often that in the past, grace their covers, rather than the models on their European counterparts. American Vogue’s big spring issue featured Drew Barrymore, where as, British Vogue had supermodel Kate Moss. While Moss is a celebrity herself, she is still primarily known for being a model. A better comparison would be the February 2008 issues, with British Vogue featuring Russian model Sasha Pivovarova (the face of Prada for much of the decade) as opposed to the cover of its American counterpart with actress Kate Bosworth plugging her movie “21″.

The sacrifice of expanding American Vogue’s subject matter, is the decreasing coverage of solely fashion editorial photography and articles. Instead, the magazine covers celebrities, food, beauty, and travel. Admittedly, because American Vogue has a much bigger circulation and therefore bigger budget, the fashion editorial shoots do have higher production values. Further, their food critic, Jeffrey Steingarten is one of my favorite food writers.

Chris Anderson of Wired recently published his article on Free. Much of the free content on the web is ad supported. Because ad-based models, including the likes of Goggle, were the initially profitable web media, the Me-toos of the digital world are all following suit. Interesting, in the web 1.0 era, people used to point to the WSJ.com as the golden child site, which got people to pay for it, something that most newspapers have never been able to do.

However, there is something to be still said for pure subscription content model. Anderson is obivously a smart guy, but I hope that his ideas on Free don’t encourage people to blindly pursue ad-based models, without really reading what he is discussing.  Towards the end of his article, he notes that in a Free economy, attention and reputation become scare resources, and sometime, that people are willing to pay to receive.

British Vogue is much more narrowly focused on pure fashion editoral, which may make it more niche. But there isn’t anything wrong with that smaller audience of people looking for strong fashion writing and photography. There will always be a market for targeted content, it is just that the standard for what people are willing to pay for has risen. The death of the subscription model is premature and should not be discounted. The game is just a lot harder than it used to be.

Well, I am finally posting. Work and life got a little crazy, and something had to give. That something was side projects, like blogging. However, I’m back from a week in Seoul and I’m almost adjusted to this time zone. When I travel, people always seems to tell me to take lots of pictures, which I enviably never do. However, I did manage this time around. Here’s a map of an underground mall in Seoul. These malls and subway stations are sprawling and can cover a few city blocks. Like in Tokyo, directions to a location often tell you the specific exit, which are numbered, you need to take. Getting from one end of the station to another can take twenty minutes to walk on the street, which makes using the correct exit rather important.

On my free day, I took the Circle Line (formerly called Line 2) all the way around. I was going from City Hall to the Coex Mall at the Samseong station, which is not quite half way around. So I went there and returned going the same direction. (Counter clockwise if you’re curious.) Being non-rush hour, it was quite relaxing, and the people watching is always good. It was also much warmer than cold Korean winter air outside.

I decided to forgo the standard shot of a teenager watching television (DMB) or talking on their mobile in the subway. Flickr is full of photo displaying Koreans using the high bandwidth in the subway that we dream about back home. Thankfully, earbuds are always used. Conversations are at low volume, with one hand holding the phone and the other covering the mouth to limit the noise to others.  After a week of seeing it, I started doing it myself. I’m not sure New Yorkers would be so polite, when mobile phones finally work on the MTA. It’s striking how the culture of use evolved differently here.

Images source: Peer to Patent

A month ago, I heard Beth Novack from the New York Law School give a talk at the Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace. She is working on an interesting project called the Peer to Patent project, which is trying to incorporate peer review into the patent review process. She pointed to a (then) recent blog post by Adam Oram, on O’Reilly Radar:

“The idea of micro-elites actually came to me when looking at the Peer to Patent project. There are currently 1611 signed-up contributors searching for prior art on patent applications. But you don’t want 1611 people examining each patent. You want the 20 people who understand the subject deeply and intimately. A different 20 people on each patent adds up to 1611 (and hopefully the project will continue, and grow to a hundred or a thousands times that number).”

The concept of the micro-elite is interesting because it has characteristics of both a zero-sum and a non-zero-sum game. In that, anyone can in theory become a micro-elite, by picking a sub-genre (or perhaps sub-sub-genre) and broadening your knowledge base. Picking something obscure helps achieve micro-elite status. The problem appears if you want to become a micro-elite on a popular subject. Then, being one of the select few becomes more much difficult. Oram also mentions that this project also requires someone to have to go out and persuade the 20 experts to help out. However, what happens when you have too many equally skilled people who want to be involved? The term micro-elites by definition set a finite number of participants. The idea of crowd sourcing, if you will, the patent review process is a very interesting one. Peer to Patent is just starting out. I’ll be curious to see how it scales, how the collaborative efforts can grow, and if there is competition for participation in general or for specific cases occurs.

Image source: Amazon.com

I love the idea nanocelebrity or micro-celebrity, where people are famous among a small group, but far from being a household name. Academic conferences are often a great place to find micro-celebrity. In the US, few academic cross over to the mainstream celebrity. Within a field, an academics can become rock stars, who have followers and detractors and can be controversial for their ideas. Their opinions can be widely cited and discussed in formal scholarship as well as on blogs and discussion groups.

At the recent Computational Social Sciences conference I attended and covered here, many of my social network theory rock star heroes  were speaking, including Lada Adamic from the University of Michigan. Adamic has done some important and early work looking into the link structures of the blogosphere.  In 2005, she “famously” looked at political blogs after the 2004 US Presidential Election, showing how most blue and red blog were far more likely to link to similarly minded blogs. Some of her visualizations made their way across the internet increasing her micro-celebrity status. The first time I met her (in the elevator at another conference) I didn’t even realize who she was. In the world of micro-celebrity, one’s ideas can be posted across the blogosphere, and can have the occasional pictureless quote in mainstream publications, adding to their street credibility among their small fan base.

Clive Thompson recently wrote a nice column on the subject and how Facebook status updates are like sending out press releases. He quotes Theresa Senft who is attributed with coming up with the idea micro-celebrity in the digital age, “People are using the same techniques employed on Madison Avenue to manage their personal lives.” In a networked society, information flows more freely and connections are more easily made. Groups of interested parties are form around people, through discussion forums and Yahoo Groups are Thompson sites. However, micro-celebrity can even be sliced into smaller facets.

Facebook allows anyone to be and operative as a micro-celebrity. It’s not uncommon for people who went to college in the Facebook era to have over 500 friends. On the occasional ego-check to see how many “friends” I have, I usually surprised to see how high the number is, because I don’t consider myself a power user. Digital micro-celebrity is replacing what was the traditions of the “small town.” The traditional “small town” with multi-generations living near by, if not the same street or house, fostered micro-celebrity. The only difference is that the micro-celebrities have a distributed network of fans, rather than local ones.  Small groups (of say, less than 1000) can easily form, some of the forces which motivate the formation of these groups are worth looking to into, and will be covered in posts to come.

Image source: USGS

Yesterday, Facebook was frequently mentioned at the Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace conference, but I’m trying to figure out what is the value my Facebook network.

For a free service, Facebook is getting expensive. Not just for Microsoft, but for the users who maintain their social network. Dealing with Pokes, Invites and Scrabulous take time, effort and bandwidth. As the popularity and membership of Facebook increases, the cost for not participating grows as well. Just as there are costs associated with not having a telephone or email address, the social and economic pressure to join these sites can be readily felt.

These Facebook clicks of “friendship” are simple gestures that replace deeper interactions. This form of communication is low bandwidth, in terms of data but more importantly of cognition. We are now able to easily increase our social networks in terms of reach, but the fidelity of our interactions within the networks is decreasing. Facebook seems to value to the size of the network, but not the fidelity of the links. The value of a network is not only the number of nodes, but also the quality of the information that flows through the edges between the nodes. Finally, the work of Ronald Burt suggests that there is value in having a network that is unique from those with whom are competing. The low fidelity of Facebook communications show a shift toward networks which have low costs, effort, and unique characteristics, which overall have less value than we suppose.

Looking at usage rates, it is becoming the preferred tool for many people, young and old. One of the main reasons Facebook is a popular because of its convenience. We are able to maintain these relationships, which seemingly take a minimal amount of effort. A simple click allows us exchange gifts, play a game, or say hello. It also increases the efficiency of the user by automating one communication effort across many friends. By filling one movie quiz, we are able to apply this work to all our other friends who answered the questionnaire describing how much they liked “Shrek.” In a way, it’s like sending out a mass interactive Holiday Letter, which is admittedly better than nothing, but not quite fulfilling. Nevertheless, these Facebook apps are extremely efficient for members who have hundreds of friends. We are able to interact with all these friends though one gesture. For many current and recent students, Facebook is an intimate part of their social experience. However it is successful because it is compliments real time interactions, of a past history of deeper real time interactions. These compliments could have been face to face or some other digital communication form that has more fidelity than a Facebook post of ten word sentence on a user’s Wall.

What is the meaning of these gestures? What is the meaning when an app is flawed, as in the case of the movie taste matching application, if none of my favorite movies are listed? What is the cost of forgoing communication with higher fidelity?

The adoption of Facebook shows our willingness to extend a network (adding nodes) in exchange for quality of information and even meaning. Facebook is an important tool for maintaining relationships, especially when a person in a friendship moves away, such as attending a different university after high school or leaving a job. Before, these ties may have dissolved, but now they have a longer lifespan. But how long can a purely Facebook relationship last within itself?

The beauty of Facebook, and one of the reasons for it adoption, is that we can fake friendship, which is to say, simulate a relationship with minimal work. Rather than actually having a meaningful exchange with a person, in a couple of clicks you can send the latest application interaction to her. But has anything meaningful been communicated?

We do not acknowledge the trade offs between a large social graph with less fidelity in communication and a smaller social graph with higher fidelity in communication. With high fidelity, and more information, the relationship and connection will most likely wither away. This trade off is important and often left unconsidered.