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I saw this post about IMDB as I was perusing Techmeme last night. Wow, talk about a tough situation - the new Batman movie gets voted up to #1 movie of all time even though it clearly is not deserving. Similarly, the long standing #1 - The Godfather - actually is getting voted down. What can you do? The community has been taken over by biased participants and agitators.

The holy grail is to build the perfect reputation system, where you count votes in relation to the voters “reputation”, but that is impossible to define. A reasonable alternative might be to take a cue from Wikipedia and lock voting for the Dark Knight (and possibly the top 5 movies). When Wikipedia articles are getting vandalized or constantly being fought over by various factions, moderators can come in and lock an article until emotions cool. Considering that movies have a strong temporal aspect to them - how many people will be talking about this summer’s blockbuster over Thanksgiving dinner - locking voting on the movie might do the trick. If the movie is unlocked after several months, truly passionate fans can go back and vote for their favorite movie, but the mob energy will be much more difficult to recreate. As to fixing the current vote tallies, I’m not sure. Reverting votes could result in an even more significant and wide spread backlash from the community. My recommendation would be to leave votes as they are and count on your loyal fanbase to reset the rankings to their appropriate levels. Good luck, IMDB.

The NYTimes Magazine today has an article that is part criticism of the band Coldplay and part criticism of the MySpace design aesthetic. Definitely refreshing to see a major publication like the Sunday Times Magazine writing about the message that is imparted by design, the emotion it generates, and the conclusions one draws from design. Just one more example among many that what you see is just as important as what you get.

Mine is the 21,120,387th visit to Coldplay’s MySpace page. I am not greeted warmly. The British band — which is known for giant pop hits, a sheen of fakery and the marriage of its lead singer to Gwyneth Paltrow — does not exactly rush out to greet me. The page is rudimentary and indifferently decorated, like the apartment of four couchbound soccer addicts who barely look up when a girlfriend comes in.

Josh Porter wrote an article about the co-evolution of humans and technology, which I think should be expanded further. To start, a little background from the one semester class I took with Hod Lipson when I was in school (see his TED talk for self-evolving robots). Co-evolution is a feedback loop where the fitness function of one actor is defined by the fitness function of the other. You can think of it as symbiotic or parasitic. A symbiotic example would be the bacteria in your digestive tract evolving to help you digest while your body evolves to require their presence for healthy digestion. A parasitic example would be the arms race between antibodies and antigens - each continues to evolve to outpace the other. (There is an interesting discussion about the influence of evolving man-made pharmaceuticals and other biotechnologies on the natual co-evolution of antibodies and antigens, but I’ll leave that aside.)

To get back to Josh’s article, I think he didn’t go far enough. Yes, individual’s behavior does change in response to technology, but what if we think about it generationally. Compare children today vs. people born in the 1950s or 1930s. They have a technological intuition that is astounding compared to their parents or grandparents. How is that happening? Now, I’m not arguing that there is some genetically detectable evolution going on with regards to the cognition of technology. I do think there is a behavioral co-evolution (in the same sense that Josh intends) where technology creates a generation of children who intuitively grasp that technology, and as that generation ages will produce even more advanced technology (leading to yet another generation of children more intuitive than the previous).

Where does that leave us? I’m not sure, but I do look forward to an ever-increasing rate of radical innovation in technology.

Tags: co-evolution, science, technology

Thanks to a Facebook Application called Friend Wheel, I can generate the visualization pictured above of my 549 Facebook friends (and still growing). It’s kinda fun to look at; my friends are listing around the edges of the circle, and a line connects to people who are also friends of each other on facebook.  The reds, oranges, and yellows are high school friends. The deep blues are Amazon.com friends. The greens and aquas and most of the rest are college friends.

I had dinner with my friend Steve McNally last night, who is roommates with my other friend Jake Tuck. Lisa asked me which one was I closer to. My response was that I had more history with Jake (we were housemates all through college, whereas Steve only lived in my house for half of college) but was probably closer to Steve since we shared a passion for baseball. Tough call, since Jake is a musician (as I am). Then Lisa asked me if they were friends with Will Paul. I said no, because Will is a hometown friend while Jake and Steve were college friends. So that got me into thinking about how to visual social networks and how inadequate two dimensions is.

Let’s try three dimensions. For the x- and y-axis, imagine an ideaspace - this is a plane that maps out the various interests people have, the hobbies they participate in, the fields they work in. So you have one circle for the friends you go to jazz concerts with, one circle for your photowalking friends, one for your baseball friends. The size of the circle is the number of mutual friends you have who share that interest. At the center, (0,0), is you. The circles in the plane are arranged such that the interests that are most passionate to you are closest to the center. Does this make sense? Two dimensional graph containing overlapping circles of various sizes, with the ones closest to center being of the most interest to you. Got it? Good.

Now for the third dimension, which is time. Over time, you will naturally transition environments. High school, college, work, living abroad, joining the local book club, marrying your spouse and meeting her friends and family, moving to the suburbs to raise a family, etc. Each of these events expands your social network and can form dense clumps. The third dimension in our visualization allows for the stacking of these clumps. It is more uncommon for connections to span the clumps, but it can happen and can be enlightening. I think seeing such a visualization would tell a lot about a person - what their interests are, who their friends are, and how have they changed over time. What’s your social network look like in three dimensions?

I haven’t blogged since the day Lisa came home from Italy. I think it’s because I’ve structured my life to be dichotomous - there are work hours (9 - 7), and then there are non-work hours. So when Lisa was in Italy, I was spending my non-work hours living my “online life” - blogging, reading blogs, sharing posts, keeping up on twitter, reading about friends via Facebook, tracking Etsy using Summize. Now that Lisa is back, I have almost completely replaced those activities with spending time with Lisa, which has been wonderful. I get home from work and dive right into the life we have together.

But it got me thinking - shouldn’t I be able to balance work, life, and online life? How can I fit in my online life without feeling like I’m ignoring the person in my home in favor of a virtual internet community? Just to be upfront, Lisa has been encouraging me to take time and blog and read and do all the other things she knows I like to do. I guess I just have my priorities straight - I like her better than the internet.

So I’m making an effort to come back to my online life, which should make Mark Blumberg happy (a friend of mine from high school who encourages me to blog, not this guy). I’ll fit it in before work or before bed, and we’ll see how it goes. I should probably declare bankruptcy on my Google Reader - it’s been a month since I’ve done more than skim headlines.

OK, time for a real post.