Memetic Codes and Games
Posted in Attention, Blogging, Civic Issues, Future Science, Future Shock, Google Verse, Virtual Markets, Web 2.0 by wayne.porter on April 3rd, 2008 I apologize for the late April Fool’s Joke, but I prefer being out of sync, …(Scott Jangro has a funny video on April Fool jokes and includes some of my own history around jokes). You see why I had to publish something after the day of joking around. I also liked Jen Goode’s Penguin page. However Sam Harrelson sort of blew up every possible neuron I had left for lack of a better word. Hat tip to all you pranksters and story tellers. I laugh and I cry.
So on with my story on collissions and the value of generalization in a world of specialists and why being a specialist isn’t always great…I am thinking out loud because I can. (My Isaac Asimov beard is almost ready for video.)
Attention Serves Many Masters
My recent posts on Twitter and collisions received some play as I found it Stumbled, on many social networking pages and in some RSS feeds. Neat. It also got my attention as I ran through some stats and saw an alarming change in SERPs for my own blog (e.g. Right here.). I admit that I do not pay much attention to SEO because resources are better spent elsewhere and this blog often serves as my own sounding board, or “thinking out loud” place for others I know. I run small and large experiments, try creative approaches, and sometimes just keep an eye out for who (or what) shows up. Primarily I like to explore and share observations or give an opinion. I am not a lawyer.
I do not mean one should disregard SEO best practice- Don’t Be Evil is nice but perhaps too vague or too simple for the here and now. I think best practice might be to try to add to the value of the Internet through participation, discussion, and perhaps some basic common sense.
As a marketer if your site does not follow some basic architecture rules for Search Engines you will miss out on some of the “influentials” (potential collisions) that can happen.
If you rely on “search” as your primary attention tool you are probably missing out on a number of emerging technologies that connect people to people and therefore people to information. There are lots of sources of free information, there are plenty of people, but putting it together takes knowledge, experience and time and perhaps even a bit of luck. (Makes a side note to Ev- what might have caught your attention was not Unicode but perhaps the nature of chance e.g. gambling on Twitter or it could have been pure chance, on a quantum level just about anything “could” be responsible.)
Quick Review
I allready knew that my blog was dated and I have started the processes for cleaning up and proofing it for problems. In short a “force unknown” injected some pretty nasty links into a YouTube video post about self learning and another repeat injection another entry. It was injected in such a way as to be cloaked and the content I found extremely “disturbing”. Having researched, as a trade, some of the shadier sides of the Internet economy it really has to be nasty to make me flinch. This was pretty rude.
I am still tracking down how it happened, but it did get my attention as I realize how difficult it is to make everything secure in a period of hyper-change. The charge of being the steward of one’s own blog is a tough task today. However I realize that exploration means a trade-off in security. I value exploration and the liberty to do so and believe it worth the risk. Life is all about taking risks and the outcomes from those risks determine the future. I am a skeptical optomist.
I am not the only one battling it with issues of security, stewardship and liberty as I note various search engines and large media sites have either struggled, are struggling or trying to find their own way in a very chaotic world or at least one that seems chaotic. Reality is broken to the point of being “fake”. Actually I would argue “reality is not even real”, but that is beyond the scope of this post and my understanding. Remember I am merely thinking out loud.
Quick thoughts for my friends to ponder:
- Assume new rules are in play and have been in play for some time.
- Computers are truly acting and growing exponentially in ability.
- We need to start assuming personal responsability for our actions.
- This will take some time as no one wants to be ultimately responsible.
- Technology is pacing faster than our legal system and even our human brains can handle.
- A good place to start practicing stewardship is at your home- and online your home is everywhere.
- Wayne should heed the very advice he gives, but he sometimes gets lost in exploration. (Smack- because he is only human.)
- It is ok to make mistakes and learn, but try not to keep making a mistake over and over.
The Outcome and Dust
Over the next weeks you should expect some dust here as I clean-up some things, update Word Press and the various plug-ins I have tested, and continue working on streamlining my own “work processes” for better vigilance, productivity and fun. I add fun because I know I will be a better steward if I really love what I do and I really enjoy games. Make no mistake, as much as I like Word Press, a quick search on any specialist’s sites about various security vulnerabilities and it gives you an idea of how fragile the concept of security can be.
Think about this- There is much talk in game circles about “gold farming” and World of Warcraft. What does it mean when people start outsourcing their fun?
Spammers Kindle Interests
One cannot spend all the time dwelling on the negative- much of the media will happily do this for you. This is a part of the learning process and step one is a reality check. No amount of money, formal education or mentorship can replace experience. I could spend all day, and probably many nights, talking about the nature of reality, but I won’t bore you with mental gymnastics or semantics. I will add that I firmly believe in getting one’s hands dirty. It is important not to accept everything at face value. It is important to remain as explorers and to try to understand that the very construct we operate in shapes what we do or do not do. Even technology can obscure what we do, how we think, and our intent. We are not even aware of this layer.
So a nasty spam injection on an entry about informal learning forced me to open my eyes up further to how Search Engineers might have to cope with this stuff from a pragmatic standpoint, from an engineering standpoint and from an internal and external competition standpoint. I can cite cases like WorldCup Blogspit technique, Spazbox or the Kmeth worm as prime examples of past research I have worked on and just how difficult this can be to sort out. Search Quality Assurance guards another very important ecosystem- SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). It makes me wonder if the philosophy of “Right Livelihood” can, from a pragmatic view, be maintained and who gets to set the rules?
Quality Really is Relative
I admit years of going after spyware pushers and scummy adware makers may have left me blinded from a more “holistic view”. I go on record that I dislike spam. However, I must see spam for what it is- a key parasite that sends signals about our society and our systems.
“Although parasites are often omitted in depictions of food webs, they usually occupy the top position. Parasites can function like keystone species, reducing the dominance of superior competitors and allowing competing species to co-exist.”
To put it bluntly, as much as I hate it- spam, in certain periods, probably serves a more important function than a WII Mote.
Motivations Behind Spam and Stewardship
I would guess that quick economic gain is the primary motivating force behind a spammer’s actions, however this doesn’t mean economic gain is intrinsically “evil”, it could mean that short-term thinking is not healthy for our species as a whole. This has been rehashed over and over recently in the hot debate around affiliates (note Google’s recent moves with Performics and DoubleClick). From experience I know that affiliates are often “the patsy” for spam, lacking resources they will try and test many systems to survive. However, not all affiliates are spammers, nor are all spammers affiliates. Bad apples do exist, but to lump everyone together is a dangerous road to walk down.
It is important to remember gain can be money, influence, social capital, etc. Where and how it is converted is important. “Right Livelihood” is a philosophical concept you can look up in a basic philosophy primer or probably one of those “guides for idiots”. As I examine my own life and experiences I have come to the conclusion that at the end of the day, what I want to strive for is good stewardship. My father taught me this action by example. He maintained very complex communication equipment over a large region, yet he would never hesitate to do the most basic tasks he would ask of other technicians. When leaving a tower site he always took the time to use a broom to clean the site.
It is odd how small actions I see over and over shape my vision and even other’s perception. I am sure in ways I do not know and cannot know. (e.g. Johari Window Communications Theory)
Power of Collisions…
In my interim posts about “collisions”, and a good and constant reason to be a social collider I happened upon a real-life metaphor on how powerful colliders are being built. I found this via Phillip Lessin’s bookmark on his FriendFeed. (Note my FriendFeed and disclosure of using an Amazon “affiliate link” as a crude form of “attention measurement”. This is like caveman era measurement.)
The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.
Wow. That is some heavy stuff, yet companies are spending much more on mobile marketing. That is a constant you can bank on for a little while anyway.
Yet, and I cite the New York Times again:
“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.”
Double Wow. This is the New York Times and while we are looking at weird mobile advertising figures while some physicists are potentially creating collisions that could make the earth a black hole, in theory. What next? The cure for cancer? Even if we had such a cure I think it would be important for many people to talk about it first because we probably couldn’t handle it. I would suggest printing it on the back of baseball cards in some sort of statistical code so people could find it later. Everything takes time and time is a finite resource for people. Come to think about it, baseball might not be valuable so I might use rocks or stone.
The Meme Code- Spam or Brilliance?
A game from the creator of FriendFeed…
I think it is quite interesting, yet I worry about diversity. Note how the web pages are encoded to “die”.
The meme code generates a page from a visitor who arrives from Google, the page will create a new modified and randomized version of itself via a database back-end, and creates a link to it in a visible place. The new page will continue do the same as the old page. After some time a page is taken offline or “dies” although how it dies is not made clear.
Over time several pages would be able to specialize on search niches in the Web – word combonations people are looking for that are not yet covered online are created. This makes “evolutionary pages” turn up in the top results which people will actually click on. A search phrase entered by a search engine visitor is just like food in our nature’s ecosystem. Primarily our ecosystem is full of corn- I might add as an aside. The dynamic process of the meme game means there will be specialized or niche pages to catch this “food”.
A page’s “meme code” will lead it to become a successful species with a lot of offspring, or if not popular it will die and be forgotten…this is not new as Lessig’s game has been around for sometime….even affiliates have been doing it with web services and/or datafeeds too only I doubt they encoded a “termination gene” into the pages. Limited resources and financial incentives would probably force smaller publishers to ensure all pages live and to not practice disclosure because it selects against their visability.
See Kids Forbidden to Use Google this is good food for thought. The comments are even more illuminating. As I collide along I start to make some neat connections and new ways of seeing and experiencing the world. I share them because I am able to do so. I think therefore I am.
How Can You Collide with People and Have Fun? Here is a simple and short list. Five simple concepts or exercises.
- Break your pattern: This is much harder than it seems because patterns are so ingrained.
- Talk with others outside of your core discipline from time to time. Exchange information. Be tolerant.
- Spend some time in the humanities, music, or philosophy to find common ground or evaluate new and old views.
- Understand that collissions can be bumpy, but you will grow your business and you will grow. That is OK.
- Help someone out. I don’t want get into the philosphical arguments about the nature of altruism (selfish or not)- just help someone or take the time to thank them. It simply makes the experience here more fun.
Example Exercise. Think about Music and why you listen to what you do? How does it make you feel? Today my son is using the Wii to play songs on Guitar Hero. The songs or genres he finds “main stream” did not even exist when I was his age, and when I was a foolish teenager they were considered “taboo”. I am an adult, I am still foolish yet wise enough to know I am foolish, but at any age I can appreciate music.
Here is some music via a video (Semi-Random- I selected it from someone’s Last.fm feed) and it is not a band I follow: Faith & the Muse - Burning season. Do you like it or not? What do the images conjure in your mind? Who listens to this? What neurotransmitters change in the brain when you watch or listen to music? I don’t know- that is the downside of being a generalist in a specialized world. I am asking the same questions because I think they are good questions to ask and by building bridges I can find some experts.
So excuse me while I randomly select someone from Twitter or maybe somewhere else for my next experiment. I plan to use a new O/S, and a couple of dice rolls, and the room temperature to help with the randomness- there are some things in life I don’t want to outsource e.g. being random.
Below is the video I embedded via YouTube.
Popularity: 2% [?]