Free

Professor Dean, I understand that you hate everything Chris Anderson but I agree with what he said in "Free". I have heard the example used in the beginning about Gilette before, they were the first company for the most part to give their product away in order to gain business. That idea evolved throughout the article to say there are still ways you can figure out how to profit out of a free services just like craigslist and google. He says how free is what people want. The final section I think sums up the article well. He says...

"Between digital economics and the wholesale embrace of King's Gillette's experiment in price shifting, we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly. How big a deal is that?"

...I don't believe that this is a big deal. We have seen throughout history that money is still made off of being free. Another thing that he mentions in this article is that...

"Traditionalists wring their hands about the "vaporization of value" and "demonetization" of entire industries. The success of craigslist's free listings, for instance, has hurt the newspaper classified ad business. But that lost newspaper revenue is certainly not ending up in the craigslist coffers. In 2006, the site earned an estimated $40 million from the few things it charges for. That's about 12 percent of the $326 million by which classified ad revenue declined that year"...

...with that being said, do you think that everything being free will be a big deal? Because to me it seems hard to answer other than yes or no. What do you think?

Also Professor Dean, I like posting articles from wired.com, is that an issue because of your passionate dislike for Chris Anderson? If so I won't mind looking for links else where.

Network Culture: Chapter 2

Chapter 2 definitely was much easier to follow than chapter 1 was. In chapter 1 it seemed as if Terranova was all over the place in an attempt to set the foundation for what she felt was relevant for the reader to learn. Chapter 2 does a good job of dissecting some of chapter 1's points a little. The part of chapter 2 that really caught my eye was where she goes into the transformation of information. On page 51 she says, "A peice of information spreading throughout the open space of the network is not only a vector in search of a target, it is also a potential transformation of the space crossed that always leaves something behind - a new idea, a new affect, a modification of the overall topology. Information is not simply transmitted from point A to point B: it propagates and by propagation it affects and modifies its milieu." This point goes back to the idea of noise and what becomes information. Everything we hear is this greater noise and we as a listener have to decide what to take in and store as information. As the noise goes from channel to channel, it is modified which makes the next person who grasps onto that information have a different experience than the previous person who evolved the idea. This quote from chapter 2 shows that information is constantly changing which creates and entirely different feel than before. This made me think about how things I believe to be true just via the word of mouth may have been drastically altered from the original true fact.

Is Twitter Really Worth 10,000,000,000?

Take a look at this article I found which talks about a recent rumor that Twitter was going to be bought by Google for $10bn. The CEO of Twitter Dick Costolo has dismissed the rumor and talked about where Twitters revenue comes from and the plans for expansion. I suggest everyone to take a look. It surprised me because I didn't realize Twitter was this large, I thought it was just a vehicle for celebrities, musicians, and athletes to get their thoughts out. Enjoy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12462653

Network Culture: Chapter 1

Alright so it seemed like everyone was sooooooooo happy to be done with Lanier as was I. Then to begin reading this...

I thought that this was way more confusing than "You Are Not A Gadget". It just seemed so dense that I could not understand a thing it was saying. Not even just the material on the pages made this book difficult to read I thought. The pages seemed way to bright white as if you walk outside with fresh snow on the ground on a very sunny day. That mixed with small font and tight pages made this book nearly impossible for me to get into/understand at all. Hopefully today's class will let me better understand what Terranova is trying to say.

However, there was something right off the bat in this first chapter that confused me and hopefully someone can clear this up for me. Is Terranova arguing that there is an information quality that defines the twenty first century culture? Or is this chapter saying that there is not quality that makes such cultures unique? I don't get it...Please save me!

Organized Crime: Is it the Worlds Largest Social Network?

Organized Crime: The World's Largest Social Network

So I was looking at Wired Magazine today because one of my roommates has a subscription.  I saw the most interesting article and thought that it was perfect for our class to take a look at. It is completely interactive so go click around and you will be amazed with some of the info you find!

The title of the article is "Organized Crime: The World's Largest Social Network". It really made my head spin to be honest. One of the stats the article had said "Transnational organized crime - that is, cooperative activity between criminal groups in various nations - is estimated to be a $2 trillion industry, larger than the economy of Spain." This along with many other facts such as the breakdown of where all this money is made and spent is frankly just absurd. There is a completely interactive map with every different crime organization like the Yakuza and La Cosa Nostra and what their specialty is. Also it even breaks down to the flow of goods around the globe such as things from female trafficking to counterfeit goods.

Honestly it is amazing and I think everyone should check it out. Let me know what you think about it!

Powerlaws vs. Bell Curve?

Hey class sorry about the delay for this post, I must not have hit publish last night. Well anyway here you go...

As we have been having this on going discussion about the way in which we should be graded in class, I thought the idea of the power law system was a great topic for this post. The concept of the power law system to me seems crazy. The article says "We are so used to the evenness of a bell curve, where the median position has the average value, that the idea of two-thirds of the population being below average sounds strange." In class we all made a huge deal that some people would always have to get a bad grade per assignment if we had a bell curves in place for all of our assignments. I thought it would only be bad if nobody deserved a failing grade. For instance what if the worst work for that particular day was C worthy, I don't believe that person should be bumped down to an F because of the bell curve. I think curves should help not hurt you.

However, imagine if our class was on a system like the power law system? Imagine having 2/3rds of the say 15 students in class being below the median...that would mean that 10 of us on every single thing would receive a grade worse than a C. Also, in this power laws system, many of us would assume that a rising number of students (in my class example from above) would cause the curve to flatten out, but in fact, increasing the size of the system would increase the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot. This is making me start to believe that the bell curve idea for our class isn't that bad.

I understand that I just compared this power laws system to our classes predicament over the bell curve but I wanted feedback from everyone about what they were still thinking about our classes grading situation. Professor Dean sent us to the web to sort out this discussion on our own and I think that this article was a great way to get this discussion up and running.

What does everyone think? Should we have the bell curve, no curve, or perhaps something as extreme as in this article? Please let me know!

Question from class - 2/3

My question from discussion today that we didn't get to answering was...

Lanier wrote about the power music has on people. Then he continues on to say that the industrialized world of today, has caused the reinvention of life through music to have stopped. Do you find that to be true?

Let me know!

You Are Not A Gadget - Part 2/3

After reading parts 2 and 3 of “You Are Not A Gadget” I found some correlations between them and part 1. I found that there can be another kind of danger that can arise from believing in bits too much. Back in chapter 1, Lanier made a distinction between ideal and real computers. Ideal computers can be experienced when you write a small program. These “ideal” computers seem to offer infinite possibilities and an extraordinary sense of freedom. We experience these “real” computers when we deal with large programs. They actually reify our philosophies through the process of lock-in before we are ready.

These concepts are built off of good ideas; however, this cultural software is built like a brand new tiny program each time, which is free to be anything at all. That seems like a great idea, but then everything is aligned on the same starting line. Which in turn makes everything the same.  This concept is called a “flat” global structure and it suggests this big happy world.

That is not how the world works. Lanier makes a good point when he says “software people know that it’s useless to continue to write tiny programs forever. To do anything useful, you have to take the painful plunge into large code.” These flat tiny programs are meant to be applied to human affairs, which then leads to a blandness and meaningless way of life. What if everyone was exactly the same? Would that be a fun world to live in? That is basically a very rough comparison of what these tiny programs are trying to do to the human affairs online.

I don’t believe that the mass computer users should be grouped into this “flat” category simply because of the lack of scientific thought. This flatness can cause confusion between methodology and expression.