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Great stuff in the comment section of the post below. Viva!

Tim of Ubiwar had a near-simultaneous post on Social Media yesterday that was congruent with mine and expands on aspects that I did not. Highly recommended:

Noise and News

An excerpt:

Alexander van Elsas wrote an excellent piece on mobile phone functionality in which he referenced a recent post by Scoble, Why Google News has no noise. Scoble’s thesis is that he is able to spot trends in news before the main web news carriers, Google News for mainstream news, and TechMeme for tech news, before either they or their readers can. The enabling media for Scoble’s prognostications are social aggregators like FriendFeed and microblogging services like Twitter. I won’t go into the details of exactly what these are but essentially they are services delivered direct to the device of your choice which provide frequent updates of what your friends and acquaintances are doing, thinking, writing, at all hours of the day. With a lot of people in your network these alerts can be relentless.

Scoble likes this, as do many others, because it provides him with a background of noise which allows him to discern patterns in the network of social interaction across these services. Scoble is a journalist by background and inclination and, arguably, he is a new sort of journalist through his work at Scobleizer, and ‘swimming in the noise’ these services provide is food and drink to someone of his bent:

So, how come services like Twitter and FriendFeed have so much noise? Who likes the noise? Who likes the news?

I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.

This is an important and valid point. Scoble is watching the new news ‘wires’ to get a jump on the bigger outlets but also to discern the patterning in the information coming from across the globe. This process is aided by aggregative nodes which filter reports of activities into streamlined summaries of many people’s information. Once such example is ‘bridge blogging‘ which enables one bilingual individual to aggregate locally-generated ‘news’ in one language and to disseminate it in another. Scoble likes to avoid these nodes wherever possible but they serve a purpose, as any blogger will tell you.

I’m very curious about the pattern recognition part. Are Scoble and Jason Calacanis and other uber-geek bloggers following tens of thousands mentally upjumping in terms of discriminating patterns or are they gravitating to those signals in the noise that they are already predisposed to “see” anyway?

Twitter, as a Web 2.0 app, is often confusing at first glance, because the typical Twitter-user homepage resembles gibberish; an effect that comes from reading only one side of a person having many conversations, interspersed with random thoughts, links and reports of mundane minutia – 140 character microblogging. Even clicking “with others” isn’t much help as the asynchronous nature of the exchanges make these conversations very, very, difficult to follow.

This has led Dave Davison of Thoughts Illustrated, who has great experience in high tech angel investing, to ask of Twitter, “What is the Return On Attention? (ROA)” and ultimately, he came to the conclusion that twittering, unfiltered, is mostly attention-wasting noise.  As a consequence, Dave now uses one such (multiplatform) filter, Friendfeed and no longer twitters.

So then, what good is Twitter? Here’s the “Return on Attention” that I’ve found from using Twitter:

Conversation Within An Existing Network:

I kick around ideas, shoot the breeze or just stay in the loop with what is happening with Shloky, John Robb, Michael Tanji, Selil from SWC,  Adam Elkus, Charles Cameron and Shane Deichman. Additionally, Chirol, Sean Meade, Curtis of Dreaming5GW, Critt Jarvis and Dan of Tdaxp are alo on Twitter but “tweet” very irregularly.

Note that many of us have actually met in person, some more than once and/or have been interacting online together for years. This is where Twitter is going to yield the most value, given the 140 character limit of the “tweets”; a shared understanding is necessary to maximize the utility of this app.

Network Building:

Adding to the above group, which has clearly defined interests in 4GW, strategy, intel, COIN, futurism and technology, teaching and writing, was relatively easy. Joining us after a time were Fantomplanet, Jeffrey Carr of IntelFusion, Sandbaggerone, Fester of The NewsHoggers and Powerweirdo ( of many sites). The signal to noise ratio in this group is very high – and what noise exists, social chatter, joking, etc. serves psychologically as a positive reinforcer.

Gateway/ Breadcrumb Trail:

When I “follow” someone on Twitter or if they elect to “follow” me, I eventually get around to checking out their website, blog or links with greater scrutiny. This is how I found Jessica Margolin’s Solvation blog, Carr’s IntelFusion and started reading some of the blogs of the hi-tech/Web 2.0 gurus and entrepreneurs who “follow” me but for whom I mostly don’t reciprocate on Twitter because, like Robert Scoble, their combined sheer volume of “tweets” would drown everyone else out.  I have excepted  David Armano and Scoble; the former, because I have been repeatedly  impressed with his command of visual information and he keeps his tweets to a reasonable number and Scoble because, despite his maniacal aspect, he is a “hub” for that entire subculture and occasionally posts up high value links like this.

I pretty much find something interesting every day on Twitter or by somebody who uses Twitter – like this piece on 5GW. It’s a useful app, if you accept the inherent limitations of the platform or if you intend to bring your entire network with you and speed up the  conversation.

No top billing today – just an array of interesting links.

Nick Carr -“Von Ahn’s Gwap“

All of us may someday teach a computer to be smarter than…well…all of us.

DANGER ROOM -“Secret Strobelight Weapons of World War II”

There’s actually quite a few bizarre, experimental, weapons of this period that never quite made it to the “big time” without a military-industrial complex to push square pegs into round holes.

Thomas P.M. Barnett -“Barnett: What will America do when Iran gets nuclear weapons?”

Tom argues that the Osirak option is not going to work with Iran and we need to jump down the road to a different dynamic.

Progresive Historians (Robert Ellman) – “An Interview With Iranian Expert and Journalist Barbara Slavin”

Thought this fit well with Tom’s aticle above as  Slavin has a new book on Iranian-American relations out. I need to expand on my comment about Mosadegh that I left there sometime later today.

Wizards of Oz – “Thermodynamics & Resilience”

Shane puts on his particle physicist’s cap and tackles John Robb’s latest work in progress on resilient communities

Small Wars Journal – “Third World Experience in Counterinsurgency“

COIN by a Soviet proxy state intervening in another state.

Michael Gove MP -“Various interesting science and technology” and “Various interesting science and technology (2)”

Featuring a Kurzweill link.

Charles Murray -“The age of educational romanticism:On requiring every child to be above average”

The author of The Bell Curve and Losing Ground joins the growing conservative activist chorus against No Child Left Behind. Hat tip to The Fourthcheckraise.

Bruce Kesler -” New GOP: Freedom Vs. “Biggies”

Bruce calls for a seamless garment conservatism.

CTLab -“Smuggler’s Round-Up”

A grab-bag on the sherpas and mule-drivers of Black Globalization.

Quadrant Magazine -“Will China Fail?”

Book review. Hat tip to Lexington Green.

That’s it!

John Robb is hard at work on Book II which will be about the building of ” Resilient Communities”. He’s batted a few comments about on twitter and worked up a series of posts on the RC theme at his “formal” site. Here are a few samples to give the flavor of his enterprise:

Journal:COIN without a model for Resilience is Futile

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Resilient Community

THE THERMODYNAMIC CRISIS

JOURNAL:Why use the thermodynamic crisis as a framework

DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURES

“Resilience” is a particularly intriguing concept with multiple meanings though John is honing in on those related to Newtonian physics and complexity theory ( one source in the last post, Ilya Prigogine ,was a significant influence on John Boyd). I particularly liked this bit by John:

The modification of thermodynamics necessary to accommodate this observable fact was formulated by the Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine in a theory called “dissipative systems” (read his excellent book: “The End of Certainty” for more). One important leap in this theory is that a dissipative system isn’t a closed system. Rather, it lives within a larger system (an “environment”) that it can interact with.

This upshot of this is that it can extract energy from this larger external environment to increase its structural complexity (build itself up through a process called self-assembly). It can also use this external environment to dump the entropy created during the energy conversion process to minimize the deleterious impact on its structure.

We’ve been pretty good at building up the complexity and are rather poor at dissipating the entropy, mostly for reasons related to the structure of our political system that ties self-interest of politicians and corporate CEOs to short-term frameworks and gives comparative advantage to rentier interests over innovators. The problem has become more difficult because many aspects of “the system” due to globalization are now beyond any state’s control.

Resiliency will involve decentralization and independence within greater interdependence in order to put natural “brakes” on high velocity forces without using draconian state controls ( which won’t work and never did  – except with globalization they will be all side effects and no benefits). I’m very much looking forward to reading what solutions Robb proposes in Book II.

ADDENDUM: Past posts on resiliency:

THE RESILIENCE OF CIVILIZATIONS

DIMENSIONS OF RESILIENCE

LEADERSHIP, RESILIENCE AND OSSIFICATION

COUNTERING 4GW: STATE RESILIENCE, NOT STATE BUILDING, IS KEY