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Blogfriend Charles Cameron spotted this post by Flowing Data that has visualizations of social networking on Twitter.

“If you build it, they will come…”

A start-up called Creative Weblogging  is attempting to build a stable of  business/finance/tech bloggers from scratch by paying unknowns a modest but not unattractive sum ($ 84 -140/ month) for steady posting.  In fact, they offer a “Pro Blogger Compensation Package” of sorts:

Pro Blogger Compensation Package:

• Monthly compensation: $84-140 (US) – paid via PayPal or Moneybookers
• 3-5 posts per week are required, min. of 70 words each.
• Traffic bonuses for aggressively growing traffic are available.
• Access to our vibrant community discussion group with 80+ bloggers, where you can share tips and network.
• We take care of all the technology with an advanced blogging platform.
• We also provide marketing support.
• Virtual shares program: blog with us for a year and you can earn virtual shares in the company.

Hmmmm…..Do “virtual shares” pay real dividends? 

Kind of interesting. Where Newsvine tried relying upon an ego-driven reputation management economy to gain free content, these folks are betting on actually sharing some of the wealth with creators will assemble a social network that can be commoditized.  As most bloggers produce inane drivel, especially when they are new to the game, the payment is far more than the labor is worth – until they find a blogger who can pull in hundreds of thousands of hits a week. Four of five of them should pay the bills for all the failures.

Presumably their business model is some kind of targeted RSS feed subscription marketing to justify ad revenues and later by hyping products by raising their status in the attention economy, assuming the network ever commands that kind of traffic leverage. I suspect the company retains intellectual property rights to what their bloggers write but I could be wrong. Bears watching as an experiment in the evolution of Web 2.0.

( Hat tip to Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

Galrahn at Information Dissemination had a great post recently that tied Naval strategist Julian Corbett in to  NCW and Thomas P.M. Barnett:

The Sin That Will Sink the Strategy

….Julian Corbett believed the object of naval warfare “must always be directly or indirectly either to secure the command of the sea or to prevent the enemy from securing it.” In that spirit we observe Social Network-Centric Warfare to be the cooperative processes that mitigates the disruption of cooperative command of the sea to promote peacetime commerce. As part of a circular theory. Social Network-Centric Warfare responsibilities for the Navy exist both prior to warfare (cooperative partnerships) and after warfare (reconstitution of commerce and security), also described as the periods of time absent warfare. We observe that Social Network-Centric Warfare relies upon the application of Network-Centric Warfare to regain command of the sea when command is lost.

In a retrospective review of the seven deadly sins put forth by Thomas Barnett, we see them not as the devil’s advocate position he initially portrayed them as, rather as an antipodal point in the circular theory of warfare that the Navy is being asked to execute in strategy. We acknowledge up front that warfighting and peacemaking are not diametrically opposite, however we also observe the methods and/or intentions often are.

Read it in full here.

An intriguing post from the loudly mysterious Kent’s Imperative:

“SIGINT in the exaflood environment ”

“There has been a lot of talk recently regarding the implications of the rising rate of data exchange for policy issues such as network neutrality and broadband penetration. The term exaflood – coined by one particularly lobbying group – is apt enough, even if one doesn’t necessarily agree with their proposed solution approaches.

….Traditional SIGINT techniques – even within the relatively new realm of digital network intelligence – are the products of an earlier era, in which the target set and its emanations were distinct enough from its environment to be amenable to capture and analysis using a certain degree of discrimination. The kinds of intelligence that will be required against the adversaries of tomorrow will be increasingly less able to rely on the traditional tradecraft which is undergirded by such assumptions.

We do agree with the statement, frequently attributed to former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis & Production Mark Lowenthal, to the effect that “there is no such thing as information overload, only poor analytical strategies.” However, the exaflood will challenge both collection and analytical strategies such as never before. Against this backdrop, we look to the continuing infrastructure, language, and human resources challenges faced by those in this section of the community, and greatly wonder if our future community will be adequate to the task.”

Read the rest here.

Hmmm. What does this mean then? Will the digital environment itself be the target with “the system” set to by stymied by ( and thus alert human operators to the existence of) processing of data pattern anamolies ? Looking for “non-haystack”, however defined, to stand out from a sea of carefully studied hay? How do we know the exact parameters of a continuously evolving complex system of systems of networks ? My head spins.

I am thwarted in my attempt to comprehend by my inherent  non-geekiness. My kingdom for a slide rule!

By now many of you have probably read the exchanges between Thomas P.M. Barnett and Noah Shachtman of WIRED’s Danger Room over Shachtman’s recent article “How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social – Not Electronic“. If you haven’t, the exchange pretty much went like this:

“Wired’s subpar Iraq analysis” -Barnett

“My ‘Weird’ Article, ‘Well Worth the Read’ ” -Shachtman

“Tom’s reply to Noah” – Barnett

“Blog Fight? Zzzzzzzzzz” – Shachtman

“File it under whatever you want” – Barnett

Admittedly, Network-centric Warfare today is a larger concept than the original theoretical ideas of Arthur Cebrowski and John Garstka; whenever a theory is accepted by a large and powerful bureaucratic organization- like, say, the Pentagon – it collides with reality. Some ideas get tested, tinkered with, discarded or adapted to existing factional agendas by people with more enthusiasm than understanding. Network-centric Warfare, an emerging doctrine, had more “legs” inside the DoD bureaucracy than did it’s main rival, the 4GW School, because it suited the intellectual needs of armed services planning to fight a future “near peer competitor” state military and to rationalize the U.S. military’s systemic coordination and use of emerging technology on the battlefield (“rationalize” in the sense of provide a coherent order – though NCW was also used as a justification in making budgetary requests). And as with any bureaucratic paradigm shift, factional partisans who had career and mission objectives became personally invested in deriding or advancing NCW’s ” transformation”. That’s a far cry from the complexity of the NCW ideas, as presented by Cebrowski and Garstka. Some examples:

“Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future”

“Network-centric Warfare:An Overview of an Emerging Theory”

“Arthur K. Cebrowski on Transformation of Defense”

“Statement of Vice Admiral A. K. Cebrowski, Director, Space, Information Warfare, Command and Control, Chief of Naval Operations – Senate Select Committe on Intelligence Hearings 1997”

The crux of the problem with Shachtman’s article is that his opener gives the impression that the botching of the occupation in Iraq should be laid at the door of two men who articulated strategic ideas with impressive intellectual celerity and subtlety, one of whom is no longer able to defend himself.  It’s a preposterous implication. When the  4 star grandees of the post-Vietnam War U.S. Army decided to “purge” COIN doctrine from the Army’s institutional memory, Admiral Cebrowski was a mere Navy fighter pilot. The creation of the CPA with the subsequent incompetence of Paul Bremer and a bunch of non-Arabic speaking kids just out of college, who interned at AEI, was above the pay grade of any uniformed officer of the United States. Dr. Barnett, who was very close to Admiral Cebrowski, was justly irritated by this cartoonish libel of his friend and mentor.

In fairness to Shachtman, as the WIRED article proceeds, he offered a more nuanced picture of the role of Network-centric Warfare in the larger scheme of things and backtracked somewhat during his exachanges with Tom. However, not all of WIRED’s readers are defense geeks who surf obscure PDFs from OSD.mil and understand the entire context of defense doctrine and policy; Cebrowski and Garstka are therefore, left tarnished by Shachtman in a way that’s sort of akin to blaming William Lind and 4GW theory for Pakistan and India brandishing nuclear weapons at each other.