The Curate's Web

Jason Kottke points to an excellent review by Alexander Bohn of Ffffound, a newer visual bookmarking site based upon the same principal as Wists, but with a supremely visually literate, design focused, community rather than a craftster one.

Social Media

When we developed the idea of visual bookmarking in 2005, it was fashionable to look at publishing as being purely democratic - all readers were publishers and everything was 'social'. We created the term Social Shopping (hip word meets $$$) as a joke, and people took it seriously. Two companies did versions of it, and one sold for $40M. And the very best of luck to them, too. But there is something fundamentally wrong with sites that are driven by a passion for the business model at the expense of the content. In the long term these don't work as businesses.

Digital Curation

Something different and much more interesting is now happening, social media sites are cropping up with a focus on a narrow but expert community of contributors. The buzzword for this is 'curation' and is what we are doing with sites like Oobject and Cribcandy which are collections of 'picks'.

The Myth of Social Media

Within 2 weeks Digg will release their visual bookmaking tool. I have heard people suggest that that this will become the platform for the filtering of visual content of the web, just as I heard people say that Digg would become the platform for filtered links in all the major verticals.

This is wrong. For all the focus on 'everyone as a contributor', social media sites like Digg or Epinions before it are highly asymmetric, and gravitate towards the subjective taste of a specific community. A tiny number of users (a fraction of a percent) determine the content, and the user base tends to be like minded.

The Curated Web

There will be very few 'platforms' and very few startups that will play out the way that their investment justifies. At the moment Facebook looks like the only one, everything else is probably irrelevant.

What there will be is a natural distribution of communities, rather like (in fact, mathematically, exactly like) the distribution of animal species.

These communities will not be like social networks or they will be interminably bland. They will be highly stratified, driven by the obsessive pickers, the collector types - or to give them the fancy name that makes people write about them - the curators.

Geneticist, Steve Jones interviewed in 1994 during the controversy over the book, The Bell Curve.

Something that is very relevant today, given that one of the most famous living scientists claimed that black people were less intelligent.

(as an aside - I've finally figured out how to embed videos so that they start at a specific timecode point - do a view source on the video linked to here, if you want to now how.)

Steve Jones Interview - (in light of the Watson controversy) | smashing telly - the best full length free tv programs on the web, updated every day

Wojciech Zurek is onto something wonderful.

My dad is a physicist and runs and Internet startup. Since I am over 40 myself, this is fairly unusual. It also means that when we don't talk about physics, we talk about computers. For the last couple of years this has amounted to pretty much the same thing, since I have become immersed in the voguish idea that physics and information theory are essentially the same thing.

My hobbyist hunch is that information is relative (being measured in bit pairs) and that it doesn't flow so much as sync. I believe that the interpretation problems we have explaining the experimental results at the extremes of physics magnify the effects of us trying to explain the inevitable information syncing within system that we are part of by looking near the scale of the entire system or its individual bits, where the definition of the system itself or the bits themselves as something that exists outside of purely our relationship to it/them gets in the way

My second hunch is that the pattern of this inevitable trend towards information syncing (when you communicate you eliminate difference) has another name - Darwinism, and the meta-rule of life - Darwinism, seems much more fundamental than its qualitative use to describe things that poop.

Darwinism is simply the law of efficient elimination of difference, that drives the laws of physics. A true meta-physics that has nothing to do with spirituality and can be expressed quantitatively. I would put my money on the idea that the eventual constant that cancels out the multitude of physical constants will be a 'D' in an equation - or perhaps more likely, an algorithm of - Darwinism.

There are a few scientists that are currently most exciting in this area of info-physics/biology/chemistry, such as Lee Smolin and Stuart Kauffman, but Wojciech Zurek seems particularly close to a breakthrough in understanding.

In July he produced a paper that tickles my hunches, (although I have a further hunch that even his 'relativistic' view of information is not relativistic enough - that the 'environment' that he allows us to use as an indirect witness of some kind of branching quantum lightning bolt, in universal space - simply does not exist. The environment is information's ether).

That paper, linked to here, is much more technical than my paltry understanding of physics - but I found it somewhat life-changing, so don't be put off. It is written in the language of physics which is different from everyday English, and it also uses the excessive 3rd person language of technical papers, but it is much easier than it looks to get something out of as a non scientist, if you read it carefully, since, like all great ideas it is itself, elegantly simple.

Relative States and the Environment Einselection, Envariance, Quantum Darwinism, and the Existential Interpretation.

Intravenous tea, Radio 4 and doctors calling themselves Mister again, when becoming surgeons, are the lifeblood of a particularly understated and delicate cultural facet that, along with aggressive guitar music and appropriate use of swearwords like cunt, are the things that I miss about the UK.

Even when I worked in an office designing rock concert sets for bands like the Rolling Stones, all we actually listened to all day was the calming sound of BBC Radio 4.

My favorite show was Loose Ends, presented by Ned Sherrin. He died Sunday. Bugger.

Ned Sherrin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia