"How far and how fast does information spread in social media? Researchers have recently examined a number of factors that affect information diffusion in online social networks, including: the novelty of information, users' activity levels, who they pay attention to, and how they respond to friends' recommendations. Using URLs as markers of information, we carry out a detailed study of retweeting, the primary mechanism by which information spreads on the Twitter follower graph. Our empirical study examines how users respond to an incoming stimulus, i.e., a tweet (message) from a friend, and reveals that %retweeting behavior is constrained by a few simple principles. the "principle of least effort" combined with limited attention plays a dominant role in retweeting behavior. Specifically, we observe that users retweet information when it is most visible, such as when it near the top of their Twitter stream. Moreover, our measurements quantify how a user's limited attention is divided among incoming tweets, providing novel evidence that highly connected individuals are less likely to propagate an arbitrary tweet. Our study indicates that the finite ability to process incoming information constrains social contagion, and we conclude that rapid decay of visibility is the primary barrier to information propagation online."

I guessed what the cause must've been, and this was still hilarious. (Also, it's old enough that I might have heard it before.) Still, this is great.

"In sum: It’s awesome that Palmer’s Kickstarter has done so well — but look at what it’s entailed. It’s entailed time, effort, planning and work both backward and forward in time. That currently $439,000 isn’t a windfall for her; it’s a marker of what all that commitment to the work has earned.
"If you’re one of the people looking at her Kickstarter money with stars in your eyes and awesome plans of your own in your head, ask yourself first: Have you put in the time? Earned the credibility? Scoped out the financial balance sheet? Made the commitment to fulfill every single thing you have promised? Palmer has. If you haven’t — on any of this — be aware that your results, shall we say, may vary."

(The earlier part, about the very long process of reputation- and network- building which got Palmer to this point, is quite astute, but too long to excerpt.)

Odd that he doesn't mention slashdot. (Not odd that he doesn't mention Sterling's _Distraction_, with its rival confederations of nomadic biker-gangs, oriented around competing reputation systems.)

"It's easy to imagine how we could make something worse than "Girls Around Me"—something much worse. Facebook encourages us to disclose a wide range of information about ourselves, including our religion and a photograph. Religion is obvious: "Yids Among Us" would obviously be one of the go-to tools of choice for Neo-Nazis. As for skin colour, ethnicity identification from face images is out there already. Want to go queer bashing? There's an algorithm out there for guessing sexual orientation based on the network graph of the target's facebook friends. It's probably possible to apply this sort of data mining exercise to determine whether a woman has had an abortion or is pro-choice.
"In the worst case, it's possible to envisage geolocation and data aggregation apps being designed to facilitate the identification and elimination of some ethnic or class enemy, not only by making it easy for users to track them down, but by making it easy for users to identify each other and form ad-hoc lynch mobs. (Hence my reference to the Rwandan Genocide earlier. Think it couldn't happen? Look at Iran and imagine an app written for the Basij to make it easy to identify dissidents and form ad-hoc goon squads to proactively hunt them down. Or any other organization in the post-networked world that has a social role corresponding to the Red Guards.)
"But as I said earlier, the app is not the problem. The problem is the deployment by profit-oriented corporations of behavioural psychology techniques to induce people to over-share information which can then be aggregated and disclosed to third parties for targeted marketing purposes."

Comment: Stross is not, sadly, exaggerating.

Indeed.

Thinking about it, I have spent >= $100/yr on particular artists in three cases: getting all of Catherynne Valente's books after reading _In the Night Garden_; buying fancy career-retrospective editions of Jack Vance; and a fancy edition of _Sandman_. This is not a viable career path.

Preach it, sister!

"How important are friendships in determining success by individuals and teams in complex competitive environments? By combining a novel data set on the dynamics of millions of ad hoc team-based competitions from the massively multiplayer online first person shooter (MMOFPS) Halo: Reach with ground-truth data on player demographics, play style, psychometrics and friendships derived from an anonymous online survey, we investigate the impact of friendship on performance in such competitive environments. We find that friendships play a fundamental role, leading to both improved individual and team performance---even after controlling for the overall expertise of the team---and increased pro-social behavior. Furthermore, because players structure their in-game activities around opportunities to play with friends, we show that friendships can largely be inferred directly from behavioral time series using common-sense heuristics. Algorithms that leverage the utility of friendships, without needing explicitly labeled (and thus private) data, are thus both possible and will likely improve many aspects of competition prediction and design."

"I'm doing a short talk at SXSW tomorrow, as part of a panel on Creating the Internet of Entities. Preparing is tough because don't I believe it's possible, and even if it was I wouldn't like it. Opposing better semantic tagging feels like hating on Girl Scout cookies, but I've realized that I like an internet full of messy, redundant, ambiguous data.
"The stated goal of an Internet of Entities is a web where "real-world people, places, and things can be referenced unambiguously". We already have that. Most pages give enough context and attributes for a person to figure out which real world entity it's talking about. What the definition is trying to get at is a reference that a machine can understand.
"The implicit goal of this and similar initiatives like Stephen Wolfram's .data proposal is to make a web that's more computable. Right now, the pages that make up the web are a soup of human-readable text, a long way from the structured numbers and canonical identifiers that programs need to calculate with. I often feel frustrated as I try to divine answers from chaotic, unstructured text, but I've also learned to appreciate the advantages of the current state of things."

"So here’s a riddle: which form of technology should we prefer, labor saving or labor complementary? Labor saving technology is consistent with high wages and tight labor markets. But it also, of course, leads to less jobs overall in the sectors where it is deployed. Which brings us back to the homeless people with hotspots. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that this is a legitimately profit-making business venture rather than a weird kind of charity. (And note that even as charity, the project depends on its consumers viewing it as a kind of legitimate business, a way for the homeless to engage in “productive” labor.) Putting hotspots on homeless people has to count as a labor complementary technology. From the standpoint of the wireless company, the marginal product of a homeless person’s labor is much higher (i.e., it’s non-zero) once you’ve figured out that you can attach hotspots to them. So if you think that it’s bad when machines replace human labor (which is not what I think), then this is just the kind of technical change you should prefer.
"But labor complementary technology doesn’t necessarily look so great once you’re face-to-face with the kind of labor it complements. In this case, it relies upon the existence of a cheap and exploitable labor force—something that’s obvious when you’re looking at a homeless person in a creepy t-shirt, less so when you order from an online retailer. And here’s where I think a lot of the outrage over homeless-people-as-infrastructure goes wrong.
"I don’t recall seeing a lot of complaints about the problem of homelessness in Austin prior to this story. Which I don’t mean as some kind of “gotcha”—the world is full of horrible things, and it’s neither possible nor particularly helpful to try to talk about all of them all of the time. But to get up in arms about an ad agency exploiting the homeless as wifi routers strikes me as a peculiarly half-assed form of outrage. If they weren’t walking around as billboards for wireless service, Austin’s homeless and poor would still be homeless and perhaps a bit more poor. The fundamental problem here is not exploitation, but the condition of possibility for that exploitation, which is the fact that there are so many poor and homeless Americans in the first place.
"“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all”, goes the old adage from Joan Robinson. Then again, says Marx, “to be a productive laborer is not a piece of luck, but a misfortune. In the short run, labor complementary technology may employ more people, which is better than them not being exploited at all. But in the long run, the jobs thus created tend to be terrible, and our real goal ought to be to channel technical change toward labor saving innovation.
"This leaves us with the question of what the homeless of Austin can demand, if not the right to be walking 4G hotspots. Fortunately there is a simple solution to that. There’s nothing (economically) stopping us from just giving people cash; and as the housing activist Max Rameau likes to say, the cause of homelessness is that people don’t have homes, and we have plenty of those. So imagine what would happen if this pool of cheap, easily exploitable labor wasn’t available. A company that wanted to sell 4G wireless services might have to invest in more transmitters to fulfill demand. Or perhaps they would deploy robots to roll around the streets selling wireless access! This would not employ as many people, since it’s more a labor saving than a labor complementary technology. But it also wouldn’t create the grotesque spectacle of fellow human beings serving as pieces of infrastructure."

Indeed. I am very happy with switching to electronic books for novels & c., but it is exceedingly clear to me that _somebody_ is profiting here, even at $0.99, and it is not the authors, but rather the intermediaries who act as centralized controls over the flow, and make sure that their monopoly status is hard to challenge.
(Or: Amazon self-publishing as the Elsevier of electronic books; discuss.)

"The Motion Picture Association of America, chief sponsor and financier of SOPA and PIPA, addresses Wikipedia, Reddit, and other major sites going dark tomorrow, accusing them of “abuse of power.” “It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.” In related news, the mutilated body of Irony was found washed up against a pier in the East River. She was pronounced dead at the scene."

Interesting as a case study in economic sociology, though none of the participants seem to be equipped to recognize this.
(Predictably, the comments section is full of hurt bitcoin boosters.)

Flagged "to_teach:data-mining" if I can think of a good project for students with this.

"Bliss it was in that atrocity to be alive, but to be on the internet was very heaven."

Amusing and thoughtful, but of course it's going to be as quaint looking in 2061 as 1911's vision of 1961.

"Equally to the point, a lot of what Gabler describes as Big Ideas turn out to have been actively wrong or at least misleading in the wrong hands, and one of the reasons is not the insights and findings of their initial creators but the seductive refashionings of later popularizers. The process that made Big Ideas into two or three-sentence applause lines that can be rattled off in succession in an op-ed in the New York Times is often what allowed them to turn into ideology and dogma.
If the informationally overloaded present is resistant to Big Ideas, maybe that’s not because we’re too busy watching YouTube videos of Jennifer Aniston playing with a cat. Maybe it’s because we’re acquiring an immune system resistance to the salesmanship of middlebrow middlemen trying to extract saleable Big Ideas from the raw material of knowledge production."  (That last seems more like a hope to me than a real observation.)

"I that in heill wes and gladnesAm trublit now with great sicknesMy sicklie stait is no surprise:IM IN UR BASE KILIN UR GUYZ.
Death sovran is of all the tubez,Of rich, of poor, of l33t, of n00bz;No mortal shal escaip his eyis:IM IN UR BASE KILIN UR GUYZ.
Al flesh is dust; we are but bones;Baith knight and maid he freely pwns;Against his glanse brooks no disguyse;IM IN UR BASE KILIN UR GUYZ.
He draws al to his dark bucket;Whoe'er ye be, ye're surely f***kit;The Walrus wil not sympathise;IM IN UR BASE KILIN UR GUYZ.
Our base are al belong to DeathAnd have done since our natal breath(This point I'd like to emphasise):IM IN UR BASE KILIN UR GUYZ."

I remember that editor!

"If pant-wetting were a sport, the recent study on how memory adjusts to the constant availability of online information would have launched the damp drawers Olympics.
‘Poor memory? Blame Google’ claimed The Guardian. ‘Internet search engines cause poor memory, scientists claim’ said The Telegraph. ‘Google turning us into forgetful morons’ wibbled The Register.
If you want a good write-up of the study you couldn’t do better than checking out the post on Not Exactly Rocket Science which captures the dry undies fact that although the online availability of the information reduced memory for content, it improved memory for its location.
Conversely, when participants knew that the information was not available online, memory for content improved. In other words, the brain is adjusting memory to make information retrieval more efficient depending on the context..."

Some interesting observations.  (But repeat after me: the link distribution of weblogs is not a power law.)

"Reputation-Based Governance melds concepts from businesses like eBay with politics. Author Lucio Picci uses interdisciplinary tools to argue that the intelligent use of widely available Internet technologies can strengthen reputational mechanisms and significantly improve public governance. Based on this notion, the book proposes a governance model that leans on the concept of reputational incentives while discussing the pivotal role of reputation in politics today. Picci argues that a continuous, distributed process of assessing policy outcomes, enabled by an appropriate information system, would contribute to a governance model characterized by effectiveness, efficiency, and a minimum amount of rent-seeking activity. Moreover, if citizens were also allowed to express their views on prospective policies, then reputation-based governance would provide a platform on which to develop advanced forms of participative democracy."

What search can and cannot predict. They mention, but I think could have stressed even more, that the search data is generated _automatically_ as a by-product of now-ordinary social life, rather than a deliberate construction on the part of public or private data-collecting agencies, so it is very, very, very cheap.

"Duke shut down its Usenet server yesterday, which is significant because Duke's server was the original home of Usenet. I think this means that Usenet is now available only to about a dozen people with panix accounts.... So long, Usenet. You will be remembered fondly, and in jokes that nobody gets any more."

Exit, voice, loyalty, and social-network lock-in: "Facebook is like a beloved national homeland poisoned by a corrupt and unyielding government. As in real life, a few people like Dan will respond to such a situation by ritual suicide. Others will choose to exercise voice and or soldier on with resigned loyalty to life under the boot. But in real life, a significant number of people choose to defect, to flee. That’s different from just “deleting” yourself. And to do that, you have to have somewhere to go. Plenty of us would choose such an exile from the dictatorship of Facebook were there a welcoming neighbor nearby to which we could escape with our friends and families..."

This seems like a nice custom.

Words fail me.