Network / 2007 / SML

Network / 2007 / SML, originally uploaded by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML.

SML Network = See-ming Lee + Network;

Related SML
SML Network = See-ming Lee + Network;

Related SML
SML Circles
SML Fine Art
SML Flickr: Homo Magi / 2007 / SML
SML Flickr: Life / 2007 / SML
SML Flickr: Meta Human / 2007 / SML
SML Flickr: Sex / 2007 / SML
SML Flickr: SML / 2007 / SML
SML Flickr Set: SML Circles / SML Groups / SML Universe

SML Copyright Notice
Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Flickr / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

SML Copyright Notice

Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Ideas Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Sex

Source: SML Flickr

SML Sex (SML Flickr Group)

SML Circles (SML Flickr Set)

SML Groups (SML Flickr Tags)

SML Universe

SML Math

• SML Circles
  Circle S = life = mother nature ;
  Circle M = pure transformation = pure process;
  Circle L = dirty appearance = evil exterior;


• SML Colors
  Magenta = Life;
  Black + White = Gorgeous Photography;


• SML Dictionary
  Sex = Art + Communication + Life;

SML Reference

• Wikipedia: Sex
  
  Sex refers to the male and female duality of biology and reproduction. Unlike organisms that only have the ability to reproduce asexually, sexed male and female pairs have the ability to produce offspring through meiosis and fertilization. The two sexes attract one another and communicate their readiness to procreate through differences in their biology.
  
  An organism’s sex reflects its biological function in reproduction, not its sexuality or other behavior. The female sex is defined as the one which produces the larger gamete and which typically bears the offspring. In contrast, the male sex has a smaller gamete and rarely bears offspring. In some animals, sex may be assigned to specific structures rather than the entire organism. Earthworms, for example, are normally hermaphrodites.

SML Copyright Notice

Copyright 2007 See-ming Lee (SML Pro Blog) / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Communication is Addictive / Thoughts on Social Networking Sites

Posted originally on Flickr in response to Morgan Carpenter’s comment regarding the addictiveness of Flickr vs. Facebook.

I think that everything that fosters communication is addictive. If you think about it like this:

1. Email, the original means of Web communication, was very addictive. Do you remember the days back in 1995 when you typed and quoted people's emails for 4-page long and conversations which lasted over months?


2. Then IMs came about, and that was essentially a digested form of email, except that you don't really have to edit much because it's not very formal.


3. People like to voice their opinions and made themselves heard, not just to a single person, but to many at once--that's where chatrooms come in, allowing individuals to broadcast their opinions to a group.


4. But chatrooms are instantaneous, and are not permanently stored, so most don't find that extremely effective. That's when you have blogs, where their opinions and discourses are permanently stored on databases, and remained indexable and thus searchable by search engines.


5. Blogs require authorship, and most don't have the time to do that, and that's where comments came in. Friendster was originally very viral, but Friendster calls them testimonial, and testimonial sounds very serious and so it never really kicks off.


6. Comments, like IMs, are intentionally casual, so people write more often. What makes Flickr popular is that users can submit whatever they want to on the Web (a subjective perspective), and people can write whatever they want. Its database is hosted by Yahoo, and so it becomes very searchable. In fact, you will find your Flickr comments get onto Google index within 4-5 days (I subscribe to my own Google Alerts so I know that)


7. Facebook is addictive, possibly because it allows you to install multiple applications based on interest, which is the link that link people together originally anyhow, and connect them together (see SML Pro Blog: Innovation = Synergy of Existing Ideas). In other words, Facebook creates multiple points of entry for communication. If Flickr would allow users to easily comment on other people's tags, date, EXIF info, etc, it might make it an even more interesting product. The notes feature is definitely a pro.

Mashing up your life

An easy way to mash everything up would be even more powerful. I am working on a project to mash every single social network that I have a presence in. This project, code name SML Lifelog, is a venue to provide multiple points of linking possibility to create a summation of all the social networks where I have a presence (See SML Network), and foster the ability to comment on a single topic spanning multiple networks.

Hopefully, when the product get onto beta in 2011, it will be more addictive than any networks you find today :)

SML SEO = See-ming Lee + Search Engine Optimization

Source: Amazon

After reading Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams, my exploration of decentralized networks went down a very viral path. I discovered that the application of network theory is enormous and has huge implications and applications on every seemingly unrelated topic that I have come across.

It can be used as a tool and device to understand cities, computer networks social networks, human-human interactions (speech), human-computer interactions (HCI), computer-computer interactions (protocol), diseases, computer viruses, nature. If you think about it, all these things boil down to a single category: communication.

My recent interest in networks has in turn got me into search engine optimization — because search engine is essentially a highly networked database with stored properties between data collections. Here are the steps I have taken to research this topic:

1. Study network theories (mostly through books and wikipedia)


2. Dive into every social-networking sites and analyze their business strategies


3. Domain-shopping and create targeted content as a way to validate the theories studied

It appears that my SEM (aka Wikipedia: Search Engine Marketing aka SML: Search Engine Masturbation) has paid off — I discovered today that I have accidentally fell into a gold mine:

1. Googling design, technology and marketing returns about 209,000,000 results.
   SML currently secure results #1, #2 and #3.


2. Googling design, technology and strategy returns about 159,000,000 results.
   SML currently secure results #3, #7 and #9.


3. Googling design, technology and marketing strategy returns about 109,000,000 results.
   SML currently secures results #1, and #2.

Notes:

1. Your personalized results may vary.
2. Sign out from Google to view neutral results.

Here are a collection of books that I recommend if you are interested in this topic:

Source: Amazon	Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi "Understand the properties of networks, and you will understand the principles governing life." — See-ming Lee
Source: Amazon	Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems) by Mitchel Resnick
Source: Amazon	The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation by Gary William Flake
Source: Amazon	A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
Source: Amazon	Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks by Mark Buchanan

If you like these books, you might also be interested in other books that I recommend.

From closed to open

If Web 1.0 is about information authoring, then Web 2.0 is about information sharing (1).

This change is evidential when we look at the climate of information representation: from FAQs to forum discussion, from personal homepages to personal blogging, from closed-development to open-source movement, from categorizing to tagging, from trees to wikis.

In other words, from closed to open.

Being open is a good thing. A prime example is opensource development. You initiate an idea and concept, and a whole world of developers is available to improve and improvise on it (2). IBM reaps the benefits of open-developing their Eclipse platform as a successor to their VisualAge family of products.

In the world of knowledge, Wikipedia became statistically evaluated to be as accurate as Encyclopedia Brittanica, eclipsing Brittanica’s once dominant sovereign in the world of knowledge (3).

In the world of business, corporations open up their communication channels and invite the whole world for discourse. Blogs like the Google Blog, Adobe blog and Microsoft’s Channel 9 created two-way communication channels, and thus benefits, with the users. Web users learn the insider tips on different companies’ products and services, and the companies in turn gain tremendous amount of user feedback on their betaware with very little upfront investment.

Interactive agencies see blogging as a free PR device to influence the industry. Organic has Three Minds, Frog Design has the Frog Blog. I find myself reading these quite a bit to learn where the industry is going and how different companies are utilizing upcoming technology to do amazing things.

In turn, I noted that while I took note of Razorfish in the early days (~1997) via the RSub–the Razorfish lab that sells company merchandise and all kinds of ‘experimental’ ideas that their employees create–it appears that the same business model of social marketing has now transformed to corporate blogging.

References / Citations

1. Inspired via discourse with Tom Nicholson.
2. Via discourse with Adam S. Kirschner.
3. CNet | Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica by Daniel Terdiman, 2005-12-15