Hakiri

Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so.

If you watch the video you will spot the Kindle sell-out but it is interesting presentation nevertheless. Actually, I listened to (yes audio version) of Seth’s book called Tribes and I found the whole idea quite fascinating but a bit off the ground.

See the video. You might get inspired to start your own tribe.

I wrote about the importance of simplicity before but here is another reason why you should believe me. :)

Keep this in mind the next time you design a service or a product. The simpler the better.

Confused information security folks (but not only) can find this video quite interesting.

What I liked the most about this video is that the authors clearly explain that social media is first of all the collective contributions of ordinary people through blogs, wikies, podcasts and other social instruments combined with the efforts of other individuals and organizations who are willing to aggregate, organize and help facilitate community feedback.

By the people, for the people!

Funny Sunday morning stuff:

Steve Jobs and St. Peter are also there.

In my opinion, some of the facts presented in this video are questionable. There isn’t an easy way to verify them. Nevertheless, the footage is quite interesting and informative.

3.0 for 2008 – Newly Revised Edition Created by Karl Fisch, and modified by Scott McLeod; Globalization & The Information Age. It was even adapted by Sony BMG at an executive meeting they held in Rome this year. Credits are also given to Scott McLeod, Jeff Brenman.

The reason why I am posting this is to stress that information has become an important part of our lives. Today we are information hungry. Tomorrow… who knows? I suspect that we will get fed up with the world and escape for the simpler life. You might want to check my previous article on the same subject.

A video from 1993 when the Internet was just making its premiere in the world.

Some people say that what happens on the Web STAYS on the Web. Although I agree that this is true for some of the content it is largely untrue for the majority of it.

The reason for this is relatively simple. Not everything is rated equally and not everything is disseminated in a way that it is preserved within the inner fabrics of the web ecosystem. For something to stay on the web you need not only to publish it but also to cause the so called viral effect where hundreds if not millions of individuals help the information to disseminate permanently. The viral effect is a key property for prolonging or immortalizing the life of information. It also protects the integrity of the information so that its true meaning cannot be lost. If you think about it, the viral effect is to some extend like a networked RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) system.

Without the viral publishing successful dissemination of the information is not possible and without recurrent viral campaigns its immortalization is not guaranteed.

For the majority of the content it is fair to say that if it born on the web, it will die on the web as well.

This is a quick post just to share some early morning thoughts with you. So, there they are.

If you notice everything around you is probably getting more and more automated and synced. Data is flowing in and out of any particular system and of course between different systems and their input and output channels. Data is also flowing between virtual and physical world by means of automation or convenience such as mobile devices, etc. All of this is pretty fascinating as a great number of our days on the earth can be recorded better than ever before and also communication between people is immensely improved.

There are several interesting questions that need to be answered in this hyper-synced world. The first important question, which as a security guy I am obligated to ask, is how secure is the whole interlinked, highly-synced world is? My conclusion, which by the way comes after being involved in this world for quite some time now, is that is not very secure if at all. It is easy to lose track of the information flow and therefore it is easier for attackers to intervene with the synchronization process. Not knowing the origins or the integrity levels of the stream of information could lead to all kinds of catastrophic situations. I am sure you can imagine some.

The second question is more phylosophical and it is about whether we actually need that level of synchronization between each other. Sadly, it seems that syncing online reduces our social lifestyle by a great factor as it is easier to meet people on virtual places and it is also easier to share an opinion especially if anonymous. Moreover, you don’t have to express opinion online anymore, your life can be simply synced by the help of technology worth a couple of hundred pounds.

I am not trying to make any point here. Most people who read/write blog posts believe that we should stick to the good/bad mantra when developing an opinion. No. What I am trying to do is to facilitate a conversation. And that’s all I need to say.

The following is a great TED talk from David Carson. David is a typographer running a successful magazine which explores the possibilities of text on a page. In his talk, David makes some useful points about design but also provides some other intriguing insights worth taking note of.

I like what he said about what will be next, just near the end of the presentation. Quoting:

What’s next? What’s next is going to be people. As we get more technically driven the importance of people becomes more than as ever seen before. You have to utilize who you are and your work. Nobody else can do that. Nobody else can pull from your background, your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience. If you allow that to happen, it is really the only way to do some unique work and you are going to enjoy the work a lot more as well.

and a bit further he says:

For the most part they are not real-life threatening (talking about jobs). Why not experiment? Why not have some fun? Why not put some of yourself into the work… and when I was teaching I used to always ask the students what is the definition of a good job… and as a teacher you have to give them all the answers, you have to give them the correct answer… and the best one I’ve heard is… and I am sure that some of you have heard this… the definition of a good job is that if you can afford to, if money wasn’t an issue, would you be doing that same work? And if you would then you have a great job. If you wouldn’t, what the heck are you doing…

…and with that completes another great TED talk.

Twitter is full of bots. It should be no big surprise to you, I hope. Bots make the service essentially less useful. For example, how do you know how many out of the 2000 followers are real people with opinion that is valuable to you or your community? You don’t know! Any newbie programmer can code up a simple script to post thoughts, retweet and sync feeds and do other things to the extend you no longer can differentiate between real and spammy traffic.

This is primarily due to the fact that twitter relies on smaller contributions from its userbase (140 characters message), which is significantly easier to imitate than a whole blog post for example. Moreover, messages can be as vague as it can get and in fact, most of them are. Now add the easy to use programmatic access and you have a recipe for disaster.

This leads us to the obvious (to some) conclusion that twitter is not a reliable source of information. Clearly, it can be abused and it is evident that it is abused but not to the extend we will see it getting abused in the future. Twitter is quite popular, no doubt about that, but is it useful? Probably not! I will stick with blogging!