Social Networking

While I generally like the idea of "re-use" and swapping and freestore and all that, I can't see how this company Zunafish.com will work out. Basically you have to trade items one for one with other users, and the items must be of the same category. So I have a dvd... "When We Were Soldiers" let's say. You watched it, and once was enough, so you think, let me put it up for trade along with these other 20 war and Mel Gibson DVDs I will never watch again. Some one sees my list of movies and figures I are a war movie buff, and they have "Saving Private Ryan" so they offer to trade... But I am a war movie buff, I already saw "Saving Private Ryan".

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Our one-day quick-n-dirty Save Ocean Beach advocacy site developed by CivicActions' own Aaron, Fen and Arthur has turned into quite the success story. A day after the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) began accepting public comments on a proposal to ban beach fires on San Francisco's Ocean Beach, the users of the site have delivered over 160 emails to the GGNRA opposing the ban. Emails continue to be sent at the rate of one per every 2-3 minutes. Check out SaveOceanBeach.org

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Andrew Hoppin (of Draft Clark and CivicSpaceLabs fame) has a new project called GoodStorm. It is a socially progressive Cafe Press. THe site allows users to upload images and create products (t-shirts) that are sold through a webstore on the goodstorm site. The actual products are printed to order, so there is no risk for the organization creating the product. GoodStorm has just introduced some social networking functionality that will let folks talk about the products, what they mean, connect with friends and cross promote each other's stores.

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Gunner of Aspiration Tech, founder of Penguin Day and co-creator of SpeedGeeking shows us how it is done!

From the New York Times: The United States has spent about $1.6 billion on [port] security since Sept. 11, but only about a third of the 600 monitors needed nationwide have been installed, so only about 37 percent of shipped goods are checked for a dirty bomb or other nuclear device. The Coast Guard has estimated that it would cost about $7 billion to equip ports in the United States to comply with security standards.

Overall, the contents of only 5.6 percent of containers headed into the United States are checked by the gamma-ray machines or manual inspections, customs officials said. That leaves about 940,000 containers that are not inspected before they are driven out of the American ports.

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Brad deGraf and the folks at Smartocracy (an experiment in "augmented democracy") have just released a visualization of the first test in their social network for collective decision-making In this system, each participant gets 10 votes to give away, and gets to exercise those votes given to them. For instance, how can 1000 donors of $20 each best decide what to do with $20,000? In the case of this test, the poll is used to determine of humankind's most debated inquiries: "What's the greatest rock n' roll song of all time?" Shown here is the XML output in the network visualizer. You can play with it interactively by downloading the XML and Java player from the Smartocracy site. (which actually reminds me of Josh On's work at http://theyrule.net. This could really be the future of democracy. Added bonus... the use of I-names to log-in!

I have just gotten back to Seattle from the Open Source CMS Summit / Drupal Con. My head is bursting with ideas. And it is going to take a few days to get all the ideas in order, but here is a quick list of interesting things that I will come back to in later blog posts:

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This is the second podcast from the car. Aaron asked Fen to ellaborate on iNames, how they work, and how we might be able to use them in our work. In the spirit of my podcasting style, these podcasts have no intro and no outtro, just the conversation. Listen to "Fen Labalme Talks About iNames in the Car"

Friday afternoon, Aaron, Rich and Fen picked me up in Seattle, we grabbed AJ up in Ballard and got on the Road to Vancouver for our second retreat. The location this time is Lions Bay. We chose British Columbia because of next week's OSCMS Summit / Drupal Con. About half way through the trip we realized maybe we should record out conversations for a podcast. In this first segment Fen answers questions about iNames and we talk about the implications for trust systems in social networks.

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Whatever business you're in, your product's success or failure is going to become more and more dependant on "sneezers" like me. We are not going away. We are getting more viral by the day, while other ways of spreading ideas- TV, newspapers etc- are becoming less effective by the day. (from GapingVoid.com) This was a topic that came up during BarCampNYC: Marketing Through Social Networks. I mentioned the concept of "sneezers" and someone I was talking to asked for clarification. I talked about Seth Godin's market distribution graph with sneezers at the very beginning followed by early adopters, etc.

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