Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age - Part One

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 15

In the circles that I travel the Internet is often breathlessly embraced as the herald of all things good; the bringer of increased choice, personal empowerment, social harmony...and the list goes on. And yet, as with any powerful technology, the truth of its consequences eludes such a singular and happy narrative.

Here is the first of three paradoxes of the Internet Age. I would love to see Radar readers point out others. More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us. Elizabeth Kolbert has a piece in this week’s New Yorker reviewing Cass Sunstein’s new book, “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done." In the review she lays out the concept of "group polarization"

People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still.

The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.” (Thanks to Jim Stogdill for surfacing this link via email)

How Long is Your City's Tail?

by John Geraci | @johngeraci | comments: 10

Here's something that everyone doing business on the web knows today, thanks to Chris Anderson: it's all about the long tail.

When the cost of each individual transaction falls to nearly zero, marginal and low-performing items, grouped together, can account for a lot more of the overall value of a company than the top-performing ones. Amazon.com makes more money from the aggregate of all of the books that sell one or two copies a month than from sales of best sellers. And Amazon is a much stronger, healthier, and richer company because of the extremely long tail of books it sells.

Everybody gets that.

What almost nobody realizes yet is that the same is true for cities - or can be.

Most cities right now are models of closed, rigid systems, systems that rely on a few, top-performing agents to get civic tasks done and keep quality of life high for residents. Most of these agents are departments of the city itself, though some are outsourced. Either way, cities rely on one agent per issue, no more. To use Amazon.com as an analogy, cities today are like an Amazon that only allows the #1 best-selling book from each category into its system.

A good number of cites are beginning to do deals with mega companies like Google and IBM, giving them access to city data so that they can build excellent tools for residents to use. This is a great thing. I love looking at Google Maps and seeing that bulging red line right next to my house indicating that traffic there is at a standstill so I should consider biking instead. Makes my life better.

Still, to use the Amazon analogy again, now these cities have allowed not just the #1 best-selling book from each category into the system, but best-seller #2, #3 and #4. It's still a closed system of cherry-picked agents with privileged access.

And that's about where a lot of people would choose to end the opening of cities' data - giving unrestricted access to the Googles, Microsofts, and IBMs of the world. The rest get limited access, or access contingent upon satisfying some governmental board or other. (New York's Mayor Bloomberg, who launched his Big Apps contest yesterday, is seemingly among this group.)

If we do that, of course, we're missing out on what is potentially the biggest piece of the pie - the tail. That's where a huge chunk of the value comes from.

So, imagine instead a city that has totally open, unrestricted access to data (say, San Francisco or DC in 2011). What does it look like? It has all of the familiar city-run departments providing all of the services and assistance they've always provided - that's not going away. Then it also has public services offered by the mega companies, the Google Traffic, IBM's Smarter Cities, and so forth. Those are huge added value to these open cities - they're used by a large percentage of residents and make life in those cities better. But THEN, it also has an insane long tail of services set up and run by anyone with an interest in doing so, just by hooking into city data, distributing it in a new way, improving on it, mashing it up, giving it back to the city, etc. These services each individually get used by a small minority of people, but collectively they get used by more than any other single source in the city.

That's the healthy, long tail city of the future in action: head, "meaty middle" and tail, all working together, all reinforcing each other, all driving each other forward.

And that's the future of cities.

So it might be time to ask yourself: how long is your city's tail shaping up to be? The answer may determine, to a large degree, how much your city is a thriving place to live in decades to come.

Four short links: 21 September 2009

Bad Writing, Tech Immigration, Long Tail Fail?, and The Real McKoi

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 5

1. Dan Brown's 20 Worst Sentences -- awful awful writing, and glorious glorious mockery of it.

   Deception Point, chapter 8: Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.

   It’s not clear what Brown thinks ‘precarious’ means here.

2. From Australia to the World: The Story of Google Maps and Google Wave (PDF, HTML Cached here) -- history of Google Maps and Wave, from the creator. This particularly struck me: I know few matters more frustrating than finding funding for a start-up. Immigration tops the list.
3. Rethinking The Long Tail: How to Define 'Hits' and 'Niches' -- the argument comes down to absolute vs relative measurements of popularity. Anderson says that relative hides too much, because percentages are meaningless in a world of infinite inventory. Researchers respond that hits and niches are defined in absolute numbers (top 10, bottom 100). The real takeaway is that infinite inventory requires excellent discovery tools drawing upon collective intelligence systems (hence the Netflix recommendation contest). (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. The Mckoi Database -- MckoiDDB is a database system used by software developers to create applications that store data over a cluster of machines in a network. It is designed to be used in online environments where there are very large sets of both small and big data items that need to be stored, accessed and indexed efficiently in a network cluster. The focus of the MckoiDDB architecture is to support low latency query performance, provide strong data consistency through snapshot transaction isolation, and provide tools to manage logical data models that may change dramatically in physical network environments that may experience similar dramatic change. (via joshua on delicious)