Solvation

The Social Capitalists' Lens

Shankar Vedantam wrote up an interesting article in the Washington Post, One Thing We Can't Build Alone in Iraq.

It's a quick introduction to why thinking in terms of financial wealth and "more money = better lives" is misleading:  a bigger bottom line might correlate with a healthy economy, but it's not predictive.  A community's social capital is.

Twitter

Twitter is, effectively, an asynchronous chat room. 

Evidently, you can now track special interests and meet people via Twitter. A very interesting entertainment use.

Online meme game

The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is ...".

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

• You can leave them exactly as is.
• You can delete any one question.
• You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...:, or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
• You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...”.

You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the "parent" blog you got them from, e.g. Open the Future to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

--------

My great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My grandparent is Sentient Developments.
My parent is OpenTheFuture.

1. The best Religious Novel in SF/Fantasy is...
Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice

2. The best Romantic Movie in Comedy is...
Shakespeare in Love 

3. The best Sexy song in Rock is...
Give it Away by The Red Hot Chili Peppers

4. The best Assimilation Novel in serialized graphic storytelling (comic books) is...
American Born Chinese by Gene Yuen Yang

I'll ask some folks to join in but of course anyone else who wants to accept my meme can also join in the game.

O'Reilly Analysis of Facebook Apps

It's not easy being green. A recent analysis shows the shortcomings of what we early Gen X Old Farts know: if you work for free, it's very unlikely you're going to get paid.

This doesn't mean that Facebook won't become an important platform for developers, just that a throwaway Facebook app is not the ticket to quick riches. Embracing the Facebook opportunity requires more than just optimism.

The post goes on to suggest a hackathon during the social graph conference. 

You know, when you have too MANY aspiring developers/actors/musicians, it turns into a situation where people just hope to be discovered. So if, as a society, we could be quiet already about the alleged "shortage of developers" and realize that it's a lack of companies that good developers want to be with we might actually make some progress.

Facebook is providing a venue for talented, creative developers to communicate to the world what talented and creative developers could possibly do.  It's also got a lot of drek.

Morgellon's, Nanotechnology, and the Medical Profession

As some know, I have recently had the honor of being chosen for the position of Director of Research Communities for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

Occasionally people in the general public have questions about things they've heard or conjectured, and they submit these via the CRN webform. One such topic was Morgellon's, which for those who don't know is a newfangled mystery disease that seems to be legitimate but was discounted for a long time.  What it is, exactly, is apparently still up in the air.

Jamais Cascio, CRN's new Director of Impacts Analysis made a comment about the professional resistance "new" diseases encounter, and that climate change may foster a lot more of these kinds of things.

I think one of the major transformations that will have to occur in the medical profession will be how to deal with the proliferation of new data and treatments.

The Best (Financial) Prediction of 2007 - CNBC

When I was at a Hedge Fund in Minnesota -- Deephaven Capital Management -- I was fortunate enough to be exposed to the insight of Andy Redleaf.  He subsequently left and set up Whitebox Advisors.  Here he is expounding on his "best prediction of 2007".

He ends with his new prediction: he agrees with US dollar predictions and adds to it the anticipation of highly volatile markets.

Social Network Business Model

A list I'm on has been having a discussion about a news item that decrees the end of MySpace as younger people continue to try to find a place devoid of older people.

There is often surprise at the transience of these communities.  Inherently, investors want to be in on whichever social space "Wins!", but the reality is that most social network sites are just like any other location that someone might hang out in - it depends on who is there, and how frequently they drop by, and you go to more than one place, but you don't go to an infinite number of them because that would be unwieldy.

However investors want barriers to entry, IP, "coolness."  But just like in physical-space, where for every oxygen bar, there's an Applebee's, in internet-land, for every FaceBook, there's a MySpace (to cite two currently popular choices).

The investment model SHOULD be more like something for a game, which is to say a transient entertainment -- that can sometimes be extensible but is fundamentally discrete -- and something that participation in one of implies it's likely you participate in several.  But it's sold as an infrastructure: a few big winners, everyone else is a loser, and if you can't hold on to your market advantage, then something's wrong.