Here is a rare find, thanks to Howard Reingold.

"Lada A. Adamic and Eytan Adar of HP's Information Dynamics Lab and Orkut Buyukkokten of Google applied scale-free network metrics to the social network of an online community, poked the social network in various ways, and discovered juicy stuff. HP researchers created a Friendster-like online social network, then mined it for information about the real-life social networks it reflected. After the online community, "Club Nexus," had been cooking for a couple of months, the researchers asked participants to rate how "trusty," "nice," "cool," and "sexy" every one of their buddies were, on a scale of one to four. The plot thickened."

The 326K PDF can be directly accessed here.  Yummy!  I'll mention a few people here, who enjoy this sort of intellectual candy, so they can find the paper via Technorati.  I wonder if other people are [mis?]-using Technorati for notification purpose like me?

Responding to my Introducing Chaos to Social Software post, Chuck Lawson nails the issue I was wrestling with in his post titled Where's the love, Baby?  He wrote:

"These systems seem like great ideas, but like Don, I’ve found that it takes a degree of effort I’m not likely to make to really benefit from them.  I signed up for “Friendster” awhile back, and after a half-hearted cruise through my address book, managed to get four people to sign up in my network.  I guess they’re not any more gregarious than I am, since they haven’t signed anyone else up.  Since browbeating people I’ve already sent invitations to feels a little bit too much like trying to peddle mlm distributorships, my “social networking” efforts are pretty much at a standstill."

"So, until folks like Don, and aggressive networkers like Marc Canter (on whose site I found the link to Don’s article) work out some sort of automagic system to drag the rest of us introverts into the social network revolution, the best idea I can come up with is to park an invitation here." – Chuck Lawson

I particularly love the word 'automagic'.  It's one of the things I try to strive for when working on UI.  Although I hardly qualify as an introvert, I hate to disturb other people.  Unless I am in midst of my gregarious fit, of course.  When you see me yacking 1000 words a minute, run like hell.  It's worse that core dump after a full meal.

After reading Marc's rocking response to my images-as-blog-comments post, I realized that I was actually describing a wiki masqerading as a blog post: a small stand-alone wiki initially created by a blogger and 'completed' by contributions from others, a Micro-Wiki, if you will.  No one has complained about the ordering of blog comments, so Micro-Wiki is a one-way street too in that contributors are only allowed to add to the post.

Trackback?  That's just an entry in a Micro-Wiki.  Comments?  Same thing.  Endorsements?  Yes to that too.  Thinking about all this leads naturally to structured blog post (fine-grained structure within a blog post) and extensible types of blog post contributions.

Imagine news aggregators that presents you with an updatable list of actions you can take with the selected item (subitem if its structured).  Strutured post allows reader to endorse the product being talked about in the post instead of the post itself.  Woohoo!

Here is a crazy experiment that might reveal something interesting: a meeting where participants talk only via a speech synthesizer.  Obviously speech synthesize has to be really good and have to support multiple voices so participants can identify individuals by their 'synthesized voice'.

The point of the experiment is to measure the effects of separating a person's thoughts from his or her physical body.  While the effect should be most pronounced for the speaker, I think listeners will also be affected.  I am not sure what kind of effects this form of communication will have on individuals and the group, but it sure will be weird.

Anyway, this was just a dump (as in core dump).

I started with an intention to explore ways to lazily increase connections in BlogLand, using randomness as primary means.  Steve Wilhelm (at Reuters?) suggested trackback ticker and random faces appearing in blog search engines.

His suggestions lead me to weird combinations of the concept like Face Tickers (similar to Joi Ito's Random Faceroll except it really [sc]rolls 😉 and Blog Faces (similar to blog comments except a reader is associating a face with a blog post) which lead me to thinking about multimedia comments.

When I read a blog post that I like, I don't always have something to say.  Still, I might like to leave something.  What if I was to leave a small photo of myself that shows up either at the bottom of the blog post or where comments are displayed?  People will see at a glance that so-and-so read the post.  If I did make a textual comment, the image can link to the comment.  Otherwise, the image can link to my own blog.

This feature can be added to news aggregators or to browsers using a browser extension.  Just click a button and a visual representation of your opinion gets added to the article (as a comment for now).  At the same time, link the article could be added to your daily recommended article list published at your own blog.

Although I got sidetracked, I thought this was an interesting enough idea to share.  At least, I think Marc might like it since this idea is in the neighborhood of his visual endorsement stamp idea.  Of course, you can already do this now by inserting HTML into the comment.  But HTML support is not ubiquitously available and those comments usually appear in one-off area like second-class data.

When I claimed BlogShares for this blog on May 18th, there were 5000 shares priced at around 50 cents.  Since then it shot straight up Internet-style and I, intending to keep it affordable, kept splitting it when ever it rose above a dollar, sometimes even twice a day.  Today, mere nine days later, there are 640,000 shares at 70 cents each.  BlogShares is a funny magnified reflection of the dot com years.  Ah, the memories come rushing back.  P/E?  It's 97.73 just now.

Could Dot Com Bubble happen again?  You bet.  IMHO, we are incapable of evolving out of phenomenons like the Dot Com Bubble.  People who think otherwise are just high on intellect.  Same thing with wars, communism, fascism, and jihads/holywars.  In fact, I believe the world has become far more unstable than, lets say, twenty years ago.

I just leased a Honda Odyssey, but I think I got screwed royally.  What can one do at this point?  It's obviously not a lemon, so I can't invoke the Lemon Law.  Anybody have a suggestion?  I know I should have been better prepared, but combination of the salesman's smoothtalking, eagerness of my wife and son, and my non-existant shopping skills were just too potent.  Argh.  What bothers me the most is having to look at a blatant reminder of getting screwed every single day for the next four years.

I spent most of this morning shopping for a van (Sienna looks at this point).  Feeling drained, I checked my mailbox and found a LinkedIn invitation to connect from someone I don't think I know.  Since I don't have any LinkedIn connections (lazyness), I was glad.

After accepting the invitation, I pondered about what had just occured.  Someone looked me up and initiated the connection.  Cool, but I don't think enough people do that to make a significant impact on a social network.  At least, I am not likely to do it since I am socially lazy.  Yet I enjoy meeting new people.  If there was a way to make new connections lazily, it will make a monstrous impact on LinkedIn and other social software.

Introducing chaos, random connections in LinkedIn, to social software might do just that.  LinkedIn can estimate individual member's interest and simulate chance encounters by sending out mutual invitations to connect.  Different types of connections will have also have to be introduced to make this work.  LinkedIn members must have some control over the random connection feature so they can block it entirely or specify connection preferences.  I am not sure whether random connection feature is an opt-in or opt-out feature though.

While the idea of random LinkedIn connections is interesting, I am more excited about other uses of chaos in social software.  If you got some ideas, let me know.