Social network is a network where nodes are people and connections are positive relationships — I guess negative relationships can also be used to build social networks but they are not very useful.  Current upswelling in the interest about social software can be divided into two:

1. Forming new connections and nurturing old connections
2. Sending and receiving data through social connections

Companies like Friendster and LinkedIn are focused on the first.  Bloggosphere is all about the second.  I tend to favor the second because the first reminds me of the sneaker net and because relationships are easy to stress and difficult to create.

Seeing social networks as a data networks like the Internet or intranet helps me see new opportunities.  One I recently thought about involves distribution of favors, Favor Network if you will.

Think of what you need, whether its information or something more tangible, turn it into a packet of bits and send it to the immediate nodes in a social network using whatever communication medium you share like e-mail or IM.  Each of the receipients can take whatever action on the favor request including ignoring it.  Some will choose to forward it to appropriate immediate nodes.  In the end, it will get dropped or reach people who have the desired information or objects.

Rising up a level and looking at the Favor Network again at an angle, it's like Google over social network, a search engine that uses people as servers or routers.  Interesting.

Accounting of favor giving and receiving will promote such use of social networks.  So the sender rates his request in favorpoints which places a value on the favor.  The final receiver who fulfills a favor receives majority of the favorpoints.  Those who participated in routing of the favor to that person shares the remainder.

To prevent abuse, each node's balance of favorpoints must be recorded somewhere and provided on request or attached to the favor request.  If a person asks favors all the time, people will learn not to do any more favors for that person.  If a person does a lot of favors for others, others will be more likely to help that person out.  Favorpoints received are added to a person's favorpoint balance.  Favorpoints spent are subtracted.

Will it work?  I'll do you a favor and find the answer if you got a few million dollars.  ;-p

I am in the process of moving my blog to a personal mutation of DasBlog.  Already moved all the post and comments over but there are lots of changes to make in DasBlog.  I chose DasBlog because it gives me a good excuse to play with ASP.NET and it offers relatively easy migration from Radio.  It's pretty slow and code itself is not exactly pretty but I can tear into it easily enough.  At this point, I am gearing up to replacing its file-based storage with either Berkeley DB XML or MySQL.

Visual design-wise, I am going to be replacing the calendar with tabs to display the blog in daily, weekly, or monthly views.  Daily views will show posts spanning days.  Weekly view will show post titles spanning weeks.  Monthly views will show post titles spanning a year.  Search is already there but I'll have to checkout its performance before deciding to replace it or not.  And then there is the legacy URL preserving code so old links don't break.  Lots of enjoyable headaches ahead.

I am switching ISP as well, so don't be surprised if the blog becomes unavailable for a few days.

I found a wonderful gift for myself today, a nice domain name for a pet project I have been working on: eSignHere.com.  It's a great name and it cost me only $7.95 per year.  What's is the project about?  It's about making e-signing as easy as picking one's nose.  Try selling that to your board.  Ho Ho Ho!

I really mean it because it doesn't cost me anything.  Merry Christmas.

Speech recognition continues to get better and labor cost keep rising, but, as an engineer in habit of jumping 'out of the box' like Jack does, I like to think about alternative solutions.  Here is one that is amusing.

I walk into a little corner restaurant in Paris to have lunch.  As the waitress comes over, I flip-open my cellphone and press a button that was programmed to connect to a translator service which was part of my vacation package.  When the waitress opens her mouth, I point the phone to her.

Francine is sitting in front of her computer and writing into her blog.  She lives in Chicago and works part-time as an on-demand translator.  When her computer beeps and pops open a window, she is looking at the waitress opening her mouth to say something.  She takes a quick glance over to the side of the popup and sees basic info on the client.  His name is Don and his location is in Paris.  Based on his GPS location, he is in a restaurant.  Francine proceeds to help Don order a lunch.

I picked this scenario because, the last time I was in that siutation, I ended up ordering a lunch of just side-dishes.  It involves more than speech recognition, but the core idea is that speech recognition does not manadate machine doing the recognition.

Kaye Trammell, whom I ran across via Dave's post, thinks Fox Searchlight Pictures blog sucks because:

1. It isn't even hosted on a real server. They host it on blogspot. Don't get me wrong, blogspot is great — if you're a teenager without server space! This is a CORPORATE BLOG for heaven's sake — host it on the company's server!
2. The content stinks. I don't want mini press releases about award nominations or what cities a movie is in. I want real content. I want to know what it is like on a set. I want some stars to guest blog. I want to know what George Clooney asks for in his trailer. I want content that I can't get anywhere else.
3. The branding bites. Is this a film company? One tacky mouse over logo – great. Where are the corporate colors? Where is the link to the blog on main site? This blog is missing out on everything freshmen learning in marketing 101.

One does what one can and it takes time for an organization to discover and learn the values of blogging and to commit resources.  Andrew is obviously a blogger doing what he can to convince his company about blogging.  Meanwhile a Miss Perfect comes along and places it at the top of her worst corporate blogs.  Geesh.

Even a big company has to start somewhere and it isn't reasonable to expect every corporate blogs to be top of the line from the start.  If her kinds of nonsense is what they teach in Marketing 101, I am glad I skipped it.

Blogging is about making it affordable, time and resource wise, to deliver fresh content and it doesn't need this "What Mr. Einstein needs is a haircut" kind of vanity.

Since I like to watch movies, I occasionally come down with a screenplay bug.  A screenplay bug is that buzzing one gets inside his head when a neat storylines strikes.  This time its a story about an old man with Alzheimer's disease who forgot everything about himself and is left only with his online identity, specifically his MMORPG character.

He is taken care of by a nursing home staff whom he doesn't know nor care about.  Doctors decided that MMORPG is the best therapy for him so he plays it all day.  While he is playing. he knows exactly who he is because his name is on the screen.  There is no purpose, except surving from moment to moment instead of staring at the wall all day.

While the story would be near impossible to tell visually, it was compelling enough to buzz me all day today.  Now that I spit it out onto my blog, I hope it's gone.  I do wonder though whether video games are good for people with Alzheimer's disease.

I sometimes wonder if the world is turning into a globe of pansies when I read statements like "I can't blog that because it would appear as if I am attacking competitors."  Geesh.  What is wrong with attacking competitors?  The world is not an Olympic and the market is not some field-and-track sporting event where you are competing side-by-side.  Get in touch with your inner feelings and kick your opponents between the leg in earnest.  When they are down, kick them again so they can't get up.  Nasty?  I call it being sincere.