A colleague of mine had to be evacuated from her Manhattan apartment this week after the underground car park was flooded. Two days later, the blog of the Residents of 90 West Street (interestingly, they call it “Forum”) was born, and it is not the only one; previously blogging residents of the house also took up the topic, creating a community of people who hardly knew each other before, even if they lived in a house before. Information is exchanged and questions are discussed, for example whether the rent is now due if you are not allowed into the apartment and also have to advance the costs for the hotel. The exciting question is whether this community can be maintained if the emergency situation no longer welds those affected together. But nowhere is it written that communities must last forever.
The Whole Truth About Social Networks
Timo had recently wondered why there were so few registrations for the Lunch 2.0 September in Hamburg, where it was usually full faster than some would have liked; one explanation was that people in Hamburg already meet all the time and know everyone. Only at the legendary Gimahhot party would there have been other people. What Timo has experienced here is a fundamental characteristic of communities that can be observed in every scale-free network, and this is also evident in another example I mentioned in the Web 2.0 book, namely linking within the blogosphere. In the German blogosphere, not everyone is networked with everyone. There are many pages with few links and few pages with many links. However, having a lot of inbound links is not enough to be a multiplier. Because if you take a close look at the graphic, which I created using my own crawler and GraphViz, there are different centers in the blogosphere that are more or less well connected to each other. This means that a piece of information may be hotly debated in one region of the blogosphere, but does not make it to the rest of the blogosphere due to the few connections to another region. So what is more interesting are the nodes that have connections to several regions, as they are the ones that can act as multipliers (they are also called hubs). Let’s transfer this to a human network away from the blogosphere. How do you find a new job? Not through your closest friends, because they usually only have access to the information you have yourself. It is the less good acquaintances who have access to another (information) circle and can help them get a new job (this clever idea, as well as many others about communities and social networks, come from Albert-Laszlo Barabasis’s book Linked). And the more contacts they have with different clusters, the more likely they are to know someone who is looking for someone with exactly the same qualifications as you have. But doesn’t everyone know everyone over 6 corners anyway? What about the six degrees of separation? A myth has developed here that, if you take a closer look, seems sobering. There was actually this study that everyone refers to, and it comes from Stanley Milgram, who sent letters to people in the USA in the 60s asking them to forward them to a specific target person or to someone who might know this target person. And indeed, on average, the letters took 5.5 stations to reach the target person. The flaw, however, is that of the 160 letters sent, only 42 arrived. In some cases, it took almost a dozen stations for the letter to arrive. So is that not true with the 6 stations after all? You don’t know, I would say. After all, those who received a letter to forward always forwarded it to people they thought might know the target. So it could be that there were much shorter paths through the network. This or something similar happens to us when we look at XING through whom we could know a person if we didn’t already have them as a contact ourselves: “What, they know each other too?”. In addition, today, with modern communication methods and cheap flights, the number of stations between two people may actually have decreased. But we don’t know exactly. More on that in a moment. By the way, the term “Six Degrees of Separation” was never used by Stanley Milgram; it only became popular through the film of the same name. Why don’t we know today how many stations lie between us and another person, especially if they live in another country? (Milgram’s experiment took place in only 3 states in the USA) Because there is no social network on the web that really connects different social networks (across countries). There are thoughts in different companies about how to do this, but until then, the clusters of the various social networks are rather “manually” connected to each other. Example: I have some XING contacts, and I have some LinkedIn contacts. Two networks for the same thing. In fact? No, the overlap of my contacts in the two networks is low. Likewise, the overlap between this network and my Last.fm friends is low. I am a human being (like any other person) who is part of different communities, and I am the link between these communities. Does this mean that I can ensure that information gets from one community to another? Maybe, but not in every case, because not every community is receptive to the information from another community. And in some cases, I have to do “manually” to connect the two different networks. The digitally mapped networks still need analog connections in order to be able to map the connections in the real network. The people who can really help you (or bring you a PR disaster) are the ones who have the most contacts in as many different communities as possible, in real as well as in digital life, and actively cultivate them and don’t just let them rest in the address book. These are the people who make Hush Puppies fashionable again (see also Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book The Tipping Point). However, these hubs or multipliers or connectors are not the ones that produce innovations themselves. But they are the ones who help innovations break through by spreading information about them to the various clusters they know. And those who can help you get a new job. For Lunch 2.0, for example, this could mean that one of the participating hubs has to bring other people that no one knows yet. A blind business date, for example. XING is used to check whether the participants are in direct contact with each other, and if not, they are allowed to participate. This allows anyone to connect to another cluster.
Blackberry Perl 8100
An article about a Blackberry? The Blackberry in the picture doesn’t belong to the Alby, does it? Didn’t he write that he never, never, never wants to have a Blackberry? To quote Adenauer, what bothers me about my chatter from yesterday. It’s mine. Well, not quite, it belongs to my employer. And I wished for it. Not because I have a different opinion about the Blackberry orphans, but because I spend a large part of my time not in an office, but on the road, on the way to the airport, on a plane, on the way to an office, in terminals, in hotels, and not everywhere there is a WLAN that you can easily access. It is very pleasant for me to come to the office and have already processed the emails and to be able to concentrate on work.
The article by Volker Weber in ct helped me with the whole story, I didn’t realize beforehand that you can choose either an enterprise model or a “free” model. Otherwise, I would have just bought one from T-Mobile, but that would have been absolutely pointless, because I need an Enterprise model. And this is not sold without a license. Pretty difficult everything, and the few euros for the ct were a good investment to avoid an expensive bad purchase.
My first impression: the keyboard takes a lot of getting used to, I had read that before, probably that’s why I wouldn’t have chosen this model myself, but it was chosen for me. The advantage, however, is that the device is very, very light. I also find the display of text very unaesthetic, especially since I saw the iPhone just last week, which is really very appealing. But otherwise the Blackberry solves my problem (often far away from the computer), and that’s good.
At this moment it is switched off, and it will remain so until tomorrow morning. And on weekends it remains switched off. I don’t want a Blackberry orphan.
Fallen in
You should watch the mockumentary Citizen Cam to the end to understand that it’s not a documentary and also that there aren’t 200 cameras in Reykjavik whose footage is shown on its own TV channel. Otherwise, it could get embarrassing if your conversation partner knows better.
About the difficulties of finding a good Mail2Fax service
Actually, I had thought that Mail2Fax services should be a dime a dozen. There are also services, just not those that you can really seriously use. The use case: I have a signed document that I have to fax to a company. I can scan this and then save it as a PDF on my computer. I could also scan my signature and put it in a document and then create a PDF from it. The second option doesn’t really look good, and I don’t have time to take care of it. In the next step, I would like to put this PDF file in an email and send it to a Mail2Fax gateway, which sends the file as a fax to the fax number given in the subject or elsewhere, in the best case with a header that contains my fax number and my name. Shouldn’t be that hard. I also don’t want to pay for it monthly, but only per fax, because sometimes I don’t send a fax for months. It all sounds very simple, doesn’t it? My first thought was web.de. In fact, you can send a fax there from the web interface, but unfortunately you can’t attach any documents. Deceased. Then I thought of the Unified Messaging of Puretec/Schlund & Partner/1&1/United Internet, after all, this was the buzzword that was always printed in bold in their colorful brochures that tumbled out of every computer newspaper. Although web.de is now a subsidiary of United Internet, I still had the hope that the services had not yet been consolidated and that there would be another product at Puretec/1&1. In fact, something like this is offered, but not in my expensive hosting plan. Only if I also took DSL, then I could use the Mail2Fax gateway. As it is, however, I can only send a fax from a web interface. If you click on one of the many advertising links on a search engine after the search “mail2fax”, you will usually only find services that cash in monthly. It was only after some time that I found an offer that requires a set-up fee of a few euros, but then only charges per fax; the provider is called Xaranet. Although access is apparently only activated after a slow bank transfer and is not for spontaneous decision-makers, the money is not transferred to an account in the Bahamas, but to that of a German GmbH. The managing director, Timo Dreger, not only answers support emails personally, but also writes his own company blog. There were some small teething problems, but once I understood the principle, I can finally send faxes without having to buy a machine or apply for a second line. Interesting that there is no Web 2.0 solution yet, something like DropSend for faxes; Some time ago I thought that faxes were a dying species, but some things just can’t be solved with e-mail or Skype yet. This makes it all the more surprising that there are so few providers.
Blackberry orphans
In the Wall Street Journal’s December 8, 2006 article “Blackberry Orphans,” Katherine Rosman discusses the role reversal that takes place in many families: Instead of parents making sure that the kids don’t spend so much time in front of the TV, the kids are worried because their parents secretly check e-mails when they should be taking care of them. The article also features kids who report that their parents read and answer e-mails in the car instead of paying attention to the road. The children are relatively powerless, especially when they understand that the parents have to work to earn money. But not everyone puts up with the ever-decreasing attention spans:
When nothing else works, Lucas turns to the highest of authorities. “I go tell my mom that Daddy’s not listening and then my mom yells at him.”
The article also provides tips for email addicts, such as not checking emails while eating, not using the Blackberry while driving, and having Blackberry-free zones and times at home (of course, these rules aren’t limited to Blackberry devices alone). On the other hand, a Blackberry defender is quoted as saying that children should ask themselves whether it is better to have their parents away from home only 20 percent or 100 percent.
After this sentence, I decided not to buy a Blackberry or similar.
Business idea: track down the daughter in Second Life
Second Life is still something for the early adaptors. In 10 years at the latest, however, kids will spend their time in virtual reality, and since feelings can be just as real there as in the real world, it’s no use running around the house with a sword to protect your own daughter from bad guys. House arrest is of little use. Computer ban perhaps, but how is that supposed to work when the computer and the Internet are essential for the fulfillment of school obligations?
My idea: Watchdog for virtual worlds. I’m opening an agency for parents who want to know what their children are doing in the virtual world. This can also be expanded: Wives will have to hire detectives who are familiar with virtual reality to uncover their partner’s infidelity.
Imbecility? We’ll see 🙂