Here’s a sample below:

David Bowie's letter to Sandra Dodd

One of the things that fascinates me when reading something like the letter above, (a letter that David Bowie wrote to his first “American Fan”) is the fact that writing was so linear compared to how most of us write today. Imagine putting together a letter, report, or news article back in the day. I mean, once you typed something, it was practically impossible to go back and change the structure of a paragraph or rewrite something  without having to start all over again. I suppose you could go back and add your corrections after the fact with pen, but that’s not very professional now, is it? Or I suppose you could do as David Bowie did when he caught an error and just make up a new word. Wi-at? Oh Bowie, you’re so cleaver clever.

In the video from my post on the birth of Web 2.0, the presentation starts with an example of linear writing, and then briefly illustrates how writing has changed with the help of technology. I’m absolutely certain that our method of writing is drastically different from the writing of past generations, but is it affecting our minds? I think so.

When I write, I go over a paragraph multiple times. When I’m done writing, I go back and take out entire paragraphs or move them up or down on a page. That’s because the writing that comes out is often disorganized and scattered. Digital text allows me to organize, delete, and restructure my thoughts on a page without having to start typing my entire document all over again. It almost feels like this style of writing was invented to suit my scattered brain.

So is technology affecting our minds? Yes, but some seem to think that it’s a bad thing. They say that it’s making us less organized and less effective.  I totally disagree. As evident from the letter above, communication was not linear in 1967, and I don’t think it has ever been (unless Bowie was is as scatter-brained as me). I believe that due to our technological limitations, we forced our brains to think in a very unnatural linear fashion. Now, with the help of technology, writing is more natural, more non-linear, and I couldn’t be any happier. If you ask me whether I think technology is affecting our minds, I’d say yes…finally, I can write like I think and then reorganize my thoughts so I can at least seem like I have some structure! At the very least, people can now understand what the hell I’m writing (you’d understand if you saw my handwriting).

How is technology affecting my mind? It makes  me feel normal, and that’s not so bad now, is it?

“One of the reasons I have long supported the U.S. biotechnology industry is that it is a homegrown success story that has been an engine of job creation in this country.” This written statement by Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina on the health care bill was identical to one by Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer and used language suggested by lobbyists.

The headline from the New York Times article reads “In House, many spoke with one voice: Lobbyists’” and has Joe Wilson on the front cover. We know Mr. Wilson from my blog post on his outburst during Obama’s speech and the importance of transparency.

With the technology and ability to reference check on the spot and look into ties, why do so many public figures insist on feeding us lines? I don’t think it has hit home quite yet that these aren’t the 1990′s, when you could claim or say anything and chances of you getting called on it were slim. We are in a different age. I look forward to an interesting backlash.

The main thing you should know about HTML is that it was a language created to give browsers, like the one you’re using, instructions on how to display text, pictures, links, etc. Most web pages were very simple in nature since the programmer was usually not very good with graphics or the tools to create graphics were expensive, and compression tools to make those images a decent size were nowhere near as good as they are today. Throw in the fact that most people were on dial-up (56k was fast when I was in High School!), and you ended up with a site that looked like this:

The White House home page...back in 1996.

Yeah, that’s the official White House website. Very plain and boring, and not at all like the whitehouse.gov of today. HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language was great though. It allowed people to create pages that could link to other parts of the site, files, and other sites. The ability to go from one page to the other came to be known as “Web Surfing”, I suppose because it was something like catching one wave after another. Soon enough, we had a huge collection of pages that didn’t look very visually appealing, but were all linking to one another and making information accessible to the world.

The biggest problem with HTML was that, though it allowed the user to view lots of information, it didn’t allow for much participation. You were a consumer, and nothing more.  For example, using the site above as an example, all I could do was search for this thing or that thing. Also, as the creator of the site, If I wanted to make changes to the site, I had to know HTML and have access to FTP (file transfer protocol) to upload the content to the place where all my files are stored on a server.

Take a look at the page you are on right now. This is all code too. If you look at the source of this page, you’ll see that its main structure is still HTML. The biggest difference between this page and a page from 1998 is that now the consumer can also be a participant. You can comment on this page and say something. Not only that, but since the content (take the YouTube video below as an example) and the structure are now separate, you can piece together a webpage using content from thousands of locations (it would make for a crowded site, but hey…enjoy yourself).

A couple years back, I came across a video about the evolution of the internet that truly fascinated me because it illustrated perfectly how web 2.0 worked and how it was different from the original internet. Today, I went back to search for it and found that the version I saw in 2007 had completely changed. This version now explains the changes up to today. Try to follow along, it’s fascinating.

The intro part to the video is a topic that I want to discuss in another post. The way we communicate is changing, and there are lots of people out there that refuse to adapt. What will become of them or what will become of us? That’s a question that’s yet to be answered.

Yesterday, David Letterman revealed on-air that he was the victim of an extortion plot by a former CBS News employee who was threatening to reveal some rather embarrassing details about him by publishing them in a screenplay unless he paid 2 million dollars. Apparently, Letterman had affairs with female employees on his show and this guy thought he could extort some money from him. Letterman did the right thing by taking things to the authorities. They arrested dirtbag Robert J. “Joe” Halderman on Friday and put him behind bars where he belongs. Here’s what’s interesting, rather than keeping things under wraps after the guys plot was foiled, Letterman decided to confess his wrongdoings on national television!

There are some serious implications to having office affairs, but even more so with your subordinates. I’m not going to go into that. What I want to focus on is transparency. When Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinski in the 90s, no one was able to capitalize on the scandal better than Letterman, who was still  making jokes about the affair in 2001. Maybe Letterman learned form Clinton’s mistakes, but I think his decision to come clean even after the blackmailer was arrested really comes as a result of the type of world we live in NOW.  Whereas Clinton felt that he could lie about his affair and keep his wrongdoings secret, Letterman (and Mark Sanford) realized that access to information and dissemination via social media like blogs, social bookmarking, and social networks make the spread of this information almost inevitable and difficult to cover up, so coming clean was probably the best choice. When people said “honesty is the best policy”, they were just lying. However, transparency is making this a reality. Access to information is making it difficult to lie.

Jenny Merkin with the Atlantic  wrote a story entitled “How Facebook Will Change Our Scandals”. She argues that Facebook (she uses it to symbolize Social Media) will make scandals more common while also making them less damaging. “Scandals will still exist, but popular reaction could ease. As with monetary inflation — the more money out there, the lower the value of the dollar — we could experience scandal inflation. With so much private information sloshing around the net,  scandals could lose their luster.”

Social media is still a fairly new phenomena and we are just now beginning to see its power to do positive things and destroy lives. For the most part, I agree with Jenny’s conclusion. Really though, what I think is happening is the veil that existed between our public and private lives is becoming more transparent.  Social media is changing our lives, not just online, but in “real life”. People are realizing that their online profile is only an extension of themselves and, as an old quote says, “character is who you are when no one is watching.” To put it bluntly, if pictures of you doing things you’d be ashamed of are showing up online, then there is a misalignment between who you try to portray and who you really are.

As peer review, video, cell phone cameras, and even satellite photography become more widespread, we are sure to be more careful about what we do or say in public (Orwell’s 1984 is here). Just as with anything new we don’t understand quite fully, we are bound to make mistakes when learning how to use it. It may take some failures to get us to change our way of doing things and, in social media, I trust there will be some social casualties. Some have already learned lessons like, don’t post pictures of yourself up on Facebook getting wasted with friends,  don’t make inappropriate comments on a photograph if you wouldn’t want them broadcast over the internet, and don’t lie about something you know can be Googled. Who knows, maybe we’ll get smart and instead of creating scandals for ourselves, we’ll make sure that our behavior in private reflects what we say we represent. Or maybe Jenny Merkin is right, scandals will become so rampant that we’ll just lower the standards and say…”Ah, WTF does it matter anyway?”

Mark Grgurich, an avid cyclist and artist was killed in a hit-and-run accident on August 30, 2009 as he was doing a 100 mile bike run in rural Iowa. After examining the location, all police investigators had was a vague description of the vehicle (a truck) and the following clue:

The clue left behind at the scene of the crime

Not having much else to go on, they asked the public for help in identifying the small plastic fragment they believed belonged to the vehicle that killed Mr. Grgurich, hoping it would generate some leads. Little did they expect what ensued.

Within hours of the story hitting the air at a local TV station, the true power of Social Media as an investigative force became known. A website called idthis.org featured the image and the search for clues spread through other social media sites like wildfire, most notably digg.com, a bookmark aggregator which thousands of people visit each day.

Photo posted on idthis.org

Digg works like this (in a nutshell): 1) users submit a story they find interesting, other users who also find the story intersting “digg” the story 2) stories with the most “diggs” land on the front page 3) once the story has it’s moment in the spotlight, it dies. One thing thing you should know about Digg is that its users are the most tech savvy, funny, political, smartass, and damn right nerdy people you’ll ever meet (yours truly included). Some of these folks live, breath, and excrete (not literally) technology. When the story of the clue hit the front page everyone from graphic designers to forensic scientist wannabes started looking for possibilities.

You and I may not be able to do much with the two letters (or is it three letters) shown on the image above, but the Digg community not only had a list of possible businesses the truck could have belonged to (plumbers were first targeted, as Digg users believed the letters were part of the logo or spelled out “HEating”), but screen shots of google maps which showed business vehicles parked in front of the business and image analysis were generated. Some Digg users in Iowa went as far as visiting the locations of interest to check the vehicles in question! When they ran out of business to target, they checked for screen printers in the area who might have used the font used in the plastic fragment. That’s right, they might not know the truck make and model, but they definitely know the font (a Digg user had identified it as… the Kurt Russel font! Horrible taste, I must say!).  One user even had a definite suspect :


I did mention Digg has lots of political smartasses, right?

Sure, a huge percent of the leads that were suggested were not even remotely close to being serious (I have to admit, some of the best comedy I read comes from the comments people post), but a small percentage, the percentage that eventually led to the capture of the person who killed Mr. Grgurich, were. Eventually, a small blurred picture taken from a security camera and details about the findings ended up in a 4×4 forum and a user recognized the vehicle as her neighbor’s! She called the police, the TV station, and within hours, the suspect was apprehended.


What’s amazing about this whole thing is not the fact that this all happened within a matter of hours after the story hit the front page, but the fact that it illustrates perfectly how my generation communicates and works together. Web 2.0 makes the viewers of the content active participants instead of passive consumers and collaboration changes everything!

On a side note: If your site does not allow for your audience to participate, your site is a stone tablet in the age of typewriters (to put it in terms that both the oldest and youngest of readers can understand — some, possibly even remember

The story also illustrates the basic premise behind Open Source. Open Source, whether we’re talking about programming languages or encyclopedias, make the content (source) available for free, let the whole community have a stab at it, and the good stuff will rise to the top. What you end up with is called the Pareto Principle (aka the 80-20 rule), which states that 80 percent of the work is generated by 20 percent of the people, 20 percent of your clients generate 80 percent of your income, etc, etc. etc.

Sure, in the case of the clue, 80 percent of the stuff suggested was way off, but if the Detectives had not made the content available to everyone (made it an “open investigation), that 20 percent that made significant findings (and comedy) would have never happened!

Open does not mean free-for-all (unless you let it be). A basic system must be in place that encourages participation while ensuring that if content doesn’t meet the expectations of the community, it is eliminated. For example, Wikipedia members check the accuracy of the articles other members submit. Apple’s iPhone applications go through a screening process that ensures the application is not malicious, then gets rated by the community, which usually makes or breaks the application.

The Open model is being adapted everywhere. From Apple, where any developer can create an application for the iPhone, to Wikipedia, where anyone can contribute to an article. Organizations that take advantage of this model, the technology, and the way we communicate will prosper, those that don’t…well, they are probably too far into their own demise to see it happening to them already.